[Marxism] Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System

["Daniel Rosenberg" <dddrrr84@xxxxxxxxx>]

Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System
William K. Tabb

This essay examines aspects of the global political economy that I
hope will inform progressive governments and movements for social
change. It evaluates the constraints and opportunities presented in
the current conjuncture of world capitalist development by analyzing
four areas of crisis in the contemporary world capitalist system.
These are not the only contradictory elements in the contemporary
conjuncture, but they are, in my view, the most salient.

The first problem is the financial turbulence that has gripped the
economy of the United States and has had widespread effects. It is a
crisis that further discredits mainstream Anglo-American economics. I
do not know that it is the crisis of capitalism. For this to be the
case it would not only have to become much deeper, but its impacts
would have to be felt more dramatically as a systemic failure. Most
importantly, a party formation capable of explaining how such crises
are inherent in the nature of the functioning of capitalism and of
inspiring a socialist alternative would have to mobilize a movement of
the sort that ended apartheid in South Africa. Without the last, even
a deep and painful crisis will be, at best, only the occasion for
reforming and not abolishing capitalism.

A second crisis is that of U.S.-led imperialism, which has been
discredited both in terms of its regime-change-wars-of-choice and the
increasingly effective resistance to the international financial and
trade regime we know as the Washington Consensus. Because of the
incalculable harm neoliberalism has done, and continues to do, it is
now ideologically on the defensive. A third point of crisis is the
rise of new centers of power in what had been the peripheries of the
capitalist system and the tensions this has unleashed, providing room
to maneuver for countries wishing to break with the United States. A
fourth area of crisis has to do with resource usage, the uneven
distribution of the necessities of life, and a growth paradigm that is
no longer sustainable. Here grassroots social movements in South
Africa and elsewhere are leading actors in resisting privatizations
and the imposition of a hyper-individualism that brings disaster for
the most oppressed and exploited.

full text:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/081006tabb.php

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