Can Global Capitalism Endure?

Can Global Capitalism Endure?

Can Global Capitalism Endure?

WILLIAM I. ROBINSON

©2022 William I. Robinson

ISBN: 978-1-949762-56-3

EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-949762-63-1

In-house editor: Diana G. Collier

Book design: Becky Luening

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934371

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface: A Planetary Crisis

Can Global Capitalism Endure?

I. The Structural Dimension of Global Crisis

II. The Global Production, Circulation, and Appropriation of Value

III. The Second Information Age

IV. The General Crisis of Capitalist Rule

V. Contested Futures

Postscript: Ukraine and the Crisis of Global Capitalism

Endnotes

Index

Acknowledgments

KIND THANKS to Roberto Danipour, the late Neil Faulkner, Venus Leung, Steven Osuna, Kees van der Pijl, and Hilbourne Watson for their invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. I have been discussing the ideas raised here in a number of professional and political forums. Special thanks to Juan Manuel Sandoval and to Marcela Orozco, who have invited me over the past few years to give talks on the global crisis to the Seminario Permanente de Estudios Chicanos y de Fronteras of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico, to the Working Group on Borders, Regional Integration and Globalization in the American Continent of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Social Science Council), and to several other professional forums in the Americas. Thanks also to Germán Carrillo, who invited me to contribute an article to the inaugural issue of Revista de Estudios Globales, Análisis Histórico y Cambio Social, which served as the original inspiration for the present study. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for the work and for its inevitable shortcomings.

FOREWORD

Global Capitalism in the Great Implosion: From Planetary Superexploitation to Planetary Socialism?

Jason W. Moore

Every paragraph of Can Global Capitalism Endure? sizzles with insights. Here is William I. Robinson at his best: empirically sensitive, theoretically original, politically committed. Global Capitalism, in this groundbreaking formulation, is no amalgamation: global plus capitalism. It identifies, rather, an emergent and profoundly unstable phase of capitalism—hence the upper-case—growing out of neoliberalism’s gruesome contradictions.

This book unfolds a world-historical trinity: globalization, financialization and digitalization. Robinson charts these in their shifting configurations of the ongoing overaccumulation crisis, the worldwide class struggle, and Biospheric tipping points. Grasping these moments as mutually formative, he achieves the near-impossible: a lucid primer on the great fractures of capital, class, and political power while elaborating an original theory of capitalist crisis. This interpretation presages capitalism’s possible transformation from a world-economy of many competing states and capitalist blocs into a tributary civilization governed by a relatively unified gang of oligarchs. Of course, Robinson understands this dynamic as a tendency, not a done deal. Global Capitalism forms through and creates counter-tendencies—not least the potential emergence of working-class internationalisms. He explores the contradictions faced by the global bourgeoisie in its attempt to morph into a transnational capitalist class (TCC), whose runaway financialization—reinforced by militarized accumulation—renders it unable (or perhaps unwilling?) to re-establish the conditions for another capitalist golden age.

Two themes shape this question. One is Global Capitalism’s ascendancy since 2008 and the Great Recession. Here we see a hyper-financialized TCC and its incipient transnational state apparatuses (TNS) maturing. Global Capitalism’s financialization is distinguished by an unusually predatory relation to non-financial capitalist firms—along with the rest of life. In my reading, this predatory movement represents the world-historical crystallization of hedge-fund-style asset stripping—a development whose implications are underappreciated. The second theme extends beyond conventional political economy. Here, the dialectics of class and capital are joined to a penetrating recognition of capitalism in the overall web of life. Capitalism’s epochal crisis is a unified crisis of life-making¹ and profit-making. This is the essence of what I’ve called the world-ecology conversation.² Broadly defined, this conversation is a political and intellectual effort to rethink capitalism, socialism, and planetary justice through capitalism’s evolving relations of power, profit and life—historically, and in the present crisis.

