{"id":130268,"date":"2012-03-23T15:31:42","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T19:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=130268"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:04:26","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:04:26","slug":"structural-crisis-fix-it-with-structural-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/03\/23\/structural-crisis-fix-it-with-structural-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Structural Crisis? Fix It With Structural Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Structural Crisis Needs A Structural Change<\/a> by Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros in The Monthly Review.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> When stressing the need for a radical structural change it must be made clear right from the beginning that this is not a call for an unrealizable utopia. On the contrary, the primary defining characteristic of modern utopian theories was precisely the projection that their intended improvement in the conditions of the workers\u2019 lives could be achieved well within the existing structural framework of the criticized societies. Thus Robert Owen of New Lanark, for instance, who had an ultimately untenable business partnership with the utilitarian liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, attempted the general realization of his enlightened social and educational reforms in that spirit. He was asking for the impossible. As we also know, the high-sounding \u201cutilitarian\u201d moral principle of \u201cthe greatest good for the greatest number\u201d came to nothing since its Benthamite advocacy. The problem for us is that without a proper assessment of the nature of the economic and social crisis of our time\u2014which by now cannot be denied by the defenders of the capitalist order even if they reject the need for a major change\u2014the likelihood of success in this respect is negligible. The demise of the \u201cWelfare State\u201d even in the mere handful of the privileged countries where it has been once instituted offers a sobering lesson on this score.<\/p>\n

Let me start by quoting a recent article by the editors of the authoritative daily newspaper of the international bourgeoisie, The Financial Times.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Talking about the dangerous financial crisis\u2014acknowledged now by the editors themselves to be dangerous\u2014they end their article with these words: \u201cBoth sides [the U.S. Democrats and the Republicans] are to blame for a vacuum of leadership and responsible deliberation. It is a serious failure of governance and more dangerous than Washington believes.\u201d1 This is all that we get as editorial wisdom about the substantive issue of \u201csovereign indebtedness\u201d and mounting budget deficits. What makes the Financial Times editorial even more vacuous than the \u201cvacuum of leadership\u201d deplored by the journal is the sonorous subtitle of this article: \u201cWashington must stop posturing and start governing.\u201d As if editorials like this could amount to more than posturing in the name of \u201cgoverning\u201d! For the grave issue at stake is the catastrophic indebtedness of the \u201cpower-house\u201d of global capitalism, the United States of America, where the government\u2019s debt alone (without adding corporate and private individual indebtedness) is counted already in well above 14 trillion dollars\u2014flashed up in large illuminated numbers on the fa\u00e7ade of a New York public building indicating the irresistible trend of rising debt.<\/p>\n

The point I wish to stress is that the crisis we have to face is a profound and deepening structural crisis which needs the adoption of far-reaching structural remedies in order to achieve a sustainable solution. It must also be stressed that the structural crisis of our time did not originate in 2007, with the \u201cbursting of the US housing bubble,\u201d but at least four decades earlier. I spoke about it in such terms way back in 1967, well before the May 1968 explosion in France,2 and I wrote in 1971, in the Preface to the Third Edition of Marx\u2019s Theory of Alienation, that the unfolding events and developments \u201cdramatically underlined the intensification of the global structural crisis of capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this respect it is necessary to clarify the relevant differences between types or modalities of crisis. It is not a matter of indifference whether a crisis in the social sphere can be considered a periodic\/conjunctural crisis, or something much more fundamental than that. For, obviously, the way of dealing with a fundamental structural crisis cannot be conceptualized in terms of the categories of periodic or conjunctural crises. The crucial difference between the two sharply contrasting types of crises is that the periodic or conjunctural crises unfold and are more or less successfully resolved within the established framework, whereas the fundamental crisis affects that framework itself in its entirety.<\/p>\n

In general terms, this distinction is not simply a question of the apparent severity of the contrasting types of crises. For a periodic or conjunctural crisis can be dramatically severe\u2014as the \u201cGreat World Economic Crisis of 1929\u20131933\u201d happened to be\u2014yet capable of a solution within the parameters of the given system. And in the same way, but in the opposite sense, the \u201cnon-explosive\u201d character of a prolonged structural crisis, in contrast to the \u201cgreat thunderstorms\u201d (in Marx\u2019s words) through which periodic conjunctural crises can discharge and resolve themselves, may lead to fundamentally misconceived strategies, as a result of the misinterpretation of the absence of \u201cthunderstorms\u201d; as if their absence was the overwhelming evidence for the indefinite stability of \u201corganized capitalism\u201d and of the \u201cintegration of the working class.\u201d<\/p>\n

