Читать книгу Capitalism’s Crises - Alfredo Saad-Filho - Страница 25

This chapter tested a thesis about the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation to identify signposts, openings and new ways of thinking. It asked what Marx’s thought can offer us, both in its strengths and limitations, to comprehend the contemporary crises of capitalist civilisation. If the empirical world of capitalism is showing morbid signs of civilisational crisis – self-destruction, systemic breakdowns, gridlocks and failures in terms of various dimensions – we need to engage with Marx’s way of thinking about capitalism to understand its logic of destruction. This may, however, mean challenging and departing from Marx at the level of our theoretical understanding of the systemic crisis tendencies of capitalism and how we periodise historical capitalism. It also means we have to understand how the systemic crisis tendencies of the capitalist civilisational crisis are constituted by the US-led bloc and transnational class practices. Such an analysis and understanding have to guide us through the millenarian narratives and catastrophic discourses of our time. The crux of the matter is, if the US superpower and capital have produced a crisis-ridden civilisation, then this can be undone with transformative agency.