Can Global Capitalism Endure? by William I. Robinson

Author:William I. Robinson [Robinson, William I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarity Press
Published: 2022-07-31T22:00:00+00:00

IV

THE GENERAL CRISIS OF CAPITALIST RULE

Thus far we have discussed the structural dimension of a global crisis. But the crisis is as much political as it is economic. Capitalist states face spiraling crises of legitimacy after decades of hardship and social decay wrought by neoliberalism, aggravated by these states’ inability to manage the COVID-19 health emergency and the economic collapse. The system is moving very quickly towards a general crisis of capitalist rule as capitalist hegemony breaks down. A 2020 survey found that a majority of people around the world (56 percent) believe capitalism is doing more harm than good.91 Lack of trust in capitalism was highest in Thailand and India (75 percent and 74 percent, respectively), with France close behind (69 percent). Majorities rejected capitalism in many Asian, European, Gulf, African, and Latin American countries. In fact, only in Australia, Canada, the United States, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan did majorities disagree with the assertion that capitalism currently does more harm than good. A “global spring” is breaking out all around the world.92 From 2017 to 2019, more than 100 major anti-government protests swept the world, in rich and poor countries alike, toppling some 30 governments or leaders and sparking an escalation of state violence against protesters.93 However, this two-year period was but a peak moment in popular insurgencies that spread in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. It is a veritable tsunami of mass rebellion not seen since at least 1968.

The uprising has a truly global character. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, and South Africa to Colombia, mass struggles appeared in some instances to be acquiring a radical anti-capitalist character. These protests involved workers and often migrant workers, farmers, indigenous communities, women and feminists, students, prisoners and activists against mass incarceration, democracy and anti-corruption activists, anti-racists, those struggling for autonomy or independence, anti-austerity campaigners, and environmental advocates, among others.94 In all of their diversity, these mass struggles have a common underlying denominator: an aggressive global capitalism in crisis that is pushing to expand on the backs of masses who can tolerate no more hardship and deprivation. It would seem that the contradictions of this crisis-ridden system have reached the political breaking point, placing the world in a perilous situation that borders on global civil war.

The ruling groups cannot but be alarmed over mass popular discontent. They must figure out how to keep accumulating capital in the face of stagnation and at the same time maintain control by keeping a lid on rebellion. As protest spreads around the world, they have turned to expanding the global police state. Savage inequalities are politically explosive and, to the extent that the system is simply unable to reverse them or to incorporate surplus humanity, it turns to ever more violent forms of containment to manage immiserated populations.95 As popular discontent has spread in recent years, the dominant groups have ramped up the transnational systems of social control, repression and warfare

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