Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
The triadic present
The scale of Therborn’s intellectual achievement, in synthesizing these contemporary trends and situating them within an original, globe-spanning narrative, is remarkable. And his political prescriptions are useful, as far as they go. But the first step in evaluating this global snapshot is to consider its foundational assertion that Marxian dialectics have been surpassed. ‘The World and the Left’ describes the dialectic as ‘an endogenous process’ marked by constitutive contradiction, ‘deriving from the developmental logic of the social system’—the primary example being capital and labour, whose collision appears to demand a new historical synthesis.footnote41 Yet a different characterization can be found in Science, Class and Society, where Therborn writes that
The opposition and struggle of classes . . . does not in itself point to the necessity of a solution, to a transformation of the system of classes or to their abolition. Indeed, as a matter of fact Capital does not speak of contradictions between classes, but of contradictions within the structure and processes of the capitalist mode of production, which develop in the course of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and which determine the mode of existence of their antagonism and the relations of strength between them.footnote42
For the young Therborn, the only genuine ‘systemic contradiction’ adhered to the mode of production: its forces and relations. This was the determinant dialectical opposition—the engine of history and futurity. It could intensify or attenuate a highly contingent realm of class struggle; but class struggle, in itself, did not ‘point to the necessity of a solution’, nor was its dynamic inherently contradictory, given the potential for particular material or ideological conjunctures to prevent mass challenges to capital. As a result, the contraction and fragmentation of the twentieth-century proletariat would, by Therborn’s earlier criteria, have little bearing on the question of dialectics as such. It would rather be downstream from more fundamental processes in the structure of accumulation. The halting of labour’s ‘forward march’ may have neutralized the conflict between socialized forces and capitalist relations, but this hardly precludes the existence of new primary contradictions.
With this in mind, we might look again at Therborn’s triad of contemporary politics: ecology, geopolitics, inequality. Can any of these be said to have a dialectical structure? It is worth recalling, initially, that the term ‘productive forces’ applies not only to the given stage of technological development, but also to the technical organization of production—its coordination in the slave plantation, the factory system, the digital economy and so on. Accordingly, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rise of fossil capital and the recoil of climate breakdown constitutes a dialectic in the strictest sense. The capitalist imperative of self-sustaining growth could only be fulfilled, from the second quarter of the nineteenth century onward, through the switch to coal power as the energetic basis of production, since it was more amenable than air or water to private sequestration. Fossil fuel subsequently became what Andreas Malm calls ‘a necessary material substratum for the production of surplus value’, creating a novel paradigm in which ‘the exploitation of labour by capital is impelled by the consumption of this particular accessory’.footnote43 The transition to oil preserved this function, enabling productivity breakthroughs and cheaper manufacturing which underpinned the post-war expansionary cycle. Now, carbon-intensive commodity production is mostly delegated to the East and financed by the West—whose belated attempts at ‘green onshoring’ have had minimal impact, and have been offset by increases in environmentally ruinous military spending.footnote44 Extreme weather events show that this fossil regime is already facing the revenge of its structural antithesis: a natural world which, as it breaks down, threatens the conditions for accumulation by leaving stranded assets, depleting demand, rupturing supply chains and destroying vital infrastructure. The transgression of planetary boundaries elicits their reassertion. The system’s ‘developmental logic’ subverts itself.footnote45
