The End of the End of History: COVID-19 and 21st Century Fascism

Debs Bruno and Medway Baker lay out the conditions of the current crisis, the political potentials it opens up, and the need for a socialist program to pave a path forward.

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” —Milton Friedman

As COVID-19 rages through the shell of a global civilization systematically ravaged by five decades of catabolic capitalism, the facades of processual stability are crumbling and revealing, in their place, a crossroads for human society. The illusion of stability and robustness projected upon the delicate systems of production, distribution, exchange, and social reproduction has long been predicted to evaporate. Yet the prophets of this revelation have long been marginal– considered doomsday prophesiers and malingering malcontents besotted by their own unpopular utopian aspirations. Now, in the wake of a challenge to those processes’ perpetuation – a challenge unprecedented in the annals of fully-developed, advanced global capitalism – such grim prognostications are being rewoven, this time into the weft of history.

The tasks of socialists, spectating from within the structure as it has been stripped down to the girding beams and beyond, are to clear-headedly analyze the conjuncture at which we find ourselves, identify the opportunities and dangers that conjuncture creates, and to organize at the weak points which yield the greatest leverage for reusing the rubble that results. The first part of this charge promises us a head-spinning voyage. Almost nobody alive has experienced a societal crisis of this scale, and absolutely nobody alive has experienced a menace of this nature. Furthermore, the suite of contingencies within which this havoc has arisen and within which it is doing its work have never before existed.

The imperial core has, in the course of realizing its ineluctable tendencies, hollowed itself of the substance of its self-perpetuation. The production networks have exogenized themselves, expanding for their continued competitiveness beyond the outer membrane of the core itself and relocating in territories still fertile for exploitation. On the foundation of world destruction following the Second World War, capital has created a global network of energy and resource flows, sending the production of value and the extraction of resources to postcolonial and economically colonized nations in the Global South and the periphery broadly. In the core Western nations, coronated by the whorls of history as the center of this global web, the increasingly costly machinery of capital production has been either left to rot or cannibalized in favor of an ethereal finance economy. The tools of leverage and speculation are used to direct the operation of the global system as a whole while little of substance is produced in the formerly unrivaled center of commodity production. This, however, creates a contradiction. Absent the productive and social apparatus which put the core in this privileged position, the nerve center of global capital has stripped its muscle and hollowed the bone. The aberrant wealth and power resulting from the annihilation of the two imperialist wars of the 20th century have evaporated, and a crisis of reproduction– ecological, political, cultural, and economic– has matured.

The foundering of profitability, meanwhile, has required the abortion of such regulatory mechanisms as had previously placed a limit on self-destruction, leaving the interior composition of the capitalist core bound, sedated, and ripe for predation. The exportation of ecocide, genocide, and the iron-heeled boot have become impossible; there are no boundaries in interpenetrated systems, and the segmentation once feasible has given way to self-reinforcing, malign cycles of crisis in infrastructure, geopolitics, social degradation, and ecological death.

The political systems of the core’s constituent nation-states have responded accordingly, as the coalition of interested groups inherited from the Fordist Bretton-Woods system has steadily seen its legitimacy and ability to navigate exigencies eroded. In place of the ironclad sovereignty this coalition once enjoyed, chasms have yawned– and nature abhors a vacuum. Into this void have rushed various strains of reaction, most retrograde, whether from the right or the left. In a way, the current presidential contest in the United States represents a popularity contest between various past eras to which to return: Trump wants a return to the post-historical jouissance (or doldrum-plagued interregnum, depending on whom you ask) of a mythical 1990s; Sanders to the New Deal-inflected, postwar imperial sugar-high that reigned during the 1950s and 60s class compromise; Biden to the last-ditch resuscitation of the Third Way characteristic of the late 2000s; and Marianne Williamson to the Zoroastrian golden age of 1500BCE. None of these alternatives are viable, as the preconditions for their existence no longer exist. But some of them represent the extremely powerful but heretofore latent rejection of the absurdly non-functional status quo, while the rest do not.

