The conjucture of the first few decades of the twenty-first century witnessed Alex Callinicos usefully mapping the contours of imperialism as set out in his pivotal book Imperialism and Global Political Economy. As somewhat of a successor text, this is now accompanied by The New Age of Catastrophe that seeks to address today’s conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis), the conditions of which are situated as immanent to capitalism as a totality. The creativity of Imperialism and Global Political Economy flowed from Callinicos offering an innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin to propose a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical. The book bears repeated revisiting. Indeed, I have done so recently in an article for the pages of International Affairs (see ‘Mainstreaming Marxism’, International Affairs 99: 3, 2023). There I demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy (drawing from Nikolai Bukharin) and racial capitalism (drawing from C.L.R. James) have been silenced by mainstream imitators (namely, Kenneth Waltz and E.H. Carr). There is also much wider engagement with Callinicos’ theorising on capitalism and the state-system in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-authored with Andreas Bieler.
As an ‘antechamber’ to the present, the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The New Age of Catastrophe offers a theoretical framing of the argument by recovering and reasserting a discussion of totality as a category in order to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Drawing from Lukács and others the method of totality is legitimised in order to constitute capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts. As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, ‘even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality’ (p. 8). This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as emblematic of a dialectical critique of the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge by mainstream perspectives.
In The New Age of Catastrophe Callinicos endeavours to engage with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments that encompass the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning gender and race as intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms). The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments in the present conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis of capitalism.
The main theme to pick up on for the rest of this review is the recognition of the conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism and how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics is treated in the book. Throughout The New Age of Catastrophe the long-term trend of neoliberal authoritarianism is addressed, whether it be through some of the earlier work on authoritarian statism on the eve of the neoliberal era (drawing from Nicos Poulantzas), the COVID-19 pandemic (drawing from Paul Passavant), or the rise of the far-right under neoliberal authoritarianism (drawing from Priya Chacko and Kanishka Jayasuriya). One conclusion, for Callinicos, is that ‘all advanced capitalist states are structurally racist’ (p. 134). The final chapter of the book attempts to assess the intersection of race and class through movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), or how class antagonisms are interwoven with race and gender. ‘The BLM explosion is suggestive of how the racial fracture increasingly condenses all the antagonisms of contemporary society’ (p. 161).
My main frustration with the conjunctural framing is the omission of two crucial sources. The first is from the conjuncture of yesterday; the second is from the ongoing conjuncture of today. It was Stuart Hall that so eloquently drew from both Althusser on conjunctural analysis and Poulantzas on authoritarian statism to move from the abstract to the concrete in tracking the Thatcher counter-revolution. Most crucially, the creativity of Hall was to display how authoritarian statism (from above) was secured at the base by a complementary shift to authoritarian populism (from below). This tracing of the lineaments of the “great moving right show” began with Hall’s political interventions as early as 1979 to detail authoritarian populism and how it built support for attacks on social welfare by renewing personal responsibility for effort and reward, creating the notion of the over-taxed individual, purveying anti-statist elements based on entrepreneurship and competition, and propagating spurious notions of “rolling back the state” while increasing state power through law and order and policing the crisis. Central to this authoritarian populism was an incipient racism that the media reproduced in the very “whites of the eyes” of British society. The wealth of these essays are collected in a multi-volume series of writings published by Duke University Press.
Fastforward to the ongoing conjuncture today and it has been Ian Bruff who, in the most original way, has contributed to analysing the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, drawing from Hall and Poulantzas. In a break-out 2014 Rethinking Marxism article (now with nearly 20,000 article views), Bruff was the first to trace in the authoritarian neoliberalism debates ‘the reconceptualisation of the state as increasingly nondemocratic through its subordination to constitutional and legal rules’ in moving away from consent to ‘favouring instead the explicit exclusion and marginalisation of subordinate social groups’. This has since been expanded and refined across multiple publications not least in the volume States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Discipline of Capitalist Order edited by Cemal Burak Tansel (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and a special issue of Globalizations, (2019) where attention is refocused on the question of state power and the pre-emptive discipline of authoritarian neoliberalism to limit spaces of popular resistance. My point here is that the Hall-Bruff axis and their analyses of the slide from authoritarian populism to authoritarian neoliberalism whilst addressing logics of racial oppression goes to the heart of the present conjuncture and its crisis conditions. To miss this scholarship gives the sense that the contribution of The New Age of Catastrophe is seemingly all a bit too post festum, dealing with the results of the polycrisis of neoliberalism ready to hand whilst neglecting the collective intellectual labour that has gone before it.
