To Change the System, We Must Know the System!

Charles and Karen McFadden, Spring 2019 issue of The Green Social Democrat

The popular demand for “System Change, Not Climate Change!” concisely encapsulates the existential crisis humanity now faces and the necessary approach to its solution.

We cannot, however, respond in any manner we might like. The system in this case is both the social system through which we make our living within nature and the earth system in which rapid climate change is now occurring.

If the continuation of contemporary capitalism has as an inevitable consequence the destruction of the conditions necessary for humanity’s further existence, then a kinder, gentler capitalism is not an adequate response. Likewise, if the current level of carbon gas pollution of the atmosphere is known to produce conditions incompatible with further human existence on Earth, then the continued mining, processing and use of carbon fuels can have no significant part in our future.

In a word, if our actions in response to the threat of climate disaster are to have positive effect, they need to be consistent with the best knowledge we can obtain from the social and natural sciences.

The purpose of this issue of The Green Social Democrat is to recommend two social scientists and their most recent work. For those committed to bringing social science to bear on their political work, Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (2018, Haymarket Books) by sociologist William I. Robinson can serve well as a principal source. We represent that work below. For those mathematically inclined, we recommend that Marx 200: A Review of Marx’s Economics 200 Years After His Birth (2018, published and printed by Lulu.com) by political economist Michael Roberts be read together with Robinson’s work.

While in recent years we have drawn heavily on earlier more comprehensive works written by these same authors, we recommend to a general audience these two recent works. In these, they each present updated versions of their principal arguments clearly and succinctly while including essential empirical evidence for their conclusions.

While both inform us about contemporary capitalism, Robinson focusses on the latest adaptation made by the capitalist class to the circumstances of its own making, in the process revealing the depth of the present crisis within capitalism, one that is fatal for the system, and would likewise be fatal for humanity if we were to remain within this system. Roberts, on the other hand, summarizes and applies the three laws of capitalism discovered by Karl Marx, empirically confirming that Marx’s three laws, taken together, enable us to both explain the pattern of its periodic crises across its 500-year history and to predict the next one.

Science by itself, of course, does not resolve political problems. Robinson and Roberts are professional social scientists; their work informs political action. The Green Social Democrat, and our evolving programmatic work, available on www.greensocialdemocracy.org, are dedicated to identifying a political path to resolving the societal problems revealed by social and natural science, namely the existential crisis that wealth and income inequality and environmental degradation have in combination produced for humanity.

Here, we introduce Robinson’s latest work by selecting representative excerpts from it, beginning with his guide to globalization and concluding with his views on an alternative direction for humanity. We hope this will entice many of our readers to become acquainted with the work which we briefly excerpt below. Some of our readers, we hope, will also read Roberts’ presentation of Marx’s three laws. We need a new generation of political economists dedicated to humanity’s escape from capitalism, not our increasing enslavement and ultimate destruction by it.

William I. Robinson’s Essays on the New Global Capitalism

Robinson intends that each of the ten essays included in this collection be sufficiently self-contained that a reader could approach them selectively and in any order. Nevertheless, these essays are well-articulated, and taken together constitute a reasonably coherent whole, but with repetition of some of Robinson’s core arguments. We believe most readers will find this repetition more helpful than distracting.

In his foreword, Walden Bello provides the best argument for reading this work: “This is an indispensable guide to globalization and the resistance to it by an indispensable thinker.” In our view, these essays provide an appropriate framework for contending with capitalism in its contemporary transnational form.

