Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
10 10UTC Dezembro 10UTC 2009 por veglass
David Harvey, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion
point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly
shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very
serious constraints. Three percent compound growth (generally considered
the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy)
is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all
manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets
and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons
to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of
governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero
growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is
no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the
World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme “another
world is possible.” It must now take up the task of defining how another
socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these
alternatives are to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window
of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.
The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis
of the 1970s. These steps included:
(a) the successful assault upon organized labor and its political
institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting
labor-saving technological changes and heightening competition. The
result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in
total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster
disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions.
(b) undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the
previous stage of (nation state) monopoly capitalism by opening up
capitalism to far fiercer international competition. Intensifying global
competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits.
Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became
key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the
beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not
exclusively towards East Asia.
(c) utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of
capital – money capital – to reallocate capital resources globally
(eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking
deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of
(ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and
agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets. The corollary
was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find
new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation
of fictitious capital markets.
(d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance
on “accumulation by dispossession” as a means to augment capitalist
class power. The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous
and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower
classes in the core ecoomies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing
market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon
African American populations.
(d) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing
the debt economy (governmental, corporate and household) to its limits
(particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries
from Latvia to Dubai).
(e) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the
construction of whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a
Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in
2007-8. These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were
facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and
collateralized debt obligations.
The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these
transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in
the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal. The ideology
rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative
and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty
and freedom and that the “nanny state” should be dismantled for the
benefit of all. But the practice entailed that the state must stand
behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus introducing
(beginning with the Mexican and developing countries debt crisis of
1982) “moral hazard” big time into the financial system. The state
(local and national) also became increasingly committed to providing a
“good business climate” to attract investments in a highly competitive
environment. The interests of the people were secondary to the interests
of capital and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of
the people had to be sacrificed (as became standard practice in IMF
structural adjustments programs from the early 1980s onwards). The
system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism
for the capitalist class.
These conditions varied considerably, of course, depending upon what
part of the world one inhabited, the class relations prevailing there,
the political and cultural traditions and how the balance of
political-economic power was shifting.
So how can the left negotiate the dynamics of this crisis? At times of
crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain for all to see.
Surplus capital and surplus labor exist side-by side with seemingly no
way to put them back together in the midst of immense human suffering
and unmet needs. In midsummer of 2009, one third of the capital
equipment in the United States stood idle, while some 17 per cent of the
workforce were either unemployed, enforced part-timers or “discouraged”
workers. What could be more irrational than that!
Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This
question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in
the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and
environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding “yes.” But
the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labour
to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won
asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to
suffer environmental degradations galore to say nothing of serial
reductions in their living standards which means starvation for many of
those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities
will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require
more than a little political repression, police violence and militarized
state control to stifle unrest.
Since much of this is unpredictable and since the spaces of the global
economy are so variable, then uncertainties as to outcomes are
heightened at times of crisis. All manner of localized possibilities
arise for either nascent capitalists in some new space to seize
opportunities to challenge older class and territorial hegemonies (as
when Silicon Valley replaced Detroit from the mid-1970s onwards in the
United States) or for radical movements to challenge the reproduction of
an already destabilized class power. To say that the capitalist class
and capitalism can survive is not to say that they are predestined to do
so nor does it say that their future character is given. Crises are
moments of paradox and possibilities.
So what will happen this time around? If we are to get back to three
percent growth, then this means finding new and profitable global
investment opportunities for $1.6 trillion in 2010 rising to closer to
$3 trillion by 2030. This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new
investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the
dollar figures are inflation adjusted). Real problems of finding
adequate outlets for surplus capital began to emerge after 1980, even
with the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The
difficulties were in part resolved by creation of fictitious markets
where speculation in asset values could take off unhindered. Where will
all this investment go now?
Leaving aside the undisputable constraints in the relation to nature
(with global warming of paramount importance), the other potential
barriers of effective demand in the market place, of technologies and of
geographical/ geopolitical distributions are likely to be profound, even
supposing, which is unlikely, that no serious active oppositions to
continuous capital accumulation and further consolidation of class power
materialize. What spaces are left in the global economy for new spatial
fixes for capital surplus absorption? China and the ex-Soviet bloc have
already been integrated. South and SouthEast Asia is filling up fast.
Africa is not yet fully integrated but there is nowhere else with the
capacity to absorb all this surplus capital. What new lines of
production can be opened up to absorb growth? There may be no effective
long-run capitalist solutions (apart from reversion to fictitious
capital manipulations) to this crisis of capitalism. At some point
quantitative changes lead to qualitative shifts and we need to take
seriously the idea that we may be at exactly such an inflexion point in
the history of capitalism. Questioning the future of capitalism itself
as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of
current debate.
