Searching for a Socialist Approach to Crises
In this excerpt from Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World, Ståle Holgersen outlines a coherent socialist response to today's economic and ecological crises.
What legitimises power under capitalism is called progress. Although capitalism has always produced poverty and underdevelopment, it has been legitimised by the idea that ‘in time’ everyone will enjoy the fruits of progress. It only takes some policy reforms, a few more rounds of investment and some more development before even poor countries become rich, and poor people in rich countries become middle class.
But what happens to faith in progress when capitalism is in a sea of crises? How is capitalism legitimised when both growth and jobs are lost and companies go bankrupt? What about progress when we fear the climate of tomorrow?
The crises expose capitalism. Suddenly, we can see clearly how useless the billionaire celebrity speculator really was, how little politicians really knew about our society and how dogmatic the ruling ideology was. Crises reveal what lies behind the fi ne theories of market freedom and self-regulating economies. We see, in the words of Henryk Grossman, ‘the chaos of the destruction of capital, the bankruptcy of fi rms and factories, mass unemployment, insufficient capital investment, currency crises, and the arbitrary distribution of wealth’.[1] Class interests immediately become more apparent. As quickly as ideology and pretty words about freedom and human values disappear, self-interest and pragmatism emerge. Praise for the free market falls silent when the capitalist class needs support from the state. During a crisis, we have historically seen both the flexibility of the capitalist system and the desperation of the ruling class – two phenomena that should never be underestimated.
But, if crises really expose the nature of capitalism, why haven’t 200 years of recurring crises sent the system to the dustbin of history? If, as Karl Kautsky said a hundred years ago, the recurring crises are memento mori – a ‘reminder of death’, that is, a foretaste of capitalism’s final collapse – why does capitalism appear as alive today as ever? If, as Daniel Bensaïd argues, crises threaten to blow up the whole of bourgeois society, why does capitalism seem to draw additional strength and energy from each new crisis? If, as Jared Diamond argues, crises are moments of truth that challenge the ideology of progress, why does the ruling class seem able to use crises precisely to advance its positions, reinforce its power, and once again create a world in its image?[2]
That intellectuals can use crises to disclose capitalism is politically cold comfort. It is an illusion that a ruling ideology must be coherent.[3] Capitalism is not driven by coherent ideologies. In fact, it is not primarily driven by ideologies at all. The crises of capitalism come with a curious double character. While crises can – in theory – help us to reveal and expose capitalism’s weaknesses and problems, they are also – in the actual political economy – central to the reproduction of capitalism. Crises are a good starting point for criticising capitalism, but they also make it harder to actually overthrow the system.
The crises of capitalism come with problems even for liberals. An old liberal dream is to maintain what is considered the sunny side of capitalism – growth, progress, optimism – and to be able to control or simply get rid of permanent and recurring disasters. One can try to realise this dream in different ways, for example through active state policies and regulations (as with Keynesians and social democrats) or through privatisations and deregulations (as with neoclassical and neoliberal thinkers). Together, these schools of thought seek a world based on capital accumulation, growth and progress, where crises are controlled or eradicated.
This liberal dream has been shattered again and again throughout history. The dream of many Marxists is an inversion of the liberal dream. Here, the crises are supposed to lead to the collapse of capitalism and thus to the age of socialism. This hope has been dashed just as many times as the liberal dream of a world without crises.
While Marxist and socialist theories are useful tools for understanding crises, in actually existing capitalism the system is reproduced one crisis after another. For liberals, crises are theoretical problems with political possibilities. For Marxists, crises present theoretical possibilities, but political problems.
Dangers or Opportunities?
