The
volume starts off with a historical comparison with another age of catastrophe,
the period of 1914 to 1945 characterised by two inter-imperialist wars, a
severe economic recession as well as revolution and counter-revolution. In
Chapter 2, similar to other Marxists (e.g. Carchedi and Roberts 2023),
the ecological crisis, or biological crisis in Callinicos’ words, is right at
the beginning of analysing today’s age of catastrophe. ‘The main driving force
of catastrophe today’, Callinicos writes, ‘is the progressive destruction of
nature by fossil capitalism’ (P.30). Clearly, human relations with nature and
the disastrous impact of capitalism on the environment are no longer merely an
afterthought in Marxist thinking. Economic stagnation and the permanent crisis
management of global capitalism from the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 to the
Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 is discussed in Chapter 3, while increasing
geo-political confrontations between the USA and China as well as the war in
Ukraine are dealt with in Chapter 4.
In Chapter 5, Callinicos looks at today’s revolution and counter-revolution including the Zapatista revolt in the early 1990s and the Arab uprisings in 2011 amongst others. Here, he also discusses the rise of the far right. Importantly, although the far right managed to attract many disillusioned voters, it does not offer its own alternative. ‘While the contemporary far right benefits from disaffection with neoliberalism, it lacks a distinctive economic programme’ (P.129). It is in this respect that the left must do better. As Callinicos writes in Chapter 6, ‘only a socialist revolution that ends capitalism can eliminate the threat of fascism’ (P.168). In order to do so successfully and in contrast to autonomist Marxists, the left has to seize political and thus state power in Callinicos’ understanding.
The
breadth and depth of the book is clearly impressive. And yet, there are
especially two conceptual shortcomings, which limit the insights of Callinicos’
discussion. First, as Adam D. Morton and I already pointed out several years
ago, Callinicos’ understanding of international relations is state-centric and
based on a focus on the external relations between the political and the
economic (Bieler
and Morton 2018: 109-11). Geopolitical tensions are, thus, understood as
the result of a ‘fusion of economic and geopolitical rivalries’ or the
‘interweaving of economic competition and interstate rivalries’, i.e. a
situation when political and economic powers overlap within distinct
nation-states. This completely misunderstands the novel role of large
transnational corporations in charge of global value chains and the
organisation of production across borders. Their internal relations with states
are crucial for any analysis, but simply understanding them according to the
national territory, in which they are domiciled (PP.36), misses these novel
dynamics, which are rather different from the period of 1914 to 1945.
The
shortcomings of Callinicos’ state-centric approach are most visible in his
(mis-) understanding of the European Union as ‘constitutionally still primarily
a confederation of states; … dependent on the capabilities and political will
of the most powerful member states’ (P.73). Or, as he writes elsewhere, ‘the
European Union is a cartel of states with differing interests and, like states
in other regions, they too feel contradictory pulls from the Unites States,
China, and Russia’ (P.103). Of course, the EU is not a state like the USA or
China, but the way sovereignty is shared and pooled in some areas make it a
powerful actor at the international as well as European level, which cannot be
captured in Callinicos’ state-centric understanding. Internationally, for
example, the EU in its ‘free trade’ policy has been a major actor of enforcing
neo-liberal restructuring elsewhere in the world (Bieler 2013).
Within Europe, the EU especially with its New Economic Governance mechanisms since
the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 has become highly influential in pushing
member states towards further commodification of services (Erne et al forthcoming).
To explain this by emphasising the particular interests of various larger
member states is impossible.
Finally,
Callinicos does not overlook the importance of race and gender in shaping
today’s crises. Similar to his focus on the external relations between the
political and the economic, however, here too the emphasis is placed on
external relations with race and gender being separated out as terrains of
contestation (PP.149-63). This allows him to reflect on ‘how the contestation of gender and
“race” in contemporary ideologico-political conflicts might contribute to the
formation of a new working-class subject of emancipation’ (P.151).
Nevertheless, it precludes a more detailed analysis of how racist and
patriarchal forms of oppression are an intimate part of capitalist accumulation
itself, internally related to the exploitation of wage labour.
In
sum, an impressive book, no doubt, but Callinicos seems to be stuck in his conceptual
understandings and here especially a focus on external relations between
different things and phenomena, which ultimately limits the power of his
empirical insights.
11 March 2024
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