capitalism has become crony capitalism through the force of the logic of accumulation. The English term “crony capitalism” should not be reserved only for the “underdeveloped and corrupt” forms of Southeast Asia and Latin America that the “economists” (the sincere and convinced believers in the virtues of liberalism) denounced earlier. It now applies to capitalism in the contemporary United States and Europe. In its current behavior, this ruling class is quite close to that of the “mafia,” even if the term appears to be insulting and extreme.
The political system of contemporary capitalism is now plutocratic. This plutocracy adapts itself to the practice of representative democracy, which has become “low-intensity democracy.” You are free to vote for whomever you want, which is of no importance since it is the market and not the Congress or Parliament that decides everything. A plutocracy also adapts itself elsewhere to autocratic forms of management or electoral forces.
These changes have altered the status of the middle classes and their mode of integration into the global system. These classes are now mainly formed of wage-earners and no longer of small commodity producers as before. This transformation manifests as a crisis of the middle classes, marked by a growing differentiation: the privileged (high salaries) have become the direct agents of the dominant oligopolistic class, while the others are pauperized.
The Profiteers: The New Dominant Class in the Peripheries
The centers/peripheries contrast is not new. It has been part of the globalized expansion of capitalism from the beginning, five centuries ago. Consequently, the local ruling classes of the peripheral capitalist countries, whether independent or colonies, were always subaltern ruling classes, though still connected to their countries, drawing profits from their insertion into globalized capitalism.
There is considerable diversity in these classes, which are largely derived from those that had dominated their societies before their submission to capitalism/imperialism. The reconquest of independence often led to the replacement of these older (collaborationist) subordinated classes by new ruling classes—bureaucracies, state bourgeoisies—which were more legitimate in the eyes of the people (at the beginning) because of their association with national liberation movements. But here again, in the peripheries dominated either by the older imperialism (forms prior to 1950) or the new imperialism (from the Bandung era up to around 1980), the local ruling classes benefited from a visible relative stability. The disruptions caused by the oligopolistic capitalism of the new collective imperialism (the triad) truly uprooted the powers of all these older ruling classes in the peripheries and replaced them with a new class that I will call “profiteers.” The profiteer in question is a businessman, not a creative entrepreneur. He derives his wealth from his connections with the established government and the system’s foreign masters, whether representatives of the imperialist states (the CIA in particular) or the oligopolies. He acts as a well-paid intermediary, benefiting from an actual political rent. This is the origin of most of the wealth he accumulates. The profiteer no longer subscribes to any moral and national values whatsoever. In a caricature of his alter-ego in the dominant centers, he is interested in nothing other than “success,” in accumulating money, with a covetousness that stands out behind a supposed praise of the individual. Again, mafia-like, even criminal, behaviors are never far away.
The formation of the new class of profiteers is inseparable from the development of the forms of lumpen-development widely characteristic of the contemporary South. But the main axis of the dominant bloc is formed by this class only in the “non-emergent” countries. In the “emergent” countries, the dominant bloc is different.
The Dominated Classes: A Generalized but Segmented Proletariat
Marx rigorously defined the proletarian (a human being forced to sell his or her labor power to capital) and recognized that the conditions of this sale (“formal” or “real” to use Marx’s terms) were always diverse. The proletariat’s segmentation is not a new phenomenon. The description was more accurate for some parts of the class, like the nineteenth-century workers in the new manufacturing sector or, a better example, the Fordist factory in the twentieth century. Concentration on the workplace facilitated solidarity in common struggles and the maturation of political consciousness, but it also encouraged workerism in some historical Marxisms. The fragmentation of production resulting from capital’s strategy of implementing the possibilities offered by modern technologies, without, however, losing control of subcontracted or delocalized production, weakens solidarity and strengthens diversity in perception of interests.
Thus the proletariat seems to disappear just at the moment it has become more widespread. Forms of small, autonomous production, and millions of small peasants, artisans, and small merchants, disappear and are replaced by subcontracting work, large chain stores, etc. Ninety percent of workers, in both material and immaterial production, become, in formal terms, wageworkers. I have drawn certain conclusions from the diversification in wages. Far from being proportional to the costs of training for the required qualifications, this diversification is accentuated to the extreme. Yet this has not prevented a rebirth in the feeling of solidarity. “We, the 99 percent,” say the Occupy movements. This twin reality—capital’s exploitation of everybody and the diverse forms and violence of this exploitation—is a challenge for the left, which cannot ignore “the contradictions among the people” and yet cannot give up on moving toward a convergence of objectives. This, in turn, implies a diversity in forms of organization and action by the new generalized proletariat. The ideology of the “movement” ignores these challenges. Moving to the offensive requires an inevitable reconstruction of centers able to think about the unity of strategic objectives.
The image of the generalized proletariat in the peripheries, whether emergent or not, is different in at least four ways: (i) the progress of the “working class,” visible in the emergent countries; (ii) the persistence of a large peasantry that is, nevertheless, increasingly integrated into the capitalist market and consequently subjected to exploitation by capital, even if indirect; (iii) the extremely rapid growth of “survival” activities resulting from lumpendevelopment; and (iv) the reactionary positions of large sections of the middle classes when they are the exclusive beneficiaries of growth.
The challenge for the radical left in these circumstances is “to unite peasants and workers,” to use terms derived from the Third International, to unite workers (including the “informal” ones), the critical intelligentsia, and the middle classes in an anti-comprador front.
New Forms of Political Domination
Transformations in the economic base of the system and its accompanying class structures have changed the conditions for the exercise of power. Political domination is now expressed through a new-style “political class” and a media clergy, both dedicated exclusively to serving the abstract capitalism of generalized monopolies. The ideology of the “individual as king” and the illusions of the “movement” that wants to transform the world, even “change life”(!)—without posing the question of workers and peoples seizing power—would reinforce capital’s new methods of exercising power.
In the peripheries, an extremely caricatured form is achieved when lumpen-development confides the exercise of power to a comprador state and class of profiteers. By contrast, in the emergent countries, social blocs of a different type exercise real power, which derives their legitimacy from the economic success of the policies implemented. The illusion that emergence “in globalized capitalism and by capitalist means” will make it possible to catch up with the centers, and the limitations, in fact, of what is possible in this context, and the concomitant social and political conflicts, open the door to different possible developments, moving either toward the best (in the direction of socialism) or the worst (failure and re-compradorization).
Obsolescent Capitalism and the End of Bourgeois Civilization
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