Buenos Aires.- The capitalist world economy continues to have structural problems with low growth, especially in the dominions of the USA, Europe and Japan. China, India and other “emerging countries” are slowing down the global trend and cushioning production and circulation problems worldwide.
Julio C. Gambina*, contributor to Prensa Latina
In essence, it is part of the dispute over the hegemony of the global order, the basis of the economic, political, diplomatic and military conflicts that populate daily reality in the context of threats to civilization, whether due to climate change or the growing criminality of capitalism in drug trafficking, arms trafficking or human trafficking. The main goal of the capital regime in these moments of crisis is the increasing exploitation of labor and the plunder of common goods.
Capital vs. labor
This explains the strong offensive of capital against the workers, their rights and forms of struggle as well as their trade union and social organization; as well as the offensive against nature, which is expressed in the appropriation of commons and territories, especially in the global south. An offensive directed against the entire society through ideological manipulation, mediated through social networks and media, that subsumes humanity into the logic of profit and capitalist accumulation. The challenge for the ruling classes is to emerge from the crisis. In this direction, they consolidate the worrying trends towards inequality, war and militarization by using resources for unproductive purposes and thereby hindering the satisfaction of unmet needs of the world's population.
Global military spending is increasing and the privatization of social rights such as health and education is deepening. The IMF forecasts growth in the region of 2.9 percent in 2024, lower than post-pandemic records between 2021 and 2023, with “advanced economies” reaching a record 1.4 percent, including the United States. would grow by 1.5 percent, Germany by 0.9 percent and the United Kingdom by six percent. The “emerging markets” would grow by four percent, China by 4.2 percent and India by 6.3 percent. Latin America and the Caribbean 2.3 percent, which explains serious problems for the development of the peripheral countries of world capitalism.
Wealth information produced by the Swiss Banking Association highlights the global rise in inequality, with a pyramid that widens at the poor base and groups a reduced core of concentration of wealth and income at the top.
The crisis of capitalism and the alternative
The world economy, capitalism, responded to the crisis of the 60s/70s with the policy of liberalizing the economy under the umbrella term “neoliberalism” because it sought to restore the original logic of political economy (Adam Smith in 1776 and followers). , which laid the foundation for the capitalist order in universal expansion. The liberalism of the economics classics supported the aspirations of the new bourgeois rule over human relations based on the principles of free trade, free competition and free markets.
Karl Marx's criticism (Capital was published in 1867) founded anti-capitalist aspirations for a different social order without exploitation or plunder, which inspired popular social organizations since the International Workers' Association (1864). The answer to the perspective of “revolution” emerged on a new basis with the neoclassical school, which had been hegemonic in the academic and national and global governance spheres of the world system since the end of the 19th century. From this neoclassical approach emerged Keynesianism, which tried to overcome the crisis of 1930 without falling into the perspective of the Russian revolution and socialism.
In this direction, in view of the crisis of the 60s/70s and under the terrorist experiment of the state in South America, “neoliberalism” is emerging, which expands the economic liberalization that began in the 80s of the 20th century and the crisis since 2007/09. and seeking new theoretical and political directions for the capitalist order. This explains the aggressive contemporary offensive.
Given the slowdown in the economy and the limits to the growth of labor productivity, which are reflected in the falling rate of profit, there is an intensification of exploitation and plunder to increase the mass of profits, which is particularly clearly expressed since the military complex or the pharmaceutical business in Healthcare, among many others. The required energy transition therefore results from increased profits and the accumulation of concentrated and centralized sectors of the global economy. This is the case of Elon Musk and Tesla, one of the companies that illustrates current trends in technological development and the dispute over territories for plunder, as evidenced by the attempts to appropriate lithium as an input for the transformation of the energy system.
From Pinochet to Milei
The current dispute is about the subordination of workers to the logic of capital, which requires an ideological, political and cultural “consensus”. Therefore, the central meaning of world domination lies in the resignation of political forms of domination.
In this sense, just as in 1973 the Chilean dictatorship became the neoliberal test that later spread throughout the world, Javier Milei's electoral victory in Argentina in 2023 can be the experiment for a new test of economic liberalization that will overcome all anti- capitalist perspective. Unlike other expressions of the extreme right (Bolsonaro, Trump, Meloni or Le Pen), Milei is not a “nationalist”, but rather a “libertarian liberal”, as he defines himself. Its aim is to restore “market freedom” at any cost and to challenge the consensus of society to the detriment of any project of criticism of capitalism, objected to by the current of collapse in Eastern Europe and the absence of a global anti-capitalist imagination.
50 years after the coup in Chile and the “neoliberal” beginning, the ruling classes are re-articulating themselves in a scenario of threats to nature through violence (war and inequality) and testify to a criminal capitalism that subordinates humanity to the goal of profit and accumulation .
What to do again?
The theoretical and political challenge involves a critique of the new conditions of world capitalism from the perspective of the deceleration and crisis of 2024. A challenge that has a history in the struggle of indigenous peoples, redefined and visible in the first decade of the 21st century. in the Andean countries, especially the experiences of Bolivia and Ecuador, whose constitutions adopted around 2009 form and outline the foundations of an emancipatory program for the 21st century.
In this sense, the experience of the struggles of popular feminism, of anti-capitalist struggles against the plunder of common goods, of the re-signification of trade union struggles and of workers introducing new forms of organization, struggle and reproduction of daily life, operates from self-management, cooperation and communitarianism .
rmh/jcg
*Doctor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, UBA; Professor of political economy at several public universities in Argentina and the region; He is chairman of the Foundation for Social and Political Research, FISYP.
Taken from Prensa Latina
Share it on social networks