for democratic Marxism. In this volume, by elaborating on the themes of capitalist crisis and class struggle, the authors affirm the need for open, engaged and living Marxism in relation to contemporary realities of globalising capitalism. At the same time, such perspectives derive from activist scholars, activists engaged in movements and intellectuals from the Left. None pretend to have all the answers or a monopoly on the truth, but they offer different ways of engaging with the vast historical corpus of Marxism, and provide new analyses of capitalist crisis, situated struggle perspectives and thoughts for strengthening democratic, bottom-up, left agency.
CRISES OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM: SAME AS BEFORE OR UNPRECEDENTED?
Many observers of capitalism, including some on the Left (such as Marxist social democrats, revolutionary socialists or revolutionary nationalists), tend to understand capitalism as a durable social construct – a social system with permanence. In other words, despite cyclical moments of crisis in capitalism – booms and busts that are largely explained by overproduction or underconsumption – in the end, capitalism will adjust by marshalling a set of reforms to get out of the crisis. This view has three pitfalls, however. First, its proponents tend to believe that every crisis is the same. But this is not the case. Some crises of capitalism are cyclical but some are more generalised, which calls into question the accumulation model, state legitimacy and ruling-class strategies of control. Such general or systemic crises of capitalism are driven by their own historical, structural and class-struggle dynamics. In the history of capitalism, there have been three such crises: the first great depression (in the last quarter of the nineteenth century), the Great Depression of the 1930s and the so-called ‘stagflation’ crisis of the 1970s. According to Panitch and Gindin (2010: 4–5),
the term ‘crisis’ is commonly used to refer to interruptions in the process of capital accumulation and growth … Of greater significance is that some such interruptions do not simply come and go, but take on a much larger dimension. So we need to ask not just why crises occur, but why some crises are distinct: why they last so long, are marked by persistent economic uncertainty and produce significant political and social change.
Eight years since the collapse of the US housing market and, subsequently, the US stock market, the global economy has not recovered from the financialised crisis. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Europe is in a state of stagnation, with low inflation and weak credit threatening any attempts of recovery. Greece continues to be the epicentre of the crisis in Europe. Ukraine received a bailout to the sum of 17 billion euros but still requires further assistance. According to IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, the Eurozone crisis is far from over and Ukraine could destabilise the world economy (Wearden 2014). In this volume we look at the crisis in the Eurozone in terms of its underlying political-economic dynamics to understand what drives and what is reproducing the crisis. As for the US, modest economic recovery has begun, but the deep-seated inequalities that were foregrounded by the symbolic protest actions of the Occupy movement still haunt American society.
The big hope that economies in the global South would lead recovery in the global economy has also proven to be unfounded. Growth has slowed in the big global-South economies of China, India and Brazil, and in some cases this set in before the 2008 financial crisis. In this volume, the political economies of India and Brazil, and the limits of their versions of globalisation, are analysed. The economies of the global South face challenges from outward flows of finance and from the modest recovery in the US turning that country into a renewed destination for financial flows. In other words, countries in the global South are facing risks from fickle outward movements of finance, and there are strong predictions that financial contagion and turmoil could hit the global South (IMF 2014). Ironically, this is likely to happen despite the coordination and crisis-management role of leading global South economies through the G20.
As well as the long duration of the financial crisis and its widespread global impact, there are two crucial dimensions that accentuate its distinctiveness. First, the economic dimension of the crisis is underpinned by specific dynamics linked to the financialisation of the global economy. For example, the current economic crisis is not the same as the 1987 US stock-market crash as a result of junk bonds or the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000/01 because of overinflated values. This crisis, in contrast, has much deeper roots in the financialisation of the global economy. Transnational techno-financialised chaos, grounded in globalised and computer-linked financial markets, is now both endemic and a built-in structural feature of the global economy. Some refer to this as the global casino effect. These dynamics make the current crisis distinctive.
Second, the contemporary financialised crisis is also distinctive because it intersects with and engenders other dimensions of systemic crisis, including climate crisis, peak oil, food-system crisis and the securitisation of democracy. Contemporary capitalism is experiencing an existential crisis that is historically unprecedented. The total effect of today’s crisis of capitalism on civilisation reveals serious challenges and limits to the reproduction of capitalism, to the extent that a mere reform of the system – in other words, producing more of the same – will perpetuate a system that will destroy all human and non-human life forms. Capitalism may not collapse, but it certainly has become the enemy of planetary existence and it is incapable of resolving these incurable systemic contradictions without bringing about its end.
In terms of reforming capitalism, the second pitfall is that this imbues the capitalist class with ingenuity while at the same time reducing capitalism to a naturalised social system. This largely derives from a veneration of scientific progress, technological fixes and instrumental rationality. The allure of capitalist modernity looms large in this approach. A simplistic and deterministic Marxist view converges with such a perspective, and argues that capitalism is never on its last legs as long as there is room for further accumulation, profits and technological innovation – in other words, as long as the march of the forces of production can take place, then capitalism will survive. However, given the deep systemic and unprecedented character of the contemporary crises of capitalism, it is necessary to ask, can capital solve every crisis of capitalism so that it ensures the system survives? Whose interests are realised with these capital-led solutions?
It is revealing that the lessons that capitalism learnt from the Great Depression are still applied to fashion managerial strategies for the current crisis. According to the 40th-anniversary edition of Charles P Kindleberger’s book The World in Depression 1929–1939 ([1973] 2013), it is claimed that Lawrence Summers, a White House advisor, turned to the writing of Kindleberger and his peers for guidance in the dark hours of the 2008 crisis.2 For DeLong and Eichengreen (2013), who wrote the foreword to the 2013 edition of Kindleberger’s classic, the lessons from the book are informative: ‘Three lessons stand out, the first having to do with panic in financial markets, the second with the power of contagion, and the third with the importance of hegemony.’3
However, even with this advice and the hegemonic stability role prescribed for the US, the crisis has not abated. This has mainly to do with an intersection of the unprecedented dimensions of a crisis that is systemic, and not just economic. Even if capital ostensibly asserts solutions, which currently really means stabilising global capitalism, workers and the ‘precariat’ are squeezed and they pay the price in the end. This has become patently clear during the current crisis.
A third pitfall associated with the reform-of-capitalism perspective is its denial of class struggle to confront capitalism when it is in crisis and vulnerable. This is not just about fear of the unknown, a lack of political consciousness or the weaknesses of the vanguard. More importantly, it is about the failure to connect