Many of us had hoped to have at least the ten remaining years promised us to avert certain climate catastrophe as a political deadline, and some had projected relative stability further into the future. Socialists within or adjacent to the Sanders campaign and its attendant parapolitical formations had hoped that a demonstration of its inability to implement its program would further the radicalization and cohesion of a left mass politics. This was a form of impossibilism, it has been argued, but one which could conceivably have worked along the lines it promised. The handlers of the neoliberal consensus had hoped that an exposition of the (clutch pearls now) utter incivility of the perfunctory right-populism of the Trump orbit would enable them to slowly reorient the official political sphere back into carefully-managed, popularly unaccountable, and technocratic halcyon typified by the Obama years. Neither of these alternatives are any longer possible, and the mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic points to the deeper systemic reason why, illuminating with it our overdetermined spiral into the event horizon of total catastrophe.

The structural impossibility of an effective response to the economic crash of 2007-8 made it inevitable that a more deeply impactful repetition of that crisis would manifest within the normal course of the capitalist business cycle. The overextension and simultaneous neutralization of fiscal and monetary measures introduced to reinflate doomed financial mechanisms and speculation has additionally made certain that the next capital-elimination event would be largely intractable to the top-down treatments required to sustain neoliberal suspension of profit-rate decline. In sum, we knew that another, more system-shattering crisis was coming and that it was coming soon. We could not know what event would precipitate it nor even foggily apprehend what the result would be. It is very possible that we now know the first. What we must do now is to address the second.

Intimations as to the sorts of social and political reactions to this crisis are beginning to coalesce. In recent days, the social-democratic proposal for the maintenance of the slowly disintegrating capitalist system having been roundly rejected, two main strains of response have surfaced. The first of these is a cataclysmic abdication of the concept of governance and even of society as an organ. This is best embodied in the United Kingdom’s policy of pursuing what is misnamed “herd immunity”. Actual herd immunity is not the purpose or result of this strategy. Instead, what it proposes is inaction. While the United States has de facto gone the same route due to incompetence and the total absence of social infrastructure, Boris Johnson has affirmatively asserted that the UK’s response will be to not respond. This will, as everybody knows, result in the expiration of approximately 3% of British people and the utter disintegration of the British economy, but, in Johnson’s theory, will then produce returned stability after everyone who could die from this virus has done so. Perhaps he views the lives lost along the way as more extirpation than expiration.

The Johnson approach is consonant with that of the United States and, oddly, Sweden. The key difference is that, while the central political figures in the US are surely indifferent to the eventuality spelled out above, they are at least feigning interest in taking tepid steps toward mitigating the catastrophic effects of that approach. Proposals from such figures include the following: from Trump, lying about having already accomplished the initial stages of a pandemic response; from Joe Biden, providing limited financial assistance to healthcare providers and public health organizations for the duration of the first wave of infections, thereby allowing otherwise helpless populations to access treatment; from Bernie Sanders, the same universal healthcare proposal he has advocated for decades; and from Nancy Pelosi, et al., provision of two weeks’ paid sick leave for about 20% of American workers. This constitutes a less-than-total abdication of governmental responsibility– with just enough prevarication to ensure that levels of hatred for the US stay steady but do not increase.

More interestingly, however, is the second strain of political response to the many-sided crisis precipitating around COVID-19. This strain is one that has been developing potentiality for many years, but which has, until very recently, remained embryonic and subterranean. Slavoj Zizek recently assessed the political situation in the United States as increasingly four-faceted. His categories fell roughly along the lines of neoliberal-establishment, neo-conservative establishment, right-populist, and left-populist. There are valid objections to this framing, but in the interest of this analysis, we can retain the idea that, despite appearances, the political polarity is between neoliberal-neoconservatism, straining mightily to maintain its stranglehold on the formal-political, and rupture-seeking populisms on the left and the right. Zizek’s analysis suffers from diffraction: there are not four faces, but two. There exists a backward-looking political contingent, comprising the cores of both major parties. And there is a rapidly-condensing sentiment which is formulating from the far right a politics which, in the United States, at least, is entirely new. If we accept the notion that politics is only politics in the millions, there is no forward-looking left.

