In this review essay ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence discusses Alex Callinicos’ new book The New Age of Catastrophe. Callinicos has written a book that admits to the mind-numbing scale of the catastrophe that confronts humanity but provides enough ammunition to those who want to see a more optimistic future. Lawrence argues that Callinicos makes a strong case for socialism as the solution and mass mobilisation from below of the organised working class as the only way to achieve it.
By Peter Lawrence
Capitalism is in crisis everywhere and hanging over us is ‘the shadow of catastrophe’. The Covid-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine war, increasing inequality, rising levels of poverty between and within nations, together with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of powerful individuals and corporates are all topped by the looming catastrophe of climate breakdown. Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Catastrophe started with the First World War followed by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and ended with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Callinicos’s New Age of Catastrophe in which we have been living for at least a decade could end with destruction of life on the planet either by climate breakdown or war or both. Pessimism of the intellect indeed, knocking the spirit out of the optimistic will.
Of course, it was capitalism what did it. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets” (Marx, 1970:595). The need for capital to grow and in doing so seek more and more resources, whether precious minerals in the ground or fish in the sea, drives the capitalist system and increasingly destroys the livelihoods and health of populations around the planet and especially in the Global South. The power of global capital, and its institutional representatives such as the IMF and World Bank, to capture the state or at least heavily influence the direction of government policy, making left-wing political parties powerless to change anything, feeds a pessimism that the situation Is hopeless. However, as Slavoj Žižek proposed in 2017, having the courage to admit this hopelessness could paradoxically help generate radical change. Alex Callinicos has written a book that admits to the mind-numbing scale of the catastrophe and provides enough ammunition to those who want to see a more optimistic future.
His approach aims ‘to integrate the different aspects of our situation into a structured totality’ (p.7). As might be expected from a Marxist and a Trotskyist activist, he makes a strong case for socialism as the solution and mass mobilisation from below of the organised working class as the way to achieve it. Capitalism and its driving forces are of course at the root of all the problems that add up to the catastrophe. The book gives us some historical perspective to understand the drivers of the first age of catastrophe and the golden age before the effects of neoliberalism sent us into the new age. This is followed by chapters on the environmental crisis, the global economic situation, the geopolitics of a multipolar world, the different directions, both right and left, of the popular reaction to imperialism and racism and economic decline, finishing with a chapter that looks to the future and for the forces that might effect radical socialist change.
At the root of the first age of catastrophe was the rivalry of different national and imperialist capitals in a globalised world of relatively free trade which ended in 1914 with a war that saw the triumph of British and French imperialism and the humiliation of Germany. This fuelled popular discontent which was harnessed in Germany and Italy by Hitler and Mussolini with consequences ending in the assertion of German imperialism and another world war. The formation of the USSR and the rise of Japan together with the eventual realisation in the US that the future of Europe and the Far East was a matter concerning its own imperialist interests created after 1945 a bi-polar world. The USand USSR mapped out their spheres of influence while the ‘Global South’ formally decolonised and tried to resist the hegemony of their previously imperial rulers by asserting their non-alignment with the imperialist blocs and also playing off one bloc against the other, with the Soviet bloc and the emerging China offering material support to many of the liberation movements in Asia and Africa. That bi-polar world continued through the post-war boom and the relatively stable world economy of Keynesian economic policy and international cooperation until the contradictions of the system resulted in the collapse of the post war settlement. A ‘neoliberal’ world of freer trade, floating exchange rates, financial liberalization developed, becoming another turn of the century’s globalisation, this time organised into trading blocs regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and dominated by ever larger and concentrated global financial and producer corporates.
The big difference this time around is the climate emergency. Fossil capitalism, as Callinicos argues, is the main driver of ‘the progressive destruction of nature’ (p. 30). Fossil extraction is at the centre of the system of capital accumulation and fossil producers with their investment in exploration financed by the banks have a strong hold on governments whose environmental policies inevitably reflect the producers’ interests. There are geopolitical consequences to both global warming and the rise of the production of renewables. Global warming opens the Arctic region both commercially and militarily expanding geopolitical rivalries while the rush to renewables puts China in a powerful position as a manufacturer of batteries and solar cells and a miner of the minerals needed to produce them. Either way the destruction of nature is guaranteed. As Callinicos points out, Marx argued that capitalist agriculture had a deteriorating effect not only on the workers but also on the soil. Of course, chemicals and mechanisation helped to slow down or even reverse both processes but with unintended consequences for the pollution of rivers and seas from the resulting seepage of chemical fertilisers, as well as the desertification effects on the soils and their capacity to hold water because of the over-tilling of the fields.
