Rosa Janis argues for a theory of crisis and social decay that uses elements of Marx’s Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall as well as the concept of fragility. Crisis must be understood as something not simply occurring in the economy, but the entire society as a whole. Yet the question remains whether an emancipatory politics can emerge from the stagnation and decay of civilization. 

The rhetoric of civilizational decline is often associated with the radical right, as the major theorists of it, from Nietzsche to Spengler, were quite plainly reactionaries. The specific imagery that is invoked in describing civilizational decline—a once great Civilization sliding into decadence, collapsing under the weight of its moral failure, with loose references to the Roman Empire—is something that’s fundamental to the radical right to the point where many cannot think of the life cycles of empires without drawing it back to Spengler.

However, there are left-wing—in particular, Marxist—theories of civilizational decline, the obvious one being the ‘fettering thesis’ where the social relations of production are thought to be holding back the productive forces:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”

Let us turn instead towards what Henryk Grossman sees as implied by Marx’s crisis theory in Capital, Vol. 3: a theory of world-historical decline specific to capitalism. Whereas Marxist decadence theory might often be suspected as an attempt to rearticulate moralistic condemnations of degenerative culture in historical materialist terms, the law of breakdown as elaborated by Grossman is expressed purely in terms of political economy. Grossman’s theory of breakdown is based on the tendency for capitalist recovery to be less and less effective every cyclical crisis, showing a long-term tendency towards the ‘breakdown’ of social reproduction itself as it becomes increasingly impossible to extract surplus value. What I am proposing here is an alternative to Grossman’s theory and other forms of what is referred to in Marxist circles as crisis theory. It will also be proposed here that it is important to highlight the existence of Marxian theories of civilizational decline and crisis that are separate from the crude mystical understandings put forward by the radical right. In the theory that will be outlined in this article, it will primarily be a crisis of capitalism that is the trigger of this broader civilizational crisis, particularly the relationship between cheap labor and technological stagnation (something that has existed in non-capitalist societies such as the Soviet Union and ancient Rome). We will be referring to this theory as the ‘stagnation theory of crisis’ as it is primarily focused on the stagnation of production and its consequences.

Labor and The Progress of Productive Forces

In the first section of chapter 3 of Towards a New Socialism, W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell begin to lay out an interesting argument about labor and technological progress. They start off with speculation of the Roman Empire’s decline. It seems strange that Rome, despite possessing the key to the 18th century in the waterwheel and having a relatively advanced grasp on science for the time period, did not go into an early version of industrial capitalism. The authors explain this apparent anomaly by thinking about the class dynamics of Rome. Rome was a slave society meaning that labor was incredibly cheap, as all the owner would need to pay is the initial price for the slave and then feeding them scraps. There was no incentive for a slavery-based mode of production to use labor-saving devices such as the waterwheel since slave labor was already cheap. In this theory, if ancient Rome had not been a slave-based mode production with cheap manual labor easily available, they would be forced to advance their mode of production beyond the limits set by slavery. (pg.32)

The authors connect this observation on ancient Rome to the grievances of economic reformers in the Soviet Union. One of the criticisms made by economic reformers was that the low-level wages that were common in the Soviet Union (since the government provided basic things like housing automatically to working people) lead to labor being wasted. The Soviet Union was plagued by incredible inefficiencies of the economy. Slower technological progress compared to the West, wasted labor and constant shortages plagued the Soviet Union throughout its existence to the point where the Heterodox Trotskyist Hillel Ticktin claimed that USSR was so inefficient that it could not possibly be capitalism of any kind and that it was something wholly unique to history. For Ticktin Soviet society was defined by its inefficiencies, a “non-mode of production”. However, the authors of Towards A New Socialism offer insight into how these inefficiencies may not be completely unique to the Soviet Union.

While maintaining that Capitalist societies are more efficient modes of production than actually existing socialism or the slave-based production of Rome (since unlike those modes labor was paid for with higher wages), capitalism might still have the same fundamental problem that both those societies had, which is the continuing process of labor being devalued by the drives underlying all of these societies. Under Capitalism, there is a constant drive to pay workers less for their labor due to this being profitable in the short term and the Capitalist class is driven by profit. However, as in Rome and the USSR, this devaluing of labor has long-term consequences that the capitalists cannot perceive, as such overarching tendencies within capitalism are hard to spot in the constant struggle for profit that defines the capitalist mode of production. The long-term trend is that the devaluing of labor leads to stagnation of technological progress, which in turn becomes an issue of stagnation of the economy and the rest of society, as we have seen with the slave mode of production and what is commonly referred to as Actually Existing Socialism. The authors of towards a new socialism give an example of this process in action with IBM. IBM in the 1950s and 60s had automated the production of memory cores almost completely. In order to keep up the demand for their computers they kept on making this process even more driven by automation, yet when they were able to find factories in “the Orient” they shifted investment. While these factories were way less productive than their more automated factories, they had access to cheaper labor, making up for the inefficiency of this manual production process by being more profitable than the high-tech factories (pg 44).