The left-ruptural cohort has yet to promulgate a political vision which supersedes what it has already tried: a politics it has never stopped fighting to implement in the course of US labor history. The right-ruptural faction, on the other hand, appears to have formulated something novel and unspeakably dangerous. The mere appearance of an articulation seeking an alternative rather than a facially-improved continuation of the present arrangements is revolutionary in the post-neoliberal moment. And, as in all revolutionary epochs, the possibility for seizing the vlast – for challenging the sovereignty of the present regime and seizing it for one’s own political project – flows to the right as well as to the left. It is evident that the political center has almost fully fallen away and that a new center of gravity which will frame a new political polarity is inevitably on its way. The neoliberal hell-halcyon is as good as dead. The question that remains to us is what new social conjuncture will follow it.

The gravest threat, therefore, is neither (as most readers will agree) Donald Trump or “Trumpism”, as the liberals bray, nor the Democratic Party inertia-machines. Nor is it mass catatonia, although that threat and its ecological implications rank higher than either of the two former monstrosities. Instead, the true nightmare scenario against which we must be vigilant and organized is presented by what we have called the “Carlson Effect”. Sensing, as anyone with cortical function probably has, that the winds are shifting, elements of the American right (parallel to various European right parties and populations) have at least rhetorically embraced a vigorous right-populism tending, even, to social-fascism. At the time of writing, there have been at least three calls from prominent figures in or adjacent to the Republican Party for social provision to those deemed to be “real Americans”. Mitt Romney, the billionaire Mormon, ex-presidential candidate, and longtime denizen of the lounges of Republican Party officialdom, last week called for a $1,000 payment to offset the financial ruin in store for half of US workers in wake of the indefinite suspension of their employment. Crypto-fascist Senator Tom Cotton today decried the ersatz and indirect system of tax credits used for social provision, calling instead for a similar UBI-esque policy.

While, at first glance, these programs appear to be much-needed and overdue relief for millions of Americans barely clinging to the economic margins, they are very likely the opening shots in a coming salvo of right-populist political sentiment. A salvo which will certainly vouchsafe the irrelevancy of any left movement – and maybe even violently suppress such a movement – for generations. Of course, we would never take a position counter to the material alleviation of the suffering of the working class over insignificant political quibbles regarding who is providing that relief. The objection, however, that we should raise to this politics is not insignificant quibbling.

Any program of social provision implemented by the virulently nativist, white supremacist US ruling class or their political lickspittles will contain within it exclusionary mechanisms that will demarcate the populations they wish to recruit to their politics. Communities most affected by the grindstone of capitalist destruction will inevitably fall shy of program requirements. They may lack sufficient citizenship status or be in debt to the Internal Revenue Service. They may have criminal records or (god forbid!) low credit scores. As the Democratic Party – never a champion of the working class despite over a century of too-clever-by-half attempts to subvert it from within – has withdrawn its constituency to the extent that it now solely serves the whims and aesthetics of a shrinking, cosseted coastal elite, the space for any collectivism has gone unfilled. This will not persist as the existing pressures intensify and new ones arise. Reform movements led or won by social-democrats do not carry us further from revolution and the emancipatory project. Reform movements helmed by fascists certainly do.

The goals of any politics which falls under the scattershot term “fascist” are bounded by the class nature of their constituent population segments. Fascism, in its minimum identifying features, is a socio-political movement that hijacks an existing mass-political framework or creates an ersatz mass-political appeal in service of the perpetuation of the current class relations. Fascism arises in times of capitalist crisis; they are socio-political responses to the possibility of revolutionary upheaval. They seek to curtail this possibility by forging unitary social institutions, crushing any deviant or dissenting factors, and accommodating the reintensified cannibalization of the social fabric and its extrinsic environment, both ecological and geopolitical.

