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Sunday, December 4, 2011

Global Rebellion: The Coming Chaos?

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Published on Friday, December 2, 2011 by Al Jazeera

Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into a quagmire of their own making, says author.

by William I. Robinson



SANTA BARBARA, CA - As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to proposal viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarized police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable are to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalized repression.

Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.

To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the "Great Depression" that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring about once a decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.

Structural crises are deeper; their resolution requires a fundamental restructuring of the system. Earlier world structural crises of the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s were resolved through a reorganization of the system that produced new models of capitalism. "Resolved" does not mean that the problems faced by a majority of humanity under capitalism were resolved but that the reorganization of the capitalist system in each case overcame the constraints to a resumption of capital accumulation on a world scale. The crisis of the 1890s was resolved in the cores of world capitalism through the export of capital and a new round of imperialist expansion. The Great Depression of the 1930s was resolved through the turn to variants of social democracy in both the North and the South - welfare, populist, or developmentalist capitalism that involved redistribution, the creation of public sectors, and state regulation of the market.

Globalization and the current structural crisis

To understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s. The globalization stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved out the response of distinct agents to these previous episodes of crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social democracy, or more technically stated, of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive capitalism. In the wake of that crisis capital went global as a strategy of the emergent Transnational Capitalist Class and its political representatives to reconstitute its class power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints - the so-called "class compromise" - had been imposed on capital through decades of mass struggles around the world by nationally-contained popular and working classes. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, globally-oriented elites captured state power in most countries around the world and utilized that power to push capitalist globalization through the neo-liberal model.

Globalization and neo-liberal policies opened up vast new opportunities for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in computer and information technology and other technological advances helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in productivity and to restructure, "flexibilize," and shed labor worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new market segments fueling growth. In sum, globalization made possible a major extensive and intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide that offset the 1970s crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities.

However, the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an unprecedented worldwide social polarization. Fierce social and class struggles worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of social control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital accumulation. What has taken place through globalization is the severing of the logic of accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting in an unprecedented growth of social inequality and intensified crises of survival for billions of people around the world.

The pauperizing effects unleashed by globalization have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding more and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperization have intensified enormously since capitalist globalization took off in the 1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century".

Global social polarization intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarized accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of over-accumulation.

While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working and popular classes dates back to the crisis of the 1970s and has grown in intensity ever since, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several respects a major turning point. In particular, as the crisis spread it generated the conditions for new rounds of brutal austerity worldwide, greater flexibilization of labor, steeply rising under and unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political agents utilized the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, to squeeze more value out of labor, directly through more intensified exploitation and indirectly through state finances. Social and political conflict has escalated around the world in the wake of 2008.

Nonetheless, the system has been unable to recover; it is sinking deeper into chaos. Global elites cannot manage the explosive contradictions. Is the neo-liberal model of capitalism entering a terminal stage? It is crucial to understand that neo-liberalism is but one model of global capitalism; to say that neo-liberalism may be in terminal crisis is not to say that global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Is it possible that the system will respond to crisis and mass rebellion through a new restructuring that leads to some different model of world capitalism - perhaps a global Keynesianism involving transnational redistribution and transnational regulation of finance capital? Will rebellious forces from below be co-opted into some new reformed capitalist order?

Or are we headed towards a systemic crisis? A systemic crisis is one in which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through its super-session and the creation of an entirely new system, or more ominously the collapse of the system. Whether or not a structural crisis becomes systemic depends on how distinct social and class forces respond - to the political projects they put forward and as well as to factors of contingency that cannot be predicted in advance, and to objective conditions. It is impossible at this time to predict the outcome of the crisis. However, a few things are clear in the current world conjuncture.

The current moment

First, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features unique to the present:

The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We face the real specter of resource depletion and environmental catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.

The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented. Computerized wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalized and sanitized for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control.

We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralization 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. Like riding a bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it collapses. Where can the system now expand?

There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion.

There is a disjuncture between a globalizing 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 organize and stabilize the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political legitimacy.
Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralyzed, and certainly unwilling to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most rapacious and destabilizing fraction. While national and transnational state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis on labor. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes.

Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarization of social control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and environmental degradation around the world.

Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalization in the 1980s and 1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide in favor of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain its offensive by militarizing world politics and extending systems of repressive social control in the name of "combating terrorism".

Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programs. On the other hand, the "empire of global capital" is definitely not a "paper tiger". As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organize coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.

In my view, 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.

© 2011 William I. Robinson

William I. Robinson is a Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism.

