Читать книгу New South African Review 1 - Anthony Butler - Страница 18

The notion of ‘crisis’ can take on different meanings, depending on which discipline one is located in. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with a commonplace definition. According to the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1999), a crisis is either, on the one hand, a time of ‘difficulty or stress’ (or an ‘emergency’); or, on the other, a ‘turning point’ (a crucial or ‘decisive’ moment). In the first sense, a crisis can come and go, leaving the system largely intact. In the second sense, a crisis can dramatically alter, even overthrow, the system, bringing forth a fundamentally altered state of being. In either case a crisis can be short-term and dramatic, or long-term and gradual, with dramatic eruptions from time to time.

A crisis is usually deemed a crisis by those in the midst of it, experiencing its effects. The poor, hungry and exploited majority of the world’s (and South Africa’s) population, it could be argued, have been in crisis for much of the twentieth century – stripped of their land and means of subsistence, and forced to sell their labour (if they are lucky) or beg and steal to eke out an existence, often in health-threatening working and living environments deliberately placed close to the polluting waste of industry. From an ecological perspective, the natural world or ecosystem (including other living creatures) has been in various stages of crises as industrial development crowds out non-human animals, forcing them into fenced-off parks and zoos, hunted and sought for trophies, while the destruction of forests, pollution and emissions threaten the very existence of earth as we know it. The latter has only become a concern for the privileged and powerful when it threatened their own system of production and consumption – but only grudgingly, and partially. Many are still in denial.

However, when there is a crisis of profitability, such that the wealth of the rich and powerful is directly threatened, only then is a ‘crisis’ truly proclaimed. This is even more so when the rich and powerful at the centre of global capitalism – in North America and Western Europe – are affected, which is the case today.

The financial crisis has had a direct impact on the real economy, with low consumer demand leading to a crisis in manufacturing, and millions of job losses throughout the world. This crisis, which began in 2007 and has grabbed the headlines since then, rapidly displaced the ecological crisis gripping the world a few months previously (particularly when oil prices began to approach the US$200 a barrel level). The run-up to, and aftermath of, the December 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change temporarily put the natural limits to growth back on the global agenda, but with relatively low oil prices (around US$70 a barrel), the minds of the world’s governments were insufficiently focussed to produce a binding commitment to lowering carbon emissions and move decisively towards a non-nuclear renewable energy regime.

High oil prices, the threat of depleted fossil fuels (particularly oil) to run the modern economy, oil spills, the destruction of rain forests, the displacement of millions of rural dwellers for the building of dams to supply industry, the rapid decline of biodiversity, rampant carbon emissions and pollution such as acid rain and acid mine drainage (which endanger the health of both humans and the eco-system) and natural disasters caused by climate change – all of these and many other ecological disasters are rarely or weakly linked to the economic/financial crisis, and the socio-political consequences of both.

In other words, when we speak of a ‘global crisis’, it is necessary to conceptualise the interconnected economic, ecological and socio-political crises, as well as a looming food crisis that arises out of them (Roberts 2008). Indeed, as Foster (1999: 195) observes, the word ‘ecology’, coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, has the same Greek root oikos for household, out of which grew the word ‘economy’. Neoclassical economics, as Karl Polanyi (1944) argued, have sought to dis-embed economics from society, as well as nature, to produce what the political economist Ben Fine¹ has called economics imperialism – the subordination of society and nature to a narrow, mathematised and dismal pseudo-science. The poly-crisis points to the necessity to re-embed and subordinate the economy to society and nature.

These crises are rooted in a centuries-long process of what David Harvey (2005), following Rosa Luxembourg, calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ – the dispossession of people’s land and livelihoods, of the commons, of the natural environment. We are witnessing, in South Africa and globally, the commodification of all that is valued, where wealth is measured not in terms of the intrinsic value of things and relationships, or for Karl Marx their ‘use-value’, but in terms of their exchange value (what they can be bought and sold for – that is, for money).

This process began as merchant capitalism in fourteenth century medieval Europe (Mielants 2007) and, through the dispossession and plunder of people and resources in Africa, the Americas and Asia, wealth was accumulated in Western Europe, providing the capital for the industrial revolution of the seventeenth century. This, of course, required further waves of colonial plunder and dispossession in the search for cheap labour, resources and markets for an ever-expanding global regime of accumulation.

Capitalism, in other words, is characterised not merely by the marvels of innovation, entre-preneurship, modernisation, higher standards of living and increasing consumer choice. This is only one side of the coin, which the insiders (like readers of this volume) enjoy. More accurately, capitalism is a system of uneven or enclave development – namely a world system comprising islands of privilege and power, surrounded by seas of alienated poverty, pollution and plundered resources. The promise of ‘modernisation’ and its ‘neoliberal’ or free market variant, that expanded growth will eventually bring ‘development’ to all the world’s population, has proven to be more myth than reality. Instead, poverty and inequality between and within nations has increased significantly (Bieler et al 2008). Capitalism, as Marx once said, develops and destroys. It simultaneously enriches (the few), and impoverishes (the many). The development of Europe and later North America (the core countries) rested to a significant extent on the underdevelopment of the rest of the colonised world (the peripheral or semi-peripheral countries) (Wallerstein 1979; Frank 1966).