The insufficiency and brutality of the US sociopolitical system was enough to spark in its populace anger, despair, non-participation, and social disease. Its collapse will generate a deconstruction of the former system’s constituent parts and their reassemblage into something new, which, as in all ruptural processes, will come into existence as a chimera of those parts and will gradually metamorphose into something entirely new. In a society based fundamentally on settler genocide, racialized caste relations up to and including race-based slavery, aggressively-pursued imperialism, and thoroughly insinuated anti-collectivism, that recombination is very likely to yield an atrociously destructive lusus nature.¹

A peculiar manifestation of this kind of settler right-wing populism took shape in Western Canada during the Great Depression. This movement called itself “Social Credit”, after the economic theories of British engineer CH Douglas, although it rapidly took on a life of its own, separate from Douglas’s original formulations. Informally led by the deeply religious educator and radio show host William Aberhart, the movement rapidly acquired a grassroots base among the impoverished farmers of Alberta during the early 1930s, and swept Aberhart to electoral victory in 1935, heralding a virtual one-party rule in the province for the following 36 years.

Although Douglas’s economic theories are not particularly relevant for our purposes, it is useful to elucidate his philosophy, particularly his conception of “cultural heritage”, which, he said, entitled citizens to dividends based on their participation in society—essentially, an early form of universal basic income. In his own words:

“In place of the relation of the individual to the nation being that of a taxpayer it is easily seen to be that of a shareholder. Instead of paying for the doubtful privilege of being entitled to a particular brand of passport, its possession entitles him to draw a dividend, certain, and probably increasing, from the past and present efforts of the community [i.e., nation] of which he is a member…. Not being dependent upon a wage or salary for subsistence, he is under no necessity to suppress his individuality”.²

Douglas himself never intended to inspire a populist movement; he rather wished simply to influence economic policy through dialogue with the powers that be.³ It was Aberhart who brought social credit to the masses. Aberhart was quite literally a rabble-rousing preacher, spreading the word of God and social credit, denouncing the establishment politicians and finance capitalists, and promising his constituents a miraculous cure to the Depression. His radio audience ballooned as the economic crisis deepened, and his conviction inspired thousands to believe in him and his cause.

The specific financial measures he proposed were not so important as the message he propounded: There is no reason for our poverty! The bankers are robbing us! We, the people who work this land, must take what is rightfully ours! Douglas himself noted that

“it would not be possible to claim that at any time the technical basis of Social Credit propaganda was understood by [Aberhart], and, in fact, his own writings upon the subject are defective both in theory and in practicability…. [However,] it was at no time Mr. Aberhart’s economics which brought him to power, but rather his vivid presentation of the general lunacy responsible for the grinding poverty so common in a Province of abounding riches, superimposed upon his peculiar theological reputation.”⁴

Aberhart, in line with Douglas’s own theories, proposed that the state apparatus was in the hands of bankers who cared only about their own profits, not the common people. Although he attempted to convince the political establishment in Alberta of social credit policies, he was rebuffed, so he went to the people. Through his radio show, he tapped into the alienation of the impoverished workers and farmers of Alberta, their anger at the banks which drove them into eternal debt, their despair at the neverending Depression. He denounced, too, the mainstream media, the newspapers, for their failure to publish “the truth about the financial racketeers.”⁵ He framed himself as a man of the people, bringing the truth to the masses which the elites concealed from them. This scenario will be familiar to many of us today, in the age of television talk show hosts who seem to be displacing serious journalism in the popular consciousness.

