Abstract
For this fifty-fifth volume of the Socialist Register, founded in 1964 to provide ‘an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left’, editors Leo Panitch and Greg Albo bring together twenty-one analysts of a world turned topsy-turvy by the global economic crisis of 2008. 1 The sixteen pieces examine the trajectory of global capitalism since the ‘fourth great global crisis’ and consider whether we are ‘witnessing the emergence of a new form of exceptional state as an authoritarian mutation of liberal democracy, entailing the closure of democratic political space’. This ambitious attempt to provide a kind of road map for disorganised left political forces in an uncertain world, not surprisingly, is somewhat difficult to sustain throughout the collection, with the many contributions varying in style, quality and persuasiveness.
Of the sixteen essays, four focus solely on the US and Trump, a further four look at Brazil-Russia-Indian-China-South Africa (BRICS countries), two look at globalisation from the vantage point of Europe and Brexit Britain, while the remaining six take a more eclectic approach. But all are geared towards understanding the economic drivers of global turbulence: neoliberalism and financialisation; global and regional shifts in manufacturing production; resource wars for dwindling stocks of oil, natural gas, metals, minerals, water and land; and the growing contradictions within the global market as Russia and China demand a greater role in rule-making. 2
Despite their different takes, contributors seem to agree that the ‘fourth great global crisis of capitalism’ has been generated by neoliberalism and financialisation, with Panitch and Gindin in ‘Trumping the Empire’ arguing that the interpenetrations in production created by integrated global markets formed the basis for the election of Trump, with his ‘Make American Great’ signalling the ‘long accumulated frustrations with global and regional shifts in manufacturing production’. Probably the clearest explanation of how financialisation works is provided by Marco Boffo, Alfredo Saad-Filho and Ben Fine in ‘Neoliberal capitalism: the authoritarian turn’. In explaining how neoliberalism creates a new set of rules within a different regime of accumulation and a different kind of society, they locate financialisation as the salient feature of neoliberalism which ‘encapsulates the increasing role of (globalized) finance in ever more areas of economic and social life’, with financialisation providing the underpinnings of a ‘neoliberal system of accumulation, articulated through the power of the state to impose, drive, underwrite and manage the internationalization of production and finance in each territory’.
By and large, the collection does not systematically analyse nationalism and protectionism in the neoliberal project, though there are exceptions, such as Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘Extreme capitalism and the national question’, which considers Hindutva nationalism in India, Erdogan’s attempts to redefine Turkish nationalism in Islamist terms, and European fascism. Despite nods to the importance of transnational capital, and the structural changes it has wrought to the production process, the essayists all tend to follow Panitch and Gindin’s assertion that the ‘making of global capitalism’ does not ‘bypass states’, but rather depends on ‘states facilitating and codifying globalizing capitalism’ as well as cooperating with its international management. The role that states play in combined and uneven development is foregrounded. Though contributors continue to use terms such as core and periphery they differ as to the nature of that relationship today, in particular the centrality of US imperialism (or just imperialism per se) in determining relations. Panitch and Gindin suggest that while the US and the ‘informal American empire’ still stands at the centre of world capitalism, the attempt to integrate the (re-constituted) capitalist states of China and Russia into world capitalism makes it nonsensical to talk of imperial rivalries. Lin Chun discusses whether it is legitimate to charge China with neo- or sub-imperialism, while Ana Garcia and Patrick Bond assert that a ‘resurgent imperialism is being facilitated by the politics of the (BRICS) network’, even suggesting the BRICS ‘sub-imperialism’ in Africa and Latin America could ‘in many cases, be characterized as even more exploitative than traditional Western multinational corporations’. On the other hand, the creation of a transnational migrant class is acknowledged by many contributors, with Adam Hanieh describing it, in a particularly insightful essay, as a ‘mobile army of international labour that originates in the displacement generated by capitalism’s unevenness, and whose peripatetic wanderings feed capital accumulation across the world’.
The contributors constantly shift the geographical focus from the US and Europe, to China, India and Brazil, the ‘emerging markets’ of what used to be the ‘politically transformative agent of the Third World’. Being ‘clear-eyed’, as Sean Kenji Starrs puts it, about what’s really going on in Xi Jinping’s China is a key concern for many contributors who discuss the ways in which China has emerged as the ‘export assembly hub of the world’, replenishing the global capitalist system through its provision of a vast workforce and spaces for exploitation. In an excoriating critique of the Chinese Communist Party for betraying socialist internationalism and joining a ‘unipolar world’, Lin Chun, who notes China’s immense economic achievements, warns that it is ‘fuelling global capitalism with its enormous workforce and vast market for capitalist expansion and financialization’. She characterises China as a ‘capitalist growth centre providing capitalism and its global division of labour with a vast new space of exploitation and reconfiguration’. Nevertheless, she and Sean Kenji Starrs warn that China’s continued rise is not sustainable, as its economic model is based on debt-fuelled investment driven growth, its export boom not only dependent on integrating into global capitalism but driven by foreign capital in key respects. In an (ideological) aside, both Lin Chun and Sean Kenji Starrs discuss the attempts of the Chinese Communist Party, including its incorporation of a Confucian perspective of ‘moral leadership’, to fashion a nationalism to regain the position it had lost with the penetration of western imperialism.
The Chinese workforce in China and transnationally is one of the many issues discussed by Adam Hanieh in his multifaceted essay ‘The contradictions of global migration’, connecting migration with levels of capitalist production worldwide. His understanding of illegality as an artificially created category and his analysis of the creation of a transnational migrant class is highly original and with practical implications for struggle – particularly needed now over freedom of movement. In the UK, Brexit is now framed so that Leavers are represented as anti-immigrant and racist, while Remainers are depicted as pro-immigration and anti-racist. The debate over freedom of movement has been hijacked, and not just by the likes of Nigel Farage, but also by neoliberal politicians, such as Tony Blair and Chuka Umunna, a Labour defector first to the recently formed Change UK – the Independent Party and then to the Liberal Democrats. Neoliberals like Blair and Umunna support freedom of movement, not out of xenophilia, but because freedom of movement is central to neoliberal capital accumulation. Hanieh may not deal with this directly, but his understanding of how the internationalised world market works illuminates it. Explaining how transnational corporations operate across a variety of different national spaces and often cluster their ‘command and control’ functions in regional markets, he shows how migration needs to be placed right at the centre of the debate on globalisation, as migration is not a ‘contingent epiphenomenon of the world economy’, but an ‘internal feature of how capitalism actually functions at the global scale – a movement of people that is relentlessly generated by the movement of capital, and which, in turn, is constitutive of the concrete forms of capitalism itself’. Hanieh, with his plea that we both ‘expand our conceptualisation of class away from container-like views on a national scale’ while embracing an ‘international’ approach that ‘links conditions at home to those existing overseas’, also makes a number of essential points about class formation. For in today’s world class comes into being through the interlinking of geographical spaces and is continually forged through the flows (and displacement) of human beings across borders. Migration is a process of class formation, a means by which capitalist states create themselves.
For Hanieh’s essay alone, with its plea to activists to move beyond moral outrage over anti-immigration arguments and sharpen our practice on migrant and labour rights, this volume of the Socialist Register is well worth reading.