Crisis of a New Type

viewpointmag.com/2020/05/13/crisis-of-a-new-type/

May 13,
2020

Robert Delaunay, Rythme, 1934

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The future looks bleak.

Here in the United States, nursing homes are reborn as temples of death, city
governments clear trenches for anonymous corpses, farmers destroy tens of millions of
pounds of unsold food, unemployment approaches Great Depression levels, the
President encourages us to ingest poison, and politicians force Americans to sacrifice
themselves at the altar of profit.

Though perhaps avoiding the lunacy of our particularly kakistocratical administration,

those living outside the crumbling capitalist capital of the world fare little better. The
virus is killing tens of thousands, disrupting normal patterns of life, eroding entrenched
institutions, and putting into question the future of life itself.

We must be honest about the scale of today’s catastrophe, but we must also avoid
succumbing to despair. Every crisis brings not only sorrow, anxiety, and destruction, but
also opportunity for creation. And the greater the crisis, the greater the opportunity to
build something new. The unprecedented magnitude of today’s crisis offers us an equally
unprecedented chance to change the world. Here, too, we must be honest: the future
offers us hope.

After all, it’s not enough to want to change the world. Sweeping social change depends
on objective conditions that are largely out of our control. We may possess the will,
vision, and organizational capacity to make a difference, but we need an objective crisis
of the existing order, a window of opportunity, to make a breakthrough. This is not to say
that emancipatory politics is impossible during times of equilibrium, only that dramatic
systematic change happens not gradually, but only through unexpected, and often rare,
moments of rupture.

We are living through such a moment now. What lies before us is not just a pandemic,
but several nested crises. There’s of course the conjunctural crisis caused by the corona
pandemic, which no one can stop talking about. But this crisis has had such catastrophic
effects precisely because it has detonated an underlying organic crisis of neoliberalism.
Graver still, this organic crisis of neoliberalism is in turn linked with a longer-term
structural crisis of capitalist social reproduction. And this structural crisis is articulated
with an even more profound epochal crisis of planetary life itself.

Each of these has its own origins, operates on its own level, and follows its own distinct
temporality. If the corona crisis erupted last month, the organic crisis of neoliberalism
began years ago, the structural crisis years before that, and the epochal crisis decades
earlier. If the corona crisis disrupts life in the here and now, the crisis of neoliberalism
signals the collapse of a hegemonic life world, the structural crisis of social reproduction
spells the deaths of tens of millions of people without reserves, and the epochal crisis
portends the possible end of all life on the planet.

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Despite their relative autonomy, these four crises have not only drawn together, like
stellar objects ominously aligning in the night sky; they have interlocked, with each
amplifying the power of the other. The crisis of neoliberalism, for example, has made
corona all the more devastating, while the pandemic has become the way in which
neoliberalism’s organic crisis is now experienced. Or, to take another example,
neoliberalism has exacerbated the crisis of planetary life, but this epochal crisis,
especially in the form of climate instability, is now supercharging all aspects of
neoliberalism’s organic crisis.

If revolution equals objective crisis plus subjective intervention, then the first variable in
the equation has already arrived. And it’s not just any old objective crisis, but an
articulated crisis that offers us opportunities the likes of which we have never before
seen. But in order to take advantage of this unique opening, we need to have a better
sense of what exactly we are dealing with. My aim here is to offer a modest contribution
to this necessarily collective effort by making a first pass at synthetically mapping out the
anatomy of our crisis, which can in turn help us think about how we should try to
respond.

First Circle: Conjunctural Crisis of Coronavirus

The origins of this most immediate crisis are still shrouded in mystery. It seems that a
particularly nasty member of the coronavirus family somehow infected someone
sometime somewhere back in 2019.

Like its origins, there’s still much we don’t know – why some feel mildly ill while others
crash and burn, why some suffer diarrhea while others lose their sense of taste, or while
some appear asymptomatic while others get reinfected. But what we did know from the
start is that COVID-19 is highly contagious, it’s more fatal than the seasonal flu, and it
escapes any known vaccine.

Although entirely predictable, the pandemic caught Americans entirely unawares. Barely
giving the virus much thought, other than to maybe crack a joke or two, most people
simply carried on with their normal lives, encouraged in this by their representatives,
both Democrat and Republican, who failed to take it seriously.