Aberhart insisted that social credit would never involve confiscations of property, and that “production for use does not necessitate the public ownership of the instruments of production.”⁶ The explicit aim of social credit was an agreement between social classes, in which all citizens (i.e. members of the national community) would be taken care of. Aberhart explicitly counterposed class struggle to the “brotherhood of man”.⁷ “If we do not change the basis of the present system,” he exclaimed, “we may see revolution and bloodshed.”⁸ It was through “the common people stick[ing] together” that class warfare and violent revolution would be averted. ⁹

Indeed, while the labor movement was on the rise in other parts of the country, and the social-democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, now the NDP) was making gains in the neighboring province of Saskatchewan, the left was utterly crushed in Alberta, which remains a right-wing stronghold to this day despite the death of the Social Credit Party. The victory of right-wing populism in Alberta destroyed the capacity of labor activists and socialists to have any success for generations. In uniting the workers and petty bourgeoisie against the banks and the political establishment, social credit simultaneously staved off the threat of a genuine workers’ movement which could pursue its own, independent interests.

A comprehensive history of Social Credit rule in Alberta is well beyond our scope, but it is useful to highlight one incident which occurred under Aberhart’s Premiership, which involved government officials calling for the “extermination” of political opponents, termed “Bankers’ Toadies”. The leaflet they distributed read:

“My child, you should NEVER say hard or unkind things about Bankers’ Toadies. God made Bankers’ Toadies, just as He made snakes, slugs, snails and other creepy-crawly, treacherous and poisonous things. NEVER therefore, abuse them—just exterminate them!”¹⁰

This incident epitomises the type of threat presented by right-wing populism. While liberalism openly detests the masses and pretends at enlightened nonviolence while enacting the violence of the state, right-wing populists are unafraid to whip up popular sentiment against political opposition. This is the language of pogromists.

Although Aberhart was committed to realizing his program through constitutional means, the social credit movement did not remain committed to democratic principles. The right-wing thinks nothing of using force to crush dissent. If they are willing to take coercive and even violent measures against the capitalists to enact their program, the measures they are willing to use against workers are a thousand times worse. We must give the populist right the same treatment they would visit on us: we must exterminate them.

Regardless of what exigencies arise in the coming years’ political landscape, most of which are entirely obscured to us now, we can be certain of the crux of every political question: ecological collapse. Beyond the most obvious horror of this central question, the high-visibility catastrophes which will increase in magnitude and frequency, the tendrils of crisis will reach outward into every level of our social systems. Drought will spark agricultural collapse, which will cause multiple deluges of human migration, often all at once. Severe storms, flooding, weather-pattern changes, and sea-level rise will render major metropolitan areas functionally uninhabitable. The desertification of regions now devoted to large-scale monoculture or husbandry will disrupt critical commodity chains. This will doubtless cause armed conflict within and between nations.

We have likely all read these and many other dire projections and do not need to systematically enumerate them in order to demonstrate that whatever new mode of social organization coheres from the ashes of the old, it will be structured first and foremost by ecological catastrophe. This means, however, that during the collapse or slow disintegration of this social formation, a revolutionary program of clarity, urgency, and mass appeal never before attainable is possible to pursue.

Climate change is the skeleton key that unlocks the barred gate between us and the better world we struggle for. Every demand we now pursue in the interest of social justice, proletarian self-activation, and relief of sheer human misery will become a critical factor of our social system which has to be radically transformed in order to mitigate climate collapse. This means that any progressive, affirmative program of socio-ecological collapse constitutes, by the very nature of the adaptations required, a minimum program– a suite of demands which, when implemented, create the dictatorship of the proletariat and bring into the world real democracy for the first time. All other potential courses of action responsive to the general crisis coming down the pike are not only reactive and politically reactionary but will be insufficient to the scale of the calamity they respond to. The disastrous, sublime, terrifying situation we are now faced with lays down the gauntlet: we must either overcome our inhumanity and for the first time realize our collective potential, or consign the project of humanity to ignominy and extinction.

The retooling of society has already begun But we are in the premonitory tremors, so we cannot see around the curve. The present mode of economic relations, production methods, distribution mechanisms, political engagement, and energy production; our understanding of humanity’s position relative to “external nature”; the system of politically adversarial nation-states; those same nation-states’ positions in a rigid world-economic system; the presence of military conflict; social atomization – all of these elements of social existence and countless more will be altered by the metamorphic pressures of the coming total crisis. This inevitability creates two types of potential outcomes: the construction of an emancipatory, livable, fully-realized society; or the fall into a society increasingly composed along the barbaric trend-lines evident today. This epochal moment either breaks left, or it breaks right.

