In
my latest open access article Confronting Multiple Global Crises:
a political economy approach for the 21st century, published in the
journal Globalizations, I discuss the essential features of a political
economy approach, which facilitates the conceptualisation of the internal
relations between the current, multiple global crises including a crisis of
global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global
gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global
ecology.
Based
on the philosophy of internal relations, I make three claims in this article.
First, we need a historical materialist approach to comprehend the historical
specificity of capitalism. Unlike mainstream approaches, which uncritically
take the separation of the political and the economic, the state and market as
ahistorical starting-point, a historical materialist approach enquires why it
is that these two spheres appear to be separate within capitalism. Through a
focus on the way production is organised around wage labour and the private
ownership or control of the means of production in capitalism, it becomes clear
that formally ‘free’ labour is economically, but not politically coerced into
selling its labour power. Otherwise, workers are unable to reproduce themselves
considering that they do not own the means of their own reproduction. Of
course, the political underpins the economic internally in that the state
ensures private property, for example, but the appearance is nonetheless that
the economic and the political are two independent spheres.
Second,
I argue that we need an expanded conceptualisation of capitalist accumulation,
understanding that capitalist reproduction depends not only on the exploitation
of wage labour in the sphere of production, but equally on different forms of
expropriation in the sphere of social reproduction. This allows us to
incorporate in our analysis the unpaid labour often carried out by women in the
sphere of social reproduction or by racialised modern day slavery. The ongoing
expropriation of Indigenous land and the relentless expansion into nature, all
for the purpose of maximising profits and sustaining capitalist accumulation,
is also understood.
Third,
to reveal the internal relations between these different crises, we need to
focus on class struggle in our analysis, defining both class struggle and
labour movement broadly when doing so. Thus, it is not only struggles at the
workplace over pensions, pay and working conditions, but equally struggles for
access to healthcare, potable water, equal human rights and against land
expropriation and environmental destruction, which have to be analysed as class
struggle. Equally, it is not only workers, a privileged subject, and their
trade unions, who constitute the ‘labour movement’. Environmental movements,
feminist groups, social movements, citizens committees and others are also part
of the wider ‘labour movement’. Ultimately, any contestation of capitalist
accumulation is part of class struggle and any group involved in resisting
capitalist exploitation is part of the labour movement.
Class
struggle, as always, is open-ended. With far-right political parties and
populist politics coming to power in many parts of the world, a progressive way
out of crises is by no means guaranteed. Hence, the
task of a political economy approach for the 21st century is to
reveal the internal relations of exploitation and expropriation through a focus
on related class struggles and broader alliances across the spheres of
production and social reproduction. It, thereby, provides the basis for
potentially contributing to the development of progressive alternatives.
Andreas Bieler
31 January 2025
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