Bhabani Shankar Nayak
The post-pandemic economic recovery looks uncertain and projections of economic growth look gloomy in every stretch of policy paradigm within capitalist imaginations. The strong and existing multilateral cooperation within the Westphalian international system is falling apart and facing its existential threats due to its entrenched Eurocentric bias, democratic deficits and institutional dominance by erstwhile colonial powers. The world is moving into a long-term crisis within capitalism and the capitalist system has failed to offer any viable alternatives to recover from these crises. Instead, it’s deepening the globalisation of crises and miseries among the masses. The predicaments of hunger, homelessness and unemployment are growing. The accessibility, availability, and distribution of essential goods and services are becoming difficult. Some markets are shrinking, some others are sinking; both producers and consumers are stuck in hard times.
More importantly, many continue to be in a denial mode about the follies of globalisation. These illiberal charlatans of power who live in the cocoons of their privileged ghettos continue to argue that the current crisis is not one of capitalism/globalisation. Their concocted propaganda is that the crisis is because of greedy or irrational individuals, inefficient governments, and unproductive states; free market-led systems are the only viable and competent alternative. Such reactionary narratives are trying to assert that the current economic, social, political, environmental and coronavirus-led global health crisis are simply the results of some immediate state and government failures, and thereby aid capitalism.Right-wing economists, liberal commentators, and consultants part of various ‘think-tanks’ continue to glorify and justify capitalist globalisation by hiding how it has failed egalitarian democracy, peace and prosperity.
The globalisation of crises under capitalism serves four objectives to the ruling and non-ruling classes. Firstly, the propaganda makes people reject the governments they have helped formed with the help of their collective will. Secondly, it diminishes citizens’ faith in their own abilities and intellect; it diverts them from analysing and reflecting on their own realities. Thirdly, it weakens the state and destroys the capabilities of governments as instruments of social, economic, political and cultural change based on scientific spirit and progressive ideals. Finally, it destroys democratic cultures by replacing it with authoritarianism that is concomitant with the requirements of capitalism for its growth. In this way, the narratives of reactionary politics and global capitalism help achieve these four specific objectives, which are central pillars in establishing authoritarianism, accelerated by crises — for the globalisation of capitalist crises means the globalisation of authoritarian politics and vice versa.
At the moment, the world is facing six major immanent capitalist crises:
i) Coronavirus-led Global Health Crises
ii) Environmental Crises
iii) Economic Crises
iv) Political Crises
v) Military Crises
vi) Crisis of Governance
These are integral to each other and one crisis triggers the other. Due to this, it is impossible to address them separately and needs an integrated approach to understand and find reliable alternatives for.
Coronavirus/Pandemic-led Global Health Crises
The pandemic has revealed that the spillover of the virus from their natural habitat to the human body is associated with burgeoning wildlife trade, deforestation and loss of natural wildlife habitat — all of which have happened due to the over-exploitation of nature under capitalism. The monetisation of nature for profit is the foundation for the spread of pandemics. According to recent research, at least two viruses enter the human body from their natural hosts every year, and this has been going on for a century now.
The coronavirus-led health crisis and other forms of global health crises are products of capitalism, which considers the human body and nature as resources to be used for the expansion of capitalist profit. It also uses sickness as a business opportunity for health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, and such profit-driven healthcare and economic systems breed health crises all around the world. The pandemic has simply aggravated existing health crises due to the privatisation of public health infrastructure and corporatisation of health services. The alternative is to look at health as human rights and abandon the model that seeks profit from illness; the nationalisation and universalisation of healthcare is the way forward for it.
Environmental Crises
The unprecedented environmental crisis is not natural. The environment has been degraded and destabilised by the growth of a desire-based society under capitalism. The magnitude and severity of the environmental crisis reveal that the capitalist economic system creates a grave imbalance within the ecosystem through over-exploitation of natural resources. From global warming to pollution, all are the products of the productivist and utilitarian ideology of capitalism, which has monetised the environment — severely impacting the quality of land, water and air. The outbreak of air and waterborne diseases are products of environmental crises manufactured by the capitalist system and this irreparable damage to the environment is a threat to human lives, because environmental crises, in turn, aggravate global economic and health crises. The reversal of a profit-driven desire-based capitalist economy is inevitable to attain a sustainable economic and social future.