Yet there appears to be little appetite for such discussion, even among
the left. Instead we continue to hear the usual conventional mantras
regarding the perfectibility of humanity with the help of free markets
and free trade, private property and personal responsibility, low taxes
and minimalist state involvement in social provision, even though this
all sounds increasingly hollow. A crisis of legitimacy looms. But
legitimation crises typically unfold at a different pace and rhythm to
that of stock markets. It took, for example, three or four years before
the stock market crash of 1929 produced the massive social movements
(both progressive and fascistic) after 1932 or so. The intensity of the
current pursuit by political power of ways to exit the present crisis
may have something to do with the political fear of looming illegitimacy.
The last thirty years, however, has seen the emergence of systems of
governance that seem immune to legitimacy problems and unconcerned even
with the creation of consent. The mix of authoritarianism, monetary
corruption of representative democracy, surveillance, policing and
militarization (particularly through the war on terror), media control
and spin suggests a world in which the control of discontent through
disinformation, fragmentations of oppositions and the shaping of
oppositional cultures through the promotion of NGOs tends to prevail
with plenty of coercive force to back it up if necessary.
The idea that the crisis had systemic origins is scarcely mooted in the
mainstream media (even as a few mainstream economists like Stiglitz,
Krugman and even Jeffrey Sachs attempt to steal some of the left’s
historical thunder by confessing to an epiphany or two). Most of the
governmental moves to contain the crisis in North America and Europe
amount to the perpetuation of business as usual which translates into
support for the capitalist class. The “moral hazard” that was the
immediate trigger for the financial failures is being taken to new
heights in the bank bail-outs. The actual practices of neoliberalism (as
opposed to its utopian theory) always entailed blatant support for
finance capital and capitalist elites (usually on the grounds that
financial institutions must be protected at all costs and that it is the
duty of state power to create a good business climate for solid
profiteering). This has not fundamentally changed. Such practices are
justified by appeal to the dubious proposition that a “rising tide” of
capitalist endeavor will “lift all boats” or that the benefits of
compound growth will magically “trickle down” (which it never does
except in the form of a few crumbs from the rich folks’ table).
So how will the capitalist class exit the current crisis and how swift
will the exit be? The rebound in stock market values from Shanghai and
Tokyo to Frankfurt, London and New York is a good sign we are told even
as unemployment pretty much everywhere continues to rise. But notice the
class bias in that measure. We are enjoined to rejoice in the rebound in
stock values for the capitalists because it always precedes, it is said,
a rebound in the “real economy” where jobs for the workers are created
and incomes earned. The fact that the last stock rebound in the United
States after 2002 turned out to be a “jobless recovery” appears to have
been forgotten already. The Anglo-Saxon public in particular appears to
be seriously afflicted with amnesia. It too easily forgets and forgives
the transgressions of the capitalist class and the periodic disasters
its actions precipitate. The capitalist media are happy to promote such
amnesia.
China and India are still growing, the former by leaps and bounds. But
in China’s case, the cost is a huge expansion of bank lending on risky
projects (the Chinese banks were not caught up in the global speculative
frenzy but now are continuing it). The overaccumulation of productive
capacity proceeds a-pace and long-term infrastructural investments whose
productivity will not be known for several years, are booming (even in
urban property markets). And China’s burgeoning demand is entraining
those economies supplying raw materials, like Australia and Chile. The
likelihood of a subsequent crash in China cannot be dismissed but it may
take time to discern (a long-term version of Dubai). Meanwhile the
global epicenter of capitalism accelerates its shift parimarily towards
East Asia.
In the older financial centers, the young financial sharks have taken
their bonuses of yesteryear, collectively started boutique financial
institutions to circle Wall Street and the City of London to sift
through the detritus of yesterdays financial giants to snaffle up the
juicy bits and start all over again. The investment banks that remain in
the US – Goldman Sachs and J.P.Morgan – though reincarnated as bank
holding companies have gained exemption (thanks to the Federal Reserve)
from regulatory requirements and are making huge profits (and setting
aside moneys for huge bonuses to match) out of speculating dangerously
using tax-payers money in unregulated and still booming derivative
markets. The leveraging that got us into the crisis has resumed big time
as if nothing has happened. Innovations in finance are on the march as
new ways to package and sell fictitious capital debts are being
pioneered and offered to institutions (such as pension funds) desperate
to find new outlets for surplus capital. The fictions (as well as the
bonuses) are back!
Consortia are buying up foreclosed properties, either waiting for the
market to turn before making a killing or banking high value land for a
future moment of active redevelopment. The regular banks are stashing
away cash, much of it garnered from the public coffers, also with an eye
to resuming bonus payments consistent with a former lifestyle while a
whole host of entrepreneurs hover in the wings waiting to seize this
moment of creative destruction backed by a flood of public moneys.