When the pandemic ripped across the world, it found the United States entirely
unprepared. Oblivious crowds made for perfect breeding grounds, unrestricted travel
spread the epidemic far and wide, and a vulnerable healthcare system struggled to keep
up. Hospitals didn’t have enough beds, emergency rooms didn’t have enough ventilators,
doctors didn’t have enough tests, and nurses didn’t have enough masks.

Having failed to contain the outbreak, reluctant officials were eventually forced to close
down concerts, public parks, local businesses, schools, colleges, office buildings and then
entire cities to mitigate the damage. Of course, quarantining tens of millions of workers

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unsurprisingly triggered economic meltdown. The market plummeted, banks threatened
to go under, small businesses failed, and millions lost their jobs. In about a month, a
microscopic virus paralyzed life in the most powerful nation in the world.

The corona crisis is an example of a “conjunctural” crisis: an event, sometimes

exogenous, that disrupts normal patterns of life, with unexpected consequences. We’ve
lived through many of these before, with 9/11 jumping to mind. Depending on the
precipitating event, each conjunctural crisis will necessarily disrupt life in different ways.
Whatever form they take, these kinds of events usually die down, with life eventually
returning to “normal,” but forever bearing the traces of the crisis. It’s too soon to tell
precisely what changes this crisis will bring, let alone what scars it will leave behind, but
the effects of this pandemic will undoubtedly stay with us for a long time, in our habits,
culture, social attitudes, institutions, and even in the balance of forces.

Second Circle: Organic Crisis of Neoliberalism

What has made the corona crisis all the more destructive is that it has catalyzed another,
deeper crisis.

Unlike the conjunctural crisis, we know much more about the origins of this “organic”
crisis. The story begins in the 1970s, the decade when the threads holding together the
managed capitalist system assembled after the Great Depression and the Second World
War came undone, plunging the United States into disorder.

Though liberating for some, the postwar counterculture’s glorification of drugs, free love,
and nonconformity left many others apprehensive. The wave of new social movements
not only dismantled discrimination, but challenged core assumptions about gender,
sexuality, and the family. The skyrocketing crime rate led to panic about social decay. A
deep recession terminated the unprecedented economic boom, dealing a psychological
blow to millions who had believed prosperity might last forever.

In the midst of all this, President Richard Nixon became the only President in US history
to resign the office, kicking distrust in the government to an all-time high. A year later,
and after tens of thousands of American casualties, millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian,
and Laotian lives, and billions of dollars, the Vietnam War ended in stunning defeat,
putting the future of American hegemony into question. In fact, by the end of the
decade, nearly a third of all humans lived in countries that claimed to be transitioning to
communism, leading some to speculate that the United States might lose the Cold War.

But the US was far from alone in its troubles. Because of structural commonalities, a
similar trajectory of development, a shared postwar model of managed capitalism, and
deep transatlantic connections, this crisis played out across the capitalist North Atlantic
more broadly. Although the precipitating fractures varied, and the crisis itself unfolded
somewhat differently, country after country in North America and Western Europe
experienced the 1970s as a time of great uncertainty.

What made the decade so consequential was not simply the many fractures erupting in
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every sphere of life, but their vertiginous fusion. The crisis of masculinity, to take just one
example, intersected with the recession, as resentful male breadwinners with once
steady factory jobs found themselves unemployed, while their working wives now took
charge. Although these fractures all had their own origins, rhythms, and stakes, their
contingent articulation deepened one another.

All this led Stuart Hall to diagnose the crisis of the 1970s an “organic” one. Taking a cue
from the carceral reflections of Antonio Gramsci, he argued that unlike a “conjunctural”
crisis, an organic crisis marks a generalized breakdown of the entire hegemonic system
itself. Of course, he quickly added, an organic crisis is not the same as terminal collapse.
It is simply that which reveals the limits of the existing order, shakes old assumptions,
and challenges ways of life that many once took as immutable truths. The old world is
burst open, creating an opportunity for new alternatives. There is “no destruction which
is not, also, reconstruction,” he explained.

In this way, the crisis of the 1970s, created a window of opportunity, which any social
force could take. This opening seemed to be precisely what radicals like Hall had been
waiting for all along. Since the 1960s they fought to truly change the system, and now, in
part through their own efforts, they finally had their chance. But at the very moment
when the system fell into crisis, those forces calling for radical systemic change found
themselves mired in a crisis of their own, too weak to carry the day.