Perhaps the most common definition of crisis comes from the thirty-fifth president of the United States. John F. Kennedy said in 1959 that the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters – one (危,wei in Mandarin) meaning ‘danger’ and the other (機, ji) meaning ‘opportunity’ – and this great wisdom has been repeated innumerable times. In a modern take on the climate crisis, Al Gore said in 2015, ‘We all live on the same planet. We all face the same dangers and the same opportunities; we share the same responsibility for charting our course into the future.’[4]
The idea that we all face roughly the same opportunities and dangers in economic crises is simply wrong. In the case of climate change, the same statement becomes morbid. (According to Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature, Kennedy was wrong even linguistically, as the second character does not mean opportunity, but rather ‘incipient moment’ or ‘decisive point’. Thus, not necessarily a time for optimism or a good chance of advancement, but certainly a period of change.[5])
If crises really are opportunities, why is it a given who will lose? Because it is. It is (almost) always the poor who pay the price. Crisis as ‘danger and opportunity’ hides a class character: danger for whom and opportunity for whom? For the ruling class, crises can indeed be opportunities.
The famous saying ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ (often attributed to Winston Churchill) also comes with a class character. Try saying that to the thousands losing their loved ones in wildfires, heatwaves and floods, to the millions losing their jobs and homes in economic crises, or to young women and children being forced into prostitution. For workers, the poor and small farmers, especially in poor countries, crises are not opportunities to be ‘used’. Crises are desperation, unemployment and death.
Despite the devastating impact of crises on ordinary people, it is not only bourgeois economists and North American presidents who have viewed crises with a degree of hope and optimism. The young Karl Marx was basically preparing for the fall of capitalism as soon as he saw signs of crisis on the horizon.[6]
Engels was not much different. In 1845, Engels wrote that the people ‘will not endure more than one more crisis’.[7] But the next crisis in 1847, in the midst of the Europe of revolutions, quickly passed. Hope returned with the Great Crisis of 1856–57. Engels wrote to Marx in November 1857: ‘Physically, the crisis will do me as much good as a bathe in the sea; I can sense it already. In 1848 we were saying: Now our time is coming, and so in a certain sense it was, but this time it is coming properly; now it’s a case of do or die.’[8]
Marx was working on the Grundrisse at the time and wrote in a letter to Engels that he was working like mad at night to finish the manuscript before the flood came.[9] Regardless, the crisis of 1857 passed without any revolution; there was no ‘do or die’. Instead, the crisis was followed by a prolonged economic boom.
The young Marx’s optimism did not come out of nowhere, and we can better understand this with a short return to the conceptual history. Milstein argues for a defensive reading of crisis developing during the seventeenth century, which can be linked to Hobbes’s Leviathan and was about overcoming dangers and restoring a ‘normal state’. In contrast, what Milstein calls an ‘offensive reading’ of crisis developed during the eighteenth century, with writers such as Rousseau and Thomas Paine.
This was no longer about retreating or trying to avoid crises, but, rather, about moving on to the next stage of historical development.[10] In this respect, the younger Marx is surely a child of the eighteenth century.
The older Marx gives us a very different approach to crisis, and according to Peter Thomas and Geert Reuten, the Grundrisse is the battleground for the two different perspectives.[11] In sharp contrast to all previous naïve optimism, the older Marx emphasised how crises functioned within phases of accumulation cycles and were components of the reproduction of capital.
Many Marxists never stopped hoping that crises would be opportunities, even with revolutionary potential. Environmental historian Jason Moore argues that, while crises are full of dangers, ‘as the Chinese would remind us, they are also full of opportunity’.[12] If any Chinese have actually reminded us of this very point, they have probably studied Western crisis theory. Moore subtitles one of his most famous texts ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying about “The” Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism’. It is not clear from the text what this means, but, elsewhere, he has argued that the fall of the Roman Empire aft er the fourth century and the collapse of feudal power in the fourteenth century led to a golden age in living standards for the vast majority.[13] This might be empirically true, but it remains politically irrelevant to speculate today about positive outcomes centuries into the future. For someone losing their loved ones due to crises, the prophecy that someone else’s greatgrandchildren’s grandchildren might benefit from the current disasters is hardly a reason to learn to love any crisis.
