ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the consequences of the global financial crisis of 2008 and beyond; one of the most serious criticisms of the FSRP is that while it made a serious attempt to map out and research the new political economy of post-Fordism and, at the same time, attempted to map out and propose new and progressive even radical, institutional transformations that would embed flexible specialisation as a pre-distributive rather than solely post-distributive ‘welfare state’ form of post-Fordist social democracy or socialism, it failed, however, to engage successfully with the question of the transition to such a regime through human agency and subjective and collective struggle, despite the fact that the themes of non-determinism, non-necessitarianism, and contingency in political, social, and economic arrangements were one of its strongpoints and claim to specificity as a research programme. This chapter examines some of the key debates around the 2008 crisis and beyond, with reference to questions of class conflict, social movements, and forms of organisation developed by struggling actors in this period. The rebirth of the socialist–communist hypotheses, to be sure, are a positive sign, yet the various Marxist theories of this moment fail to consider plausible, realistic, feasible strategies, and models of social transformation beyond capitalism. This is something the FSRP attempted to do and, moreover, is continued with Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s later work on the high productivity, high wage, ‘knowledge economy’ but still, however, without much contact with collective subjective agency – consciousness and, crucially, strategies for an egalitarian structural transformation of society.
