Emerging From the Crisis of Capitalism Or Emerging From Capitalism in Crisis?

The principle of infinite accumulation, which defines capitalism as synonymous with exponential growth, and the latter, like cancer, results in death. John Stuart Mill, who understood this, imagined that a ’stationary state’ would put an end to this irrational process. John Maynard Keynes shared this optimism of the Reason. But neither was equipped to understand how the necessary overcoming of capitalism could come about. Karl Marx, in giving its full place to the new class struggle, could, on the contrary, imagine overturning the power of the capitalist class, which is currently concentrated in the hands of the oligarchy.

Accumulation, which is synonymous with pauperisation, forms the objective framework of the struggle against capitalism. But the latter is principally expressed through the growing contrast between the wealth of dominant societies which benefit from their imperialist dividend, and the poverty of marginalised societies. This conflict has become the central axis of the choice between ’socialism or barbarism’.

‘Real and actual’ historical capitalism is associated with successive patterns of accumulation by dispossession, not only at its origin (‘primitive accumulation’) but at all stages of its manifestation. Once established, ‘Atlantic’ capitalism became part of global conquest and re-shaped it on the basis of permanent dispossession for the conquered areas, which, as a result, became the oppressed margins of the system.

This ‘victorious’ globalisation has proved incapable of maintaining sustainability. Half a century after its triumph, which seemed at one time to have begun the ‘end of history’, was itself challenged by the revolution in semi-marginal Russian and the (victorious) liberation struggles in Asia and Africa which constituted the history of the 20th century – the first wave of struggles for the emancipation of workers and peoples, the first wave of the ‘awakening of the South’.

Pambazuka News