Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: A critical-realist look at contemporary capitalism: goodbye to wishful thinking We stand at a peculiar historical junction.The neoliberal form of capitalism -the combination between free and open markets that has been the dominant formula of the political economy for the past four decades 1 -has come under pressure, as it has been blamed for skyrocketing inequalities, financial instability, deepened exploitation, and environmental degradation.This is creating the opening for an emancipatory transformation.However, three facilitating factors for radical change are missing -a systemic crisis, the likelihood of a revolutionary upheaval, and a motivating utopia. 2 First, there is no systemic crisis of capitalism, apart from the periodic crises that are endemic to it -capitalism is surely not on its death bed, as the economic dynamic of profit-creation is doing fine.3 Rather than a terminal crisis of capitalism, we find ourselves in a condition of societal meta-crisis: the crisis has entered a crisis of its own, it has looped itself into 1 The neoliberal policy doctrine that permeated the political mainstream of western societies in the late 1970s combined laissez-faire in domestic economic policy (i.e., via privatization of public assets and de-regulation of product-and labour markets) with opening of domestic markets to global economic competition via free trade as the foreign economic policy component of the shift.Notwithstanding diverse national variations in its implementation, this doctrine has provided the impetus for tearing down the post-war welfare state and the construction of globally integrated capitalism, operating on the principle of free markets. These reflections draw on my book Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). See also Azmanova (2022) and Allen et al. (2023).3 For a discussion of opposing views on the 'terminal crisis of capitalism' see Janzen (2022).I subscribe to the position that cyclical crises are part of the restorative dynamic of capitalism.For a good exposition of this view, see Agnoletto (2013).
Source: Emancipations
Author: Albena Azmanova
Institution: City, University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409995309