It cannot be stressed enough that the crisis in our time is not intelligible without being referred to the broad overall social framework. This means that in order to clarify the nature of the persistent and deepening crisis all over the world today we must focus attention on the crisis of the capital system in its entirety. For the crisis of capital we are experiencing is an all-embracing structural crisis.<\/p>\n

Let us see, summed up as briefly as possible, the defining characteristics of the structural crisis we are concerned with.<\/p>\n

The historical novelty of today\u2019s crisis is manifest under four main aspects:
\nits character is universal, rather than restricted to one particular sphere (e.g., financial, or commercial, or affecting this or that particular branch of production, or applying to this rather than that type of labor, with its specific range of skills and degrees of productivity, etc.);
\nits scope is truly global (in the most threateningly literal sense of the term), rather than confined to a particular set of countries (as all major crises have been in the past);
\nits time scale is extended, continuous\u2014if you like: permanent\u2014rather than limited and cyclic, as all former crises of capital happened to be;
\nits mode of unfolding might be called creeping\u2014in contrast to the more spectacular and dramatic eruptions and collapses of the past\u2014while adding the proviso that even the most vehement or violent convulsions cannot be excluded as far as the future is concerned: i.e., when the complex machinery now actively engaged in \u2018crisis-management\u2019 and in the more or less temporary \u2018displacement\u2019 of the growing contradictions runs out of steam.
\n[Here] it is necessary to make some general points about the criteria of a structural crisis, as well as about the forms in which its solution may be envisaged.
\nTo put it in the simplest and most general terms, a structural crisis affects the totality of a social complex, in all its relations with its constituent parts or sub-complexes, as well as with other complexes to which it is linked. By contrast, a non-structural crisis affects only some parts of the complex in question, and thus no matter how severe it might be with regard to the affected parts, it cannot endanger the continued survival of the overall structure.
\nAccordingly, the displacement of contradictions is feasible only while the crisis is partial, relative and internally manageable by the system, requiring no more than shifts\u2014even if major ones\u2014within the relatively autonomous system itself. By the same token, a structural crisis calls into question the very existence of the overall complex concerned, postulating its transcendence and replacement by some alternative complex.
\nThe same contrast may be expressed in terms of the limits any particular social complex happens to have in its immediacy, at any given time, as compared to those beyond which it cannot conceivably go. Thus, a structural crisis is not concerned with the immediate limits but with the ultimate limits of a global structure\u2026.3<\/p>\n

Thus, in a fairly obvious sense, nothing could be more serious than the structural crisis of capital\u2019s mode of social metabolic reproduction which defines the ultimate limits of the established order. But even though profoundly serious in its all-important general parameters, on the face of it the structural crisis may not appear to be of such a deciding importance when compared to the dramatic vicissitudes of a major conjunctural crisis. For the \u201cthunderstorms\u201d through which the conjunctural crises discharge themselves are rather paradoxical in the sense that in their mode of unfolding they not only discharge (and impose) but also resolve themselves, to the degree to which that is feasible under the circumstances. This they can do precisely because of their partial character which does not call into question the ultimate limits of the established global structure. At the same time, however (and for the same reason), they can only \u201cresolve\u201d the underlying deep-seated structural problems\u2014which necessarily reassert themselves again and again in the form of the specific conjunctural crises\u2014in a strictly partial and temporally also most limited way. Until, that is, the next conjunctural crisis appears on society\u2019s horizon.<\/p>\n

By contrast, in view of the inescapably complex and prolonged nature of the structural crisis, unfolding in historical time in an epochal and not episodic\/instantaneous sense, it is the cumulative interrelationship of the whole that decides the issue, even under the false appearance of \u201cnormality.\u201d This is because in the structural crisis everything is at stake, involving the all-embracing ultimate limits of the given order of which there cannot possibly be a \u201csymbolic\/paradigmatic\u201d particular instance. Without understanding the overall systemic connections and implications of the particular events and developments we lose sight of the really significant changes and of the corresponding levers of potential strategic intervention to positively affect them, in the interest of the necessary systemic transformation. Our social responsibility therefore calls for an uncompromising critical awareness of the emerging cumulative interrelationship, instead of looking for comforting reassurances in the world of illusory normality until the house collapses over our head.<\/p>\n