This idea that capitalism still has the fundamental problem of stifling technological innovation by undermining its main incentive (i.e. reducing the amount of labor that’s needed to create things that are needed for human consumption) has merit. The authors of Towards A New Socialism proceed to argue that their ‘new’ socialism will not have this problem. This is because under their model of socialism, currency is merely a means of measuring labor time directly as it takes the form of labor vouchers. Having labor vouchers over money as we currently know it would mean that labor would be more expensive than it is under capitalism since every minute goes into the workers’ labor voucher wages rather than every 32 minutes that the worker normally gets back in wages under capitalism (which is calculated by the authors on pg 15). This increase in the price of labor would give economic planners and the workers involved with production incentive to invest in more labor-saving technologies than they would in previous modes of production.

While in Towards a New Socialism this idea of devaluing labor being a cause of stagnation is a convincing rebuttal to the usual claims thrown out by capitalists apologists about socialism lacking the incentives for innovation, there are some interesting implications that are not drawn out explicitly by the authors which ought to be explored more. Paul Cockshott, a co-author of Towards A New Socialism is a proponent of The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) as being the main source of capitalist crisis, yet what he shows in Towards a New Socialism is a tendency within capitalism that goes directly against what is the fundamental drive behind TRPF, something  is theorized as a counter tendency to this tendency. With Paul Cockshott and its other theorists, TRPF is based on the promises of technological innovation being incorporated into the production of commodities reducing the amount of labor going into commodities and thereby reducing their value causing the profits of overall capitalist industries to fall as a result. The independent and dependent variables of crisis are switched in these two theories. In TFRP the independent variable is automation of production while the dependent variable is expensive labor while in the prototype of the theory of stagnation that is given in Towards a New Socialism the independent variable is cheap labor and the dependent variable technology. This switching of the variables, while being motivated by the same desire on the part of the capitalists for profits in the short term, and leading essentially to the same result of slowing down of economic growth have opposite processes leading different causes with the same unintended consequences. If Labor is not too expensive for the capitalists, but actually cheaper than automation, then there is no process that gives incentive for capitalists to replace the worker with automation. Cockshott and Cottrell, while simply trying to respond to the typical capitalist argument about technological innovation under socialism unintentionally undermined their own theory of crisis and laid the groundwork for a whole new theory.  

The Tendency Towards Increased Fragility

“Crisis Theory: The Decline of Capitalism As The Growth of Expensive and Fragile Complexity” from the blog Cold and Dark Stars(3), while being a short blog article, is probably one of the more interesting contributions to Crisis theory in a while. It sets to create a Marxist theory of crisis based on the growth of fragility under capitalism. The definition of Fragility that the author of the article is working with is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s one, which is mathematically defined as harmful, exponential sensitivity to volatility. Taleb, being an expert on statistics, sees fragility in all large and complex human endeavors which leads him towards Libertarian politics. However, the author of the Cold and Dark Stars article proposes that Fragility is not something that is only created by government but by capital itself. The author provides a large amount of evidence, drawing on data coming from everything from the bloated American healthcare system to the crisis of sciences. While the author himself does not apply the categories that we are about to apply, I find it helpful to divide the kinds of fragility that he is describing into two categories. The first category is meant to describe the fragility that comes from the broader economy becoming more dependent on financial speculation and monetary liquidity, or in Marxian terms the creation of fictitious capital to hide the long-term decline in profits with short-term gains we will refer to as financialization (as it is based on the growth of the financial sector). The second category is somewhat broader in terms of its scope since it will be covering almost everything from direct production of commodities to industries like health care and education, what connects the fragility and all of these things is the expanding size of the managerial and specialist subclasses of the bourgeoisie in all of these sectors of the economy and in society as a whole.