The general tendency throughout the history of capitalism is that crises do not tend to benefit workers and the poor, but there might be exceptions to the rule. One is the Black Death which, although it occurred before capitalism, is still a relevant example. Small farmers and the poor who survived the plague were then in a better position, but at the cost of having lost friends and family in a terrible mass death. Cholera made life terrible in nineteenth-century industrialised cities, but, arguably, contributed to public health measures and urban planning that gave workers a better local environment. Should we coldly ignore social consequences and consider plagues and cholera as opportunities for the working class? At what cost?
Concerning economic crises, the most common example of the working class advancing its position through a crisis is the interwar period. Certainly not everywhere, but in places like Norway, Sweden and the US we must ask: Did the workers’ movement win because of the crisis? The working class had been strengthening its position and building its movement for years – was this really reinforced by, say, the Great Depression of 1929? These are complicated questions, to which we will return later in the book. Here we just need to emphasise that what we are discussing are possible exceptions to the main tendency.
The argument of crisis as opportunity can also be taken a step further. Some feel that it is only through crises that the left can find political opportunities. The 2019 and 2020 elections with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders were often described as ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunities. Perhaps too inspired by Gramsci, some pushed the thesis of crises as decisive ‘populist moments’ and breaking points between different forms of hegemony: yesterday was too early; tomorrow is too late! Crisis is the only opportunity for real radical change; if we lose now, we need to wait forty to fi ft y years for the next hegemonic crisis. Fortunately for us, this is wrong.
According to the Swedish historian Kjell Östberg, economic crises do not necessarily create rebellion and radicalisation. Social struggle shows a relatively independent relationship with economic cycles and with long as well as short economic waves. If anything, there seems to be a negative correlation between economic crises and higher unemployment, on the one hand, and widespread readiness to fight, on the other.[14] Looking quickly at the twentieth century, we see that widespread protests seem to take place a few years before the crisis. The 1917 revolution came in a sea of wars and crises but took place twelve years before the great crisis of 1929; the 1968 uprisings came five years before the 1973 crisis; and the anti-globalisation and antiwar movements of 1999–2003 came a few years before 2008. Should we conclude from this that great opportunities always come a few years before major economic crises? No, that would also be far too speculative. Having said that, we should acknowledge that social struggles certainly do not happen independently from political economic processes. But, rather than searching further for such historical relations in this respect, the aim of this book is to help us understand the nature of crises so that we know the terrain on which we will need to fight the coming crises.
Östberg finds it hopeful that waves of radicalisation are not determined by economic waves, as insurgencies are therefore not dependent on specific economic cycles. But this does bring further problems for the crisis-as-opportunity approach: if chances for radical change are at least as high during periods not characterised by crisis as they are during crisis, then every single day with or without any crisis is an opportunity.Here, the concept becomes politically and analytically meaningless.
The crisis-as-opportunity argument arguably peaked in 2015. Five years after the earthquake in 2010 in Haiti which killed around 230,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, a writer at the Correspondent had the audacity to ask whether the earthquake wasn’t also a ‘fresh new opportunity’. Perhaps even ‘the best thing that ever happened to Haiti?’[15]
Another version of the opportunity thesis is one that sees crisis and progress everywhere. Brian Milstein argues that social welfare institutions and human rights have been established and many ideas of socioeconomic justice have become mainstream because of, and in the wake of, economic crises.[16] The problem here is that because capitalism has created so many crises, and since major institutional changes develop over years, it is not hard to find a crisis that took place a few years before or aft er any important political decision. This does not necessarily mean that the crisis is the cause of the improvement.
If crises are indeed opportunities, should we hope for more crises? That would be ridiculous. The idea that crises are good because they open up opportunities for the poorest is just as absurd as the idea that the slave trade opened up opportunities for today’s African Americans to become entrepreneurs and even presidents of the United States. Or that colonisation was an opportunity for the poor in India, for example, because it gave them buildings and railways. Only fascists or psychopaths would make such arguments. These are anti-humanist positions that calculate with – or rather ignore – the lives of vulnerable people. If opportunities – as defined in textbooks – are occasions or situations that make it possible to do something you want or have to do, and if opportunities – as conventionally understood – entail moments of excitement, optimism and hopefulness, and chances for advancement, then we must refrain from referring to crises as opportunities for the working class, the environmental movement or the political left . This does not mean we should not attack crises with all our might. We just need a different approach.