It is necessary to underline here that for nearly three decades after the Second World War the successful economic expansion in the dominant capitalist countries generated the illusion even among some major intellectuals of the left that the historic phase of \u201ccrisis capitalism\u201d had been overcome, leaving its place to what they called \u201cadvanced organized capitalism.\u201d I want to illustrate this problem by quoting some passages from the work of one of the greatest militant intellectuals of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom, as you may well know from my book on Sartre, I have the highest regard. However, the fact is that the adoption of the notion that by overcoming \u201ccrisis capitalism\u201d the established order turned itself into \u201cadvanced capitalism\u201d created some major dilemmas for Sartre. This is all the more significant because no one can deny Sartre\u2019s fully committed search for a viable emancipatory solution and his great personal integrity. In relation to our problem we have to recall that in the important interview given to the Italian Manifesto group\u2014after outlining his conception of the insuperably negative implications of his own explanatory category of the unavoidably detrimental institutionalization of what he called the \u201cfused group\u201d in his Critique of Dialectical Reason\u2014he had to come to the painful conclusion that \u201cWhile I recognize the need of an organization, I must confess that I don\u2019t see how the problems which confront any stabilized structure could be resolved.\u201d4<\/p>\n

Here the difficulty is that the terms of Sartre\u2019s social analysis are set up in such a way that the various factors and correlations that in reality belong together, constituting different facets of fundamentally the same societal complex, are depicted by him in the form of most problematical dichotomies and oppositions, generating thereby insoluble dilemmas and an unavoidable defeat for the emancipatory social forces. This is clearly shown by the exchange between the Manifesto group and Sartre:<\/p>\n

Manifesto: On what precise bases can one prepare a revolutionary alternative?
\nSartre: I repeat, more on the basis of \u2018alienation\u2019 than on \u2018needs.\u2019 In short on the reconstruction of the individual and of freedom\u2014the need for which is so pressing that even the most refined techniques of integration cannot afford to discount it.5<\/p>\n

Thus Sartre in this way, in his strategic assessment of how to overcome the oppressive character of capitalist reality, sets up a totally untenable opposition between the workers\u2019 \u201calienation\u201d and their allegedly satisfied \u201cneeds,\u201d thereby making it all the more difficult to envisage a practically feasible positive outcome. And here the problem is not simply that he grants far too much credibility to the fashionable but extremely superficial sociological explanation of the so-called \u201crefined techniques of integration\u201d in relation to the workers. Unfortunately it is much more serious than that.<\/p>\n

Indeed the really disturbing problem at stake is the evaluation of the viability of \u201cadvanced capitalism\u201d itself and the associated postulate of working class \u201cintegration\u201d which Sartre happens to share at the time to a large extent with Herbert Marcuse. For in actuality the truth of the matter is that in contrast to the undoubtedly feasible integration of some particular workers into the capitalist order, the class of labor\u2014the structural antagonist of capital, representing the only historically sustainable hegemonic alternative to the capital system\u2014cannot be integrated into capital\u2019s alienating and exploitative framework of societal reproduction. What makes that impossible is the underlying structural antagonism between capital and labor, emanating with insurmountable necessity from the class reality of antagonistic domination and subordination.<\/p>\n

In this discourse even the minimal plausibility of the Marcuse\/Sartre type of false alternative between continuing alienation and \u201csatisfied need\u201d is \u201cestablished\u201d on the basis of the derailing compartmentalization of capital\u2019s suicidally untenable globally entrenched structural interdeterminations upon which in fact the elementary systemic viability of capital\u2019s one and only ruling societal metabolic order is necessarily premised. Thus it is extremely problematical to separate \u201cadvanced capitalism\u201d from the so-called \u201cmarginal zones\u201d and from the \u201cthird world.\u201d As if the reproductive order of the postulated \u201cadvanced capitalism\u201d could sustain itself for any length of time, let alone indefinitely in the future, without the ongoing exploitation of the misconceived \u201cmarginal zones\u201d and the imperialistically dominated \u201cthird world\u201d!<\/p>\n

It is necessary to quote here the relevant passage in which these problems are spelled out by Sartre. The revealing Manifesto interview passage in question reads as follows:<\/p>\n