Covid-19 and the war on nature
The effects of human activity on nature were no better demonstrated than by Covid-19. Callinicos has an especially interesting section on the effects of the ‘disgusting’ (Marx’s word) factory farming in the 19th century let alone its much more intensive versions that followed. He references the work of the epidemiologist, Rob Wallace, who has rooted Covid-19 in climate change causing some animal life to cluster close to areas of human settlement thus increasing the risk of disease spreading from animals to humans, as it appears to have done in this case. The immediate response to the virus induced pandemic was to find a vaccine and this bring us neatly back to corporate capitalism and the race between the corporates of big Pharma to develop an effective vaccine.
The story of its roll-out is a perfect example of corporate greed, state capture and global inequality. Big Pharma corporates like Pfizer made a fortune out of the vaccine because they sold at a profit, unlike the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine which was sold at cost (although not for long thanks to Bill and Melinda Gates, as Callinicos explains). Not surprisingly the supposedly less effective Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine was soon pushed out probably because of the bigger corporates’ capture of the state health services.
The greater level of inequality that has developed both nationally and globally resulted in greater infection levels nationally the lower household income and internationally, the poorer the country the less the availability of the vaccine. The effects of the measures to protect people from the virus inevitably involved much tighter control of their lives, especially during the lockdowns, and no more explicitly than in China, whose policy of zero transmission did effectively keep people locked up. This greater degree of government control has been meat and drink to conspiracy theorists but is more likely to be another example of bureaucratic authoritarian tendencies which have since been reversed or at least limited by an assertion of popular action, even in China, or even ignored as in the infamous case of the British Prime Minister at the time.
Falling rates of profits
Events such as the Covid pandemic have challenged the neoliberal orthodoxy’s support for a minimal state and led to a form of demand management governed by the central banks (‘technocratic Keynesianism’): maintaining low interest rates and printing money (‘quantitative easing’) to maintain economic activity at a level that maintains the public services essential to private sector activity and to keeping the people who provide the labour for these services fed and watered.
The pandemic, and now the Russia-Ukraine war have obscured a deeper crisis for capitalism and that is our old friend the falling rate of profit. Relying on the work of Michael Roberts, Callinicos shows how the decline in the global profit rate appeared in the 1960s and was followed by a crisis of profitability in the 1970s, a recovery in the neoliberal 1980s,1990s and early 2000s followed by the financial crisis of 2007-8 and a fall in the rate of profit in the following decade before the next shock of Covid-19.
Of course, these global rates of profit do not tell us anything about their distribution. But we know that banks and financial institutions have become powerful actors across all global corporates driving the shift of economic activity and especially manufacturing activity to areas where labour is cheaper and where productivity is high thanks to the use of the latest advanced technology.
As Callinicos points out, the engine of capitalism has become the credit supplied by the banks, apparently unlimited until the economic downturn causes loan defaults, as happened in 2007-8. Then the interdependence of financial institutions is exposed causing the weaker ones to fail, threatening the whole system. it was the technocratic Keynesian rescue of the money markets by the central banks which ensured the system’s liquidity and continued credit creation, essential for the system of capital.
Does technocratic Keynesianism mean the end of neoliberalism? This is the question raised by Callinicos in concluding his chapter on the economics of the new age of catastrophe. The answer is complicated. In laying out this complexity he sees neoliberalism as comprising a specific conception of freedom: strengthening institutions to preserve markets, enabling capital accumulation to thrive and ensuring the protection of the accumulating capitalist class. It is also a set of monetarist economic policies which theoretically control the quantity of money supplied so maintaining a stable price level.
However, in practice what is really controlled is the demand for money, chiefly using the interest rate. In addition, reducing government expenditure, privatising public services, and increasing unemployment to dampen wage growth eventually brought inflation under control but also weakened the trades unions especially when anti-strike legislation was added to unemployment.
While neoliberalism appeared to call for a smaller state, all of this required much more state intervention to make sure that markets worked ‘efficiently’ restoring higher rates of profit. However, the emergence of technocratic Keynesianism does suggest a possible pushback against neoliberalism with an increasingly key role for the state in getting economies performing again. As Callinicos argues, this pushback will only be successful if it comes from below (and the increasing strike activity that we now see especially in the Global North gives some hope of this happening), otherwise, neoliberal policies will continue to impoverish the working class and the precariat.