Beyond Keynesianism
Throughout the 2010s, you could go to conferences where Marxists discussed crisis theory and how crises must be solved through revolutions and socialism. Then we all went home to our respective socialist parties and voted for Keynesian investment programmes. Why do socialists run to Keynes every time there is a crisis?
Costas Lapavitsas explicitly says that Keynesianism is the most powerful tool we have, even as Marxists, to deal with political issues in the here and now. While the Marxist tradition, according to Lapavitsas, is good at understanding and dealing with medium- and long-term problems, it cannot be compared to Keynesianism when it comes to short-term crisis management.[17] If Lapavitsas has a point – that Keynesianism is the best tool Marxists have in the face of crises – he has, above all, pointed to a major problem.
But, if crises are mainly possibilities for the ruling class and problems for the rest of us, and if the struggle for socialism would be easier without crisis, could we quickly solve crises with Keynesianism and return to Marxism as soon as the storm is over? This is a dead end. Apart from the fact that there is no guarantee that Keynesian crisis management actually solves crises, the crises are so many and so severe that a left that mobilises a social-liberal approach in every crisis will be stuck there.
Keynesian crisis management may to a greater or lesser extent be directed at servicing workers and the poor, but, as with any inter-capitalist solution, it will always have to restore profits and reproduce capitalism. This is a prerequisite. And one that can be easy to forget. With arguments about state interventions, challenges to the power of certain capitalists and calls for grand reforms – add to this that Keynes himself was part of the legendary Bloomsbury Group – Keynesianism can offer a ‘critical edge’, a sense of radicalism, although it will always save capitalism, one crisis aft er the other.
It is easy to dismiss Keynesianism as liberal theory masquerading as critical theory. But, as soon as crises become concrete, things become more difficult. There are reasons why socialists so often grasp for Keynesianism in crises. Left -Keynesian approaches do seek to implement social reforms that can improve the lives of workers and the poor. Easing the pain for the working class without confronting the ruling class is, arguably, better than not easing working-class pain at all. If someone needs a crisis to vote for investments in public transport, this is surely better than no such investments at all. For socialists in the face of actual crises, there are seldom better alternatives on the table. Even for Marxists, this tends to be the least bad option. Keynesians may find it hard to admit the big truth: that capitalism itself is the problem. But Marxists find it equally difficult to know what to do with this great truth in the midst of a crisis.
Crises create shocks in situations where people demand political action. There might be much uncertainty in the air, but something must be done. The hypothetical alternatives of allowing the economic crisis to deepen or the climate crisis to escalate are, by most people, considered worse than those offered by the powers that be. The gravity of the situation – both how serious the situation is, and how little time there is to respond to it – pushes many to search for safe havens in less radical circles. We can call this the pragmatic trap, or perhaps the Keynesian fishing net: the left is caught between different choices, all of which are calibrated to reorganise capitalism. This is just as true for economic crises as it is for ecological ones. It is in such situations that the climate-conscious left bends its neck and says yes to people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – because the alternative is Donald Trump.
On the one hand, a left that accepts Keynesianism as crisis policy is a left that keeps capitalism alive, which makes the system ready for new rounds of exploitation, accumulation through dispossession and destruction of nature. Given how often capitalism produces crises, if we do not find another approach, the left will be busy reproducing capitalism for decades and decades to come. On the other hand, a left that cannot handle the here and now of crises, that cannot speak to the social distress that crises produce and that operates only on a discursive level of revolution and smashing the system will forever be politically irrelevant. We still need another approach.
We can neither escape nor ignore the crises. I see no reason to criticize individuals or groups who try to escape capitalism, either by living ‘outside’ the system within urban centres or by moving to the countryside or into the wild. But the vast majority of workers will still be left in the coils of the crises of capitalism. As the crises of capitalism are global, they cannot merely be confronted at a local scale. There is nothing wrong with deep ecologists moving to the country and growing their own food, but this type of response will not solve the major problems in a world of 8 billion people. Local mutual aid responses to crises might ease some pain during a crisis and create community solidarity. There are many reasons to support, and indeed participate in, this type of response. But socialists must also look a few steps further. It is not only about surviving the crises; it is about stopping them.