Meanwhile raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances
of democratic governance. The pharmaceutical, health insurance and
hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first
three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care
reform in the United States. Max Baucus, head of the key Senate finance
committee that shaped the health care bill received $1.5 million for a
bill that delivers a vast number of new clients to the insurance
companies with few protections against ruthless exploitation and
profiteering (Wall Street is delighted). Another electoral cycle,
legally corrupted by immense money power, will soon be upon us. In the
United States, the parties of “K Street” and of Wall Street will be duly
re-elected as working Americans are exhorted to work their way out of
the mess that the ruling class has created. We have been in such dire
straits before, we are reminded, and each time working Americans have
rolled up their sleeves, tightened their belts, and saved the system
from some mysterious mechanics of auto-destruction for which the ruling
class denies all responsibility. Personal responsibility is, after all,
for the workers and not for the capitalists.
If this is the outline of the exit strategy then almost certainly we
will be in another mess within five years. The faster we come out of
this crisis and the less excess capital is destroyed now, the less room
there will be for the revival of long-term active growth. The loss of
asset values at this conjuncture (mid 2009) is, we are told by the IMF,
at least $55 trillion, which is equivalent to almost exactly one year’s
global output of goods and services. Already we are back to the output
levels of 1989. We may be looking at losses of $400 trillion or more
before we are through. Indeed, in a recent startling calculation, it was
suggested that the US state alone was on the hook to guarantee more than
$200 trillion in asset values. The likelihood that all of those assets
would go bad is very minimal, but the thought that many of them could is
sobering in the extreme. Just to take a concrete example: Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, now taken over by the US Government, own or guarantee more
than $5 trillion in home loans many of which are in deep trouble (losses
of more than $150 billion were recorded in 2008 alone). So what, then,
are the alternatives?
It has long been the dream of many in the world, that an alternative to
capitalist (ir)rationality can be defined and rationally arrived at
through the mobilization of human passions in the collective search for
a better life for all. These alternatives – historically called
socialism or communism – have, in various times and places been tried.
In former times, such as the 1930s, the vision of one or other of them
operated as a beacon of hope. But in recent times they have both lost
their luster, been dismissed as wanting, not only because of the failure
of historical experiments with communism to make good on their promises
and the penchant for communist regimes to cover over their mistakes by
repression, but also because of their supposedly flawed presuppositions
concerning human nature and the potential perfectibility of the human
personality and of human institutions.
The difference between socialism and communism is worth noting.
Socialism aims to democratically manage and regulate capitalism in ways
that calm its excesses and redistribute its benefits for the common
good. It is about spreading the wealth around through progressive
taxation arrangements while basic needs – such as education, health care
and even housing – are provided by the state out of reach of market
forces. Many of the key achievements of redistributive socialism in the
period after 1945, not only in Europe but beyond, have become so
socially embedded as to be immune from neoliberal assault. Even in the
United States, Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular
programs that right wing forces find it almost impossible to dislodge.
The Thatcherites in Britain could not touch national health care except
at the margins. Social provision in Scandinavia and most of Western
Europe seems to be an unshakable bed-rock of the social order.
Communism, on the other hand, seeks to displace capitalism by creating
an entirely different mode of both production and distribution of goods
and services. In the history of actually existing communism, social
control over production, exchange and distribution meant state control
and systematic state planning. In the long-run this proved to be
unsuccessful though, interestingly, its conversion in China (and its
earlier adoption in places like Singapore) has proven far more
successful than the pure neoliberal model in generating capitalist
growth for reasons that cannot be elaborated upon here. Contemporary
attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state
control and look to other forms of collective social organization to
displace market forces and capital accumulation as the basis for
organizing production and distribution. Horizontally networked as
opposed to hierarchically commanded systems of coordination between
autonomously organized and self-governing collectives of producers and
consumers are envisaged as lying at the core of a new form of communism.
Contemporary technologies of communication make such a system seem
feasible. All manner of small-scale experiments around the world can be
found in which such economic and political forms are being constructed.
In this there is a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and
anarchist traditions that harks back to the broadly collaborative
situation between them in the 1860s in Europe.
While nothing is certain, it could be that 2009 marks the beginning of a
prolonged shake out in which the question of grand and far-reaching
alternatives to capitalism will step-by-step bubble up to the surface in
one part of the world or another. The longer the uncertainty and the
misery is prolonged, the more the legitimacy of the existing way of
doing business will be questioned and the more the demand to build
something different will escalate. Radical as opposed to band-aid
reforms to patch up the financial system may seem more necessary.
The uneven development of capitalist practices throughout the world has
produced, moreover, anti-capitalist movements all over the place. The
state-centric economies of much of East Asia generate different
discontents (as in Japan and China) compared to the churning
anti-neoliberal struggles occurring throughout much of Latin America
where the Bolivarian revolutionary movement of popular power exists in a
peculiar relationship to capitalist class interests that have yet to be
truly confronted. Differences over tactics and policies in response to
the crisis among the states that make up the European Union are
increasing even as a second attempt to come up with a unified EU
constitution is under way. Revolutionary and resolutely anti-capitalist
movements are also to be found, though not all of them are of a
progressive sort, in many of the marginal zones of capitalism. Spaces
have been opened up within which something radically different in terms
of dominant social relations, ways of life, productive capacities and
mental conceptions of the world can flourish. This applies as much to
the Taliban and to communist rule in Nepal as to the Zapatistas in
Chiapas and indigenous movements in Bolivia, the Maoist movements in
rural India, even as they are world’s apart in objectives, strategies
and tactics.