Although Therborn treats them separately, this dialectic of climate crisis is bound up with the dynamic of geopolitics. The two are inextricable and co-constitutive. For it was partly us state investment in petrochemical innovation during wwii that allowed the country to exercise control over the inter-state system in its wake. Adam Hanieh writes of a ‘mutually reinforcing relationship between the rise of American hegemony, the shift to an oil-centred global energy regime and the revolution in commodity production inaugurated by petrochemicals.’footnote46 America’s status as the source of world liquidity—its role as the organizing centre of global production, and its attendant seignorial privileges—were rooted in its petroleum feedstock. When this hegemony was imperilled by increasing industrial competition with Germany and Japan—which, along with heightened labour militancy and global monetary disorder, began to exert downward pressure on American manufacturing profits in the 1970s—the us policy response represented another turning point in the history of fossil capital: one which strengthened both the imperial matrix and its energetic foundations. By hiking interest rates, raising the value of the dollar and incentivizing speculation, the us under Reagan orchestrated something close to an industrial ‘shakeout’, in which firms were forced to reroute investment from fixed capital into financial channels. This shift was instrumental to winning the Cold War, as America’s self-reinvention as the primary debtor nation granted access to vast capital flows that allowed it to outpace the ussr in the arms race.footnote47 At the same time, though, it precipitated China’s remaking as ‘the chimney of the world’, with mobile capital flooding into its growing export economy. To secure an energy supply for these industries, and meet Western demand for their output, the prc deregulated its domestic coal market while ramping up fossil fuel imports in the 1990s.footnote48 Global emissions rocketed from 25 to 33 billion annual metric tonnes of co2 over the first decade of the new century. By 2020, China’s annual share of worldwide discharges had risen to 31 per cent.footnote49
Climate crisis is therefore entangled with another, equally dialectical process: Great Power conflict. In the twentieth century, the oil-based development of the productive forces entrenched asymmetrical productive relations in which America reigned supreme. Yet this led to the problems of industrial overcapacity and falling profit rates described by Robert Brenner, necessitating a volte-face in imperial strategy: from encouraging domestic manufacturing to uprooting it abroad. That outsourcing operation created the conditions for a new coal-fired superpower in the East. China’s high-speed growth subsequently enabled its emergence as a nonconforming actor in the international system—expanding its influence by forging Third World trade partnerships, investing in strategic sectors and increasingly prioritizing its internal market. The us, still suffering from persistent stagnation and sapped state capacity, has come to view this as an impingement on its sovereign authority, and responded with an aggressive programme of economic containment and military encirclement. The head of the us Air Mobility Command now predicts the two countries will be at war by 2025.footnote50 How else to describe this historical trajectory, other than an endogenous dialectic in which forces of fossil-backed production enter into contradiction with relations of American domination?
Inequality—Therborn’s third category—might not have the same dialectical structure, since it is not a historical inevitability that oppressed populations will rise up against their rulers. But given the effects of environmental collapse and geopolitical tension, there is every reason to believe that wealth disparities could produce forms of class antagonism that are just as sharp and binary as those of the last century. Inadequate climate adaptation measures will leave more people vulnerable to failing ecosystems, blurring class distinctions between the lower strata. Attempts to minimize the fallout through welfare policies will be compromised by inflated arms budgets and sluggish growth rates. Elites and their state relays will resort to further ‘politically driven upward redistribution’ to maintain their position amid the ensuing instability.footnote51 In this context, we might get what Gopal Balakrishnan terms ‘Pikettyian’ class struggle—‘in the simplified, more abstract, and classical form of rich versus poor’.footnote52 Here the primary social cleavage will be fiscal. When Therborn writes, somewhat obscurely, that class in the twenty-first-century is not a ‘structural category’ but a ‘compass of orientation’,footnote53 perhaps this is what he means: not a fixed position in the system of production, but a location on one side of the division between those with the resources to insulate themselves from crisis and those without them. Mutatis mutandis, the polarization of society into these rival blocs would resolve Therborn’s uncertainty about whether the consumptionist middle class or the atomized working class will lead the movement for liberation—as the line between the two might be erased, politically if not materially.
