In chapter one, I identified three types of crisis: cyclical, structural, and systemic. Recall that structural crises are so-called because their resolution requires restructuring the system, whereas a systemic crisis implies that its resolution must involve a supersession of the existing socioeconomic system, in this case capitalism. Historically crises resolve the tensions and contradictions that build up in the capitalist economy. They lead to a new surge of centralization and concentration of capital as it depreciates, as firms merge, go out of business, or are snatched up by bigger firms, as stockpiles are exhausted, and as the total wage bill declines. New technologies and forms of organization may spur investment and growth that restore the accumulation process and pave the way for a new wave of chaotic expansion. Resolve in these cases means displacement, either in time, so that the contradictions reappear in the future, often more acutely than before, or in space, to more vulnerable countries, regions, and peoples in the world capitalist system.
Globalization, however, has so integrated all countries and regions of the world that spatial containment of crises may now be impossible. To date, capitalism, as a global system, has proved remarkably resilient, even as it has faced one crisis after another in its centuries-long existence, defying predictions of its imminent demise and emerging renewed after each major crisis. It would be foolish to assume we are in the end game of global capitalism. The new round of digitally driven restructuring discussed in chapter two, combined with an intensification of militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression, may turbocharge the economy enough to usher in a period of rising profits and prosperity for the system as a whole, even as millions—or billions—sink into greater precariousness and desolation.
Economic restructuring through digitalization, in my view, may restore accumulation in the short run, but for the system to survive there must be social and political changes of a far-reaching nature. These changes are even less predictable than our analyses of the economy, because, as I have stressed throughout this study, they are highly contingent on how struggles among social and class forces play out around the world. Even if deficit spending and Keynesian stimulus that expanded during the pandemic remain in place, as I noted in chapter one, the experience of the financial collapse of 2008 showed that governments recovered the costs of bailouts by deepening social austerity, even as banks and corporations used bailout money to buy back stock and engage in new rounds of predatory activities.
On the other hand, it is during moments not of equilibrium but of crisis that the intervention of agency can be most effective in bringing about structural change. Crises are key conjunctures when significant structural—and, in rare historic moments, systemic—change becomes possible. Short of revolution, the popular classes must struggle now to prevent the ruling groups from turning the crisis into an opportunity for them to resuscitate and deepen the neoliberal order once the dust settles. Their struggle is to push for something along the lines of a global Green New Deal as an interim program alongside an accumulation of forces for more radical system change.1 A Green New Deal, a call first put out in the United States, proposes combining sweeping green policies, including an end to fossil fuels, with a social welfare and pro-worker economy that would include mass employment opportunities in green energy and other technologies. A global Green New Deal may help lift the world out of economic depression as it simultaneously addresses the climate emergency and generates favorable conditions to struggle for a post-capitalist social order.
While the ruling groups deploy the new digital technologies to enhance their control and profit-making, this same technical infrastructure of the fourth industrial revolution is producing the resources from which a political and economic system very different from the global capitalism in which we live could be achieved. As many have noted, these technologies could be used to free us from the drudgeries of menial and dull work, drastically reducing socially necessary labor time and increasing leisure time.2 They may allow us to overcome obstacles that socialist-oriented economic planning in the twentieth century experienced once the price (market) mechanism of coordinating capitalist production had been suppressed. Under an entirely different social and economic system we human beings could cease being slaves to machines and technologies employed for the purpose of exploitation and instead become masters of them. In an inversion of Marx’s observation that living labor is dominated by dead labor, we living human beings could wield the collective power of all those who came before us, that is, the fruits of thousands of years of collective human labor and ingenuity, to unleash our human potential and emancipate ourselves. If we are to free ourselves through these new technologies, however, we must first overthrow the oppressive and antediluvian social relations of global capitalism.
What does the future hold? As the global civil war heats up in the post-pandemic world there will be societal disintegration and political collapse. We have seen that the pandemic and its aftermath served as a hothouse accelerating the crisis of capitalist rule more that anyone could have predicted. The crisis generates enormous political tensions that must be managed by the ruling groups. It animates geopolitical conflict, as states seek to externalize social and political tensions, and accelerates the breakdown of the post–World War II international order, increasing the danger of international military conflagration. The poor and dispossessed will continue to rise up in countless struggles. We are clearly facing a revolutionary situation as described by Lenin, in which the prevailing system is in crisis, the suffering of the oppressed has grown more acute, and the masses are stepping up their historic action.
In the absence of a clear program that targets the system or a left that could help channel uprisings against the underlying causes of distress and deprivation, we are likely to see desperation erupt into racial, ethnic, religious, and other forms of aggression and into social violence among the oppressed themselves. There is no such thing as “senseless violence,” insofar as we are always able to make sense of it through analysis of its causes. Fueled by the anomie and nihilism of global capitalist culture and a gangster capitalism from above, people whose very existence is at risk will develop survival strategies that may put them in a position to be criminalized by a capitalist state that remits the crimes of the rich and the powerful, while harshly punishing those of the poor. We are precisely in the situation described by Gramsci that so many people have of late cited, and with good reason: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old way is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”3 At this time, we are unequivocally at the interregnum. The failure to either radically reform global capitalism or to replace it with a democratic socialism raises the specter of barbarism, as Gramsci’s contemporary Rosa Luxemburg prophetically warned, or of a collapse of global civilization, hastened on by the climate emergency and looming ecological holocaust.
I am not pessimistic. Despite the sobering discussion above on the challenges that emancipatory projects face, the crisis of ruling class hegemony opens up enormous prospects for a viable counterhegemony. Capitalist crises may originate at the deepest level as a structural contradiction, but they are played out in the terrain of politics, culture, and ideology. A counterhegemony depends in part on how the crisis is understood and interpreted by masses of people, which in turn depends, in significant part, on a systemic critique of global capitalism and on organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, intellectuals who attach themselves to and serve the emancipatory struggles of the popular classes, and who are committed to putting forth such a critique. It has been my aim in this study to contribute, however modestly, to such a critique.