The central problem is that in aggregate there is no resolute and
sufficiently unified anti-capitalist movement that can adequately
challenge the reproduction of the capitalist class and the perpetuation
of its power on the world stage. Neither is there any obvious way to
attack the bastions of privilege for capitalist elites or to curb their
inordinate money power and military might. While openings exist towards
some alternative social order, no one really knows where or what it is.
But just because there is no political force capable of articulating let
alone mounting such a program, this is no reason to hold back on
outlining alternatives.
Lenin’s famous question “what is to be done?” cannot be answered, to be
sure, without some sense of who it is might do it where. But a global
anti-capitalist movement is unlikely to emerge without some animating
vision of what is to be done and why. A double blockage exists: the lack
of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional
movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the
articulation of an alternative. How, then, can this blockage be
transcended? The relation between the vision of what is to be done and
why, and the formation of a political movement across particular places
to do it has to be turned into a spiral. Each has to reinforce the other
if anything is actually to get done. Otherwise potential opposition will
be forever locked down into a closed circle that frustrates all
prospects for constructive change, leaving us vulnerable to perpetual
future crises of capitalism with increasingly deadly results. Lenin’s
question demands an answer.
The central problem to be addressed is clear enough. Compound growth for
ever is not possible and the troubles that have beset the world these
last thirty years signal that a limit is looming to continuous capital
accumulation that cannot be transcended except by creating fictions that
cannot last. Add to this the facts that so many people in the world live
in conditions of abject poverty, that environmental degradations are
spiraling out of control, that human dignities are everywhere being
offended even as the rich are piling up more and more wealth (the number
of billionaires in India doubled last year from 27 to 52) under their
command and that the levers of political, institutional, judicial,
military and media power are under such tight but dogmatic political
control as to be incapable of doing much more than perpetuating the
status quo and frustrating discontent.
A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound
capital accumulation and eventually shut it down as the prime motor of
human history, requires a sophisticated understanding of how social
change occurs. The failings of past endeavors to build a lasting
socialism and communism have to be avoided and lessons from that
immensely complicated history must be learned. Yet the absolute
necessity for a coherent anti-capitalist revolutionary movement must
also be recognized. The fundamental aim of that movement is to assume
social command over both the production and distribution of surpluses.
We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times. I
propose a “co-revolutionary theory” derived from an understanding of
Marx’s account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism. Social change
arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven
moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or
assemblage of activities and practices:
a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and
consumption
b) relations to nature
c) social relations between people
d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural
understandings and beliefs
e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies,
services or affects
f ) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements
g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.
Each one of these moments is internally dynamic and internally marked by
tensions and contradictions (just think of mental conceptions of the
world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to
each other. The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting
movement across all seven moments. New technologies could not be
identified and practices without new mental conceptions of the world
(including that of the relation to nature and social relations). Social
theorists have the habit of taking just one of the these moments and
viewing it as the “silver bullet” that causes all change. We have
technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists
(Jarad Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawkin), labor process
determinists (the autonomistas), institutionalists, and so on and so
forth. They are all wrong. It is the dialectical motion across all of
these moments that really counts even as there is uneven development in
that motion.
When capitalism itself undergoes one of its phases of renewal, it does
so precisely by co-evolving all moments, obviously not without tensions,
struggles, fights and contradictions. But consider how these seven
moments were configured around 1970 before the neoliberal surge and
consider how they look now and you will see they have all changed in
ways that re-define the operative characteristics of capitalism viewed
as a non-Hegelian totality.
An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere (in labor
processes, around mental conceptions, in the relation to nature, in
social relations, in the design of revolutionary technologies and
organizational forms, out of daily life or through attempts to reform
institutional and administrative structures including the
reconfiguration of state powers). The trick is to keep the political
movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways.
This was how capitalism arose out of feudalism and this is how something
radically different called communism, socialism or whatever must arise
out of capitalism. Previous attempts to create a communist or socialist
alternative fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different
moments in motion and failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and
uncertainties in the dialectical movement between them. Capitalism has
survived precisely by keeping the dialectical movement between the
moments going and constructively embracing the inevitable tensions,
including crises, that result.
Change arises, of course, out of an existing state of affairs and it has
to harness the possibilities immanent within an existing situation.
Since the existing situation varies enormously from Nepal, to the
Pacific regions of Bolivia, to the deindustrializing cities of Michigan
and the still booming cities of Mumbai and Shanghai and the shaken but
by no means destroyed financial centers of New York and London, so all
manner of experiments in social change in different places and at
different geographical scales are both likely and potentially
illuminating as ways to make (or not make) another world possible. And
in each instance it may seem as if one or other aspect of the existing
situation holds the key to a different political future. But the first
rule for a global anti-capitalist movement must be: never rely on the
unfolding dynamics of one moment without carefully calibrating how
relations with all the others are adapting and reverberating.
