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-points, 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 movements 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.
Set image: Oceti Sakowin Camp in the early morning, Cannon Ball, North Dakota, USA, January 2017. Licensed by: Adobe Stock.
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