[The sidebar texts on Al Jazeera have become the single best source for
written analysis of global events, to my knowledge anyway--please inform
if there is any place of similar quality. This article is the most
far-ranging I've yet read on the current terminal crisis of
neoliberalism. It makes an important distinction between structural
crisis - which changes the political-economic rules of the game, as in
the 1890s, 1930s and 1970s - and systemic crisis which would actually
change the game itself. The author is among the sociologists who
developed the theory of the Transnational Capitalist Class -- oh yeah,
and as I've just learned by hunting around on the net, he was also the
subject of a huge academic scandal because he compared Israel's attacks
on Gaza to the Nazis' attacks on the Warsaw ghetto. Expect far worse
divisiveness while an unjust and unsustainable political economy
collapses. -- BH]
***
GLOBAL REBELLION: THE COMING CHAOS?
William L. Robinson
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121556567265.html
As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers
that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to proposal
viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by
the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the
United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised
police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes
are unable are to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and
must resort to ever more generalised repression.
Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political
economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of
social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are
witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.
To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century
we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context.
Global elites had hoped and expected that the "Great Depression" that
began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial
system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved
through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has
become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are
on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring and about once a
decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world
recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.
Structural crises are deeper; their resolution requires a fundamental
restructuring of the system. Earlier world structural crises of the
1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s were resolved through a reorganisation of
the system that produced new models of capitalism. "Resolved" does not
mean that the problems faced by a majority of humanity under capitalism
were resolved but that the reorganisation of the capitalist system in
each case overcame the constraints to a resumption of capital
accumulation on a world scale. The crisis of the 1890s was resolved in
the cores of world capitalism through the export of capital and a new
round of imperialist expansion. The Great Depression of the 1930s was
resolved through the turn to variants of social democracy in both the
North and the South - welfare, populist, or developmentalist capitalism
that involved redistribution, the creation of public sectors, and state
regulation of the market.
Globalisation and the current structural crisis
To understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s.
The globalisation stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved
out the response of distinct agents to these previous episodes of
crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social democracy, or more
technically stated, of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive
capitalism. In the wake of that crisis capital went global as a strategy
of the emergent Transnational Capitalist Class and its political
representatives to reconstitute its class power by breaking free of
nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints - the
so-called "class compromise" - had been imposed on capital through
decades of mass struggles around the world by nationally-contained
popular and working classes. During the 1980s and 1990s, however,
globally-oriented elites captured state power in most countries around
the world and utilised that power to push capitalist globalisation
through the neo-liberal model.
Globalisation and neo-liberal policies opened up vast new opportunities
for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in
computer and information technology and other technological advances
helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in
productivity and to restructure, "flexibilise," and shed labour
worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and
facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption
sectors around the world that provided new market segments fuelling
growth. In sum, globalisation made possible a major extensive and
intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of
accumulation worldwide that offset the 1970s crisis of declining profits
and investment opportunities.
However, the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an unprecedented
worldwide social polarisation. Fierce social and class struggles
worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of social
control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to
force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital
accumulation. What has taken place through globalisation is the severing
of the logic of accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting
in an unprecedented growth of social inequality and intensified crises
of survival for billions of people around the world.
The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social
conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more
and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows
out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have
intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the
1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward
mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000
report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s
population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic
failures of the 20th century".
Global social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of
over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer
and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world
output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more
and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus
- they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new
profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent
years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarised
accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of
sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of
over-accumulation.
While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working and
popular classes dates back to the crisis of the 1970s and has grown in
intensity ever since, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several
respects a major turning point. In particular, as the crisis spread it
generated the conditions for new rounds of brutal austerity worldwide,
greater flexibilisation of labour, steeply rising under and
unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political
agents utilised the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and
attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social
states in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, to squeeze more value
out of labour, directly through more intensified exploitation and
indirectly through state finances. Social and political conflict has
escalated around the world in the wake of 2008.
Nonetheless, the system has been unable to recover; it is sinking deeper
into chaos. Global elites cannot manage the explosive contradictions. Is
the neo-liberal model of capitalism entering a terminal stage? It is
crucial to understand that neo-liberalism is but one model of global
capitalism; to say that neo-liberalism may be in terminal crisis is not
to say that global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Is it possible that
the system will respond to crisis and mass rebellion through a new
restructuring that leads to some different model of world capitalism -
perhaps a global Keynesianism involving transnational redistribution and
transnational regulation of finance capital? Will rebellious forces from
below be co-opted into some new reformed capitalist order?
Or are we headed towards a systemic crisis? A systemic crisis is one in
which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through
its supersession and the creation of an entirely new system, or more
ominously the collapse of the system. Whether or not a structural crisis
becomes systemic depends on how distinct social and class forces respond
- to the political projects they put forward and as well as to factors
of contingency that cannot be predicted in advance, and to objective
conditions. It is impossible at this time to predict the outcome of the
crisis. However, a few things are clear in the current world conjuncture.
The current moment
First, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural
crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features
unique to the present:
The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction.
We face the real spectre of resource depletion and environmental
catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.
- The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is
unprecedented. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star
wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become
normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of
armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control
over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in
the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of
panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control.
- We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism,
in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of
significance that can be integrated into world capitalism.
De-ruralisation is now well-advanced, and the commodification of the
countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that
is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that
intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Like riding a
bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it
collapses. Where can the system now expand?
- There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet
of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the
margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to
crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of
dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the
dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to
contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion.
- There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a
nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state
apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of
what social scientists refer to as a "hegemon", or a leading
nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and
stabilise the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of
a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political
legitimacy.
Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear
to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events
unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the
G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralysed, and certainly unwilling
to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital,
the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most
rapacious and destabilising fraction. While national and transnational
state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global
finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis
on labour. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify
spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the
unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their
disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular
classes.
Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We
are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I
mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the
crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of
transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and
prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward
accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital,
the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy
sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex
depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on
terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarisation of social
control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of
state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in
turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive
industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and
environmental degradation around the world.
Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could
imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly
passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces
from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalisation in the 1980s and
1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide
in favour of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around
the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and
fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of
neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the
transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain
its offensive by militarising world politics and extending systems of
repressive social control in the name of "combating terrorism".
Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the
whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites
are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own
making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have
been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across
whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy
movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass
struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination
and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other
hand, the "empire of global capital" is definitely not a "paper tiger".
As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat
of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to -
organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and
mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.
In my view, the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism
is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the
poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic
socialism in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.
****
William I. Robinson is a Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and
Latin American Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. His
latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism.
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