Feasible future possibilities arise out of the existing state of
relations between the different moments. Strategic political
interventions within and across the spheres can gradually move the
social order onto a different developmental path. This is what wise
leaders and forward looking institutions do all the time in local
situations, so there is no reason to think there is anything
particularly fantastic or utopian about acting in this way. The left has
to look to build alliances between and across those working in the
distinctive spheres. An anti-capitalist movement has to be far broader
than groups mobilizing around social relations or over questions of
daily life in themselves. Traditional hostilities between, for example,
those with technical, scientific and administrative expertise and those
animating social movements on the ground have to be addressed and
overcome. We now have to hand, in the example of the climate change
movement, a significant example of how such alliances can begin to work.
In this instance the relation to nature is the beginning point, but
everyone realizes that something has to give on all the other moments
and while there is a wishful politics that wants to see the solution as
purely technological, it becomes clearer by the day that daily life,
mental conceptions, institutional arrangements, production processes and
social relations have to be involved. And all of that means a movement
to restructure capitalist society as a whole and to confront the growth
logic that underlies the problem in the first place.
There have, however, to be, some loosely agreed upon common objectives
in any transitional movement. Some general guiding norms can be set
down. These might include (and I just float these norms here for
discussion) respect for nature, radical egalitarianism in social
relations, institutional arrangements based in some sense of common
interests and common property, democratic administrative procedures (as
opposed to the monetized shams that now exist), labor processes
organized by the direct producers, daily life as the free exploration of
new kinds of social relations and living arrangements, mental
conceptions that focus on self-realization in service to others and
technological and organizational innovations oriented to the pursuit of
the common good rather than to supporting militarized power,
surveillance and corporate greed. These could be the co-revolutionary
points around which social action could converge and rotate. Of course
this is utopian! But so what! We cannot afford not to be.
Let me detail one particular aspect of the problem which arise in the
place where I work. Ideas have consequences and false ideas can have
devastating consequences. Policy failures based on erroneous economic
thinking played a crucial role in both the run-up to the debacle of the
1930s and in the seeming inability to find an adequate way out. Though
there is no agreement among historians and economists as to exactly what
policies failed, it is agreed that the knowledge structure through which
the crisis was understood needed to be revolutionized. Keynes and his
colleagues accomplished that task. But by the mid-1970s, it became clear
that the Keynesian policy tools were no longer working at least in the
way they were being applied and it was in this context that monetarism,
supply-side theory and the (beautiful) mathematical modelling of
micro-economic market behaviors supplanted broad-brush macro-economic
Keynesian thinking. The monetarist and narrower neoliberal theoretical
frame that dominated after 1980 is now in question. In fact it has
disastrously failed.
We need new mental conceptions to understand the world. What might these
be and who will produce them, given both the sociological and
intellectual malaise that hangs over knowledge production and (equally
important) dissemination more generally? The deeply entrenched mental
conceptions associated with neoliberal theories and the
neoliberalization and corporatization of the universities and the media
has played more than a trivial role in the production of the present
crisis. For example, the whole question of what to do about the
financial system, the banking sector, the state-finance nexus and the
power of private property rights, cannot be broached without going
outside of the box of conventional thinking. For this to happen will
require a revolution in thinking, in places as diverse as the
universities, the media and government as well as within the financial
institutions themselves.
Karl Marx, while not in any way inclined to embrace philosophical
idealism, held that ideas are a material force in history. Mental
conceptions constitute, after all, one of the seven moments in his
general theory of co-revolutionary change. Autonomous developments and
inner conflicts over what mental conceptions shall become hegemonic
therefore have an important historical role to play. It was for this
reason that Marx (along with Engels) wrote The Communist Manifesto,
Capital and innumerable other works. These works provide a systematic
critique, albeit incomplete, of capitalism and its crisis tendencies.
But as Marx also insisted, it was only when these critical ideas carried
over into the fields of institutional arrangements, organizational
forms, production systems, daily life, social relations, technologies
and relations to nature that the world would truly change.
Since Marx’s goal was to change the world and not merely to understand
it, ideas had to be formulated with a certain revolutionary intent. This
inevitably meant a conflict with modes of thought more convivial to and
useful for the ruling class. The fact that Marx’s oppositional ideas,
particularly in recent years, have been the target of repeated
repressions and exclusions (to say nothing of bowdlerizations and
misrepresentations galore) suggests that his ideas may be too dangerous
for the ruling classes to tolerate. While Keynes repeatedly avowed that
he had never read Marx, he was surrounded and influenced in the 1930s by
many people (like his economist colleague Joan Robinson) who had. While
many of them objected vociferously to Marx’s foundational concepts and
his dialectical mode of reasoning, they were acutely aware of and deeply
affected by some of his more prescient conclusions. It is fair to say, I
think, that the Keynesian theory revolution could not have been
accomplished without the subversive presence of Marx lurking in the wings.
