The Global Organic Crisis: Paradoxes, Dangers and Opportunities

The capitalist world has experienced its deepest economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Paradoxically, whereas the earlier period saw the breakdown of liberal capitalism, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the Soviet alternative to liberal capitalism (the Soviet Union), today neo-liberalism and capitalist globalization still remain powerful, and apparently supreme, on the stage of world history. Despite the financial implosion on Wall Street and its "near-death experience" for financial capitalism and the G8’s somnambulant political leaders, few coherent left alternative programs have commanded sufficient political organization or popular support to mount a serious challenge or to pose credible alternatives.

So what arguments can progressive political forces use to begin to mobilize transformative resistance in ways that can give credibility to new forms of politics and society? We start with the simple observation that appearances can be deceptive and indeed this is to be expected in the present politically paradoxical global conjuncture. This conjuncture corresponds, in part, the Chinese character for crisis, a character that combines moments of danger and opportunity. It is linked to the fact that the current global political situation involves far more than a crisis of capitalist accumulation since it is pregnant with the following paradox: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

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Reflections on global organic crisis and progressive political agency

On 23 June 2009 I gave a lecture "Global Organic Crisis and Political Agency in the 21st Century" to the conference: “Shaping Europe in a Globalized World? Protest Movements and the Rise of a Transnational Civil Society” at the Universität Zürich in Switzerland.

The lecture defines two concepts – “organic crisis” and “Post-Modern Prince” – that may be useful in interpreting some of the political and broader social and ecological aspects of the present global political conjuncture.

My lecture argued that we can use these concepts to help look beyond the present crisis of global capitalist accumulation (which has resulted in a much steeper collapse of world trade, industrial production and world stock markets than in the Great Depression of the 1930s) and to probe more deeply the nature of present global situation – in all its reality, its violence, and its political potentials.

Indeed, a wide-ranging combination of economic, social and ecological crises characterizes the present global conjuncture. Its crisis is far more deep-seated than an economic depression or a cyclical crisis of capitalist economic growth. This crisis involves emerging challenges to the knowledge forms and political dominance of neo-liberal market civilization & capitalist globalization. Together what might be called these “post-modern” contemporary political and social conditions form part of the global organic crisis.

In this crisis many progressive forces are coalescing to produce a new form of political agency. Drawing on Machiavelli’s The Prince and Gramsci’s, The Modern Prince, I call this multiple and complex set of forces and movements the “Post-Modern Prince.” The “Post-Modern Prince.” draws on a lineage of progressive traditions, networks, forums and organizations that have developed over decades.

The term post-modern used here therefore both refers to some of the specific social and political conditions that characterize key aspects of the early 21st century as well as denoting some of the progressive political forces and movements which are forming to confront the organic crisis.

Indeed, despite the tendency in orthodox political discourse and the media to represent the present realities as if there is no alternative to the mainstream parties, political leaders and government regimes, the “Post-Modern Prince” signals emerging challenges to the forms of knowledge and dominant political frameworks of neo-liberal globalization and capitalist market civilization.

The PowerPoint presentation for this lecture can be downloaded here.