The author provides enough evidence for the drive for short-term profits being both the underlying drive behind the growth of fragility in the entire economy and the direct cause of financialization. However, the second category of fragility that is covered in the article does not seem to be profitable either in the short term or the long term since the subclasses of managers and specialists are extremely expensive for the capitalists class. Just to give one example, in the American healthcare industry there has been a massive expansion in the number of specialists in the industry to the point where they outnumber general physicians. Yet specialists are still paid almost twice as much as general physicians even though there is a massive shortage of general physicians and the government has to pump money into the healthcare industry to keep it from collapsing (4). The same is true of Academia, which suffers from a glut of bureaucrats who are paid more than teachers that are actually needed and the government is again forced to foot the bill for all of this. Bureaucratization is not profitable even in the short term so the drive for short-term profits even though we will argue that it still remains an underlying part of the growth of all fragility in the economy. The direct cause lies in the process of acquiring cheap labor over technological innovation that happened relatively recently in history.

In the pursuit of short-term profits, the capitalist class begins to ship manufacturing jobs from the Core to the semi-periphery (to put it in world-systems theory terminology). The trade-off for this shift in investment is that in exchange for short-term profits the capitalist class has to deal with the lack of incentive for technological development and the new glut of unemployment in the core nations. The unemployment of manufacturing jobs in the core nations is a serious issue given that these manufacturing jobs were the backbone of the labor aristocracy with their high pay,  good benefits and in the United States, in particular, the promise of homeownership. The capitalist class, being short-sighted up until this point, proceeds to respond to the problem that they have created with a short-term solution that is even more problematic than the one before by pushing the majority of people who once had manufacturing jobs into service work. As a response to this shift to the service sector, the capitalist class also needs more managerial people as a result of the increase in logistics that comes from having a more global system of production set in. They cannot simply expect all proletarians to simply accept their precarious job at Walmart, so they proceed to turn the educational system into a  lottery for access into the managerial class, pressuring everyone in the lower classes to go to college as a means of escaping the hell that the capitalists have created. There is a relatively large number of people who end up being able to go through the crooked hoops of college and the capitalist class has to do something with these college kids so they push them into unproductive bureaucratic and specialist positions. These college kids are the lucky ones who get to be a part of the cruel ever-expanding Kafkaesque machinery, weighing down capital with every arbitrary bureaucratic position created.

As alluded earlier, financialization, the ever-increasing amount of fictitious capital that is pumped into the economy is the second form of fragility that is created by capital stagnation. The concept of fictitious capital is practically universal in all forms of crisis theory and it serves the same purpose in each form, which is to stave off whatever contradictions within the capitalist economy are leading to crisis with a constant stream of money that does not come from real growth in the economy (which can only come from the process of extracting surplus value from the producers). This stream of money comes in the form of stocks, debt, credit, loans and inflation. While financialization on paper seems to create economic growth, the fictitious nature of the capital that they are pumping into the economy will only hit the capitalists like a brick wall when they realize that they’ve invested so much money in the stock of companies that are not actually profitable and all the stuff that was bought with credit by average people (everything from apartments to cars) cannot be paid back because their wages are so utterly meager. These sort of situations that come from fictitious capital are why it is not only fictitious but a form of fragility, as it seeks to solve the problem of capital stagnation with another layer of complexity, trying to spin the plates of debt, credit, stock, etc. in order to make up for letting the plate of technological innovation drop to the ground. The Capitalists are trying to keep everyone distracted from their blithering failures by creating more problems for themselves in the future.

Before moving on from fragility we should address an argument made by the author of the Cold and Dark Stars essay against The TRPF theory of crisis, as it can be broadly applied to the theory being speculated in this paper or really any theory of that focuses on one variable of an event over others…

“The greatest flaw of the  “orthodox” Marxist approach is its dependence on pseudo-aristotelian arguments. The TRPF model is based in a logical relation between very specific variables, which are the costs of raw materials and machinery (constant capital), the costs of human labor (variable capital), and the value extracted from the exploitation of human labor (surplus value). This spurious precision and logicality is unwarranted, as the capitalist system is too complex and stochastic  be able to describe the behaviour of crisis as related to a couple of logical propositions. One has to take into account the existence of instabilities and shocks, as the mainstream economists do.”