This review is the original longer version that was edited and cut for publication in International Affairs, 100:2, 2024.
Alex Callinicos | Mar 16 2424
It’s a great pleasure to have one’s work reviewed by so intelligent and informed a reader as Adam David Morton. Over the years we’ve had a series of amicable exchanges over different aspects of the Marxist critique of political economy. Adam’s recent article in International Affairs, ‘Mainstreaming Marxism’, which brings Nikolai Bukharin and C L R James into play with E H Carr, one of the founders of modern structural realism, seems to represent a certain convergence of perspectives. It would be boring, however, if we lapsed into unanimity, and in his review Adam raises what I would describe as some friendly criticisms of my recent book The New Age of Catastrophe. I’m grateful for the opportunity to respond here and will also comment on the criticisms made of the book by Adam’s co-thinker and collaborator Andreas Bieler.
Let me deal first with the two specific omissions for which Adam reproaches me. First, he complains that, in analysing the rise of the far right, I fail to draw on the analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ that Stuart Hall developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, I greatly admire Hall’s theoretical writings on race, and regard the collective work to which he contributed, Policing the Crisis, as one of the best products of British Marxism. Though formulated in the dog days of the Labour government under James Callaghan, the theory of authoritarian populism came into its own under the Thatcher government. And Hall certainly captures the specific ideological conjunction (summed up in the formula ‘free economy, strong state’) that characterized Thatcherism.
The fact remains that the theory of authoritarian populism (even in its richest form in Policing the Crisis) failed to capture what actually happened under Thatcher. Hall predicts the emergence of an ‘exceptional form of state’ whose repressive power would be directed primarily at Black youth alienated from the world of production. But the most signal deployment of coercion under Thatcher was against the 1984-5 miners’ strike whose 40th anniversary we are now remembering. Even there she benefitted from the same mechanisms of bourgeois democracy deployed against the miners in 1926 – in particular, the refusal of effective solidarity by the leaders of the trade unions and the Labour Party.
Moreover, when confronted by inner-city risings in 1980-1 and 1985, which involved white as well as Black youth, Thatcher responded certainly with repression (including police killings and frame-ups), but more strategically with efforts at incorporation that involved putting resources into upscaling Black neighbourhoods, seeking to fragment the racially oppressed by interpellating them under particularistic ethno-religious identities, and promoting what later would become known as multiculturalism. A Sivanandan, a trenchant critic of Hall’s vapid celebrations of neoliberal ‘New Times’, shows an acute understanding of this transformations (see Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism [London: Verso, 2019] ch. 4). One defining feature of the present conjuncture is the breakdown of this strategy under the pressure of Britain’s participation in a succession of imperialist interventions in the Greater Middle East and the associated rise of Islamophobia as the dominant form of popular racism.
Secondly, Adam notes my failure to acknowledge the importance of the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism pioneered by Ian Bruff. Now one should always recognize one’s intellectual debts – where they exist. Of course, I’m aware of this literature, and indeed helped to organize a conference in 2016 that drew on it to make sense of the eurozone crisis. In a revealing phrase, Adam refers to the ‘ongoing conjuncture’, as if the entire period since the global financial crisis of 2007-9 is woven of the same cloth. But in The New Age of Catastrophe I’m concerned to understand how several determinations – the accelerating destruction of nature that underlines the pandemic as well as climate change, the failure to overcome the GFC and its consequences, the opening of increasingly intense inter-imperialist competition, and the rise of the far right – have combined to create a new conjuncture. No doubt the problematic of authoritarian neoliberalism can contribute to what Foucault would call the genealogy of our present.