The trouble in these times is that most people have no idea who Keynes
was and what he really stood for while the knowledge of Marx is
negligible. The repression of critical and radical currents of thought,
or to be more exact the corralling of radicalism within the bounds of
multiculturalism, identity politics and cultural choice, creates a
lamentable situation within the academy and beyond, no different in
principle to having to ask the bankers who made the mess to clean it up
with exactly the same tools as they used to get into it. Broad adhesion
to post-modern and post-structuralist ideas which celebrate the
particular at the expense of big-picture thinking does not help. To be
sure, the local and the particular are vitally important and theories
that cannot embrace, for example, geographical difference, are worse
than useless. But when that fact is used to exclude anything larger than
parish politics then the betrayal of the intellectuals and abrogation of
their traditional role become complete.
The current populations of academicians, intellectuals and experts in
the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill-equipped to
undertake the collective task of revolutionizing our knowledge
structures. They have, in fact, been deeply implicated in the
construction of the new systems of neoliberal governmentality that evade
questions of legitimacy and democracy and foster a technocratic
authoritarian politics. Few seem predisposed to engage in self-critical
reflection. Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on
neo classical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing
has happened and the vaunted business schools simply add a course or two
on business ethics or how to make money out of other people’s
bankruptcies. After all, the crisis arose out of human greed and there
is nothing that can be done about that!
The current knowledge structure is clearly dysfunctional and equally
clearly illegitimate. The only hope is that a new generation of
perceptive students (in the broad sense of all those who seek to know
the world) will clearly see it so and insist upon changing it. This
happened in the 1960s. At various other critical points in history
student inspired movements, recognizing the disjunction between what is
happening in the world and what they are being taught and fed by the
media, were prepared to do something about it. There are signs, from
Tehran to Athens and onto many European university campuses of such a
movement. How the new generation of students in China will act must
surely be of deep concern in the corridors of political power in Beijing.
A student-led and youthful revolutionary movement, with all of its
evident uncertainties and problems, is a necessary but not sufficient
condition to produce that revolution in mental conceptions that can lead
us to a more rational solution to the current problems of endless growth.
What, more broadly, would happen if an anti-capitalist movement were
constituted out of a broad alliance of the alienated, the discontented,
the deprived and the dispossessed? The image of all such people
everywhere rising up and demanding and achieving their proper place in
economic, social and political life, is stirring indeed. It also helps
focus on the question of what it is they might demand and what it is
that needs to be done.
Revolutionary transformations cannot be accomplished without at the very
minimum changing our ideas, abandoning cherished beliefs and prejudices,
giving up various daily comforts and rights, submitting to some new
daily life regimen, changing our social and political roles, reassigning
our rights, duties and responsibilities and altering our behaviors to
better conform to collective needs and a common will. The world around
us – our geographies – must be radically re-shaped as must our social
relations, the relation to nature and all of the other moments in the
co-revolutionary process. It is understandable, to some degree, that
many prefer a politics of denial to a politics of active confrontation
with all of this.
It would also be comforting to think that all of this could be
accomplished pacifically and voluntarily, that we would dispossess
ourselves, strip ourselves bare, as it were, of all that we now possess
that stands in the way of the creation of a more socially just,
steady-state social order. But it would be disingenuous to imagine that
this could be so, that no active struggle will be involved, including
some degree of violence. Capitalism came into the world, as Marx once
put it, bathed in blood and fire. Although it might be possible to do a
better job of getting out from under it than getting into it, the odds
are heavily against any purely pacific passage to the promised land.
There are various broad fractious currents of thought on the left as to
how to address the problems that now confront us. There is, first of
all, the usual sectarianism stemming from the history of radical action
and the articulations of left political theory. Curiously, the one place
where amnesia is not so prevalent is within the left (the splits between
anarchists and Marxists that occurred back in the 1870s, between
Trotskyists, Maoists and orthodox Communists, between the centralizers
who want to command the state and the anti-statist autonomists and
anarchists). The arguments are so bitter and so fractious, as to
sometimes make one think that more amnesia might be a good thing. But
beyond these traditional revolutionary sects and political factions, the
whole field of political action has undergone a radical transformation
since the mid-1970s. The terrain of political struggle and of political
possibilities has shifted, both geographically and organizationally.
There are now vast numbers of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s)
that play a political role that was scarcely visible before the
mid-1970s. Funded by both state and private interests, populated often
by idealist thinkers and organizers (they constitute a vast employment
program), and for the most part dedicated to single-issue questions
(environment, poverty, women’s rights, anti-slavery and trafficking
work, etc) they refrain from straight anti-capitalist politics even as
they espouse progressive ideas and causes. In some instances, however,
they are actively neoliberal, engaging in privatization of state welfare
functions or fostering institutional reforms to facilitate market
integration of marginalized populations (microcredit and microfinance
schemes for low income populations are a classic example of this).