COVID-19 is not the harbinger of doom many subconsciously await with the sense of one waiting for the hammer blow to fall. It is, however, a signal and a model of the type of crisis we must anticipate and prepare for. The failure of the present could not be better illuminated than it is in the present disintegration. The present is intolerable and the future unthinkable. But to explore and demand the impossible is the task of revolutionaries, and our failure to take on this mantle will ensure our inability to seize the moment when future calamities emerge. To that end, we must formulate a program responsive to the needs of the masses of people, integrate ourselves into those groups most profoundly impacted by the implosion we are living through, and patch them together into a coalition capable of carrying our struggle forward into this brave new reality.

Responsive to this mandate, the formation of a new minimum program is the first and most urgent task of socialists today– particularly those in the West. We must begin to build a structured movement capable of responding, and even of assuming power the next time a civilizational collapse-level event emerges. And the first step in the way toward doing that is to build a program that addresses the critical needs of the masses of working people. The role of money, debt, stratospheric financial wizardry, foreign policy and international trade, and the structure of employment as a means of social control has never been more material than it is now. The purpose of those systems as a means of the restriction of access to resources has never been illustrated as clearly and starkly as it is right now. It is crystal clear which forms of labor are productive of value and which merely distribute, realize, and circulate value. It is also becoming clear how little of the value produced goes to the producers or to the general social good.

Critically, at a moment in which the US left is more nationalist than ever, this crisis is the first in an escalating series of crises that can only be remedied by internationalist socialism. The opportunity to promulgate a thoroughly internationalist politics and weave it into the existing left is the crux of this historical moment. Whether we do that will structure the outcome of the general collapse on its heels. Which fork in the path we choose may determine the survival of the species. The crossroads at which we stand must be understood as a unique opportunity to a) expand the class composition of the western socialist left; b) direct its politics in the necessary directions; c) incorporate swathes of working people toward a socialist politics of mutual self-interest; and, d) collectively take over the process of rebuilding (or not) the capital that will be destroyed by this many-sided crisis.

Moreover, this is a social rather than merely economic crisis, meaning it can only be effectively combatted through social solidarity, mutual aid, and democratically-run governmental initiatives. Economic crises often breed individualism, while more general, social crises breed mass politics and social cohesion. This is the first opportunity of this scale in many of our lives thus far, and we cannot let it pass.

In order to accomplish this essential task, the precondition for a socialist politics in the advanced capitalist core is being increasingly illuminated. This cornerstone is the precipitation of a mass, organized social movement with material social power which forms itself independent of and prior to participation in “official” politics. It cannot be wished into existence by way of electoral campaigns– especially not within the existing bourgeois unipolar political structure– or by trading in liberal-NGO cultural appeals. It must be built through the arduous, lumbering work of on-the-ground organizing. Fortunately for socialists, crises often catalyze the formation of such networks. We must attend to the material needs of our communities, build a package of demands responsive to those needs, and, in a coordinated campaign, target the crumbling mechanisms of maldistribution and social repression, and withhold our participation in them. There is no greater opportunity in recent memory to do so: people will be unable to comply with coercive maldistribution mechanisms such as rents and debt obligations, they will lack income but require the necessities of life, they will require medical care but be systematically denied access to it, and they will be exposed to hazards in the course of their work (should they have any) by indifferent or malicious capitalist corporations.

The contradictions are sharpening and they are incandescently clear for all who care to see. The socialist left often bandies this jargon about, often to the end of promulgating bad strategy and inadequate theory but in this case the process is actively accelerating and presents a crucial window of opportunity for real organizing toward social rupture.

2018.10.262018.11.06

How Empires Die

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)