As it happened, it wasn’t the radical left that mastered the crisis. Hall himself had
recognized this possibility, insisting that, the right, not the left, seemed best positioned to
seize the crisis. Admonishing his comrades who assumed that a crisis would
automatically work in their favor, he later wrote, “When the Left talks about crisis, all we
see is capitalism disintegrating, and us marching in and taking over. We don’t
understand that the disruption of the normal functioning of the old economic, social,
cultural order, provides the opportunity to reorganise it in new ways, to restructure and
refashion, to modernise and move ahead.” Crisis does not mean that the extant system
is defeated, just that it cannot continue as before, and must reinvent itself.

Since the breakdown of the 1970s was not simply an economic downturn, but a systemic
crisis touching all realms of social life, the right devised a solution that aimed not simply
to revive capitalist profitability, but to restructure everything from the family to the state
to ideology. To be clear, they weren’t following a predetermined program issued by some
singular command center. Key figures, think tanks, and institutions did recognize,
though, that there were actual problems, that different forces were improvising
solutions, and that these could be assembled into something more coherent.

In this way, the right explicitly linked the problems of the day, drawing a connection
between boosting the free market, rebuilding the family, reviving morality, restoring
imperial power, and cultivating a sense of individual responsibility. As Margaret Thatcher
explained, “It must be quite clear that the responsibility is on each of us to make the full
use of our talents and to care for our families. It must be clear, too, that we have a
responsibility to our country to make Britain respected and successful in the world. The
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economic counterpart of these personal and national responsibilities is the working of
the market economy in a free society.” In speech after speech, figures like Thatcher
would breathlessly combine all the issues, as if they were organically part of the same
project. Of course, many of these elements had been around for years, some of them
even developed by the competing system of managed capitalism itself, but their
recombination did in fact create something novel. As multi-layered as the organic crisis it
sought to address, the radical right’s solution created a new hegemonic order that we
now call “neoliberalism.”

In the same way that the crisis of the 1970s was not simply an American affair, but also a
larger regional one, so too did this particular neoliberal solution eventually take hold
across North America and Western Europe. Ronald Reagan in the United States,
Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Helmut Kohl in West Germany. Despite important national
variations, these figures actively collaborated across borders, seeing in neoliberalism a
kind of transnational solution to a transnational problem, even if couched in nationalist
language, and adapted to specific conditions. This cascading wave proved so crushing
that it compelled even ostensibly socialist figures like French President Francois
Mitterand to reverse course, and embrace some of its core tenets, such as privatization,
law and order, and Atlanticism. A new “common sense” took hold.

By the early 1990s, the triumph of the neoliberal project was complete. World socialism
was exhausted, national liberation movements destroyed, and social movements in the
North Atlantic defeated. The old anti-imperialist movements lost their bearings after the
disasters of the preceding decades, trade union leaderships sought even closer ties to
management, and what remained of black, gay, or women’s liberation struggles survived
the wave of defeat by trading their maximalist goals for better inclusion in the existing
world. As Francis Fukuyama boldly declared, the bloody ideological battles of the past
were now settled, leaving behind a sole victor – the liberal capitalist model of
development. History itself had come to a close.

Fukuyama’s hyperbole aside, it seemed that for the first time in modern history
European countries were converging: representative governments, capitalist economies,
a neoliberal life-world. The enormous divisions of the past, which once broke the
continent in half, appeared to dissolve. European integration seemed unstoppable,
peace reigned triumphant, prosperity glimmered on the horizon. With history now over,
Fukyama speculated aloud, the greatest danger that now lay ahead was nothing more
than a pedestrian boredom.

Ennui aside, the neoliberal order inaugurated a real upheaval in political life. It sapped
workers’ power, weakened the unions, and obliterated the social bases of an inherited
worker identity. It enshrined the supremacy of free market capitalism, deregulated
banks, privatized industries, and promoted entrepreneurial subjectivities. It atomized
social life, hollowed-out democratic institutions, and provoked widespread political

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disengagement. As Chantal Mouffe has argued, with all the real questions allegedly
resolved, politics ceased to be a life or death struggle between competing visions of the
future and instead became the technocratic management of things.