Then there is Naomi Klein, who emphasises the need to remain calm in the face of shocks and avoid being carried away by panic.[18] This might be wise advice for some pseudo-crises or in the face of conspiracy theories. However, crises are not only discourses; they are actually existing events that shake the world. The shock is real. When people see their jobs, housing and the earth beneath them disappearing quickly, the strategy of organising the masses to keep calm will hardly win. I have a softer spot, in this respect, for Greta Thunberg's ‘act as if the house was on fire, because it is’.[19] We need to ‘panic together’, and we need organised socialist movements that bring our own shock doctrines and creative destructions into the ring.
A position that is very rare in Marxism is to try to ignore or disregard crises altogether. One exception was the Italian Communist Party in 1975, which declared that there was no need to dramatise the crises because they obscured the true state of aff airs and made it more difficult to find solutions.[20] This never proved a very productive strategy. When the crises are the state of affairs, we need to face the challenge: we must confront the crisis.
Towards a Socialist Approach
According to the Marxist economist Rikard Štajner, there are two cataclysms of mankind: war and crisis.[21] What Štajner is indicating is that we should relate to capitalist crises in the same ways that we approach war, hunger, slavery and so on. This approach I believe is fruitful. Crisis and its causes are something we must fight against.
Rather than opportunities we look forward to exploring, or moments when the fight for socialism is put on hold, the crises are problems we must solve. Štajner’s linking of war and crisis is also interesting from a historical perspective. In the 1910s, the struggle for revolution was not just a battle between workers and capitalists in workplaces. It was also crucial to ending (or preventing) capitalist/imperialist wars. Socialism in our time must be about stopping the crisis. Rather than hope and excitement, socialists should approach the crises of capitalism with rage and anger. Rather than opportunities, crises are the enemy.
Lenin said that war is not something you can end ‘at will’; similarly, crises are not something we can choose to pause under capitalism.[22] Stopping crises requires something more radical than a few regulations or a more active state. Over a hundred years ago, those who opposed war sought to expose its class nature: Who was sacrificed and who supported the war; what interests did it serve; what historical and economic conditions produced it, and how did wars reproduce capitalism? In a similar way, we must expose the role of crises under capitalism.
A socialist approach to crises cannot be based on any naïve optimism that crises are ‘opportunities’, or sweet dreams that crises will provide us with the collapse of capitalism. We must start from what normally happens during actually existing crises, and an understanding of how capitalism produces crises and crisis reproduces capitalism. In this book, we will see that it is empirically far-fetched to call the crises of capitalism opportunities for the working class or the political left , and we will discuss theoretically how this can be the case.
The crises of capitalism are not moments of truth; they are battlefields. There are reasons why (parts of) the ruling class – not workers and the poor – tend to win these battles, and, in order to do something about this, we must identify the reasons. Therefore, we will in this book also examine creative destruction, the class character of crisis, crisis as shocks and panic, the relative autonomy of the state, and the role of nationalism, racism, fascism and war. And more.
That the crises of capitalism are social paroxysms means that they necessarily exist on different levels. So, then, must any socialist approach that seeks to confront the crises. On a general level, we must understand the nature of crises, how crisis produces capitalism and vice versa. We can call this a Marxist crisis critique. Once we know the terrain, we can start articulating more concrete socialist crisis policies, which are general strategies and programmes that socialists can use to confront actual crises. But, when a crisis hits, theoretical understandings and general programmes are insufficient. There is an urgent need for very concrete action. Socialist crisis management is needed to ease social pain for the working class and to bring the class character we prefer directly into situations of shocks and panic.
The aim of this book – standing on the shoulders of giants, in dialogue with comrades – is to explore what a socialist approach to crisis can look like. The scope is limited to crisis critique, with only brief discussions about crisis policy towards the end. This means that much more work needs to be done. I hope that some readers will feel a calling.
