REVIEW SYMPOSIUM | Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (original) (raw)

“Capitalism Under Scrutiny: from Concept to Critique”

Capitalism on Edge (Columbia University Press), 2020

• This Chapter of Capitalism on Edge develops the first comprehensive methodology for critical social theory; • it articulates a three-dimensional model of domination and attendant notions of emancipatory practice and radical politics; • offers a theory of the internal transformation of capitalism, later applied in an account of the historical forms of capitalism from the 19th-century liberal form to our contemporary post-neoliberal, 'precarity capitalism'.

Contemporary capitalism, uneven development, and the arc of anti-capitalism

Global Discourse, 2018

Uneven and combined development remains crucial for understanding the continued widening and deepening of capitalism. However, the nature of the heterogeneous and uneven development of contemporary capitalism, especially since the 1970s, makes problematic the characterization of capitalist totality, as a coherent stage and as a singular, albeit uneven, combination. This complicates the successful pursuit of anti-capitalism, which now requires varied but interrelated responses at all scales and involving a range of approaches, from local community activism and non-capitalist alternatives to mass Leninist-inspired parties, and an international socialist movement. Thus, a far more uneven anti-capitalism is appropriate; and a single, overarching anti-capitalist process, such as Permanent Revolution may not be the only or way forward. This is not an argument for a post-Marxist horizontal heterogeneity; but rather an exploration of the reasons and possibilities for a dialectical anti-capitalism, where beneficial encounters occur across the arc of anti-capitalism, within which proletariat mobilization remains a central component. Such confluence offers one starting point for contending with the perennial duality of reform and revolution, manifest today in the either/or of an anti-capitalism of total revolution and an agonistic, fractional post-Marxist politics working to reduce oppression and hardship within capitalism.

A Democratic Critique of Precarity

The term ‘precarity’ has become increasingly popular as a way to capture the material and psychological vulnerability resulting from neoliberal economic reforms. This article demonstrates that such precarity is incompatible with democracy. More specifically, it makes two arguments. First, and inspired by Montesquieu’s analysis of ‘the principles’, or public commitments behind different forms of government, it argues that modern democracy is a sui generis form of government animated and sustained by a principle of shared responsibility. Second, it shows that this principle is negated by the neoliberal form of governing. The neoliberal policies currently operating in many democratic countries not only push ever more people into precarious conditions where they have to compete against each other for security and status; by displacing onto individuals a responsibility that ought to be shared and divided between citizens, they corrupt the core of democracy itself. The article thus suggests that precarity is problematic not only from the standpoint of social justice, as emphasized in earlier research, but also from the perspective of democracy. Precarity contradicts the ways of life that must be regenerated in order for a democratic form of government to sustain itself over time. Keywords: neoliberalism; precarity; precariat; democracy; responsibility; Arendt; Montesquieu.

Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies

In June 2015, we launched the call for articles for this special issue in an attempt to catalyze the rising awareness, both within the critically oriented and the broader organization studies community , that we are today witnessing epochal changes, which are fundamentally redefining the social, economic, political, and environmental realities we live in in unforeseen and unimaginable ways. For many of us, the financial crisis of 2008 had crystallized the notion that capitalism in its very nature is in continuous crisis, as shown by four decades of persistent decline in economic growth rate and rise in overall indebtedness and economic inequality (Streeck, 2014, 2016). Yet the political debacle of party politics in the United Kingdom and the United States together with the rampant populism in various European countries have highlighted that this is not just another installment of a crisis-prone economic system. These 'electoral mutinies' suggest that what is under crisis is the governance system of neoliberalism itself (Fraser, 2017). The responses to this crisis have been proved severely wanting, leading to the weakening of all social and political institutions that offer a semblance of protection to the vulnerable (Wahl, 2017).

Two Inseparable Features of Today's Capitalism: Authoritarianism and Precarity

Neoliberal economic policies which began to prevail from 1970s and 80s onwards comprise on the one hand deregulation of economic activities, privatisation of public institutions, liberalisation of foreign trade; and on the other hand an overall assault on the labour and its gains along with social spending cuts, subcontracted labour and undermining of trade unions. These policies, together with the internationalisation of production, have led to the spread of precarious work. This precarious work has coexisted with authoritarianism, which has functioned as a critical tool to sustain precariousness. Transition to neoliberalism and continuation of it has required authoritarian government practices. This paper intends to reveal precariousness and authoritarianism as the inseparable features of today’s capitalism. But are precarity and authoritarianism unique to neoliberal period? This paper also aims to discuss whether authoritarianism and precariousness are peculiar to today’s capitalism or they are inherent tendencies (or even one of the laws) of capitalism. Since we have enough historical evidence that capitalism is not correlated with democracy (or even bourgeois democracy), it is worth to discuss, in the light of the findings about the relationship between authoritarianism and precarity, that whether authoritarianism or bourgeois democracy is an exception in the course of capitalism.