ABSTRACT
Before we move on to the twofold purpose of this chapter, it is imperative that we place the economic malaise which commenced in 2007 in proper context. Emphatically, this context is not, as economic analysis emanating from both Right and Left sides of the international political spectrum claim, a crisis of capitalism. Rather, it is a manifestation of a confluence of pathological trends in an already unfolding world historic transition away from capitalism. There is no need to trace the final steps in the breaking out of turmoil in the Wall Street based global financial casino (the writing has been on the wall for some time as Chapter 4 makes so abundantly clear). Also, as with globalization, we are now witnessing a meltdown growth industry in both popular and academic writings and in the mainstream press. However, instructive points emerging from the better Marxian analyses of the makings of the financial crisis are that on the one hand, as Dumenil and Levy (2008) put it, “nothing would have been possible without [US] . . . world domination”. And, on the other hand, that the crisis is a manifestation of an unhinging of finance from the real economy of production and trade and has little to do with trends originating in the latter (Gowan, 2009);1 these points only lending further support to the thesis of this book and our elaboration in the previous chapter. Our first task in the present chapter, then, is to show that irrespective of whether the world economic movement away from capitalism is punctuated at this or that time, or place, with a particular cataclysmic event, the overarching tendency has been a drift toward a world of barbarism and human deprivation. And for us to remain complacent that there remains a capitalism (however this capitalism is construed in Right and Left accounts) that the economic reproduction of human societies continues to be moored to beneath the current economic malaise is tantamount to Nero fiddling as Rome burned. Second, this chapter proposes an alternative course for humanity. Certainly, with doomsayer accounts proliferating alongside the financial meltdown writings people want to hear something positive. The present chapter offers this by sorting out some fundamental questions of the progressive, material economically reproducible, redistributive, eco-sensitive socialist order which humanity must work toward creating to ensure the future of life on earth. Of course, as argued in Chapter 2, discussion of HM as the Marxian approach to human
history in toto, there is no telos of history that social science, Marxian or bourgeois, can confirm. The claim that the “end” of history is socialism is an ideological postulate as is its contemporary counterpart; that the collapse of Soviet experiments meant the “end of ideology” and liberalism constitutes history’s final outcome. This is not to deny that historical studies guided by HM have proved extremely productive of knowledge of the material infrastructure of precapitalist economies and processes of socio-economic transformation across the sweep of history. Nor that HM claims for socialism are not suggestive. However, the position taken here on where the current world economic trajectory is leading us was made evident a few lines above and at various points in this book. Altering this course will require extensive efforts of collective human agency. Whether or not there exists a weighty transformatory constituency or signs of one gestating to accomplish the genuine socio-economic change proposed here is a speculative question which we will bracket at this point. What is offered is a scientific account of the feasibility and potential institutional configuring of a socialist society should the will manifest to undertake its construction. As touched on in the final pages of Chapter 2 our knowledge of the feasibility of socialism draws upon the analysis of capital in the TPCS. It is precisely the TPCS objective demonstration of how capital is able to meet the general norms of economic life to materially reproduce a human society as a by-product of its chrematistic of value augmentation that confirms the feasibility of socialism; a society where those very same general norms will be met by communities of freely associated human beings in the kingdom of freedom of our collective future.