While there are many radical and dedicated practitioners in this NGO
world, their work is at best ameliorative. Collectively, they have a
spotty record of progressive achievements, although in certain arenas,
such as women’s rights, health care and environmental preservation, they
can reasonably claim to have made major contributions to human
betterment. But revolutionary change by NGO is impossible. They are too
constrained by the political and policy stances of their donors. So even
though, in supporting local empowerment, they help open up spaces where
anti-capitalist alternatives become possible and even support
experimentation with such alternatives, they do nothing to prevent the
re-absorption of these alternatives into the dominant capitalist
practice: they even encourage it. The collective power of NGOs in these
times is reflected in the dominant role they play in the World Social
Forum, where attempts to forge a global justice movement, a global
alternative to neoliberalism, have been concentrated over the last ten
years.
The second broad wing of opposition arises out of anarchist, autonomist
and grass roots organizations (GROs) which refuse outside funding even
as some of them do rely upon some alternative institutional base (such
as the Catholic Church with its “base community” initiatives in Latin
America or broader church sponsorship of political mobilization in the
inner cities of the United States). This group is far from homogeneous
(indeed there are bitter disputes among them pitting, for example,
social anarchists against those they scathingly refer to as mere
“lifestyle” anarchists). There is, however, a common antipathy to
negotiation with state power and an emphasis upon civil society as the
sphere where change can be accomplished.. The self-organizing powers of
people in the daily situations in which they live has to be the basis
for any anti-capitalist alternative. Horizontal networking is their
preferred organizing model. So-called “solidarity economies” based on
bartering, collectives and local production systems is their preferred
political economic form. They typically oppose the idea that any central
direction might be necessary and reject hierarchical social relations or
hierarchical political power structures along with conventional
political parties. Organizations of this sort can be found everywhere
and in some places have achieved a high degree of political prominence.
Some of them are radically anti-capitalist in their stance and espouse
revolutionary objectives and in some instances are prepared to advocate
sabotage and other forms of disruption (shades of the Red Brigades in
Italy, the Baader Meinhoff in Germany and the Weather Underground in the
United States in the 1970s). But the effectiveness of all these
movements (leaving aside their more violent fringes) is limited by their
reluctance and inability to scale up their activism into large-scale
organizational forms capable of confronting global problems. The
presumption that local action is the only meaningful level of change and
that anything that smacks of hierarchy is anti-revolutionary is
self-defeating when it comes to larger questions. Yet these movements
are unquestionably providing a widespread base for experimentation with
anti-capitalist politics.
The third broad trend is given by the transformation that has been
occurring in traditional labor organizing and left political parties,
varying from social democratic traditions to more radical Trotskyist and
Communist forms of political party organization. This trend is not
hostile to the conquest of state power or hierarchical forms of
organization. Indeed, it regards the latter as necessary to the
integration of political organization across a variety of political
scales. In the years when social democracy was hegemonic in Europe and
even influential in the United States, state control over the
distribution of the surplus became a crucial tool to diminish
inequalities. The failure to take social control over the production of
surpluses and thereby really challenge the power of the capitalist class
was the Achilles heel of this political system, but we should not forget
the advances that it made even if it is now clearly insufficient to go
back to such a political model with its social welfarism and Keynesian
economics. The Bolivarian movement in Latin America and the ascent to
state power of progressive social democratic governments is one of the
most hopeful signs of a resuscitation of a new form of left statism.
Both organized labor and left political parties have taken some hard
hits in the advanced capitalist world over the last thirty years. Both
have either been convinced or coerced into broad support for
neoliberalization, albeit with a somewhat more human face. One way to
look upon neoliberalism, as was earlier noted, is as a grand and quite
revolutionary movement (led by that self-proclaimed revolutionary
figure, Margaret Thatcher) to privatize the surpluses or at least
prevent their further socialization.
While there are some signs of recovery of both labor organizing and left
politics (as opposed to the “third way” celebrated by New Labor in
Britain under Tony Blair and disastrously copied by many social
democratic parties in Europe) along with signs of the emergence of more
radical political parties in different parts of the world, the exclusive
reliance upon a vanguard of workers is now in question as is the ability
of those leftist parties that gain some access to political power to
have a substantive impact upon the development of capitalism and to cope
with the troubled dynamics of crisis-prone accumulation. The performance
of the German Green Party in power has hardly been stellar relative to
their political stance out of power and social democratic parties have
lost their way entirely as a true political force. But left political
parties and labor unions are significant still and their takeover of
aspects of state power, as with the workers party in Brazil or the
Bolivarian movement in Venezuela has had a clear impact on left
thinking, not only in Latin America. The complicated problem of how to
interpret the role of the Communist Party in China, with its exclusive
control over political power, and what its future policies might be
about is not easily resolved either.
The co-revolutionary theory earlier laid out would suggest that there is
no way that an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without
seizing state power, radically transforming it and re-working the
constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports
private property, the market system and endless capital accumulation.