Advanced capitalism, in relation to its awareness of its own condition, and despite the enormous disparities in the distribution of income, manages to satisfy the elementary needs of the majority of the working class\u2014there remains of course the marginal zones, 15 percent of workers in the United States, the blacks and the immigrants; there remain the elderly; there remains, on the global scale, the third world. But capitalism satisfies certain primary needs, and also satisfies certain needs which it has artificially created: for instance the need of a car. It is this situation which has caused me to revise my \u2018theory of needs,\u2019 since these needs are no longer, in a situation of advanced capitalism, in systematic opposition to the system. On the contrary, they partly become, under the control of that system, an instrument of integration of the proletariat into certain processes engendered and directed by profit. The worker exhausts himself in producing a car and in earning enough to buy one; this acquisition gives him the impression of having satisfied a \u2018need.\u2019 The system which exploits him provides him simultaneously with a goal and with the possibility of reaching it. The consciousness of the intolerable character of the system must therefore no longer be sought in the impossibility of satisfying elementary needs but, above all else, in the consciousness of alienation\u2014in other words, in the fact that this life is not worth living and has no meaning, that this mechanism is a deceptive mechanism, that these needs are artificially created, that they are false, that they are exhausting and only serve profit. But to unite the class on this basis is even more difficult.6<\/p>\n

If we accept at face value this characterization of the \u201cadvanced capitalist\u201d order, in that case the task of producing emancipatory consciousness is not only \u201cmore difficult\u201d but quite impossible. But the dubious ground on which we can reach such a prioristic imperatival and pessimistic\/self-defeating conclusion\u2014prescribing from the height of the intellectual\u2019s \u201cnew theory of needs\u201d the abandonment by the workers of their \u201cacquisitive artificial needs,\u201d instantiated by the motor car, and their replacement by the thoroughly abstract postulate which posits for them that \u201cthis life is not worth living and has no meaning\u201d (a noble but rather abstract imperatival postulate effectively contradicted in reality by the tangible need of the members of the working class for securing the conditions of their economically sustainable existence)\u2014is both the acceptance of a set of totally untenable assertions and the equally untenable omission of some vital determining features of the actually existing capital system in its historically irreversible structural crisis.<\/p>\n

For a start, to talk about \u201cadvanced capitalism\u201d\u2014when the capital system as a mode of social metabolic reproduction finds itself in its descending phase of historical development, and therefore is only capitalistically advanced but in no other sense at all, thereby capable of sustaining itself only in an ever more destructive and therefore ultimately also self-destructive way\u2014is extremely problematical. Another assertion: the characterization of the overwhelming majority of humankind\u2014in the category of poverty, including the \u201cblacks and the immigrants,\u201d the \u201celderly,\u201d and, \u201con the global scale, the third world\u201d\u2014as belonging to the \u201cmarginal zones\u201d (in affinity with Marcuse\u2019s \u201coutsiders\u201d), is no less untenable. For in reality it is the \u201cadvanced capitalist world\u201d that constitutes the long term totally unsustainable privileged margin of the overall system, with its ruthless \u201celementary need-denial\u201d to the greater part of the world, and not what is described by Sartre in his Manifesto interview as the \u201cmarginal zones.\u201d Even with regard to the United States of America the margin of poverty is greatly underrated, at merely 15 percent. Besides, the characterization of the workers\u2019 motor cars as nothing more than purely \u201cartificial needs\u201d which \u201conly serve profit\u201d could not be more one-sided. For, in contrast to many intellectuals, not even the relatively well-off particular workers, let alone the members of the class of labor as a whole, have the luxury of finding their place of work next door to their bedroom.<\/p>\n