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2 comments:

  1. William I Robinson has authored a long opinion piece - containing "the big picture in historic and structural context", much with which I disagree but am not interested in spending time rebutting because the vast majority of it does not really matter with respect to the current problems and the solution. The last sentence is enough to examine:

    "In my view, 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."

    How is to this "massive redistribution of wealth" to take place? Using physical force? This has been and continues to be the way ALL governments attain, maintain and increase power (which the author also wants to be "redistribut[ed]").

    Without government enforcers - those willing to threaten and actually initiate physical force - all the promulgated words of elected and appointed officials of a government (including words suggested/urged by their highly moneyed friends) are nothing but scribbles and sounds! The thousands of volumes of regulations/laws/edicts/mandates/directives/etc are simply IGNORABLE WORDS - without the government enforcers (civilian and military, federal and state/provincial/local) who are ready, able and willing to cause physical harm inside and outside the borders of any self-decreed particular government to anyone who currently tries to ignore such words. None of the legislators, executives (President/Prime Minister/etc), judges and bureaucrats get out into the city streets, country byways and battlefields to put their own words into effect. No! They have enforcers to do all the "dirty work" - to perpetrate the actual physical harm!

    Robinson has made no suggestion at all in his piece that he even recognizes the above formula by which ALL governments operate.

    There are far more non-enforcers than enforcers in the US and in any other location. Therefore it is quite possible for a large number of non-enforcers who cease voluntary association with these enforcers to have a persuading effect on them, if reasoned logic doesn't do it first.

    For all who disagree with their various harm-causing actions don't voluntarily associate with these government enforcers - no sales, no service, no camaraderie, no anything! And do the same to anyone who you know is a direct supporter of such enforcers. This is shunning and ostracism, used down through the ages with considerable success towards modifying others' behaviors viewed as unacceptable.

    Make the position of government enforcer one that is truly unpopular and there will be a lot fewer of them. Stop enabling/supporting government enforcers in any manner and they will cease to exist. With fewer enforcers to obey their orders, governments can't do the amount of harm they get away with now. In fact, without any enforcers, governments will also cease to exist.
    [Cont'd]

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  2. [Cont'd]
    But to be truly effective with discrimination (yes, reasoned discriminating non-voluntary association!) against anyone causing physical harm, the current drive by many to be and accept that others be anonymous must be recognized as detrimental. Governments can find out what they want, so hiding information about one's self from others actually benefits government while keeping non-enforcer people from truly knowing each other and identifying enforcers in their midst, when out of uniform and electronically. Non-anonymity is an act of self-responsibility and not one that governments want among the populace.

    In the place of individuals who think and take self-responsibility for their actions (those who have historically created value worldwide), governments seek pawns. No self-responsibility wanted, since that is done by people who mostly think, question and analyze (to individually varying degrees) and therefore might balk at being pawns - good only as cattle for labor of various types that maintain and promote government power directly or via taxes, and suitable as cannon fodder to fight the numerous wars begun as part of the fear campaign to further the belief that government is a necessity. (Forbid the thought that many in the populace should come to question whether a government is truly needed... ah, but they can and such questioning may be starting by some, chiefly the young.) It is definitely within the individual capabilities of the vast majority to come to understand this and with the Internet, more and more are within a finger's tap of getting the information.

    Robinson's desire for a society "in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature" is possible but not one of "democratic socialism" (even if "along the lines of a 21st-century") which is simply a variation of government - rulers and ruled.

    Human society (anywhere on earth), just like any other natural system, can be naturally self-regulating by means of interactions between its members - if only humans seek to discover and are allowed to implement the methods by which such self-regulation can be effective, rather than continuing to embrace social systems that need to be constantly held in an unnatural (and very unoptimal) state of balance by the operations of their rulers and other influencers. "Social Meta-Needs: A New Basis for Optimal Interaction": http://selfsip.org/fundamentals/socialmetaneeds.html
    This treatise and its many links to technical terms is NOT a breezy quick read - a warning for those looking for and used to soundbites with which to walk away, thinking that such bromides are really foundational and meaningful as a solution to serious social problems. If the solution to this very longstanding problem were so simple, it would already have been much earlier discovered. Instead, the twin-framework implementations of the Social Meta-Needs theory - The Natural Social Contract and Social Preferencing - are envisioned as full replacements for entire existing governmental structures and mechanisms, which in the US alone require thousands of volumes and many millions (?billions? trillions?) of words enabling tens of thousands of lawyers to charge handsomely to serve as "gatekeepers" for the common folk.

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