Globalization. In the first essay, on globalization, Robinson presents, as a guide, nine contours of the process of globalization, which we introduce here either by briefly quoting Robinson (in italics) or paraphrasing him:

•  First, he defines the essence of globalization as “the replacement for the first time in the history of the modern world capitalist system of all residual pre (or non) capitalist production relations with capitalist ones in every part of the globe.”
• Second, globalization is the restructuring of capitalism from its nation-state form to a transnational form, with corresponding governing practices and institutions. These take as their economic form, hyperliberalism, meaning the removal of capitalism from constraints on its exploitation of labour and nature, and as their cultural/ideological form, consumerism and cutthroat individualism.
• “Third, this transnational agenda has germinated in every country of the world under the guidance of hegemonic transnational fractions of national bourgeoisies.”
• “Fourth … the old nation-state phase of capitalism has been superseded by the transnational phase of capitalism.”
• “Fifth, the ‘brave new world’ of global capitalism is profoundly anti-democratic.”
• “Sixth, ‘poverty amidst plenty,’ the dramatic growth under globalization of socioeconomic inequalities and of human misery in nearly every country and region of the world, is a consequence of the unbridled operation of transnational capitalism.”
• “Seventh, this escalating global poverty and inequality have deep and interwoven racial, ethnic, and gender dimensions.”
• “Eighth, deep contradictions in emergent world society make entirely uncertain the very survival of our species, …, and portend prolonged global conflict. … As the worldwide ruling class, the transnational bourgeoisie has thrust humanity into a crisis of civilization. … The incompatibility of the reproduction of both capital and of nature is leading to an ecological holocaust that threatens the survival of our species and of life itself on our planet.”
• “Ninth, stated in highly simplified terms, much of the left world-wide is split between two camps. … One group is so overwhelmed by the power of global capitalism that it does not see any alternative to participation through trying to negotiate the best deal possible. … The other views global capitalism and its costs – including its very tendency toward the destruction of our species – as unacceptably high, so much that it must be resisted and rejected. However, it has not worked out a coherent socialist alternative to the transnational phase of capitalism.” (Emphasis in the original.)

• In contrast to the prior historical role of US imperialism, Robinson (p.115) writes: “We see, not a re-enactment of this old imperialism, but rather the colonization and recolonization of the vanquished for the new global capitalism and its agents. The underlying class relation between the transnational capitalist class and the US national state should be understood in these terms. The US state houses the ministry of war in a much-divided global elite cabinet.”
• "Imperialism is not about nations but about groups exercising their social power – through institutions – to control the worldwide production of wealth (value), to appropriate surpluses, and to reproduce these arrangements. … During the more than 500 years since the genesis of the world capitalist system, colonialism and imperialism coercively incorporated zones and peoples into its fold. This historical process of ‘primitive accumulation’ is coming to a close.” (p.120)
• “The end of the extensive enlargement of capitalism is the end of the imperialist era of world capitalism. … The implacable logic of accumulation is now internal to worldwide social relations and the complex of fractious political institutions through which ruling groups try to manage those relations.” (p.120)

• “The story of immigrant labor in the twenty-first century is … absolutely central to that of the new global capitalism and also to the struggles of the global working class for justice and emancipation.” (p.124)
• “Immigrant workers are globally mobile, but under conditions of extreme repressive control over their movement and over their very existence. Borders and the international state system are essential for capitalist domination over workers and the creation and reproduction of a global reserve army of immigrant workers.” (p.127)
• “State controls over immigrant labor are intended not to prevent but to control the transnational movement of labor and to lock that labor into a situation of permanent insecurity and vulnerability. The creation of these direct categories (‘immigrant labor’) replaces earlier direct colonial and racial caste controls over labor worldwide.” (p.30)
• The alternative? “… the whole notion of national citizenship needs to be questioned.” “We must consider citizenship rights as universal human rights for all people who for whatever reason happen to reside in a particular territory. We must replace the whole concept of national citizenship with that of global citizenship. This is a truly revolutionary rallying cry. And it is the only one that can assure justice and equality for all.” (p.141) 

• “The hidden curriculum of ideological hegemony, socialization into hierarchy, and conformity and the suppression of critical thinking play a heightened role in global capitalism” (p.158)
• “A critical part of the construction of any counterhegemonic project will take place in schools and university campuses around the world. … There is a need to infuse student struggles and worker uprisings with radical global political economy theory and analysis that can contribute to the practices of global social justice and emancipatory struggles.” (p.162)