At the same time, on the side of the astonishing omissions, some of the gravest structural contradictions and failures are missing from Sartre\u2019s depiction of \u201cadvanced capitalism,\u201d virtually emptying the whole concept of meaning. In this sense one of the most important substantive needs without which no society\u2014past, present, or future\u2014could survive, is the need for work. Both for the productively active individuals\u2014embracing all of them in a fully emancipated social order\u2014and for society in general in its historically sustainable relationship to nature. The necessary failure to solve this fundamental structural problem, affecting all categories of work not only in the \u201cthird world\u201d but even in the most privileged countries of \u201cadvanced capitalism,\u201d with its perilously rising unemployment, constitutes one of the absolute limits of the capital system in its entirety. Another grave problem which underscores the present and future historical unviability of capital is the calamitous shift toward the parasitic sectors of the economy\u2014like the crisis-producing adventurist speculation which plagues (as a matter of objective necessity, often misrepresented as systemically irrelevant personal failure) the financial sector and the institutionalized\/legally buttressed fraudulence closely associated with it\u2014in contradistinction to the productive branches of socioeconomic life required for the satisfaction of genuine human need. This is a shift that stands in menacingly sharp contrast to the ascending phase of capital\u2019s historic development, when the prodigious systemic expansionary dynamism (including the industrial revolution) was overwhelmingly due to socially viable and further enhanceable productive achievements. We have to add to all this the massively wasteful economic burdens imposed on society in an authoritarian way by the state and the military\/industrial complex\u2014with the permanent arms industry and the corresponding wars\u2014as an integral part of the perverse \u201ceconomic growth\u201d of \u201cadvanced organized capitalism.\u201d And to mention just one more of the catastrophic implications of \u201cadvanced\u201d capital\u2019s systemic development, we must bear in mind the prohibitively wasteful global ecological encroachment of our no longer tenable mode of social metabolic reproduction on the finite planetary world,7 with its rapacious exploitation of the non-renewable material resources and the increasingly more dangerous destruction of nature. Saying this is not \u201cbeing wise after the event.\u201d I wrote in the same period when Sartre gave his Manifesto interview that:<\/p>\n

Another basic contradiction of the capitalist system of control is that it cannot separate \u201cadvance\u201d from destruction, nor \u201cprogress\u201d from waste\u2014however catastrophic the results. The more it unlocks the powers of productivity, the more it must unleash the powers of destruction; and the more it extends the volume of production, the more it must bury everything under mountains of suffocating waste. The concept of economy is radically incompatible with the \u201ceconomy\u201d of capital production which, of necessity, adds insult to injury by first using up with rapacious wastefulness the limited resources of our planet, and then further aggravates the outcome by polluting and poisoning the human environment with its mass-produced waste and effluence.8<\/p>\n

Thus the problematical assertions and the seminally important omissions of Sartre\u2019s characterization of \u201cadvanced capitalism\u201d greatly weaken the power of negation of his emancipatory discourse. His dichotomous principle which repeatedly asserts the \u201cirreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order\u201d is always on the look out for finding solutions in terms of the \u201ccultural order,\u201d at the level of the individuals\u2019 consciousness, through the committed intellectual\u2019s \u201cwork of consciousness upon consciousness.\u201d He appeals to the idea that the required solution lies in increasing the \u201cconsciousness of alienation\u201d\u2014that is, in terms of his \u201ccultural order\u201d\u2014while at the same time discarding the viability of grounding the revolutionary strategy on need belonging to the \u201cnatural order.\u201d Material need which is said to be already satisfied for the majority of the workers and which in any case constitutes a \u201cdeceptive and false mechanism\u201d and an \u201cinstrument of integration of the proletariat.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, Sartre is deeply concerned with the challenge of addressing the issue of how to increase \u201cthe consciousness of the intolerable character of the system.\u201d But, as a matter of unavoidable consideration, the leverage itself indicated as the vital condition of success\u2014the power of the \u201cconsciousness of alienation\u201d stressed by Sartre\u2014would itself badly need some objective underpinning. Otherwise, the idea (even setting aside the indicated leverage\u2019s weakness of self-referential circularity) that it somehow \u201ccan prevail over against the intolerable character of the system\u201d is bound to be dismissed as a noble but ineffective cultural advocacy. That this is problematic even in Sartre\u2019s own terms of reference is indicated by his rather pessimistic words wherein he shows that the need is to defeat the materially and culturally destructive and structurally entrenched reality of \u201cthis miserable ensemble which is our planet,\u201d with its \u201chorrible, ugly, bad determinations, without hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accordingly, the primary question concerns the\u2014demonstrability or not\u2014of the objectively intolerable character of the system itself. For if the demonstrable intolerability of the system is missing in substantive terms, as proclaimed by the notion of \u201cadvanced capitalism\u2019s\u201d ability to satisfy material needs except in the \u201cmarginal zones,\u201d then the \u201clong and patient labor in the construction of consciousness\u201d advocated by Sartre remains well-nigh impossible.9 It is that objective grounding that needs to be (and in actuality can be) established in its own comprehensive terms of reference, requiring the radical demystification of the increasing destructiveness of \u201cadvanced capitalism.\u201d The \u201cconsciousness of the intolerable character of the system\u201d can only be built on that objective grounding\u2014which includes the suffering caused by \u201cadvanced\u201d capital\u2019s failure to satisfy even the elementary need for food not only in \u201cmarginal zones\u201d but for countless millions, as clearly evidenced by food riots in many countries\u2014so as to be able to overcome the postulated dichotomy between the cultural order and the natural order.<\/p>\n