Rise of the right
If, on this basis, we can posit the existence of new dialectical currents with the potential to ignite class struggle, then Marxism may not be as obsolete as Therborn assumes. Still, there are determinate reasons why it seems to have lost much of its political relevance since the apex of the labour movement. These are related to the transformation of historical dialectics that occurred with the deindustrialization of the Global North. Before this process took hold, the socialization of production meant that Marxism, and the movements that grew out of it, could root themselves in an inherent trend in the process of capitalist development. Their aims involved unfettering this trend from private property relations—unleashing progress by allowing one side of the dialectic to win out over the other. This enabled the intuitive adoption of a futurist disposition. Yet that outlook has since been shattered by the ‘neoliberal interlude’ and replaced by the grand dialectics of climate and geopolitics: two structural trends with no progressive character. Here, the ‘oppositional’ forces (with the potential to destabilize present relations of production) are, respectively, the poisoning of the biosphere and the rise of China. The left can ally itself with neither. Its sense of futurity therefore cannot come from bringing to fruition an existing tendency within the system; for, rather than prefiguring emancipation, these binaries merely pit differently destructive forces against each other. They may still end up deepening class divisions over the coming decades. But in this new reality, no single class can occupy the proletariat’s erstwhile role as the bearer or embodiment of dialectical negation.
This marks the transition away from a hopeful dialectic towards a darker one. So far, socialists have struggled to respond to these shifting sands, whereas the nationalist right has rallied, becoming the main beneficiary of popular discontent with neoliberalism across greater Europe and North America. Therborn does not deal at length with this phenomenon. He attributes it to the ‘peripheralization of working-class heartlands’, their neglect by both the left and the centre, and the arrival of ‘skilful political entrepreneurs’ who have enflamed resentments against migration.footnote54 But this account, more descriptive than explanatory, fails to capture the underlying logic of the right’s ascent. A fuller analysis might begin, instead, with Therborn’s suggestion that liberalism has lost its modernist perspective. No longer invested in the fantasy of endless growth, unable to deliver social progress at home or abroad, it is reduced to superintending distributive conflicts in conditions of stagnation. It has replaced technocracy (policy fixes that promise perpetual improvement) with managerialism (easing social tensions in the absence of such fixes). This is a symptom of the broader ideological condition known as ‘presentism’: confinement to the horizon of the immediate.footnote55 The left, too, suffers from this affliction, since its rejection of capitalism is based on an affective revulsion rather than an alternate vision. The dialectics of the twenty-first century have deprived it of a spontaneous futurism. Which means that the right alone can claim a monopoly on opposition to the present—by retreating into the past.
This regressive movement is presented as a defensive response to insecurity and precarity: a position that resonates instinctively with workers seeking refuge from capital’s onslaught. An age of escalating crisis may further heighten its appeal. Yet it is important to note that hardline nationalism operates not by posing any real threat to the dominant liberal ideology, but by appropriating and repurposing its elements. The Third Way was, among other things, a means of enforcing market discipline on racialized communities, whose members were subjected to punitive forms of surveillance, monitoring, incarceration and deportation. Under this regime, interventionism abroad was complemented by authoritarian crackdowns at home, and national chauvinism was mobilized in the cause of selling one’s country to investors. As centrist parties have fallen out of favour, the ‘new rightists’—from Trump to Farage to Meloni—have leant into these trends while styling themselves as an alternative. Their performative invocations of the past allow them to affect dissent from the status quo, yet they also speak the common sense of the present: the values of Blair or Clinton, without the same sanctimony or hypocrisy. This Janus-faced nature allows the nationalist right to reap the benefits of liberal ideology—its persistently hegemonic status in public life—while also capitalizing on frustration with it. It dislodges the political centre by accelerating its project and borrowing its tropes.
Yet if such basic conformity with liberalism gives the right its strength, it is also a potential weakness. Once in power, nationalist politicians betray the continuities with their ‘globalist’ predecessors: identical fealty to corporate interests, disregard for rustbelt populations, subservience to American empire. Nostalgic paeans to the nuclear family and gestural attacks on migrants may not be enough to mask this resemblance in the long run—which creates an opportunity for the left to offer a genuinely counterhegemonic programme, rather than its simulacrum. It can only do so, however, if it outgrows the presentist constraints by which it is entrapped—the anti-futurist reformism famously advocated by T. J. Clark.footnote56 For what Therborn calls the ‘disaster-generating legacies’ of the twentieth century cannot be confronted by a socialism whose primary basis is immediatist and affective. Mere outrage, of the kind that propelled the progressive populism of the 2010s, is a flimsy foundation for transformative politics. It neither distinguishes the left from its adversaries (who are equally capable of marshalling indignation) nor equips it with a coherent plan for government. It thus leaves socialists facing the same crisis of credibility as centrists: hurtling towards a bleak future, without the necessary temporal orientation to change course.
