concentration and centralisation of capital. Colonial expansion continued but was also rolled back by the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Slave Revolution in Haiti (1791–1804) and the so-called Bolivarian revolutions (1810–1830) against Spanish rule in South America. The French Revolution (1789–1794) also shook up the heartlands of capitalism. Mid-Victorian competitive capitalism gave way to national monopolies. The Italian nation state was founded (1859–1870) and Germany was unified (1864–1871). The American Civil War (1861–1865), the Paris Commune (1871), the scramble for Africa (1870–1914) and the first great depression (1873–1896) happened. National monopolies displaced competition, which descended into national rivalries. The period also saw World War I (1914–1918), the Great Depression (1929–1941), World War II (1939–1945), and the end of British hegemony and the Ottoman Empire. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and a wave of socialist revolutions, including those in Russia (1917), China (1949) and Cuba (1959), and various national liberation struggles shaped the peripheries. US-centred hegemony, the cold war (1947–1991), Fordism, the Keynesian welfare state and the end of colonialism also determined the character of this stage.
Transnational techno-financial accumulation (1973 to the present) took root as social democracy reached its limits and stagflation kicked in (1973). There was a wave of struggle (1968–1975) in Western Europe, Prague and the US. The US suffered a defeat in Vietnam, and the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979) took place. There was a shift to containerisation, information-and-communications technology, post-Fordism and global financialised restructuring. Finance was globalised and played a crucial role in transnationalising class structures. The cold war ended, formal political apartheid ended in South Africa (1994), democratisation swept through Africa, parts of Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, while US hegemony was tenuous but increasingly centred on financialised expansion and military power. Power was increasingly diffused with the rise of regional state–society complexes, such as China and Russia, and since 9/11 the War on Terror has expanded. Global rivalries come to the fore as systemic crisis tendencies deepen. Anti-neoliberal and ‘anti-globalisation’ movements emerged as central to rolling back neoliberalisation and saving planetary life.
In the current stage of transnational techno-financial accumulation, contemporary capitalist civilisation has four crucial dimensions to its global political economy. First, it is underpinned by globalised financial, production and trade structures at the heart of a globalised capitalist system. Second, there is a political system of state and civil-society complexes, intergovernmental organisations and private transnational bodies. Third, there are large and powerful transnational corporations wielding immense structural and direct political power. Fourth, a US-led historical bloc of transnational forces provides strategic leadership and advancing neoliberal ideological concepts of control shaping policy, culture, law, media spheres and consumption. This also means various capitalist class projects come to the fore to advance variants of neoliberal capitalism to deepen globalisation.
THE CRISES OF CAPITALIST CIVILISATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
We now turn to testing the thesis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation empirically. Ahmed (2010) provides a Marxist-inspired account of the current systemic crisis tendencies confronting capitalism. However, there are three crucial shortcomings in his perspective, which this chapter attempts to rectify. First, Ahmed does not provide a historicised premise for his perspective of capitalism and contemporary capitalist civilisation. Second, he does not break with a reductionist account of the systemic dimensions of capitalist crisis. The role of the US superpower and state is not brought into his account of the making of systemic crisis and its dimensions. Third, class practices, including the role of transnational capital and its ideological articulations of neoliberalism, are not linked closely enough to the systemic dimensions he brings into view. Capital as a geological force prevailing over and destroying planetary life is not clearly demonstrated empirically in that work. In contrast, I want to highlight concrete historical and systemic tendencies coming to the fore that are rooted in the institutional structures, ideologies and class-based practices that buttress the destructive logic of capital as a geological force and as part of transnational techno-financial accumulation. These are systemic tendencies that bring down, limit and constrain various dimensions of global capitalism. Moreover, as these systemic tendencies increasingly interlock, they engulf global capitalism in crises of contemporary capitalist civilisation. Such tendencies need to be recognised as part of the dialectic of concrete history and at more abstract levels of understanding contemporary capitalism.
Financialised chaos
Immanuel Wallerstein (2003) has argued that the US has declined as a hegemonic power over the past 50 years. His argument tends to suggest that key defining moments – from the mass resistance of 1968, defeat in Vietnam to, more recently, the War on Terror – have contributed to the decline of the US. Although Wallerstein is alive to contingency, his argument does not take on board a crucial attempt by the US to remake the material basis of its global power, and particularly, to centre this on controlling global finance. While this has been a tenuous coefficient of power, it has increased the complexity, reach and systemic leverage that the US has over the global capitalist system. And, in this regard, Gowan’s (1999) analysis of the evolution of the Dollar-Wall Street Regime from the 1970s to the 1990s is crucial. The Dollar-Wall Street Regime has not only remade post-World War II international finance, but has also built up and articulated a complex mix of institutions, financial power, the dollar and US power. These dynamics have been further strengthened by global neoliberal restructuring, which has placed high finance at the centre of the global political economy and with free rein to do as it pleases.
This means that financialisation has ensured that the structural power of finance capital is embedded in three important ways to ensure speculation and short-term profit making. Firstly, financial structures are now part of the systemic dynamics of global accumulation. So, if banks or finance houses fail, this has ramifications on a global scale. In the 2007–2009 financial crisis, banks lost over US$140 billion through sub-prime loans, and the value of credit default swaps was estimated at US$62.2 trillion. The combination of these losses broke confidence in the financial system. Secondly, most state structures, except those that have opted out of the logic of global financialisation, manage their macro-economies to ensure that the risk to financial capital is mitigated. Macro-economic frameworks and regulatory interventions are governed by the imperatives of globalised markets (such as foreign-exchange markets, housing markets, stock exchanges, government debt and commodity markets). Therefore, the state ensures that capital’s interests are maintained. Thirdly, the frontiers of financialisation and its crisis-engendering effects span spatial boundaries – extending from households to countries, national and global economic sectors, disaster zones and even war zones.5
The global political economy has been driven by the process of financial overaccumulation as a systemic dimension of global capitalism, spreading financialised chaos and instability. Financialised chaos has been registered in the following events: the Latin American debt crisis of 1982; the US stock-market crash because of junk bonds (1987); the 1997 Asian crisis; Russia and Brazil (1990–1999); the bursting of the dot.com bubble because of overinflated values (2000–2001); Argentina and Turkey (2000–2002); and the global financial crisis from 2007/08 until the present, which has engulfed the entire global political economy.
Capital has responded to the crises of 2007/08 with a renewal of the conjunctural project of neoliberalisation. Financial overaccumulation has been rescued through state intervention and austerity, without jettisoning the rationalities, institutional structures or practices of neoliberalisation. Global financial markets are now more deeply integrated and driven by information technology, essentially guaranteeing financialised chaos in the global political economy. Although this historical