When she left office, a reporter once asked Margaret Thatcher what she considered her
greatest achievement, to which she replied: New Labour. “We forced our opponents to
change their minds,” she explained. The neoliberal solution became so hegemonic that
even its opponents on the left accepted its terms. One by one, across the North Atlantic,
nominally leftist parties became champions of the free market, privatization, and cuts to
social welfare. The results were sweeping, putting an end to political patterns stretching
back over a century: the political spectrum narrowed, viable political alternatives
vanished, parties fought for an ever smaller chunk of middle class voters, huge swathes
of the electorate were effectively abandoned, the working class found itself without a
logical political home, and abstention rates soared.

With “third way” parties on the left now embracing neoliberal assumptions about the
social order, the political atrophied, while the cultural hypertrophied. In the United
States, this took the form of the “culture wars,” as the neoliberal left and the neoliberal
right fought over such issues as school prayer, stem cell research, and gun control, while
both swore fidelity to the free market. This was the great triumph of neoliberalism:
becoming so commonsensical that it allowed for the proliferation of fiercely opposed
political currents – progressive neoliberals, religious conservatives, nationalist
authoritarians – that all nevertheless agreed on all the core questions about the
capitalist order.

In the first years of the new millennium, Prime Minister Tony Blair laid bare the new
reality. To those anxious about neoliberal globalization, he suggested that they “might as
well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” Neoliberalism had become as
natural as the ancient movements of the Earth, beyond the realm of human intervention.
There was, and would never be, any alternative.

But that which was as natural as the seasons itself came undone. As with most other
organic crises, the breakdown of the neoliberal life world did not stem from a single
event, but the accumulation of a series of fractures, some of which can be traced back to
the foundation of the neoliberal order itself.

Although confronting challenges from the start, the American neoliberal order
experienced some of its first enormous cracks in the early 2000s. One of the earliest
came with the Iraq War in 2003, which sent millions into the streets to protest American
imperialism. In 2005, the botched, and racist, response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the
state’s inability to ensure the well-being of its citizens. The following year, in 2006,
immigrant worker strikes signaled an upsurge in class struggle. In 2008, the recession
revealed capitalism’s failures for all to see, giving rise to a new discourse around
inequality. A political crisis followed, with the Tea Party attacking the neoliberal center
from one side in 2009, while Occupy took aim from the other in 2011. A few years later,
Black Lives Matter and a renewed feminist movement laid bare the racism and sexism
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permeating every institution of this country. In 2016, a self-described democratic socialist
called for a “political revolution,” while a billionaire television celebrity openly appealed
to white supremacy, misogyny, and law and order, shocking the world with an upset win
over the most “electable” candidate in modern history.

By the end of the decade, the United States was in a bad way. School shooters gunned
down students in classrooms, children shuddered in concentration camps at the border,
contaminated water poisoned infants, white supremacists murdered people of color in
houses of worship, political gridlock drove the government to shutdown, the Democratic
Party waged war against everyone to its left, a new socialist movement criticized
American capitalism, strikes erupted across the country, wealth inequality climbed to
new levels, the state poured trillions into an unwinnable “war on terror,” soldiers shipped
off to fight a war that started before they had been born, over 60% of Americans
reported they had no more than $1,000 in savings, more Americans died in a single year
from opiod overdose than in the entirety of the Vietnam War, suicide rates broke new
records.

The United States, in other words, was deep in crisis well before the pestilence arrived.
COVID-19 merely revealed the disaster festering below the spectacular stock market
figures. But the virus went further, not simply illuminating the rot, but setting it ablaze.
Gutted social welfare, underfunded hospitals, polluted cities, wealth inequality, private
insurance, segregated neighborhoods, food deserts, rampant poverty, domestic abuse,
widespread mental illness, structural racism, weak unions, fake news – all this made for
excellent tinder. The crisis we were already in suddenly became much worse.

The organic crisis of neoliberalism shares some similarities with one that generated this
crumbling life world decades ago. To begin with, like the 1970s, today’s crisis extends
beyond the United States, taking similar shape in the North Atlantic, albeit with different
triggers, morbid symptoms, and potential outcomes. Also like the 1970s, the crisis we are
living through today is multilayered, with fractures appearing everywhere: generational
warfare, rural and urban antagonism, political polarization, racial inequalities, economic
downturn, cultural anxieties, a public health crisis, etc. As Zachary Levenson has pointed
out, following Hall, it’s not just the deepening of these cracks, but their conjunction that
has produced a system-wide breakdown of the entire hegemonic order. Finally, as
before, today’s organic crisis is not an apocalypse, but an opening, with a whole array of
social forces jostling to take advantage of this crisis, each proposing a different vision of
the future.

