DEMOCRATIC MARXIST PERSPECTIVES: THE CONJUNCTURE OF CAPITALIST CRISES AND TRANSFORMATIVE RESISTANCE
Part 1 of this volume focuses on contemporary understandings of capitalism’s crises.
In Chapter 1, Vishwas Satgar confronts the limitations of classical Marxist theory for understanding the contemporary capitalist crisis. He offers a reading of Marx to understand how Marx thought about the crisis tendencies of capitalism and examines the different conceptions of crisis present in Marx’s work. In some of his work before Capital, Marx tended to exaggerate the prospects for breakdown or collapse. However, Satgar argues that Marx did not have a single or even a systematic theory of crisis, even at the level of abstract and pure capitalism.
The chapter sets out the limits of Marx’s understanding of the tendencies for capitalist crisis. The aim is not to reject Marx, but to find new openings and ways forward for thinking about contemporary capitalist crises. Although Marx abstracted his categories about the workings of the capitalist mode of production, he was grappling with the historical dynamics of a competitive mid-Victorian industrial capitalism, which is different from contemporary transnationalising techno-financial accumulation. Moreover, given that we are dealing with crises in the plural, at a systemic level and on a world scale, which capitalist historical form is in crisis? This poses a challenge for how we think about periodising historical capitalism. This chapter argues for the periodisation of ‘capitalist civilisation’ not only as the basis to understand its main characteristics, but also to understand the scale at which the systemic crises of capitalism are manifest.
The chapter also looks at how capitalism’s tendencies for systemic crisis are rooted structurally, institutionally and ideologically in US imperial power and transnational class-based practices. The chapter concludes with the challenges confronting left agency today by responding to the question: catastrophism or transformative moment? In answering this question, there is an attempt to identify challenges and requirements for a new type of transformative left agency to sustain life.
In Chapter 2, William K Carroll investigates activist understandings of the crises of capitalism through neo-Gramscian political economy. He asks the following questions: how do movement intellectuals and activist researchers associated with the production and mobilisation of counter-hegemonic knowledge view the crisis? And what can we learn from their reflections? This chapter addresses these questions on the basis of interviews with 91 activist intellectuals in 16 transnational alternative policy groups.
Carroll unpacks Gramsci’s notion of organic crisis in his engagements with movement intellectuals. Many of the reflections shared by them add substance to a dialectical conception of crisis as objective and subjective, as disintegration and re-formation, as passive revolution and anti-passive revolution. There is a translation of Gramsci at work that recognises that contemporary structural contradictions are ‘incurable’, thus shifting relations of force away from neoliberal hegemony towards a new conjuncture while rendering the course of history open. Many movement intellectuals show an acute awareness of radical contingency, of various aspects of organic crisis, and of the fierce challenges they face in building a counter-hegemonic bloc in a non-vanguardist manner. This also means organising in ways that reach beyond problematic currents in contemporary activism.
Part 2 of the volume focuses on capitalist crises in the global North and the Left’s responses to them.
Three years into the crisis that began in 2008, the world’s imagination was suddenly captured by the emergence of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the slogan ‘99 per cent versus 1 per cent’. This represented a rupturing in the neoliberal domination of public discourse and asserted the rage of good common sense. In Chapter 3, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Isham Christie examine the Left’s response to the financial crisis of 2008 in the US, focusing in particular on the emergence of Occupy Wall Street. As participants in the movement, the authors relate their angle on the context and the constraints that shaped the mobilisation. Although not representative of the Left as a whole, Occupy offers insight into some of the dynamics that characterise the Left in the US today, including its antagonism towards the history of dogmatic Marxism, the weakness of current models of organising, and widespread scepticism of the state. By embracing participatory democracy and anti-organisational suspicion, Occupy represents a point in a dialectical movement of left ideology – an orientation that created its own set of conflicts and limitations. In this chapter the authors critically analyse the experience that they were part of, and propose a set of lessons for the Left in the US and more broadly.
Europe is currently haunted by widespread austerity and restructuring. These have been justified in academic and public debates with discussions of ‘peripheral’ European states having not adequately adjusted to the institutional requirements of the Eurozone’s single currency, thereby creating an unsustainable growth of debt and deficits. Chapter 4, by Andreas Bieler and Jamie Jordan, goes beyond the accounts of neo-institutionalism, specifically the Varieties of Capitalism approach, which has various deficiencies, including a reliance on methodological nationalism. Instead, this chapter seeks to explain the onset of the Eurozone debt crisis by analysing the underlying dynamics of uneven and combined capitalist accumulation. Focusing on how the development of production structures and trade and investment patterns created particular political economic hierarchies, the authors provide a more adequate explanation of why a division between core and peripheral European states developed, thereby creating asymmetrical capabilities to deal with the onset of the debt crisis. This also explains the direction Europe is taking in terms of renewing processes of neoliberal restructuring, supported by austerity across public sectors.
In the final section, the chapter looks at the role of labour in the build-up and response to the crisis. The authors reveal that it is not simply Europe’s ‘peripheral’ workers who are under pressure to support particular accumulation strategies, but also those in Europe’s ‘core’. The chapter focuses on the relationship between capital and labour to better explain developments across Europe’s political economy.
Chapter 5, by Hilary Wainwright, explores the question of left agency, in particular the political form, in the context of crisis-ridden Europe. Wainwright argues that the rise of a new Left in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe engendered a transformative approach to power – in other words, a transformative capacity to enable and constitute alternatives from below. This trend has resurfaced with the exhaustion of social-democratic and communist parties in Western Europe, both of which embodied a politics of power as domination, which required state power to assert power over society and citizens. While not rejecting power as domination, Wainwright attempts to find an articulation between both these modes of power and political forms in Western Europe in a way that power as domination is driven by power as transformative capacity.
Wainwright traces moments of experimentation with transformative politics and government in Western Europe. In the context of the current crisis, she highlights the emergence of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain as continuing an experiment with political forms that embraces both logics of power. By reflecting on these experiences, Wainwright poses crucial questions for how a non-formulaic approach to the political instrument can be elaborated by the Left on the terrain of a capitalist crisis. It might just be that transformative politics requires a new way of thinking about the political form, based on political tasks and a political division of labour that is not reducible to a single political instrument or