How to imagine the world after neoliberalism

2023-03-13T10:43:11.479Z

Socialism is not the only possible alternative. Thinking in binary terms does not help to think about realistic scenarios

Employees at a cotton mill in China in January 1953.Michael Nicholson (Corbis/Getty Images)

On the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, a much-listened academic in the White House, enthusiastically proclaimed that history was over.

Capitalism had defeated Soviet socialism and was destined to prevail as the only system, hand in hand with the democratic values of an open society.

The trauma of September 11, 2001 and the bloody decade that followed did not substantially shake this faith in the fulfillment of a universal destiny.

We Westerners, and especially our American friends, still like to believe that this is the case: that the Chinese economy is becoming more and more like ours, that Indian nationalism is a temporary deviation from the norm, that Russia will sooner or early in a liberal economy and democracy.

But the reality is different,

and this was clear long before the Ukrainian war.

It is not only the strategic alliances of the new geopolitics that suggest it.

Technological exchanges, energy supply networks, the direction of trade flows: everything indicates that we are advancing towards a new division of the world into blocks, which tend to accentuate their differences.

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Leaving aside the question of the relationship between capitalism and democracy, which remains controversial, the question we should ask ourselves in this time of crisis of liberal globalization is what has made capitalism thrive over the last two centuries, not just keeping it alive , but also exporting it to the rest of the world.

Was it its superior economic efficiency, as its advocates claim?

Or was it rather his ideological force, as some of his critics claim?

Neither of these explanations seems convincing.

Capitalism is, above all, a social system.

It has its roots in the combination of individualism and structural inequality that has characterized Western societies since the Modern Age.

It was reproduced from those pre-existing conditions and spread to Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a precise historical phase—the era of industry and empire—characterized by the hegemony of the Atlantic powers.

In order to understand capitalism, no matter how one thinks, one must necessarily start from Karl Marx, his deepest connoisseur.

Marx had two fundamental merits.

The first was to realize that it is not a natural system, but a historical construction.

"Capital," he wrote, "is not a thing, but a social relationship between people mediated by things."

This somewhat hermetic phrase simply means that capitalism, although founded on the appropriation of material goods, is essentially a set of power relations that change over time.

The second fruitful insight of Marx is that capitalism is unstable because it is a system oriented to profit and not to the satisfaction of needs.

A concrete example, and still of dramatic relevance,

of the gap between the logic of profit and needs is the scourge of unemployment.

What is unemployment if not a senseless waste not only of labor force and education, but of life projects and human aspirations?

However, the German thinker was somewhat hasty in predicting the end of the era of capital, first of all underestimating the ability of society to activate compensatory mechanisms such as public intervention in the economy.

Furthermore, with some optimism, he assumed that exploitation and class conflict would automatically be resolved with the overcoming of capitalism.

the German thinker was somewhat hasty in predicting the end of the era of capital, first of all underestimating the capacity of society to activate compensatory mechanisms such as public intervention in the economy.

Furthermore, with some optimism, he assumed that exploitation and class conflict would automatically be resolved with the overcoming of capitalism.

To be fair, Marx was not the only prophet to err on the side of impatience.

Around 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes declared himself convinced that within 100 years we would free ourselves from the tyranny of money and finally dedicate ourselves to the good life.

Free from material worries, we would have plenty of free time to nourish ourselves with knowledge and beauty.

Keynes was a left-liberal.

But even thinkers far to the right of him were willing to swear that capitalism was producing its own gravediggers.

Also in the interwar period, Joseph Schumpeter, champion of the market economy, from his chair at Harvard pointed out the subversive power of intellectuals, parasites of society in his opinion envious of the success of entrepreneurs, the true producers. of wealth.

And what about Friedrich Hayek, the father of neoliberalism?

He was willing to swear that soon any differences between economic systems would be lost in an indistinct magma: capitalism and socialism would converge under the umbrella of totalitarian economic planning.

However, he forgot to reflect on the responsibility that capitalism had in causing the First World War and the Great Depression, without which the poisoned fruit of fascism would undoubtedly have been much less palatable.

Considering the damage it does when left unregulated, one can hardly argue that capitalism is an efficient system.

But it is also true that it is not easy to get rid of, at least in this part of the world, and even when that happens, socialism would not be the only possible alternative, nor perhaps the most probable.

Thinking in binary terms, ultimately, does not help to imagine realistic scenarios.

Now, those who care about social justice should consider that capitalism itself is not a monolith, but has existed in different forms, some compatible with a radical social democracy.

A multipolar world would offer greater freedom to experiment with new solutions.

I like to think that the south will be the protagonist of the new stage;

For example, Latin America, where the conditions could be created to definitively abandon the neoliberal model and embark on the path of self-determined and participatory development.

But Europe would also do well to wake up from Fukuyama's dream if he does not want to be late for his appointment with history.

This text is an essay written by

Francesco Boldizzoni

(Pavia, Italy, 1979), Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and member of Clare Hall (University of Cambridge), adapted from a chapter of his recent book

Imagining the end of capitalism.
Intellectual misadventures from Karl Marx

, from Ediciones Akal, which is published this March 13.

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