Imperialism and war
The climate emergency and the perpetual economic crisis could be made irrelevant by the catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust. After 1945, when the US’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki introduced us to weapons of mass destruction, the USSR’s development of its own bomb produced the deterrent of mutually assured destruction. It did not stop US imperialism from asserting its hegemony over much of the world, especially that previously controlled by British and French colonialism. The long post-WW2 boom in the Global North and the formation and expansion of what became the European Union (EU) challenged but did not undermine US hegemony, secured through NATO and other such alliances around the globe, its military power challenged in Indochina but re-asserted in the two Iraq wars and in Afghanistan. It promoted economic globalization, including bringing China into the WTO to ensure that it played by the rules.
Yet such an inclusionary policy was not offered to Russia, a country historically divided between those who looked to Europe and those to Asia. Getting Russia into NATO and the EU would have not only furthered the interests of global capital but also challenged China. The likely outcome now, especially given the Ukraine war, is greater cooperation between China and Russia with the former moving west and further challenging Washington’s unipolar view of the world. However, as Callinicos also notes, the war has brought Europe and the US closer together, not only in terms of boosting and expanding NATO, but also in reorientating Europe’s dependence on gas from Russia to the US.
While an economic bloc that allied Europe with Russia and China would have been a major threat to US hegemony, the rise of China itself to the status of a world power is now seen as the greater one. As Callinicos notes, globalization was supposed to make these kinds of national rivalries redundant as the economic interdependence between the major powers solidified with the rise of global capital. But once such factors as the concentration of the manufacture of semi-conductors in Taiwan and of the special gases required for them found abundant in Ukraine, these countries become strategically critical for the major economies. When China regards Taiwan as one of its lost provinces, such economic and geopolitical factors lead to the same result: a potential military conflict over resources.
Callinicos is right to argue that ‘the world is becoming a much more dangerous place’ (p.114). He is also right to point to the way in which the US and its allies are increasingly describing current conflicts as a battle between liberal democracy and autocracy, taking us back to the discourse of the Cold War.
The rise of the far-right
There is certainly a struggle within bourgeois democracies to preserve hard won liberties against the growing threat of the far-Right. As Gramsci famously wrote of times like ours, they are moments of the old dying and the new unable to be born resulting in the appearance of ‘a variety of morbid symptoms’ (quoted on p. 119). One of those symptoms is the rise of the populist Trumpian far-Right in the US threatening liberal democracy. He shows the way in which this far-Right has succeeded, with a strong overlay of racism, in mobilising those who have suffered from neoliberalism against the political ‘elite’, migrants and refugees. Callinicos’s argument is that the neoliberal order is disintegrating and that ‘workers’ struggles from below’ are as yet not powerful enough to offer the alternative to produce the socialist ‘new’ which leaves that space open to the vacuous promises of the far-Right. Taking a more global view Callinicos joins up developments in countries like the Philippines, Brazil, India, and Egypt where a pattern emerges of failed neoliberal policies combined with corruption and mismanagement, resulting in new right wing or military governments riding on the back of the harnessing of cultural nationalism and involving especially anti-Muslim tropes.
Callinicos’ survey of the far-Right in Europe shows it following a similar path combining racism and the xenophobia of Euroscepticism, most obviously in the UK where the mainstream Conservative Party in an act of self-preservation adopted some of the policies and attitudes of the far-Right parties especially by committing to Brexit. As Callinicos notes, while these parties have been successful at harnessing popular discontents, they do not have coherent economic policies to substitute for the neoliberal ones.
For those who often feel that we are back in another version of the 1920s and 1930s, he points to the differences, the most obvious being the absence of a powerful and revolutionary left against which the far-Right can mobilise, and the current far-Right’s lack of an alternative economic strategy to neoliberalism while the Italian fascists in the 1920s and the German Nazis in the 1930s had very clear policies of state intervention and direction of the economy, geared to re-armament. Nonetheless the levels of discontent are such that they offer the far-Right significant political influence with the possibility of fascist elements gaining some purchase as political movements. Callinicos illustrates these tendencies with a discussion of the far-Right in the US, rather surprisingly described as the possible weak link in advanced capitalism.
The notion of the most advanced and powerful state in the world being the weak link is prompted by the far-Right’s attack on the Capital in January 2021. Callinicos identifies three ‘determinations’ of this event: first, the effects of neoliberalism, especially the contrasting fortunes of the large corporations with their huge profits and excessively rewarded senior executives, and the large section of the population on falling or stagnant real wages or without jobs; secondly, political structures such as the Electoral College system of choosing a president that can result – as in the case of Trump – in the loser of the popular vote being elected, a Senate which under represents the more populous states; and thirdly, the racial divide which sees Afro-Americans over-represented at the lower end of the income distribution, and most evidently over-represented in police shootings.