History has shown that crises are not usually opportunities for workers and the poor; but there is no reason to bend the stick too far in the other direction. This is not an iron law. It is a tendency. Our historical mission as socialists in a burning world is to make a monumental exception to this tendency.
[1] Henryk Grossman, ‘Marx, Classical Economics, and the Problem of Dynamics’, International Journal of Political Economy 36, no. 2 (Summer 2007), p. 47.
[2] Karl Kautsky, ‘Finance-Capital and Crises’, marxists.org (1911); Daniel Bensaïd, ‘The Time of Crises (and Cherries)’, Historical Materialism 24, no. 4 (2016), p. 14; Jared Diamond, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change (London: Penguin, 2020), p. 7.
[3] See, e.g., Stuart Hall, ‘Gramsci and Us’, in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988), published on versobooks.com, 10 February 2017.
[4] Cited in Robinson Meyer, ‘Al Gore Dreamed Up a Satellite – and It Just Took Its First Picture of Earth’, Atlantic, 20 July 2015.
[5] Victor H. Mair, ‘“Crisis” Does NOT Equal “Danger” Plus “Opportunity”. How a
Misunderstanding about Chinese Characters Has Led Many Astray’, pinyin.info,
September 2009.
[6] Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx (London: Verso, 2018), ch. 14.
[7] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (Mansfield: Martino Publishing, 2013), p. 296.
[8] Friedrich Engels, ‘Engels Letter to Marx, Manchester, 4 August 1856’. Reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 40 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, e-book, 2010).
[9] See Liedman, A World to Win.
[10] Brian Milstein, ‘Thinking Politically about Crisis: A Pragmatist Perspective’, European Journal of Political Theory 14, no. 2 (2015), pp. 144–5.
[11] Peter D. Thomas and Geert Reuten, ‘Crisis and the Rate of Profit in Marx’s Laboratory’, in Riccardo Bellofiore, Guido Starosta and Peter D. Thomas (eds), Marx’s Laboratory, Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 312.
[12] Jason W. Moore, ‘Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rift s and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology’, New Geographies 6 (2014), p. 16. For other examples, see Dan Cunniah, ‘Preface’, International Journal of Labour Research 1, no. 2 (2010), pp. 5–7; Salar Mohandesi, ‘Crisis of a New Type’, Viewpoint Magazine, 13 May 2020; Bob Jessop, ‘The Symptomatology of Crises, Reading Crises and Learning from Them: Some Critical Realist Reflections’, Journal of Critical Realism 14,
no. 3 (2015), p. 246.
[13] Jason W. Moore, ‘The End of Cheap Nature: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about “The” Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism’, in C. Suter and C. Chase-Dunn (eds), Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation(Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014), p. 285. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 86–7.
[14] Kjell Östberg, ‘Den solidariska välfärdsstaten och förändringarna i den politiska dagordningen’, in Torsten Kjellgren (ed.), När skiftet äger rum: Vad händer när den politiska dagordningen ändras (Stockholm: Tankesmedjan Tiden, 2017), pp. 25–8; Kjell Östberg, Folk i rörelse: Vår demokratis historia (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2021), pp. 65, 100, 150.
[15] Maite Vermeulen, ‘Was the Earthquake the Best Thing Th at Ever Happened to Haiti?’, Correspondent, 12 January 2015.
[16] Milstein, ‘Thinking Politically’, p. 142.
[17] Costas Lapavitsas, ‘Greece: Phase Two. An Interview with Costas Lapavitsas’, Jacobin, 3 December 2015.
[18] Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (London: Allen Lane, 2023), ch. 11.
[19] Greta Thunberg, ‘Our House Is On Fire', Guardian, 25 January 2019.
[20] Rikard Štajner, Crisis: Anatomy of Contemporary Crises and (a) Theory of Crises
in the Neo-imperialist Stage of Capitalism (Belgrade: KOMUNIST, 1976), pp. 66–7.
40.
[21] Ibid., p. 190.
[22] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution’, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 [1917]), pp. 55–92.