Struggle, Critique, Emancipation

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9. The Crisis of Capital and the Conformist Rebellion: On the Need to Reflect on the False Solutions

José A. Zamora

Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

In capitalist social formations, social life and its reproduction are organized under two basic forms that both promise to safeguard it and submit it to its own reproduction: in general and abstract terms, these forms are Capital and the State. Both forms possess a pseudo- or almost natural character; that is, they appear as identified with the reproduction of the life itself of society and of its members, and in most cases they are perceived as such. Most individuals cannot even imagine a reproduction of their life and of society other than the one provided by these two fundamental forms of organization, in spite of the fact that they are historical forms, and it is only by accepting that we are before the “end of history” that we can consider them as insurmountable. It is obvious that, along with the socio-economic and legal-political forms, the social ties and identities of the individuals are also mediated and organized under specific cultural and psychodynamic forms that evolve and transform with the contradictory and crisis-ridden dynamic of the systemitself. In the constitution and consolidation stage of this social formation in the liberal capitalism of competitiveness, these forms become fundamentally crystallized around the objective illusions of the sphere of circulation and the theoretical constructions that accompany them in the bourgeois philosophical, aesthetic, and political thinking (autonomy, freedom, equality, contract, justice, citizenship…). However, as the promises fuelled by these illusions turn into a disappointment for the vast majority, other cultural and psychodynamic forms become more relevant in the constraint of individuals and in their identification with the capitalist organization of social reproduction, such as nationalism, racism, antisemitism, social Darwinism, authoritarianism, the entrepreneurialization of life, etc., forms that—at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, with the collapse or quasi-complete recruitment of precapitalist popular cultures and bourgeois culture—are subjected to the general framework of the cultural industry. All these forms constitute the structural and symbolic weave of capitalist societies in that they develop the processes of subjectivation subjectification. In any case, the very process of constituting individuals as social beings cannot be separated from the assumption of the need for their lives to be reproduced by means of and through the reproduction of these social forms; forms which have, in some ways, been autonomized from them and on which they depend, but with which they are mostly identified.

Certainly, none of the mentioned forms has been or is free of conflict, crisis, commotion, etc., neither of internal contradictions nor mutual antagonism. Likewise, the identification of individuals with these forms is never completely free of fissures, even more so when their coercive mediation has painful effects on them. However, to this day, they have been able to resist all their crises, even if none of these forms of subjectification and of the organization of social life have worked and work without demanding sacrifices. This becomes more obvious at times of crisis. Nonetheless, their “ordinary” operation also permanently causes suffering, alienation, exploitation, violence, exclusion, etc., which are unevenly distributed. The interplay between the forms of violence we could call structural—that is, those that emanate from the operation of the legal, institutional, and symbolic crystallizations of the systemic coercions—and the forms of explicit violence perpetrated by the military, the police, or criminal activities, has been uniquely successful in capitalism. Its history is not only one of democratic institutions and civil and political liberties, but also of authoritarian states and dictatorships, processes of colonization and the violence of war. Only with an immense dose of cynicism could we ignore the pyramids of sacrifice that have marked the global history of the Capital, State and Nation forms for centuries.

Focusing on the present, there is no doubt that the multiple crisis (economic, of reproduction/care, ecological, and political) that became visible during the 2008 crash has constituted one of the most forceful “stress tests” for the reproduction of these three forms of the organization of social life that are characteristic of capitalist social formations. The global reaction has obeyed one fundamental priority: to fortify these forms as a way of preventing the collapse. However, the tackling of this multiple crisis through the preservation of these forms has not only increased its coercive character and the sacrifices demanded; the reproduction of the Capital, State and Nation forms under the new conditions that resulted from the crisis has not been able to eliminate the threat of economic, state, or national collapse either. On the contrary, their capacity to ensure the reproduction of life in conditions of dignity, equality, and sustainability, which had never applied to the immense majority of individuals or to nature to begin with, is currently reduced in a radical and accelerated way. The destruction of the environment and the growth of the contingent of “excess” humanity are the most impactful effects of this combination of the depletion of the forms of Capital, State, and Nation and their reinforcement at all costs.

The structural dynamics, their contradictions, and their propensity to crisis currently pose immensely significant questions. Even if we cannot assert with utter certainty that there is an internal and impassable limit to the process of capitalist accumulation, as Wallerstein (2010) and Kurz (2012) point out, we must at least admit that there will be no lasting stabilization and that we will most probably face shorter or longer periods of recession—and perhaps of slight recoveries—without knowing for sure if these cycles are nothing more than a waiting period on our way to ecologicalcollapse. In any case, the third industrial revolution does not seem capable of creating the “virtuous” economic cycles of Fordism. Maintaining the profit rates or avoiding their decrease leaves less and less margin for the financing of the reproduction of the life of those who are deemed “superfluous” by the valorization of capital. The expansive imperialism that incorporated territories and peoples to the process of capitalist valorization has given way to an imperialism of exclusion, whereby an increasing mass of individuals and territories have become useless or expendable for valorization, without this being translated into any type of liberation for them. Furthermore, the forms of “recognition” of nationalsubjects of law—which accompanied the post-war capitalist expansion in the centres of the capitalist system as a model of abundance—are being progressively dismantled as the public debt that has sustained them for the past four decades becomes more and more unsustainable in the long term. The upkeeping of accumulation demands today forms of expropriation and plunder that unleash massive movements of flight and displacement. The unjustified rejections at the borders, as well as the fortification of the latter, follow an objective rationale in the same crisis of civilization that highlights the increasing impossibility of universalizing an alleged wellbeing that is mediated by the valorization of capital.

Systemic crises of such magnitude have always been associated by traditional Marxist movements of emancipationto the perspective of the collapse of capitalism and/or its overcoming through revolution. What is surprising in today’s crisis is that, to most individuals who suffer personally from this crisis, the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism has become an unimaginable reality. There is certainly no lack of forms of protest and demand, of rage and rejection, be they local and temporary or more lasting through time. However, in most cases these forms do not point towards the overcoming of the Capital, State, or Nation forms. They either demand the impossible return of an allegedly more “human” capitalism which is generally identified with the “golden decades” of the Keynesian period, as the heirs to the integrated post-war forms of the left demand; or they call for the restriction of the protective state to a national “we” as a way of guaranteeing the undivided enjoyment of benefits that are becoming more and more exclusive; or try to ensure private enclaves of privilege and wellbeing through strategies of isolation and subtraction in the increasingly debilitated structures of redistribution and solidarity; or demand the authoritarian and despotic control of the chaos—such is the case of one part of the wageworkers who perceive themselves as the middle class—in the hope of shifting the most devastating effects of the crisis to those who have been rendered more vulnerable (the immigrants and the marginalized, the impoverished populations forced into precariousness in the metropolises or the so-called periphery countries of the world, etc.). It is difficult to find significant practices and movements that aim at abolishing wage labour and the state. I believe this is the framework that allows for the appreciation of the contribution made by John Holloway.