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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/
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