Inter-state competition and geoconomic and geopolitical struggles over
everything from trade and money to questions of hegemony are also far
too significant to be left to local social movements or cast aside as
too big to contemplate. How the architecture of the state-finance nexus
is to be re-worked along with the pressing question of the common
measure of value given by money cannot be ignored in the quest to
construct alternatives to capitalist political economy. To ignore the
state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a
ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept.
The fourth broad trend is constituted by all the social movements that
are not so much guided by any particular political philosophy or
leanings but by the pragmatic need to resist displacement and
dispossession (through gentrification, industrial development, dam
construction, water privatization, the dismantling of social services
and public educational opportunities, or whatever). In this instance the
focus on daily life in the city, town, village or wherever provides a
material base for political organizing against the threats that state
policies and capitalist interests invariably pose to vulnerable
populations. These forms of protest politics are massive.
Again, there is a vast array of social movements of this sort, some of
which can become radicalized over time as they more and more realize
that the problems are systemic rather than particular and local. The
bringing together of such social movements into alliances on the land
(like the Via Campesina, the landless peasant movement in Brazil or
peasants mobilizing against land and resource grabs by capitalist
corporations in India) or in urban contexts (the right to the city and
take back the land movements in Brazil and now the United States)
suggest the way may be open to create broader alliances to discuss and
confront the systemic forces that underpin the particularities of
gentrification, dam construction, privatization or whatever. More
pragmatic rather than driven by ideological preconceptions, these
movements nevertheless can arrive at systemic understandings out of
their own experience. To the degree that many of them exist in the same
space, such as within the metropolis, they can (as supposedly happened
with the factory workers in the early stages of the industrial
revolution) make common cause and begin to forge, on the basis of their
own experience, a consciousness of how capitalism works and what it is
that might collectively be done. This is the terrain where the figure of
the “organic intellectual” leader, made so much of in Antonio Gramsci’s
work, the autodidact who comes to understand the world first hand
through bitter experiences, but shapes his or her understanding of
capitalism more generally, has a great deal to say. To listen to peasant
leaders of the MST in Brazil or the leaders of the anti-corporate land
grab movement in India is a privileged education. In this instance the
task of the educated alienated and discontented is to magnify the
subaltern voice so that attention can be paid to the circumstances of
exploitation and repression and the answers that can be shaped into an
anti-capitalist program.
The fifth epicenter for social change lies with the emancipatory
movements around questions of identity – women, children, gays, racial,
ethnic and religious minorities all demand an equal place in the sun –
along with the vast array of environmental movements that are not
explicitly anti-capitalist. The movements claiming emancipation on each
of these issues are geographically uneven and often geographically
divided in terms of needs and aspirations. But global conferences on
women’s rights (Nairobi in 1985 that led to the Beijing declaration of
1995) and anti-racism (the far more contentious conference in Durban in
2009) are attempting to find common ground, as is true also of the
environmental conferences, and there is no question that social
relations are changing along all of these dimensions at least in some
parts of the world. When cast in narrow essentialist terms, these
movements can appear to be antagonistic to class struggle. Certainly
within much of the academy they have taken priority of place at the
expense of class analysis and political economy. But the feminization of
the global labor force, the feminization of poverty almost everywhere
and the use of gender disparities as a means of labor control make the
emancipation and eventual liberation of women from their repressions a
necessary condition for class struggle to sharpen its focus. The same
observation applies to all the other identity forms where discrimination
or outright repression can be found. Racism and the oppression of women
and children were foundational in the rise of capitalism. But capitalism
as currently constituted can in principle survive without these forms of
discrimination and oppression, though its political ability to do so
will be severely curtailed if not mortally wounded in the face of a more
unified class force. The modest embrace of multiculturalism and women’s
rights within the corporate world, particularly in the United States,
provides some evidence of capitalism’s accommodation to these dimensions
of social change (including the environment), even as it re-emphasizes
the salience of class divisions as the principle dimension for political
action.
These five broad tendencies are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive of
organizational templates for political action. Some organizations neatly
combine aspects of all five tendencies. But there is a lot of work to be
done to coalesce these various tendencies around the underlying
question: can the world change materially, socially, mentally and
politically in such a way as to confront not only the dire state of
social and natural relations in so many parts of the world, but also the
perpetuation of endless compound growth? This is the question that the
alienated and discontented must insist upon asking, again and again,
even as they learn from those who experience the pain directly and who
are so adept at organizing resistances to the dire consequences of
compound growth on the ground.
Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid
out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party. They simply
constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who
understand the limits, failings and destructive tendencies of the
capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false
legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the
media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power.
Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different
future to that which capitalism portends. This is an interesting
definition. While traditional institutionalized communism is as good as
dead and buried, there are by this definition millions of de facto
communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings,
ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives. If, as the
alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, ‘another
world is possible’ then why not also say ‘another communism is
possible’? The current circumstances of capitalist development demand
something of this sort, if fundamental change is to be achieved.
These notes draw heavily on my forthcoming book, The Enigma of Capital,
to be published by Profile Books in April 2010.