conjunctural phenomena. They strictly correspond to the operational requirements of contemporary capitalism.
Bourgeois civilization—like any civilization—cannot be reduced to the logic of the economic system’s reproduction. It includes an ideological and moral component: praise for individual initiative, certainly, but also honesty and respect for the law, even solidarity with the people, expressed at least at the national level. This value system ensured a certain stability to social reproduction as a whole and marked the world of political representations at its service. This value system is disappearing. Taking its place is a system without any values. Ignorance and vulgarity characterize a growing majority in this world of the “dominants.” A dramatic change of this kind heralds the end of a civilization. It reproduces what can clearly be seen from other eras of decadence. For all these reasons, I consider that contemporary oligopolistic capitalism must now be unequivocally described as obsolescent, whatever its apparent immediate successes, since the latter are completely absorbed into a path clearly leading to a new barbarism. (I refer here to my study “Révolution ou décadence?” [Revolution or Decadence], already more than thirty years old.)4
The system of generalized monopoly capitalism, “globalized” (imperialist) and financialized, is imploding right before our eyes. This system is visibly incapable of overcoming its growing internal contradictions and is condemned to pursue its mad rush. The “crisis” of the system is due to nothing other than its own “success.” The strategy used by the monopolies has always resulted in the sought-after results up to this very day: “austerity” plans, the so-called social (in fact anti-social) plans for layoffs, are still imposed, in spite of resistance. The initiative still remains, even now, in the hands of the monopolies (the “markets”) and their political servants (the governments that submit their decisions to the so-called requirements of the “market”).
Analysis of struggles and conflicts that begin with the idea of challenging imperialist domination allows us to situate the new phenomenon of the “emergence” of some countries in the South.
Yet this autumn of capitalism does not coincide with a “springtime of peoples,” which implies that workers and peoples in struggle have made an accurate assessment of the requirements, not to “end the crisis of capitalism” but to “end capitalism” (the title of one of my recent works).5 This has not happened, or not yet. The gap separating the autumn of capitalism from the possible springtime of peoples gives to the current moment of history its dangerously dramatic character. The battle between the defenders of the capitalist order and those who, beyond their resistance, can urge humanity onto the long road to socialism, viewed as a higher stage of civilization, has hardly begun. All alternatives are thus possible, the best as well as the most barbaric.
The very existence of this gap requires some explanation. Capitalism is not only a system based on the exploitation of labor by capital. It is also a system based on polarization in its development on the world scale. Capitalism and imperialism are the two inseparable faces of the same reality, that of historical capitalism. The challenge to this system developed throughout the twentieth century up to 1980, in a long wave of victorious struggles by workers and dominated peoples. Revolutions conducted under the banners of Marxism and communism, reforms conquered within the context of a gradual path to socialism, the victories of the national liberation movements of colonized and oppressed peoples, all together built relations of force less unfavorable to workers and peoples than previously. But this wave ran out of steam without succeeding in creating the conditions for its own continuation by new advances. This exhaustion then allowed monopoly capital to retake the offensive and reestablish its absolute and unilateral power, while the outlines of a new wave of challenges to the system can barely be discerned. In that crepuscular light of the night that has not yet ended and the day that has not yet begun, monsters and ghosts take shape. Whereas generalized monopoly capitalism is truly monstrous, the responses by forces of rejection are still largely nebulous.
3. EMERGENCE AND LUMPEN-DEVELOPMENT
The term “emergence” is used by various people in extremely different contexts and most often without taking the time to clearly define its meaning. Emergence is not measured by an elevated rate of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or exports, over a long period of time (more than a decade), or by the fact that the society in question has attained an elevated level in per capita GDP, as the World Bank and conventional economists view it. Emergence implies much more: sustained growth in a country’s industrial production and an increase in the ability of these industries to be competitive on the world scale.
Moreover, two further questions need to be clarified: what industries are involved and what is meant by competitive. We should exclude extractive industries (mines and fuels) that alone can, in countries well endowed by nature, produce accelerated growth without drawing in its wake all the productive activities of the country in question. Extreme examples of these “non-emergent” situations are the Gulf countries, Venezuela, and Gabon. It is also necessary to consider the competitiveness of the productive activities in the economy as well as that of the productive system as a whole, and not just the competitiveness of a select number of production units taken on their own. By means of delocalization or subcontracting, multinationals operating in countries of the South can be behind the establishment of local production units (subsidiaries of the multinationals or autonomous units) capable of exporting on the world market, which makes them competitive in the view of conventional economics. The competitiveness of a productive system depends on various economic and social factors, such as general levels of education and training of workers at all levels, and the effectiveness of all the institutions that manage the national political economy (tax system, corporate law, labor rights, credit, public support, etc.). In turn, the productive system in question should not be reduced solely to processing industries that produce manufactured goods for production and consumption (though the absence of these really means there is no productive system worthy of the name), but also includes food and agricultural production, as well as services required for the normal operation of the system (particularly transport and credit).
The concept of emergence, then, implies a political and holistic approach to the question. Therefore, a country is emergent only insofar as the policies implemented by the government aim at the objective of building and reinforcing an inward-looking economy (even if it is open to the outside) and, consequently, capable of asserting its national economic sovereignty. This complex objective implies that the assertion of this sovereignty involves all aspects of economic life. In particular, it implies a policy that makes it possible for a country to strengthen its food sovereignty as well as its sovereignty over the control of natural resources and access to them from outside its national territory. These multiple and complementary objectives are in stark contrast with those of a comprador government that is content to adjust the growth model implemented to the requirements of the dominant “liberal-globalized” world system and the possibilities offered by it.
So far, we have said nothing about the orientation of the political strategy implemented by a particular state and society: is it capitalist or moving toward socialism? Yet this question cannot be eliminated from the debate because a ruling class’s choice of orientation has major positive or negative effects on the very success of emergence. The relation between policies of emergence, on the one hand, and the accompanying social transformations, on the other, does not depend exclusively on the internal consistency of the former, but also on the degree of their complementarity (or conflict) with the latter. Social struggles—class struggles and political conflicts—do not arise from “adjusting” to the logic of the state’s project of emergence; they are a determinant of what the state does. Current experience illustrates the diversity of and fluctuations in these relations. Emergence is often accompanied by a worsening of inequalities. Yet the precise nature of these inequalities should be spelled out: do these inequalities occur in a context where a tiny minority or a larger one (the middle classes) benefit from policies pursued while the majority of workers are pauperized, or in a context where there is an improvement in the living conditions of this majority, even if the rate of growth in their income is lower than that of the system’s
