Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Alex Callinicos - The New Age of Catastrophe

The title of Alex Callinicos' book The New Age of Catastrophe echoes Eric Hobsbawm who described the years between 1914 to 1950, containing as they did two world wars, economic crisis and the Holocaust, as the "Age of Catastrophe". Callinicos argues that we are in a comparable period, which confronts us "with a crisis of civilisation" where "the forms of living that were made possible by the development of industrial capitalism... and that became increasingly generalised in the twentieth century are no longer viable". In fact they are "hurtling us towards societal collapse."

This capitalist drive towards collapse has a number of different manifestations - economic, imperialist, environmental and disease - each of which is rooted in the system and all of them linked together. Indeed, what makes Callinicos' book so useful is that he shows how these apparently singular disasters are woven into the fabric of the system, and simultaneously how the nature of the system itself amplifies and extenuates the disaster. For instance, writing about Covid, Callinicos says:

The pandemic thus has seen a brutal struggle between life and profits. So the chances of dying from a virus that emerged in the context of the globalisation of industrial capitalism are shaped by the prevailing class structures. Capitalism features on both sides of the equation. Humankind stands before the rest of nature fractured by social antagonism. And, as we have seen in the grossly unequal allocation of vaccines, this is even more true on a global scale than it is within individual societies.

Callinicos deploys this analysis in three excellent sections looking at the economic, military and environmental crises. In these he draws on a lifetime of Marxist theoretical work and revolutionary activity, and demonstrates an enviable ability to summarise the subjects. The chapter on environmental crises focuses mostly on climate change, and Callinicos draws on the theoretical work of writers like John Bellamy Foster, Mike Davis and Andreas Malm. But he shows how this crisis, arising out of the specific development of capitalism develops along similar lines to that of the Covid example above. In locating the climate crisis as a systemic one Callinicos also makes it clear that solutions are, essentially non-solutions if they do not challenge the system that drives the problem. His conclusion is thus that a strategy to deal with climate change that relies on market mechanisms or technological deployment is "purest folly". This conclusion is echoed by a point he makes about Covid:

By offering an individualised solution, the vaccination programmes shift our attention from the need to transform our relationship with nature and to invest in better transport and healthcare; and in this way, paradoxically, they feed the anti-vax campaigns of the far right.

Mention here of the far right brings me to another key insight of The New Age of Catastrophe - Callinicos' analysis of the fascist and far-right movements. These sections are incredibly insightful, and develop an excellent earlier article on the global far right. But it is the section on the United States that I found most illuminating (and frightening). Here Callinicos describes a far-right which has largely been successful in "directing the anger generated by the ills of the neoliberal era, at least in certain sections of the population... onto a cosmopolitan elite and... onto migrants and refugees." He shows how fascist movements have grown within and from right populist movements. Often, as in the case of the United States with Trump, or Brazil with Bolsanaro, there is a interaction between the fascists movements and the populist leaderships. In the United States this has gone furthest, with the storming of the Capitol being emblematic of this (though there was a similar event in Brazil recently, presumably after the book had gone to print). Perhaps controversially, Callinicos argues that the United States is the "weak link" where fundamental social, economic and political fractures have created a cauldron for the growth of far-right policies and were most of the left has become subordinate to the Democratic Party machine. It is, Callinicos argues, possible to imagine a "violent implosion" of US society.

In the face of these threats, and the very real way that war, climate change and economic crisis will heighten the possibility of social crisis, Callinicos argues a revolutionary strategy. Here he puts a classical Marxist position of the working class as the agent of revolutionary change, and the potential for the creation out of this of a society based on the common ownership of the means of production, where production itself is planned through mass participatory democracy. But Callinicos argues this through a discussion of two "terrains of struggle" that do not immediately call to mind the organised working class - gender and race. Here he says that the contestations over these could "contribute to the formation of a new working-class subject of emancipation". These sections are excellent, and Callinicos provides an excellent summary of the movements for trans rights, Black Lives Matter and women's rights. He concludes, in a section worth quoting at length, that the convergence between movements against oppression and exploitation could lead to a "new kind of workers movement" which goes beyond narrow economic issues:

Given its nature in the twenty-first century, the working class would have to give the different oppressions that weigh down on people - especially those arising from gender, 'race', sexual orientation, and disability - a strategic importance that they have lacked in the past... This would be not merely a moral stand but a matter of self-interest, of practical necessity. This necessity is underlined by the way in which the development of globalised production networks creates an interdependence between workers in the South and in the North... In unexpected ways, the world working class, which Marx and Engels address at the end of the Communist Manifesto, could thus begin to emerge as a collective agent in this age of catastrophe.

It is a hopeful outlook as it does not offer readers any illusion that the system will fix itself, or that far-right movements will simply collapse. Instead Callinicos shows how existing movements can become the part of the revolutionary process that might create a new socialist society. But at the same time, Callinicos makes it clear - there are no shortcuts to building those movements, and there are perils and divisions. Readers however will find The New Age of Catastrophe an indispensable aid to navigate the terrain of reaction and revolution. I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

Callinicos - An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy
Callinicos - Making History
Callinicos and Simons: The Great Strike: The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons
McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Callinicos, Kouvelakis, Pradella (eds) - Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism


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