In its ascending phase the capital system was successfully asserting its productive accomplishments on the basis of its internal expansionary dynamism\u2014still without the imperative of a monopolistic\/imperialist drive of the capitalistically most advanced countries for militarily secured world domination. Yet, through the historically irreversible circumstance of entering the productively descending phase, the capital system had become inseparable from an ever-intensifying need for the militaristic\/monopolistic extension and overstretch of its structural framework, tending in due course on the internal productive plane toward the establishment and the criminally wasteful operation of a \u201cpermanent arms industry,\u201d together with the wars necessarily associated with it.<\/p>\n

In fact well before the outbreak of the First World War Rosa Luxemburg clearly identified the nature of this fateful monopolistic\/imperialist development on the destructively productive plane by writing in her book on The Accumulation of Capital about the role of massive militarist production that: \u201cCapital itself ultimately controls this automatic and rhythmic movement of militarist production through the legislature and a press whose function is to mould so-called \u2018public opinion.\u2019 That is why this particular province of capitalist accumulation at first seems capable of infinite expansion.\u201d10<\/p>\n

In another respect, the increasingly wasteful utilization of energy and vital material strategic resources carried with it not only the ever more destructive articulation of capital\u2019s self-assertive structural determinations on the (by legislatively manipulated \u201cpublic opinion\u201d never even questioned, let alone properly regulated) military plane but also with regard to the increasingly destructive encroachment of capital-expansion on nature. Ironically but by no means surprisingly, this turn of regressive historical development of the capital system as such also carried with it some bitterly negative consequences for the international organization of labor.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this new articulation of the capital system in the last third of the nineteenth century, with its monopolistic imperialist phase inseparable from its fully extended global ascendancy, opened up a new modality of (most antagonistic and ultimately untenable) expansionary dynamism at the overwhelming benefit of a mere handful of privileged imperialist countries, postponing thereby the \u201cmoment of truth\u201d that goes with the system\u2019s irrepressible structural crisis in our own time. This type of monopolistic imperialist development inevitably gave a major boost to the possibility of militaristic capital-expansion and accumulation, no matter how great a price had to be paid in due course for the ever-intensifying destructiveness of the new expansionary dynamism. Indeed, the militarily underpinned monopolistic dynamism had to assume the form of even two devastating global wars, as well as the total annihilation of humankind implicit in a potential Third World War, in addition to the ongoing perilous destruction of nature that became evident in the second half of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

In our time we are experiencing the deepening structural crisis of the capital system. Its destructiveness is visible everywhere, and it shows no signs of diminishing. With regard to the future it is crucial how we conceptualize the nature of the crisis in order to envisage its solution. For the same reason it is also necessary to re-examine some of the major solutions projected in the past. Here it is not possible to do more than to mention, with stenographic brevity, the contrasting approaches which have been offered, indicating at the same time what happened to them in actuality.<\/p>\n

First, we have to remember that it was to his merit that liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill considered how problematical endless capitalist growth might be, suggesting as the solution of this problem the \u201cstationary state of the economy.\u201d Naturally, such a \u201cstationary state\u201d under the capital system could be nothing more than wishful thinking, because it is totally incompatible with the imperative of capital-expansion and accumulation. Even today, when so much destructiveness is caused by unqualified growth and the most wasteful allocation of our vital energy and strategic material resources, the mythology of growth is constantly reasserted, coupled with the wishful projection of \u201creducing our carbon imprint\u201d by the year 2050, while in reality moving in the opposite direction. Thus the reality of liberalism turned out to be the aggressive destructiveness of neoliberalism.<\/p>\n

Similar fate affected the social democratic perspective. Marx clearly formulated his warnings about this danger in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, but they were totally ignored. Here, too, the contradiction between the promised Bernsteinian \u201cevolutionary socialism\u201d and its realization everywhere turned out to be striking. Not only in virtue of the capitulation of social-democratic parties and governments to the lure of imperialist wars but also through the transformation of social democracy in general\u2014including British \u201cNew Labour\u201d\u2014into more or less open versions of neo-liberalism, abandoning not only the \u201croad of evolutionary socialism\u201d but even the once promised implementation of significant social reform.<\/p>\n

