Crisis and Resistance: Reform or Revolution?

Abstract

The contradictions detailed in the previous chapter suggest that neoliberalism, although still hegemonic in the North, and dominant in the South, is increasingly crisis prone and subject, therefore, to a variety of resistances. Some of these are ‘systemic’ or sub-hegemonic (reformist), reflecting the interest of states, in conjunction with more nationally focused fractions of capital, in re-asserting national sovereignty, whilst others are ‘anti-systemic’ or counter-hegemonic (revolutionary) and seek a post-developmental path in which food sovereignty, agro-ecology, and social equity are of central importance. Still others may be described as ‘alter-hegemonic’, lying somewhere between these two positions, and advocating above all localism and ‘ecologization’. We are therefore passing through a crucial period, socio-politically and ecologically, in which a number of alternative politico-ecological discourses and systems, some systemic and others anti-systemic, are being defined and contested. As I argue in this chapter, more interventionist forms of capitalism (neo-productivism in the global North, neo-developmentalism in the global South) appear likely in the shorter term, and have indeed emerged already in Europe, and in Latin America, particularly. But while these models may address some issues to do with social inequality and demand-side crisis, they cannot overcome capital’s linear, entropic, and imperialistic dynamic (Biel, The entropy of capitalism. Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012; Exner et al, Land and resource scarcity: capitalism, struggle, and well-being in a world without fossil fuels. Routledge, London, 2013). (This argument differs profoundly from that developed by writers such as Rifkin (2014). He uses a non-Marxian argument to argue, as Marx did, that competitive pressure forces capital to innovate and reduce labour costs through adoption of labour substituting technology which, ceteris paribus, raises the organic composition of capital and progressively reduces profits. Rifkin suggests that the ‘zero marginal cost’ (extreme cheapness of commodities) prefigures a new ‘commons’ based on the abundance of such ‘commodities’. There are a number of flaws in his argument: (1) while the argument about ‘zero marginal cost’ is correct as an ‘internal’ tendency (as Marx argued) it ignores the reactions by capital provoked by this trend, most obviously the rise of neoliberalism and its logic of sustaining profit by moving to cheap labour locations—globalization is basically a response to this tendency; (2) ironically, while Rifkin’s argument is supposedly based on ecological arguments—entropy law—in actuality the proposed Internet of Things (IoT) is based precisely on the externalization of the real costs associated with the ‘knowledge economy’. In other words, the IoT is not actually de-materialized at all—it is an energy- and materials-intensive mode of production. The majority of those ‘hidden’ environmental costs are externalized onto the global South, where the bulk of the materials for IoT are produced. So, the abundance he refers to is in fact an unsustainable abundance based on the illusion of de-materialization; (3) so while Rifkin’s argument is basically about an ‘internal’ process of capital—the rise in the organic composition of capital—ironically it ignores capital’s ‘external’ dynamic as being premised on ecological affordances/constraints—ironic because ecology is supposed to be at the forefront of his analysis. But it is, in fact, evacuated —unlike the argument developed in this paper. A truly sustainable society would need to be established at a much lower level of consumption than the one he envisages, in accordance with the real entropic constraints of the planet.) In other words, they remain locked within capitalism as reformism, and, while attempting to address some aspects of contradiction, ‘political’ or ‘ecological’, they simply reproduce the overall contradictory nature of capitalism’s social-property relations. In moving, tendentially, from neoliberalism to a more interventionist form of capitalism, akin to Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, the system is encountering, and attempting to resolve, a developmental crisis. But as the resulting modes of reformism fail, as they undoubtedly will, to resolve the continuing contradictory trajectory of capitalism, so an epochal crisis will loom, precipitated by a ‘political’ under-consumption crisis, an ‘ecological’ over-production crisis, and anticipated by the reflexive political resistances of the subaltern classes.