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V "The economic implications of protracted stagnation, and the possible systemic responses to it at the macroeconomic level, are matters I shall not enter into here. I shall, however, end by drawing attention to an obvious political implication, one that relates to the threat to democracy that this protracted stagnation poses, of particular significance in the case of my own country, India. The general incompatibility between capitalism and democracy is too obvious to need repetition here: capitalism is a spontaneous system driven by its own immanent tendencies, while the essence of democracy lies in people intervening through collective political praxis to shape their destinies, including especially their economic destinies, which militates against this spontaneity. The fate of Keynesianism, which thought that capitalism could be made to operate at close to full employment, and thereby be made into a humane system through state intervention in demand management, shows the impossibility of the project of retaining capitalism while overcoming its spontaneity. This conflict becomes particularly acute in the era of globalization, when finance capital becomes globalized, while the state, which remains the only possible instrument through which the people could intervene on their own behalf, remains a nation-state. Here, as already mentioned, the state accedes to the demands of finance capital, so that no matter whom the people elect, the same policies remain in place, as long as the country remains within the vortex of globalized finance. Greece is only the latest example to underscore this point. But once we reckon with the tendency of the system in the era of globalization to fall into a protracted crisis, this incompatibility becomes even more serious. In the context of crisis-induced mass unemployment, the corporate-financial oligarchies that rule many countries actively promote divisive, fascist, and semi-fascist movements, so that while the shell of democracy is preserved, their own rule is not threatened by any concerted class action. And the governments formed by such elements, even when they do not move immediately towards the imposition of a fascist state as in the case of classical fascism, move nonetheless towards a “fascification” of the society and the polity that constitutes a negation of democracy. In third-world societies such fascification not only continues but even increases the scope for “primitive accumulation of capital” at the expense of petty producers (which also ensures that the world labor reserves are not exhausted). But that is not all. Since such fascism invites retaliation in the form of counter-fascistic movements, as in the case of Hindu supremacism in India, which is starting to encourage a Muslim fundamentalist response, the net result is social disintegration. This disintegration is the denouement of the current globalization in societies like mine, and no doubt in many others. It is important, of course, to struggle against this, but at the current juncture, when there are no international workers’ movements, let alone any international peasant movements, and hence no prospects for any synchronized transcendence of capitalist globalization, any such struggles must necessarily be informed by an agenda of “delinking” from capitalist globalization. This delinking should entail capital controls, management of foreign trade, and an expansion of the domestic market through the protection and encouragement of petty production, including peasant agriculture; through larger welfare expenditure by the state; and through a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and income." http://monthlyreview.org/2016/01/01/capitalism-and-its-current-crisis/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