This is a very weak argument, as while capitalist crisis much like any other complex process that comes under the scientific microscope, can and probably does have multiple variables. It can easily be argued that some variables are more important than others due to their directness in triggering the process that we are looking to study, and focusing more on said variables over others is not “pseudo-Aristotelian logic” but rather just a normal part of the scientific method. When we focus on technological stagnation as the main variable of our theory of crisis we are doing so not to completely discount that there could be other variables involved in the process but rather to pick out the one that is seemingly more important in the process than others and focus on that variable in relation to others.

Crisis: from the Base to the Superstructure  

Often when analyzing crisis Marxist and in particular Marxian economists have a tendency to avoid talking about the implications of crisis that lie slightly outside of their field of study. If we genuinely hope to break away from the limits that are imposed by hyper-specialization on the research program of historical materialism then we must engage in not only what is considered to be the more objective “base” of society as one would do in Marxian political-economy but also it’s more subjective “superstructure”. While it may be flawed to frame anything in Marxism in such terms, we can still use this “base-superstructure” framework to help us trace how a crisis that is purely economic can spread from the base of the economic sub-structure to the superstructure throughout the whole of society. When we start to think about crisis in this genuinely historical materialist or at the very least Hegelian manner, we begin to move away from seeing the crisis of capitalism in purely economic and political terms but as a much larger disease that spreads all across the body of our society, causing everything from the stock market to the minds of next generation to rot away. Here we will map out how crisis grows into the social sphere.

Crisis starts with growth in the fragility of institutions all across society, not just the ones that can be thought of as purely economic like businesses or the stock market, but also schools, the family and the church. Starting at the home we see an established family structure that has been created by industrial capitalism in the United States, that of the nuclear family. The nuclear family structure is highly atomized compared to previous iterations of the family as an institution within society. It is generally smaller, having one caretaker (usually still a woman) for the children (instead of the extended family helping raise the children) and another who is the breadwinner, usually still a man. (4) While the numbers for these roles have started to change we need to look at why they have changed. Why was there an increase in the number of women in the workforce? ( 5) Why are birth rates are dropping? (6) Why are people getting married at later parts of their lives than they did before? (7) Some would answer these questions by pointing to the slow rise of “left-wing identity politics”, as the values that are promoted by said identity politics undermine the stability of the family. This a slightly updated version of the answer that was given by social conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, echoing the political wave of social conservatism that came about in the 80s. This answer may make more sense today than during the period of time in which it was originally put forward, with social justice discourse being so prevalent in the media, yet it cannot explain why “left-wing identity politics” has won in the long term given how social conservatism basically dominated the 80s political and social climate.

The explanations of the political right that put politics and culture first are completely inadequate because even while they were losing ground they had cultural and political dominance over the United States.he only real explanation for the breakdown of the nuclear family along other bastions of American conservatism can be found in the economic sphere. What made the nuclear family a viable form of social life in the United States for a relatively long period of time given capitalism’s continuous instability was ironically enough something that American conservatism has been focused on destroying,  the social democratic welfare state. The 4 million loans handed out by the Federal Housing Administration or guaranteed by the Veterans Administration from 1935 to 1951 along with flood of money that came from the post World War II economy, with strong unions, good-paying factory jobs and decent public schools creating a labor aristocracy that was the perfect combination of socially conservative, relatively privileged due to property ownership and white as Wonder Bread.(8, 9, 10). This created a postwar political consensus that valued anti-communism fused social reaction and Social Democratic economics over radicalism of any kind.  This consensus was good for the American Empire yet went against the short-term interests of the capitalist classes as they were forced to provide more for their workers through wages, benefits and government taxes. This conflict between the short-term interests of the capitalist class with the long-term interests of the American Empire would play out over the latter half of the 20th century going into the 21st.

There were two major blows against this social conservative/economically Keynesian consensus that would lead to its downfall. First was the rise of the American civil rights movement as African-Americans, along with other minority groups who had continually been shut out of American life and enjoying the wealth created by the postwar prosperity, began to demand basic political rights along with economic reform in the late 60s early 70s. This wave of rebellion by minorities led to a retreat of the social norms that had defined American life for the longest time. The second was a global recession around the same time that was defined by Stagflation, Stagflation being a term to describe high inflation existing alongside high unemployment. The Stagflation recession of the early 70s can be seen as a relatively small side effect of the Nixon administration switching from the gold standard to Fiat currency. Keynesian economics of the time could not account for Stagflation as inflation was supposed to automatically lead to a reduction in unemployment, so this was a blow against the social democratic policies of the time. This allowed for a Capitalist offensive to be waged under the banner of conservatism, as there was the base of white labor aristocrats who were deeply frightened by their declining prospects and the gains made against their authority by the civil rights movement and liberalization of social values in general. Figureheads of the American conservatism like Reagan could provide them with a soothing narrative about an evil liberal media elite slowly destroying their way of life while undermining the existence of the base of white people that the conservative movement was trying to appeal to by removing the things that helped the labor aristocracy exist in the first place such as strong yellow unions and government aid for housing.