Moreover, a much propagandized solution to the gruesome inequalities of the capital system was the promised worldwide diffusion of the \u201cWelfare State\u201d after the Second World War. However, the prosaic reality of this claimed historic achievement turned out to be not only the utter failure to institute the Welfare State in any part of the so-called \u201cThird World,\u201d but the ongoing liquidation of the relative achievements of the postwar Welfare State\u2014in the field of social security, health care, and education\u2014even in the handful of privileged capitalist countries where they were once instituted.<\/p>\n

And of course we cannot disregard the promise to realize the highest phase of socialism (by Stalin and others) through the overthrow and abolition of capitalism. For, tragically, seven decades after the October Revolution the reality turned out to be the restoration of capitalism in a regressive neoliberal form in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

The common denominator of all of these failed attempts\u2014despite some of their major differences\u2014is that they all tried to accomplish their objectives within the structural framework of the established social metabolic order. However, as painful historical experience teaches us, our problem is not simply \u201cthe overthrow of capitalism.\u201d For even to the extent to which that objective can be accomplished, it is bound to be only a very unstable achievement, because whatever can be overthrown can be also restored. The real\u2014and much more difficult\u2014issue is the necessity of radical structural change.<\/p>\n

The tangible meaning of such structural change is the complete eradication of capital itself from the social metabolic process. In other words, the eradication of capital from the metabolic process of societal reproduction.<\/p>\n

Capital itself is an all-embracing mode of control; which means that it either controls everything or it implodes as a system of societal reproductive control. Consequently, capital as such cannot be controlled in some of its aspects while leaving the rest at its place. All attempted measures and modalities of \u201ccontrolling\u201d capital\u2019s various functions on a lasting basis have failed in the past. In view of its structurally entrenched uncontrollability\u2014which means that there is no conceivable leverage within the structural framework of the capital system itself through which the system itself could be brought under lasting control\u2014capital must be completely eradicated. This is the central meaning of Marx\u2019s lifework.<\/p>\n

In our time the question of control\u2014through the institution of structural change in response to our deepening structural crisis\u2014is becoming urgent not only in the financial sector, due to the wasted trillions of dollars, but everywhere. The leading capitalist financial journals complain that \u201cChina is sitting on three trillion dollars of cash,\u201d wishfully projecting again solutions through the \u201cbetter use of that money.\u201d But the sobering truth is that the total worsening indebtedness of capitalism amounts to ten times more than China\u2019s \u201cunused dollars.\u201d Besides, even if the huge current indebtedness could be eliminated somehow, although no one can say how, the real question would remain: How was it generated in the first place, and how can be made sure that it is not generated again in the future? This is why the productive dimension of the system\u2014namely the capital relation itself\u2014is what must be fundamentally changed in order to overcome the structural crisis through the appropriate structural change.<\/p>\n

The dramatic financial crisis which we experienced in the last three years is only one aspect of the capital system\u2019s three-pronged destructiveness:<\/p>\n

in the military field, with capital\u2019s interminable wars since the onset of monopolistic imperialism in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and its ever more devastating weapons of mass destruction in the last sixty years;
\nthe intensification through capital\u2019s obvious destructive impact on ecology directly affecting and endangering by now the elementary natural foundation of human existence itself; and
\nin the domain of material production an ever-increasing waste, due to the advancement of \u201cdestructive production\u201d in place of the once eulogized \u201ccreative\u201d or \u201cproductive destruction.\u201d
\nThese are the grave systemic problems of our structural crisis which can only be solved by a comprehensive structural change.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, let me quote the last five lines of The Dialectic of Structure and History. They read as follows:<\/p>\n

\u201cNaturally, historical dialectic in the abstract cannot offer any guarantee for a positive outcome. To expect that would mean renouncing our role in developing social consciousness, which is integral to the historical dialectic. Radicalizing social consciousness in an emancipatory spirit is what we need for the future, and we need it more than ever before.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Structural Crisis Needs A Structural Change by Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros in The Monthly Review. The Text: When stressing the need for a radical structural change it must be made clear right from the beginning that this is not a call for an unrealizable utopia. On the contrary, the primary defining characteristic of modern utopian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nStructural Crisis? 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