The current capitalist crisis has evoked a variety of responses: from the very narrow, one dimensional approaches (free market and Keynesian-lite) which see the crisis purely as a financial one, to broader Marxist (and Keynesian-Marxist) approaches which conceptualise the crisis as economic, rooted in the stagnation of the real economy (particularly the manufacturing falling rate of profit), to the very broad, multidimensional eco-Marxist approaches which see the crisis as a complex interaction between economic, ecological and social crises that has its roots in a pattern of industrialisation that relies on the exploitation of fossil fuels – what Altvater (2006) calls ‘fossil capitalism’.

In Marxist terms, an economic crisis refers to deep-seated, system-threatening breakdowns in the accumulation process. They can be short-term (for example the Asian crisis of 1997) or long-term (the Great Depression of the 1930s). The current financial crisis is not financial in origin, but has its roots in the stagnation of the real economy (Foster and Magdoff 2009; Brenner 2009; Arrighi 2007). This is due to the falling rate of profit, as a result of two things:

Firstly, the struggles of subordinate classes, including the working class at the workplace, as well as the working class and other classes in society at large, to extract as much of the surplus produced as possible, either directly from the employers through higher wages and benefits, or indirectly from the state through higher taxes to fund a higher social wage (in the form of public health care, education, subsidised transport, subsidised food, welfare benefits and other social services).

The second factor, closely interrelated to the first, is inter-firm competition, both at the national and the international levels. Rising costs make firms uncompetitive in relation to their competitors, unless they are subjected to the same rising costs. Increased competition spurs on innovation and the accumulation process, giving rise to a crisis of ‘over-production’, which drives down the unit price of commodities. This exacerbates the crisis of profitability, forcing firms to cut back and leading to the under-utilisation of productive capacity. Firms go bankrupt, workers are laid off, and stronger firms take over weaker ones, leading to the monopolisation of capital² (Baran and Sweezy 1968).

One way out of the cycle of declining profitability, at least temporarily, is to find cheaper sources of labour elsewhere, cheaper raw materials and new markets for excess products. Drawing on David Harvey, Beverly Silver (2004) identifies various ‘fixes’ that capitalism uses to navigate its way out of continuous crises of profitability. These include the spatial fix, where capital moves to cheaper and cheaper locales of production; the product fix, where capital moves from one niche product to another, chasing increased profitability (for example, from textiles to automobiles to information technology); and the technology fix, where through innovation labour-saving technology increases the productivity of labour. These fixes, however, only partially or temporarily address the accumulation crisis.

As in the past, a crisis in profitability in manufacturing boosts the financialisation of capitalism. This time, however, with a more globalised economy and new computer technology at their disposal, investments in ‘fictitious’ capital to increase profit rates rapidly overtook investments in the real economy. In the USA, the heart of global capitalism, the percentage of financial profits over total domestic profits in 2007 was just below 40 per cent, compared to well below 20 per cent in the early 1980s and below 15 per cent in the 1960s (Foster and Magdoff 2009: 93). By contrast, manufacturing profits steadily declined from over 50 per cent of domestic profits in the late 1960s to less than 15 per cent in 2005 (Foster and Magdoff 2009: 55).

To cut a long and complex story short, the financialisation of capitalism is not the cause of the capitalist crisis, but was itself a response to the crisis of the 1970s (Brenner 2009; Arrighi 2007). This is what Beverly Silver (2004) calls the financial fix. Inherently crisis-ridden, this ‘fix’ spawned a number of short-term crises in different parts of the world over the past two decades, including the US savings and loan crisis (1989–91), the Japanese asset price bubble collapse (1990), the Scandinavian banking crisis (early 1990s), the European exchange rate crisis (1992–3), the Mexican debt crisis (1994–5) the East Asian crisis (1997), the Russian crisis (1998), the Argentinian meltdown (2001), and the dot com bubble burst (2001). The current financial crisis, which hit the core developed countries directly, is the deepest since the Great Depression.

Foster and Magdoff (2009), in an extension of the Sweezy and Baran analysis, characterise the new stage of capitalism as monopoly-finance capitalism. It is based on ever-increasing concentrations of capital, under the rule of mega-financial institutions that straddle the globe, where manufacturing firms are intermeshed with financial firms and investments. Despite the anger against these institutions for ‘causing’ the financial crisis, governments in the USA and Europe are reluctant to take decisive action against them, regarding them as ‘too big to fail’. Indeed, executives of these institutions continue to pay themselves enormous salaries and bonuses, with much talk but little action against them. This is unsurprising, given the fact that core government elites are themselves part of what David Rothkopf (2009) calls the ‘superclass’ – six thousand people in a planet of six billion who, in addition to powerful governments and international finance, also run transnational corporations and global media houses (Rothkopf also includes world religions and underground criminal and terrorist empires).

Fossil capitalism is a system of accumulation based on mass consumerism (the creation of everlasting wants), but because of rising global inequality and stagnant or declining real wages, these new wants cannot be satisfied because potential consumers do not have the means to purchase the commodities produced. The only way out is increased indebtedness – household debt in the USA has increased from 62 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 92 per cent of GDP in 2005 (Foster and Magdoff 2009: 47). Consumer debt as a percentage of disposable income increased from 62 per cent in 1975 to 127 per cent in 2005 (Foster and Magdoff 2009: 29). This mirrors the increased indebtedness of the US economy as a whole, as it borrows on the financial markets to maintain its position as global hegemon – by fuelling its war machine (a form of military Keynesianism), preserving its legitimacy through social and internal security spending, continuing to provide subsidies to threatened industries (particularly agriculture) and, of course, bailing out the banking system.