Can Global Capitalism endure? Probably not. As Robinson illustrates, the ongoing breakdown of the five-century capital accumulation model is at once producer and product of a novel political project pursued by a critical fraction of the imperialist bourgeoisie—the TCC. Let’s call it the Davos Project, after the annual meetings of the planet’s oligarchs in the Swiss resort village. This Project aims at a political resolution to capitalism’s twofold crisis of profit-making and life-making. It is an unsavory cocktail of green techno-authoritarianism, totalizing surveillance, the financialization of everything, and regime change imperialism. In polite company, this is called the Great Reset.³ It is a program oriented towards a tributary way out of capitalism’s epochal crisis—tributary in the sense that political power would determine the new civilization’s relations of production. While many features of capitalism would persist, the accumulation of socioecological wealth would be definitively guaranteed by something resembling what Robinson refers to in the abstract as TNS apparatuses.

Would this be more or less dystopian—or just different—from historical capitalism? One thing can be certain. The tendency towards militarized accumulation that Robinson discusses and its gravitational influence in world accumulation has accelerated in recent decades. Since the 1970s, the expansion of a permanent war economy—including America’s Forever Wars—has gone hand-in-hand with a pathological and predatory financialization. They’ve gone together because debt collection is, and always has been, a dirty business. Both signal the historical exhaustion of the conditions for capitalist renewal. Both are fundamental to the tributary ambitions of the Davos Project and its Great Reset.

What underpins this epochal crisis? The crux of the matter is the problem of surplus capital—surplus relative to the opportunities for profitable reinvestment (without which, capital as such does not exist.) While Marxists debate its specific dynamics, everyone agrees this is the basic problem. Capitalism’s dynamism is such that Mr. Moneybags accumulates wealth beyond what can be reinvested—or even spent. (Some of this can be spent on private islands and super yachts. But only some.) Capital’s real basis—even and especially highly abstract forms of wealth like cryptocurrencies—remains dependent upon very material worlds: claims upon anticipated wealth flowing from what Marx called the soil and the worker.⁴ If new investment opportunities—relative to the rising mass of capital—do not materialize, crises of variable severity follow.

These various cycles correspond to the severity of the surplus capital problem. This is the difference between business cycle recessions and Great Depressions. Today, the problem is similar, yet different. The surplus capital problem asserts itself in increasingly intractable forms. As Robinson reminds us, financialization is always bound to the real economy. The proliferation of fictitious financialization amplifies non-productive claims on the anticipated flows of real wealth derived from the soil and the worker. But there are limits on these anticipated flows, and Robinson illuminates them. Financial capitalism’s totalizing fantasy runs aground on the shoals of simmering class revolt and overaccumulation, which this time around—in contrast to previous eras of systemic crisis—cannot be attenuated by further rounds of primitive accumulation and commodification. The enclosure of capitalism’s last great frontiers of Cheap Nature since the 1970s has removed the indispensable way that empires have resolved overaccumulation crises. Simply put, globalization has rendered a whole series of unprofitable investments profitable, such that a new working class that can labor at five cents on the dollar of workers in the imperialist centers—or $20/barrel oil equivalents.

Previous eras of financialization—from the Age of the Genoese after 1557 to the Washington Consensus after 1971—brought not only new imperialisms but new industrializations. Recent world history has diverged from this pattern. The decade since the end of the Great Recession reveals no such scientific-technological revolution in the making. The material surplus continues to expand, but very slowly; meanwhile, as Robinson shows, fictitious claims on that surplus have grown exponentially. The social shortfall—so far—has been reflected in skyrocketing inequality. This essentially Robin Hood in reverse strategy—rob from the poor, give to the rich—is an unstable conjuncture, to date underwritten by two developments that Robinson discusses: the worldwide defeat of the proletarian forces, and the unprecedented flows of cheap money in the form of historically-low interest rates.

One lesson from the study of twentieth-century social revolutions becomes relevant at this point. When ruling classes are unable to launch a new regime of accumulation that expands the economic surplus, a zero-sum situation emerges. Increasingly militant social movements materialize, and increasingly brutal and dystopian counter-insurgency methods are deployed by ruling classes. This is one of the plot lines of Naomi Klein’s well-known account of the shock doctrine and resurgent primitive accumulation.⁵ Capitalists did not hesitate to use the