Capitalism’s Crises. Alfredo Saad-Filho

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      Resource extraction, production, consumption and pollution are not just ‘technical issues’ (in the Marxist sense) but are at the heart of the crisis of civilisational reproduction. Capital, in its organisation of capitalism, has overshot planetary limits, undermined natural cycles and now threatens us with species extinction through climate change. In this context, labour – or the working class – is far from being the gravedigger of capitalism. Labour has been dramatically weakened given the structural and imperial power used to reproduce a globalised capitalist civilisation. This does not suggest the end of class struggle but rather serves to emphasise that capital is dominant and prevailing in a manner that embodies a form of social power that goes beyond just ensuring labour exploitation – it also ensures its supremacy over all forms of life.

      Finally, and as a corollary to the previous point, the dialectical logic of capital for Marx was meant to bring both destruction and progress. In its expansion in the world, capital was meant to confront and overcome backward pre-capitalist relations. This was very much a Eurocentric moment in Marx. In Capital, Marx foregrounds competition, and how it dynamises and modernises production relations in the drive for expansion. In Marx, capital brings about destruction but also progress at a higher level of accumulation. However, in the contemporary capitalist world the logic of capital is about societal and ecological destruction. Michael Burawoy (2013) makes a very insightful point in this regard, arguing that the current wave of marketisation (i.e. 1973 to the present) is about commodifying nature. But, at the same time, he acknowledges that although exploitation features in the dynamics of accumulation, we have surplus labour populations in which exploitation becomes the privilege of the few. Therefore, more marketisation equals deepening inequality and further commodification of nature.³ Put more directly, the dialectic of marketisation–destruction (of human beings and nature) is what characterises capital and capitalism in our contemporary world. This raises fundamental challenges to capitalist modernity and its narratives of progress and development. With the current dynamic of marketisation–destruction, capitalist progress and development mean ecocide, or the destruction of conditions that sustain human and all other life forms on the planet.

      In short, given the limits of Marx’s conceptions of crisis tendencies in helping us gain an understanding of contemporary capitalism, an engagement with his work highlights the need for a theoretical reconstruction of historical materialism and of Marx’s own thought. There is a need for an extension and modification of Marx’s analysis. There is a need to create theoretical space to bring in the notion of the ‘systemic crises of capitalist civilisation’ and related concepts, such as capital as a geological force. This needs to be done at the abstract level of the tendencies and structures of the capitalist mode of production, and at the concrete historical level. I now turn to the concrete historical level to further test the thesis of the crises of capitalist civilisation.

      PERIODISING THE MAKING OF CAPITALIST CIVILISATION

      To argue the existence of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation presupposes the existence of capitalist civilisation. Such a presupposition takes us into the terrain of concrete history to appreciate the making of capitalist civilisation over time. Moreover, it is important to situate the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation within concrete history to bring into view its constitution and particular features. This means that we have to think in terms of a stages approach to world history to understand the historical specificity of the contemporary systemic crises of capitalist civilisation. Marx was thinking about the capitalist mode of production and, more specifically, competitive capitalism in the mid-Victorian age of the nineteenth century. He did not think in terms of different varieties of capitalism or the specific characteristics of the stages of capitalism. This later became a preoccupation in the classical Marxist tradition, after Marx, and the subsequent revival of Marxist political economy in the 1960s (Callinicos 2001).

      Lenin’s ([1917] 2011) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism exemplifies this approach and therefore deserves attention. Lenin draws on Hobson’s ([1902] 2006) Imperialism: A Study, Hilferding’s ([1910] 1981) Finance Capital and Bukharin’s ([1917] 1929) Imperialism and World Economy to periodise capitalism. However, his approach is problematic for various reasons and not very useful in providing an understanding of the contemporary period of capitalism. First, Lenin was fixated on showing how the capitalism of his time differed from the competitive Victorian capitalism of Marx’s time. We are living in a different phase of competitive capitalist expansion and restructuring from the one Lenin wrote about. Second, Lenin placed an emphasis on the concentration and centralisation of capital as the basis for inter-imperialist rivalry among colonial empires. In the contemporary world we do not have colonial empires, but instead we have a single US superpower and a bloc of forces it leads at a global level. This also means global rivalry is driven by a new set of accumulation dynamics and conditions. The forms and practices of imperialism have a historical specificity and are distinctive. Third, Lenin’s conception of imperialism works with a teleology in which capitalism reaches an end point, or the highest stage of capitalism, after national monopolisation takes root in developed capitalist countries. Yet capitalism has endured for almost a century since Lenin wrote this work, despite various cyclical and general crises. Capitalism has adapted, restructured and is increasingly taking on a transnational character in the contemporary period. Finally, Lenin’s conception of capitalism’s place in world history fails to recognise that capitalism had origins before Marx’s time and therefore imperialism has a longer history. The origins of capitalism and imperialism have to be located in the prototypes of capitalism that emerged in the transitions from pre-capitalist societies. At least in the context of the West, this has to be related to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.⁴

      What follows is an attempt to provide a periodisation of capitalist civilisation which draws on but differs from a world-systems perspective. Although world-systems theory provides a reading of world history that allows for variances and continuities by focusing on cycles of accumulation related to hegemonic powers (see Arrighi and Moore 2001), its emphasis on more general historical patterns fails to recognise historical and geographical contingency, or the role of class struggle in shaping capitalism’s history. While keeping this in mind, the various keys to periodisation and the technical issues involved are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Jessop 2001), except to say that each of the stages of historical capitalism delineated here can be further delineated into conjunctures and phases based on historical, political, geographic and economic contingencies. For our purposes, the important point is the making and existence of capitalist civilisation and, more specifically, the recognition that this takes place through particular non-teleological historical stages.

      Capitalist civilisation, which has been established over the last 500 years, has been marked by three major historical stages, each defined by a particular mode of capital accumulation. In this periodisation there is an emphasis on key features as they relate to forms of capital, imperial power, technological development, ideological shifts and struggles from below:

       Mercantile accumulation (1400s–1800s) involved a prototype of capitalism linked to slavery, colonial conquest, trade and exchange. Sea-based expansion took off in this period, supported through merchant capital and empires such as the Spanish, Dutch and British. The Reformation in Europe, which challenged the control of the Roman Catholic Church, the Dutch Revolution (1566–1609), the English Revolution (1637–1660) and the Enlightenment (c.1650–1800) all shaped this stage of expansion.

       Monopoly industrial accumulation (c.1750s–1980) involved struggles against land enclosures; technological innovation, such as СКАЧАТЬ