Callinicos, relying heavily on the analysis of the US Marxist, Mike Davis, explains the social basis of Trumpism, a capitalist class based on ‘real estate, private equity, casinos, and services ranging from private armies to chain usury’ (p. 135). Trump is able to present those at the bottom of the income distribution as the victims of a political elite more concerned with helping other countries than its own.
As Callinicos suggests, Trump’s relationship with the large US corporates is ‘ambivalent’ but policies of low taxation and less regulation did them no harm although the election of Biden has re-instated a government with which corporate America can happily do business. However, the US is still a divided country with the possibility of a civil war breaking out especially in the wake of major climate disturbances. Even if Trump is not allowed to stand again as a presidential candidate, Trumpism will remain and as the number of unemployed and the unorganised working class grows, support from these lumpen elements will help Trumpism to grow. The book might have said more about working class support for the right both now and during the Nazi era and what the organized working class could have done and can do to deal with this.
Where to from here?
So where does the Left go from here? What indeed is to be done? In his final chapter, Callinicos gathers Raymond Williams’ ‘resources of hope’ as he again turns to Gramsci’s notion of the ‘antagonistic forces’ as the agent of radical change. He roots them, as did Gramsci, in the organized working class, but recognizing that this class today has been subjected to a series of defeats under neoliberalism, discusses the possibilities of the current struggles over gender and race as ones that might help to form ‘the new working-class subject of emancipation’ (p. 151).
The discussion of gender politics focuses on the emergence of the trans movement asserting the right to choose one’s own gender. This view has been subject to critiques from critical feminists as well as the political right and far-Right. What they have in common is their separation of the biological from the social yet as Callinicos argues, these are inextricably interconnected. The importance of the reproduction of labour power, not to mention the power of religion renders the family as the norm and preferences heterosexual relationships. But other reproductive family structures can exist with same-sex and transgender relationships thanks to progress in medical science, this allowing for gender re-assignment. All these developments challenge not only the gender norms which have been so important to the reproduction of labour power under capitalism, but capitalism itself.
The movements against racism which as Callinicos notes, is ‘institutionalized throughout global capitalism’ (p.158), are also routes through which activists can move from a specific campaign to a more generalized struggle against the system. People of colour’s long experience of precarious living standards is now spreading to other (especially professional) sections of the working class who have never lived precariously or seen a decline in living standards. The globalization of production creates a coincidence of interest between the working class of the Global North and South, the world working class of the Communist Manifesto which ‘could thus begin to emerge as a collective agent in this age of catastrophe’ (p.163).
The digital age presents all kinds of possibilities for planning democratically rather than by the relatively rigid past attempts at central planning under state socialism (Callinicos’s term given his political allegiance is ‘state-capitalism’). Marx, he reminds us, conceived socialism as self-emancipation, so that planning has to be a bottom-up process. Digital platforms such as Amazon and Facebook collect enormous amounts of data on individual consumption behaviour that could be fed into a process of negotiation with production units, led from below. Above all, planning will require, nationally and globally, managing the climate emergency: markets and the quasi-markets of carbon trading won’t do it.
Callinicos consults a wide range of literature on the subject, though surprisingly does not refer in this instance to the work of Paul Mason on the ways in which capitalism is already indicating its post-capitalist future again largely through digitalization and the reduction in the possibilities of realizing profits as the prices of so many goods and services trend to zero, and in the case of some digital services are already free.
Where Callinicos does reference different work by Mason, it is in the final section of the book where he argues strongly against a popular front style coalition of Left and Centre to combat the resurgence of the far-Right and the prospect of fascism. He argues, contrary to Mason, that the original popular front was not successful in defeating fascism in the 1930s. He points out that reference to class interests is crucial to understanding effective alliances: the Left largely comprised the organised working class while the liberal (bourgeois) centrists represented sections of capital whose interests were fundamentally not those of the organised working class. The defence of bourgeois democracy requires solid class action by the organised Left, not collaboration with the class enemy. Only a United Front, unifying left political forces connected to the organised working class, can be successful in mobilizing opposition to fascism to confront it everywhere it appears.
Organized resistance to capitalism building to a socialist revolution is the only viable alternative to the catastrophe that lies in wait. Although Callinicos presents us with a Trotskyist Marxist view of successful political activity, you do not have to be a Trotskyist to agree with most of his analysis. This is a book that tries to put together the different strands of our current predicament into a coherent and intelligible whole and does it in a highly readable way. The future may look pessimistic, but this book gives us plenty of material to feed the optimistic will.
Alex Callinicos’ The New Age of Catastrophe can be ordered here.
Peter Lawrence is an editor and founding member of ROAPE, he is also an Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at the Business School at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain, and India.
Featured Photograph: The climate emergency is dramatically impacting Africa (25 October 2018).
