There is no Possible Clear-cut Answer to this Question
The coincidence is difficult to achieve. It implies the construction of convergences at the level of the entire world (‘North’ and ‘South’), i.e., an internationalism of peoples capable of defeating the internationalism of generalized monopoly capitalism.
Once again, the class struggles cannot be viewed as realities specific to the social formations that form the world system or as conflicts between the ruling classes acting on the world stage. As Marx already said, the working class (its definition is not important, be it restrictive or expanded) only exists in its conscious conflict with the bourgeois class that exploits it. Without that, the workers remain pawns controlled by the competition that pits them against one another. In the same way, the ‘national’ working classes exist only through their participation in the struggle against dominant capital on the world scale. Without that, they remain hostages manipulated by their national ruling classes involved in competition with each other.Dominant conventional thought is economistic, linear, and determinist. There is no alternative to submission to the demands of the market. Moreover, as that way of thinking repeats incessantly, ultimately it is the market that produces progress. In opposition to that, Marx analyzes the contradictions of an aging system in dialectical terms that open the way to different futures that are equally possible. The victims of a system that has become obsolete can act consciously to surpass it. That is the ‘radical path’, whether it is described as a ‘revolution’ or revolutionary advances through radical reforms in stages. Or the system can collapse solely through its own internal contradictions. That is the path of ‘selfdestruction’ whose possibility Marx does not ignore.
Faced with the challenge of an obsolete capitalism of generalized monopolies, in which the pursuit of accumulation is henceforth simply destructive of the human being and nature with ever-increasing power, the societies of the triad of collective imperialism (United States, Europe, and Japan) are currently embarked on the path of self-destruction.
The resistance and struggles of the victims, although real, remain defensive, without a conscious and positive alternative project. They live on ‘pious hope’, in the precise sense that the propositions that they support require agreement of the two parties—the victims and the dominant powers—for their implementation, in conformity with the ideological dogma of consensus. ‘Regulation of the financial markets’ belongs to this family of illusory ‘solutions’, hence, in reality, ‘non-solutions’. A radical advance demands bold ruptures: ‘nationalize the monopolies’, in the prospect of advancing socialization through democracy instead of socialization through the market. The descending spiral in which the Euro system is caught offers us an exaggerated example of this path of chaos in action, which, lacking a positive alternative, implies the ‘deconstruction’ of the established system.The United States, Europe, and Japan are involved in a descending spiral. Up to now, capital of generalized monopolies has retained the initiative and tirelessly pursued its sole objective: the growing accumulation of monopoly rent, which, in turn, produces the runaway growth of inequality in the distribution of income. Moreover, the growth of the latter itself is weakening. This inequality increases the impossibility of monopoly rent finding an outlet in expansion of the productive system and leads headlong into the growth of the public debt, which offers a possible outlet for the investment of excessive surplus profits. The austerity policies implemented do not permit reduction of the debt (which is their avowed objective) but, on the contrary, produce its continuous growth (which is the real, but unacknowledged, objective). Despite the victims’ protests, the electoral majorities (including the left) do not challenge the economy of the monopolies and consequently allow the descending movement to continue indefinitely. Naturally, the growing inequality calls for increasingly authoritarian political management internally and militarism on the world scale.
This process of the system’s degradation by the exclusive means of the development of its own internal contradictions is again strengthened on the European level and in its Euro sub-system by the constitutional adoption of the rules of a dogmatic liberalism, certainly absurd, but nevertheless completely functional for continuing economic management by the generalized monopolies.Faced with the same challenge, are the societies of the South involved in conscious struggles? Yes, but at best only partially, as in the struggles of the emergent countries against hegemonism, a move towards the reconstruction of a multipolar world, or in some struggles for democratization of society in combination with social progress, and not separate from it, particularly in Latin America.
Yet the moment is quite favorable for an offensive of workers and peoples. Reproduction of the accumulation of monopoly rent requires, in fact, pauperization of workers in the centers and of peoples in the peripheries. Conditions for constructing an internationalist front are offered on a silver platter to the workers and peoples of the whole planet. However, to take advantage of this exceptional conjuncture they must dare, dare again, always dare. That seems desperately lacking. Are radical left-wing forces going to allow this moment to pass, one that is favorable to facing tomorrow a chaos managed by who knows whom, undoubtedly the most obscurantist forces imaginable?
References
Other Readings (Other than Marx and Hobsbawm)
Arrighi, Giovanni, 2009: The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, new and updated edition (London: Verso, 2010) Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso).
Bagchi, Amiya, 2006: Perilous Passages (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Braverman, Harry, 1998: Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press).
Gunder Frank, Andre, 1998: ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Pomeranz, Kenneth, 2001: The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press).