Helping to carry out the strangling of the nuclear family, American conservatives proceeded to break their promises about government spending and the reduction of bureaucracy. They continued to expand the size of the American military, letting bureaucracy grow in the private sector to ridiculous degrees while continuing to pour money into corporations who were abandoning the American working class, earning the Reagan administration a high deficit. (11) American conservatives along with the rest of the politicians of the ruling class are fine with Keynesianism so long as it benefits the people who are lining their pockets. This is not to say that American conservatives were the only ones who became more and more dependent on the Capitalist class to give them support as they enacted policies that would slowly aid in the annihilation of their base. Democrats had found that they could avoid having to deal with competing with Republicans over the white working class if they could feed off of the last bits of energy coming out of the civil rights movement,  ignoring the economic demands of this movement as they had a vested interest in carrying out the demands of their capitalist masters. The capitalist class had been emboldened by stagflation and the recession, seeing an opportunity to devaluing labor while not being able to comprehend the long-term problems that would come with this. The overall Democratic strategy would not be viable until American conservatism proceeded to lose steam in the 90s and the last bits of social democracy were stomped out of the party by the Third way fanatics of the party. They proceeded to outmaneuver the Republican Party on issues that they traditionally were “strong on”. Crime, defunding welfare and government spending all became Democratic Party issues along with mixing the rhetoric of the civil rights movement with blatant racist dog whistles about “welfare queens”. The uncomfortable mix of wokeness and racism can be seen as sort of a transitional phase of the Democratic Party to its more modern ideology of Social Liberalism as it was still trying to win over the remnants of the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeois whites that are the core base of the Republican Party.

The nuclear family unit becomes weaker through this process of cheapening labor as their incomes drop, financial issues being one of the leading causes of divorce in the United States. (11) The time spent trying to make up for the drop in income leads parents to leave more of the important process of socializing their children to public schools which are underfunded and dominated by an ever-expanding bureaucracy. Even if the teachers want to help the children, they are incentivized to teach for a test, being less of a surrogate parent than the students might need since their parents are wrapped up in financial issues. Responsible adults that give the students the important values of compassion and kindness to their students are left in a void. If teachers, parents and other figures of authority are failing at socializing the youth then the process of socialization becomes the duty of various forms of media. The Internet in particular has become the main force behind forming how children build relationships which the whole of humanity. The Internet as a particular vector of socialization is probably one of the most damaging to society overall as it leaves children at the whims of adults who are acting completely anonymously, unable to be held accountable for their actions and allowing children with antisocial tendencies to create communities around their issues which end up being self-reinforcing. We can see social decay in the rise in the number of people diagnosed with mental illnesses in the United States (12), in particular among youth (13), with mass shootings becoming a normal spectacle in the America media. One can point to the example of the cult of personality that spontaneously formed around the recently deceased woman beating psychopathic rapper XXXTentacion. The rapper’s death was met with a wave of mourning which then turned into rioting by his young fans. (14) The youth fanbase of XXXTentacion heavily identifying with him due to his lyrics covering issues related to mental illnesses. (15)

This image of an anti-social and amoral culture can easily be dismissed as the rantings of someone who is out of touch with the culture. It can even be described as reactionary given that cries of decline are associated with the political right. However, these seemingly small and innocuous trends within our society become much more frightening when we take into account much larger developments in the political economy. When we look at the whole structure from top to bottom, we start to see that the growing sense of alienation that we feel from one another, the dread of the future that is so widespread in our culture that we have become obsessed with nostalgia, and the constant need to pop an ever-increasing amount of drugs just to get through the day, are not just irrational passing thoughts but the same kind of instincts that other animals feel before a tornado that makes them panic, primitive instincts that drive them to run from danger. We are beginning to realize that the American Empire is dying and that if the scientists who talk about climate change are right we are going to drag the whole world with us.(16)

We’re trapped in the belly of this machine and the machine is bleeding to death (17)