<nettime> Global rebellion: The coming chaos?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

[The sidebar texts on Al Jazeera have become the single best source for 
written analysis of global events, to my knowledge anyway--please inform 
if there is any place of similar quality. This article is the most 
far-ranging I've yet read on the current terminal crisis of 
neoliberalism. It makes an important distinction between structural 
crisis - which changes the political-economic rules of the game, as in 
the 1890s, 1930s and 1970s - and systemic crisis which would actually 
change the game itself. The author is among the sociologists who 
developed the theory of the Transnational Capitalist Class -- oh yeah, 
and as I've just learned by hunting around on the net, he was also the 
subject of a huge academic scandal because he compared Israel's attacks 
on Gaza to the Nazis' attacks on the Warsaw ghetto. Expect far worse 
divisiveness while an unjust and unsustainable political economy 
collapses. -- BH]

***

GLOBAL REBELLION: THE COMING CHAOS?
William L. Robinson
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121556567265.html

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 militarised 
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 generalised 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 and 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 reorganisation 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 reorganisation 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.

Globalisation and the current structural crisis

To understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s. 
The globalisation 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 utilised that power to push capitalist globalisation 
through the neo-liberal model.

Globalisation 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, "flexibilise," and shed labour 
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 fuelling 
growth. In sum, globalisation 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 polarisation. 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 globalisation 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 pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social 
conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more 
and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows 
out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have 
intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation 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 polarisation 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 militarised 
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 flexibilisation of labour, steeply rising under and 
unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political 
agents utilised 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 labour, 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 supersession 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 spectre of resource depletion and environmental 
catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.

 - The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is 
unprecedented. 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. 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-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. 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 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. 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 paralysed, 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 destabilising 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 labour. 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 militarisation 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 globalisation in the 1980s and 
1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide 
in favour 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 militarising 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 programmes. 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 - 
organise 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.

****
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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