But it would be a mistake to characterize the present conjuncture as a continuation of authoritarian neoliberalism. First of all, this would be to ignore the confused, partial, and hesitant moves beyond neoliberalism that mainstream policy makers have been forced to attempt – first through the central banks’ resort to quantitative easing, and then in the policies intended to rebuild US industrial competitiveness and sustain income and employment under both Trump and Biden. Secondly, one of the driving forces in the growing electoral power of the far right has been a reaction to precisely the kind of imposition of austerity from above that Bruff seeks to diagnose, even if it has reinforced the tendency towards greater authoritarianism.
Of course, there are plenty of continuities with the recent past. The central banks reassumed their traditional role as hard-money hawks in response to the inflationary upsurge of 2021-22. Among the victims of the resulting rise in interest rates was the ultra-Thatcherite Truss government, destroyed in record time by the same combination of financial markets and the Bank of England that laid Labour governments low in the 1960s and 1970s. But it’s symptomatic that Truss is now trying to reframe her small-state Toryism in the very different political language of the Trumpist right. In any case, Poulantzas’s more general formula of ‘authoritarian statism’ – the ultimate source of both Hall’s and Bruff’s conceptualizations – seems more useful because it doesn’t tie the evident shift to greater coercion to a neoliberalism that certainly hasn’t disappeared, but is increasingly subordinated to other ideological repertoires and politico-economic strategies.
In a more general comment, Adam welcomes my stress on totalization as a method but would have liked to hear more about it. So would I, but to have provided it would have tried my publishers’ patience too far in what was intended primarily as an empirical work. Nevertheless, in the book I try to exemplify the method of totalization in counterpoint to the liberal pluralist conceptualization of the polycrisis pioneered by Adam Tooze. I say a bit more about all this in an article in the forthcoming issue of International Socialism. Suspicion of my methodological approach seems to inform Andreas’s blogpost, which, to be honest, I found a little baffling.
He criticizes me for ‘conceptual shortcomings’, ‘especially a focus on external relations between different things and phenomena’. This seems to hark back to an exchange I had with Adam and Andreas a few years ago, when they accused me of ‘state-centrism’ and lack of dialectics. Andreas repeats these charges in his discussion of my book. I don’t accept them for reasons set out when they first made them http://isj.org.uk/fighting-the-last-war/. I won’t abuse Adam’s hospitality by repeating them here. I’ll just say that recent developments have in my view confirmed my insistence that the interstate system continues to play a constitutive role in global capitalism. Andreas offers as a counter-example the EU, which is ‘a powerful actor at the international as well as European level’. This is true enough, but Andreas’s failure to address the present conjuncture is indicated by his citing in support of this claim a study of his published in 2013. Today the fact that the EU isn’t and cannot become, in the foreseeable future, a federal state is crucial to understanding why it is finding it hard to adapt to the intensification of geoeconomic and geopolitical rivalries.
Andreas also complains that in Chapter 6 of my book ‘race’ and gender are ‘separated out as terrains of contestation’, which ‘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’. He doesn’t explain why such a ‘detailed analysis’ is precluded, which is puzzling especially since my discussion makes it eminently clear that I do indeed think that ‘racist and patriarchal forms of oppression are an intimate part of capitalist accumulation itself, internally related to the exploitation of wage labour’. I didn’t try to substantiate this in great detail, partly because others have done this so well, and partly because I was focusing on something more specific, namely the role played by ‘race’ and gender in contemporary ideological-political contestation. My understanding of totalizing is that it permits precisely this kind of close-up of specific determinations (or, as in this case, aspects of specific determinations) while never losing sight of their articulation with other determinations in the totality.
But I don’t want to end up on disagreement. Andreas and Adam have co-authored an excellent chapter in the latest Socialist Register where they explain their own approach to totalization (drawing on one of my own inspirations, Fredric Jameson) and analyse the contemporary geopolitics of global capitalism. There are so many points of agreement – politically most importantly on the inter-imperialist character of the Ukraine war – that it would be churlish to accentuate differences that maybe reflect divergences in our intellectual histories rather than anything of real substance. The challenge now is how to develop this shared understanding to analyse how the genocidal war in Gaza represents a further twist in this hellish spiral of rivalry, domination, and violence.
Alex Callinicos 15 March 2024