World Economy www.worldfinancialreview.com May - June 2014 Pg 14 – 16
Global Capitalism:
Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism
Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism
By William I.
Robinson
About
the Author
William
I. Robinson is
professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American
studies, at the University of California - Santa Barbara. Among his many books
are Promoting Polyarchy (1996), Transnational Conflicts (2003), A Theory of
Global Capitalism (2004), Latin America
and Global Capitalism(2008), and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity
(2014).
World capitalism is
experiencing the worst crisis in its 500 year history. Global capitalism is a
qualitatively new stage in the open ended evolution of capitalism characterised
by the rise of transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class, and a
transnational state. Below, William I. Robinson argues that the global crisis
is structural and threatens to become systemic, raising the specter of collapse
and a global police state in the face of ecological holocaust, concentration of
the means of violence, displacement of billions, limits to extensive expansion
and crises of state legitimacy, and suggests that a massive redistribution of
wealth and power downward to the poor majority of humanity is the only viable
solution.
The New Global
Capitalism and the 21st Century Crisis
The
world capitalist system is arguably experiencing the worst crisis in its 500
year history. World capitalism has experienced a profound restructuring through
globalisation over the past few decades and has been transformed in ways that
make it fundamentally distinct from its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the
current crisis exhibits features that set it apart from earlier crises of the
system and raise the stakes for humanity. If we are to avert disastrous
outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and
the nature of its crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalisation provides a
template for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural and
ideological processes in this 21st century. Following Marx, we want to focus on
the internal dynamics of capitalism to understand crisis. And following the
global capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively
evolved in recent decades.
The
system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such as
that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capitalism is
fundamentally different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively
new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked
by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel
articulations of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch[1].
First
is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and
financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been
integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy,
in which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and
financial flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in
which nations are linked to each more organically through the
transnationalisation of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits
of capital accumulation. No single nation-state can remain insulated from the
global economy or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and
cultural superstructure of global capitalism. Second is the rise of a
Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in
contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and has
attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is the
hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third is the rise of
Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a loose
network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations together with
national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational
accumulation. The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise its
class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality,
domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing
importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to
North-South inequalities.
Cyclical, Structural,
and Systemic Crises
Most
commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession” of 2008
and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in
over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what
Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover, because the system is now global,
crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The
system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of
humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages
and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced
the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given
the particular configuration
of
social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national
states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and
offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is
this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism
about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act as selfcorrecting
mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the
early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast,
the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into a structural crisis. Structural crises reflect
deeper contradictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the
system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist
globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved
through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to
that the structural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of
corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by
an entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for
a systemic crisis. But if it actually
snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to
capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation – is not
predetermined and depends entirely on the response of social and political
forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to
forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which
collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in
great flux.
Hence
my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and
mutually constitutive dimensions, economic,
social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the
existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a
crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure
the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are
crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and
domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to
meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing
downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships.
The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by
millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing
expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter
this erosion of the system’s authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a
global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a
crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already
begun,
expressed in climate change and the impending collapse of centralised
agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators.
By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic
proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and
raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a
new “Dark Ages.”[2]
This
crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises
but there are also several features
unique
to the present:
1
The system is fast reaching the ecological
limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and
natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the
sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth[3]. This mass extinction would be caused
not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes
such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to
leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial
to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of
which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental
degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and
biodiversity loss) are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have
already crossed their planetary boundaries.
2
The
magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is
the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few
powerful roups. Computerised wars,
drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and
so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become
normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed
aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance
society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of
communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the
world of George Orwell; 1984 has
arrived;
3
Capitalism
is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any
new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism,
de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the
countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is,
converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion
is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or
collapse. How or where will it now expand?
4
There
is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”[4] alienated
from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to
sophisticated systems of social control and to destructionto a mortal cycle of
dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and
immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised
gentrification, and so on;
5
There
is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system
of political authority. Transnational
state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what
social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has
enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of
weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life
and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come
under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.
Global Police State
How
have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has
resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and
left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute.
One
is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising
the system, at saving
the system from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless,
in the years following the
2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are
unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the
power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular,
grassroots and leftist resistance from below.
As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be
a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake
of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many
problems and challenges.
Yet
another response is that I term 21st
century fascism [5]. The
ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad
strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with
transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged
sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and
middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity
and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme
masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the
search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes
mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia,
embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and
glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with
domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The
need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised mass
social control of the world’s surplus population and rebellious forces from
below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply put,
the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot
easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have
been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around
the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and
uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a
massive redistribution of wealth
and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a
21st century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with
itself and with nature.
[1] William I.
Robinson (2004), A Theory of Global
Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; William
I. Robinson, Latin America and Global
Capitalism (2008), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, see esp. chapter 1.
[2]
Sing
C. Chew (2007), The Recurring Dark Ages:
Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation, Landham, MD:AltaMira Press.
[5]
See in particular, William I. Robinson (2014,
in press), Global Capitalism and the
Crisis of Humanity, New York and Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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