Economic Crises
The neoliberal narrative of austerity as an economic policy alternative to recover from the economic crisis is market logic on steroids! Austerity is not an economic policy, but an economic project of the capitalist classes, which enforces economic miseries, political despondency and social alienation on a majority of the population. The voodoo of austerity and its ‘alconomics’ culture reproduce crises and empower market forces by transferring public resources to private pockets of capitalist classes. The only way to recover from the crisis in the short-run is to abandon austerity-driven neoliberal economic policies. The permanent alternative from it is to destroy capitalism and all its cultures with the help of popular struggles for a sustainable economy and society based on community-based and democratic control over resources.
Political Crises
The neoliberal shift in the economy has led to a shift from welfarist social democracy to a bourgeois democracy, where uninhibited market forces rule with their invisible free hand. The growth of islands of prosperity and continents of misery is the net outcome of such a system, which has led to the declining legitimacy of democratic political forces. In this context, the rise of reactionary religious and conservative social forces are not only filling the vacuum but also providing legitimacy to the rule of capitalist politics, in the name of culture, religion, and nationalism.
The recent political upheavals within liberal democracies in different parts of the world reflect this right-wing shift and reactionary trend in politics. Such a crisis is an opportunity for capitalist classes to dismantle all democratic norms and values in support of authoritarianism.
In this decisive period of a structural crisis of capitalism, it is only authoritarian politics that can help capitalism to further accumulate at this stage of its growth. Collective politics with a collective vision is the alternative.
Military Crises
Authoritarian and reactionary political regimes breed conflicts, disputes and wars to stay in power and control resources. The growth in nationalist war hysteria has produced military crises — inland, ocean, air, and space. It is also fuelling international arms trade; the colonial, imperialist and capitalist powers consider a military crisis as an opportunity to expand their economic base by selling weapons of mass destruction. Guns and capitalist globalisation move together and the military-industrial complex is deepening the idea of a security-state led by defence forces that ensure security to capital at the cost of human lives. States and governments are spending all their resources on military equipment at a time when citizens are suffering hunger and homelessness. The military crisis puts citizens’ welfare in the dustbin and the global rise in defence-spending is a threat to the environment, human lives, peace, and prosperity in the world.
Crisis of Governance
The world is witnessing a growing crisis of global, regional, national and local governance, which means a crisis of the rule of law, transparency and accountability. The criminogenic character of capitalism prefers a non-transparent and unaccountable system, which provides absolute freedom to the mobility of capital and control of labour, and its mobility with different legal mechanisms; the laws are for the masses and the capitalist classes live with legal impunity. This capitalist duality is central in creating a governance crisis. The rise in economic and social inequalities, political illegitimacy and illiberal thoughts have also contributed to this. Struggles for liberal, progressive, egalitarian, cooperative and democratic governance — which are destroyed by capitalism at regular intervals — is the way forward.
Conclusion
These are the six crises. The different incarnations of capitalism reveal that capitalism is an incubator of crises and that there is no alternative to solve these within it. Globalisation has aided the capitalist world economy — which promised peace and prosperity once — by globalising miseries.
The idolatry of capitalist falsehood is not the alternative to recover from the crisis of its own making. It is time to learn from our experiences and history with capitalist catastrophes. There is no individual freedom within capitalism in which a majority are made to suffer. Instead, our individual freedoms are linked to our collective emancipation. A glocal emancipatory struggle against capitalism is the only alternative for a collective future based on liberty, equality, justice and fraternity; national socialism will only be possible with internationalism. Resistance movements happening across the world can and will re-establish the hidden glory of socialism as the only alternative.
Dr. Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a Senior Lecturer in Business Strategy at Coventry University, UK. Read his piece on celebrity culture and capitalism here.
Featured Image: Kool-Aid colors, assemblage, and a raised fist: art of black America comes to The Broad | KCRW
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