Contra dialectics
The central question then becomes: can the global left regain its modernist momentum? Can it reconstitute itself as the sole representative of opposition to the present—outflanking the populist right? Writing in Jacobin, Alyssa Battistoni argues that radical politics in this century starts from the premise that current conjunctural trends have no long-term direction other than generalized devastation. ‘Told we’d reached the end of history, it turns out that we’ve actually arrived at the end of the future, or at least the one we knew.’ Once this is acknowledged, the association between optimism and utopianism breaks down, since the assumption that everything will be alright is precisely what beckons Armageddon. It is only ‘clear-eyed pessimism’, unflinching recognition of our predicament, that opens up a hopeful space beyond it.footnote57 An apocalyptic sensibility, then, is not incompatible with a utopian one. The former may even be the precondition for the latter—providing the necessary impetus to effect a terraformation. Therborn described this prospect some four decades ago in The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, when he wrote that ‘it is possible to mobilize the future against the present’: ‘In the really dramatic socio-political mobilizations . . . the future has predominantly taken the form of an imminent threat flowing from current tendencies, which has called for pre-emptive action in the present. We might term this process mobilization by anticipatory fear’.footnote58 This is surely the appropriate formula for our times. Contemporary dialectics may not have a progressive structural trend with which the left can ally itself. But they do have a tendency towards calamity which could, out of sheer terror, incite the imagination of alternative realities.
By organizing on this basis, the left would become the nemesis of dialectics. In the two-sided conflicts between capital accumulation and climate breakdown, America and China, it would be a third force: an exit-route from these various cycles of catastrophe. This is not an easy position to occupy. It was simpler for twentieth-century socialism to play its historic role, since it could rely on certain in-built tendencies of capitalist production. The absence of such tendencies today means that socialists are working against the forces of history rather than with them. This leaves their movement more susceptible to splintering, disorientation, despair; for how can it decide on a positive direction when its relation to the present is seemingly one of absolute negation? Perhaps these maladies can only be avoided if the new left coheres around its own history. Rather than ‘ignoring the bleak old era of their mothers and fathers’, its partisans could draw strength from the struggles of their predecessors. As the early Therborn writes, ‘it is possible to mobilize on the basis of the past, of what has existed, of past experiences, values, symbols . . . If such mobilization by revival is to be successful, it must be possible for the experiences and values of the past to enter into the order of the day’.footnote59
Mobilization by anticipatory fear and mobilization by revival. The first allows socialism to position itself outside the existing dialectical structure and criticize its trajectory. The second allows it to fall back on a distinct historical tradition that acts as a bulwark against dejection. Together, they create a link between past and future that transcends the present. For Enzo Traverso, the seeds of this temperament can already be seen in the twenty-first-century left. Though it appears to be a presentist creature, it is actually defined by an inability to forget its history—a persistent if largely unconscious melancholia following the collapse of communism, experienced as ‘both a finished experience and an irreplaceable loss’. This feeling of lack can have a stultifying effect, in that it inhibits the development of new political projects, ‘obstructing the separation from the lost beloved ideal as well as a libidinal transfer toward a new object of love’. But, at the same time, refusal to mourn the death of utopia keeps it alive—for ‘successful mourning could mean identification with the enemy: lost socialism replaced by accepted capitalism’.footnote60 The failure to develop new attachments prevents capitulation to a fallen reality. The presence of a haunting, spectral past helps the left to maintain its critical distance from the current system: a precondition for reclaiming futurism as its own. Were it to make this presence conscious—no longer a repressed origin, but a proud inheritance—then perhaps it could ‘enter into the order of the day’ with greater force. Therborn’s world-casting essays stop short of theorising this endeavour. Yet in tracing the long arc of socialist organising across decades and continents, they will be a vital resource for realising it.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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