This varied approach to understanding change applies to Marx’s understanding of crisis. Without an appreciation of the dialectical method in Marx’s thought, his discussion of crisis tendency, which is highly abstracted from capitalist reality and generalised, can easily be confused with an empirical trend. On the other hand, if crisis tendency is not situated within Marx’s method, it can be reduced to mono-causal economic determinism, understood in static terms, without the reader’s appreciating its interconnections with larger processes and the necessary conditions that bring it into being. Finally, Marx’s approach and method prompts a rigorous and studied approach to capitalist reality. This means that although capitalism is inherently prone to periodic crises, these have to be studied at every moment to understand the historical specificity of each crisis and its connections to larger patterns. This also means that Marxism as a body of knowledge is unfinished.
LIMITS AND CHALLENGES TO MARX’S UNDERSTANDING OF CAPITALIST CRISES
Marx’s thought is crucial to help one think about the dynamics and tendencies of contemporary global capitalism. The insights he provides from making the ‘capitalist mode of production’ an object of study are at the heart of how capitalism works in the abstract or pure level. These insights provide us with powerful resources to think about the political economy of global capitalism. However, at the same time, there are limits to how we can use Marx to think about the contemporary crises of global capitalism. This does not mean abandoning Marx. However, it does mean it is important to think in a Marxist way about our contemporary world. Merely applying Marx’s theoretical approach to crisis will not help us think about the nature of the contemporary systemic crises of capitalist civilisation. At most, a modified application of Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis will bring into view overproduction or financialised overaccumulation in our explanatory understanding.2 This is important, but it is also insufficient. Being aware of the problems and limits of Marx’s Marxism in relation to crisis theory helps us renew a Marxist approach to such a theory. Three main shortcomings with Marx’s understanding of capitalism and its crisis tendencies have to be considered.
First, although Marx’s conception of capitalist crisis and his explication of crisis tendencies in Capital are useful, they are economic-reductionist and are not sufficient to explain the nature of the contemporary crises of capitalist civilisation. There are material determinations in contemporary capitalism that go beyond even Marx’s conception of pure capitalism, as contained in the three volumes of Capital. Although Capital is a powerful heuristic device to help us think about the tendencies of capitalism, it is not able to address new concrete historical tendencies of contemporary global capitalism and crisis. For instance, climate change and peak oil are not part of the way pure capitalism is conceptualised in Capital, and these are powerful systemic crisis tendencies in today’s capitalism, which impose limits on and engender serious contradictions for global accumulation.
This is not to argue that Marx was blind to nature and ecology, or that a green reading of Marx is not valuable. Foster (1999) has done a great job in retrieving the dimension of nature in Marx’s conception of historical materialism. Foster’s work foregrounds the notion of ‘metabolic rift’ in Marx – a rift between town and countryside, and between humans and nature. However, the notion of metabolic rift is not a theory of crisis, and although it could be elaborated into such a theory post-Marx, the point here is Marx’s understanding of capitalist crisis. In Marx’s most elaborated work of capitalist crisis in Capital, his theoretical perspective has nothing to do with ecology and how this determines capitalism’s systemic crisis tendencies.
Second, Marx believed in general that capital is the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society. This is a crucial premise for his theoretical understanding of capitalist crisis. In Capital, Marx goes further to make capital an object of enquiry as a social relation. Although Marx brilliantly understood capital in a relational sense, and as this applied to labour and capital, the structural power of capital today in the global political economy is shaping and determining not only the logic of capitalist accumulation, but also the future of all living forms – both human and non-human. Capital today is a geological force determining the future of planetary life.
Resource extraction, production, consumption and pollution are not just ‘technical issues’ (in the Marxist sense) but are at the heart of the crisis of civilisational reproduction. Capital, in its organisation of capitalism, has overshot planetary limits, undermined natural cycles and now threatens us with species extinction through climate change. In this context, labour – or the working class – is far from being the gravedigger of capitalism. Labour has been dramatically weakened given the structural and imperial power used to reproduce a globalised capitalist civilisation. This does not suggest the end of class struggle but rather serves to emphasise that capital is dominant and prevailing in a manner that embodies a form of social power that goes beyond just ensuring labour exploitation – it also ensures its supremacy over all forms of life.
Finally, and as a corollary to the previous point, the dialectical logic of capital for Marx was meant to bring both destruction and progress. In its expansion in the world, capital was meant to confront and overcome backward pre-capitalist relations. This was very much a Eurocentric moment in Marx. In Capital, Marx foregrounds competition, and how it dynamises and modernises production relations in the drive for expansion. In Marx, capital brings about destruction but also progress at a higher level of accumulation. However, in the contemporary capitalist world the logic of capital is about societal and ecological destruction. Michael Burawoy (2013) makes a very insightful point in this regard, arguing that the current wave of marketisation (i.e. 1973 to the present) is about commodifying nature. But, at the same time, he acknowledges that although exploitation features in the dynamics of accumulation, we have surplus labour populations in which exploitation becomes the privilege of the few. Therefore, more marketisation equals deepening inequality and further commodification of nature.3 Put more directly, the dialectic of marketisation–destruction (of human beings and nature) is what characterises capital and capitalism in our contemporary world. This raises fundamental challenges to capitalist modernity and its narratives of progress and development. With the current dynamic of marketisation–destruction, capitalist progress and development mean ecocide, or the destruction of conditions that sustain human and all other life forms on the planet.
In short, given the limits of Marx’s conceptions of crisis tendencies in helping us gain an understanding of contemporary capitalism, an engagement with his work highlights the need for a theoretical reconstruction of historical materialism and of Marx’s own thought. There is a need for an extension and modification of Marx’s analysis. There is a need to create theoretical space to bring in the notion of the ‘systemic crises of capitalist civilisation’ and related concepts, such as capital as a geological force. This needs to be done at the abstract level of the tendencies and structures of the capitalist mode of production, and at the concrete historical level. I now turn to the concrete historical level to further test the thesis of the crises of capitalist civilisation.
PERIODISING THE MAKING OF CAPITALIST CIVILISATION
To argue the existence of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation presupposes the existence of capitalist civilisation. Such a presupposition takes us into the terrain of concrete history to appreciate the making of capitalist civilisation over time. Moreover, it is important to situate the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation within concrete history to bring into view its constitution and particular features. This means that we have to think in terms of a stages approach to world history to understand the historical specificity of the contemporary systemic crises of capitalist civilisation. Marx was thinking about the capitalist mode of production and, more specifically, competitive capitalism in the mid-Victorian age of the nineteenth century. He did not think in terms of different varieties of capitalism or the specific