Although such an analysis will not automatically shift consciousness, it does provide the basis to rethink the challenge of mass-based left politics. This is the second challenge to left agency. An analysis that foregrounds the systemic dimensions of capitalist crises also provides a map for locating left agency within a politics of counter-hegemony or transformative resistance. Although Gramsci ([1971] 1998) argued for a ‘war of position’ in civil society, this was not grounded in a concrete historical context that unpacked and theorised the nature of resistance in particular historical conjunctures. This means Gramsci’s abstractions have to be grounded in the global conjuncture of systemic crises and transformative resistance. Moreover, such a practice of transformative resistance challenges the Left to go beyond a politics of ‘reform versus revolution’ and to situate its agency within civil society, at the centre of the contradictions that will contribute to the end of capitalism. More practically, this means transformative resistance has to build a politics around the systemic crisis tendencies of capitalist civilisation, so these tendencies are confronted both defensively and offensively. In short, transformative resistance has to be against financialised neoliberalisation and for de-marketised and de-commodified alternatives that expand the commons. It has to be against false solutions to the climate crisis and for legally binding emission-reduction targets for all countries, for resolution of climate debt, rights-based carbon budgets, climate jobs and public transport; against extractivism of fossil fuels and for socially owned renewables and energy sovereignty; against the corporate-controlled industrial food system and for food sovereignty; and against market democracy and for the defence of all democratic rights, freedoms and forms of democracy – that is, more democracy, not less. The Left today has to be clear, consistent and firm on these questions to be able to build transformative mass-based movements and politics.
The third challenge confronting the Left, which is derived from an analysis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation and the transformative prospects it creates, is the strategic switch from the momentum of transformative resistance that advances opposition and alternatives, to a hegemonic politics of sustaining life. This means the question of a just transition has to be integral to the politics of contemporary left agency. For such a conception to emerge at the centre of society, it has to be situated in a hegemonic politics that sustains life by realising the following necessary conditions: first, it has to be rooted in mass-based transformative social forces confronting the systemic crisis tendencies of capitalist civilisation, which are accumulating progressive class and social forces into a new state and civil-society historical bloc. Second, it has to be constantly engaged in forms of democratic political pedagogy to raise political consciousness and build self-emancipatory capacities at the grassroots level to help advance alternatives from below. Third, it has to build a deeply democratic and humanised political instrument, anchored in logics of mass power, transformative resistance and international solidarity. And, finally, it has to clarify and develop a transformative conception of the just transition linked to a vision of building democratic eco-feminist socialism in the present as part of realising it in the future.
If the Left rises to these challenges, it would ensure that class and popular struggle are not read out of history or obscured by the current crises of capitalist civilisation. Human civilisations have risen, fallen and regenerated. Contemporary capitalist civilisation is not about to collapse but it is at an impasse, bedevilled by a fundamental question: ecocide or transformation? Class and popular struggle are necessary to ensure the balance of forces and the scales of history tilt towards transformation. The systemic crises of capitalist civilisation add up to the potential for a transformative moment for radical change. Such a moment calls for the creative, ethical and humanised power of the working class and progressive social forces to inaugurate a transition that departs from the marketisation–destruction logic of capitalism. History is still undecided and open. The time for transformative change is now.
CONCLUSION
This chapter tested a thesis about the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation to identify signposts, openings and new ways of thinking. It asked what Marx’s thought can offer us, both in its strengths and limitations, to comprehend the contemporary crises of capitalist civilisation. If the empirical world of capitalism is showing morbid signs of civilisational crisis – self-destruction, systemic breakdowns, gridlocks and failures in terms of various dimensions – we need to engage with Marx’s way of thinking about capitalism to understand its logic of destruction. This may, however, mean challenging and departing from Marx at the level of our theoretical understanding of the systemic crisis tendencies of capitalism and how we periodise historical capitalism. It also means we have to understand how the systemic crisis tendencies of the capitalist civilisational crisis are constituted by the US-led bloc and transnational class practices. Such an analysis and understanding have to guide us through the millenarian narratives and catastrophic discourses of our time. The crux of the matter is, if the US superpower and capital have produced a crisis-ridden civilisation, then this can be undone with transformative agency.
NOTES
1 Clarke (1994) has done the most extensive and detailed study that confirms this.
2 See Brenner (2002, 2006) for an explication of overproduction and competition, and the centrality of economic-centred explanations for capitalist crisis. Also see Bello’s (2013) more recent analysis of the current global crisis, in which overproduction features prominently in his explanation. Also see Lapavitsas (2013), who explicates the notion of financialisation and financial overaccumulation by building on Marx and Hilferding.
3 Harvey (2014) highlights disparities in income and wealth as an important ‘moving contradiction’, and identifies endless compound growth and capital’s relation to nature as ‘dangerous contradictions’ in his mapping of the 17 contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Also see Piketty (2014) on the state of inequality.
4 In Marxist historiography this is a very contentious issue. Some claim the origins of capitalism lie in mercantile relations, others in agrarian capitalism, others in primitive accumulation and others maintain that capitalism has its origins strictly in industrial capitalism.
5 Sassen (2011) uses the term ‘savage sorting’, which refers to the spatial spread of systemic financialisation to zones of profit making, such as developing countries and cities.
6 China has eclipsed