Despite these parallels, the two crises differ in important ways. First, ours is not just
more severe, the stakes are much higher. Neoliberalism was more than just a new
regime of accumulation responding to a crisis of managed capitalism; it was a world that
thoroughly restructured ways of life that have existed for centuries. It obliterated
patterns of communal sociability, shaped a new sense of individualized subjectivity, and
demolished the ideas, institutions, and traditions of the historical left. Far more than

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simply offering a different kind of politics, neoliberalism radically depoliticized everyday
life itself. It’s precisely because the transformations it brought about were so profound
that neoliberalism’s crisis is now all the more unsettling.

Second, as a result, the alternatives challenging today’s besieged neoliberal order are
highly confused. With the old ideological coordinates muddled beyond recognition, social
unrest has assumed unusual forms, defying conventional classifications. Take the Gilet
Jaunes uprising in France, which breaks with all the traditional features of a leftist social
movement. It is not based in youth, students, or organized workers. Its demands are all
over the place. Its members hail from across the spectrum: anarchists, liberals, white
supremacists, libertarians, communists, nationalists. It is impossible to say whether this
is politically “right” or “left.”

In fact, neoliberalism’s world-historic project of depoliticization has made the very

language of “left” and “right,” inherited from the French Revolution, barely
comprehensible to us now, even as we freely employ it out of habit. To the degree that
these terms have any purchase today, we see not coherent political forces, but only
amorphous nebulae of political impressions. Enzo Traverso, for example, uses the term
“postfascism” to describe how today’s far right is not quite a replica of traditional fascism,
but not yet a coherent political project. This vague zone of postfascism confronts an even
vaguer web of socialist impulses. The would-be brown shirts of today wear suits while
the would-be partisans take to Twitter, both trying to figure out who they are, and what
they may become. The old political constellation, which survived several prior crises, has
finally lost its meaning.

Third, and relatedly, neoliberalism has proven quite tenacious. Faced with so many
oppositional movements, this hegemonic order has fought tooth and nail to co-opt
dissent. Neoliberal managers constantly struggle to channel indignation into
entrepreneurialism, degrade activism into moralistic posturing, recast the struggle
against all oppression as the glorification of essentialized identities, reduce the radical
impulses of a new feminism to celebrating the appointment of a woman to the head of
the CIA, recoded black liberation as the diversification of the political class, and
transform the critique of work transformed into widespread precarity.

Even today, as their world wallows in crisis, the managers of the neoliberal order
continue to find the most creative ways to keep it alive, often by continuing to
instrumentally absorb the ideas of their weaker challengers. After years of castigating big
government, glorifying globalization, and singing paeans to the market, today’s neoliberal
ruling blocs tactically close borders, mail checks to taxpayers, bail out firms, inject
trillions into the economy, and draft interventionist plans that exceed the dreams of the
most ambitious Soviet state planners. To be sure, as Cinzia Arruzza and Felice Mometti
point out, most of these figures lack any grand vision, and are just improvising short-
term measures, often in sharp competition with each other. They are not omniscient, just
as the neoliberal order is not invincible, as the recent wave of mass movements has
shown. But few dying orders have been as nimble as this one.

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Third Circle: Structural Crisis of Capitalist Social Reproduction

Just as the corona crisis is linked to a deeper organic crisis, so too is the crisis of
neoliberalism articulated with an even more profound structural crisis of capitalist social
reproduction.

This crisis has a long history. As capitalism took root, dismayed capitalists discovered
that most people had little interest in working for wages. Instead, they continued to rely
on traditional patterns of subsistence, often by combining several forms of social
reproduction. They grew their own food, salvaged, bartered, sold surpluses, and only
engaged in wage labor if they had no other choice.

But over the course of the nineteenth century, wages came to occupy a much greater
component of total household income for most working-class people. One reason for
this has to do with the systematic eradication, and uneven subsumption, of non-
capitalist forms of labor, subsistence, and social life. In the United States, for example,
this meant enclosing common lands, banning livestock ownership in cities, obliterating
Mormon communal lands, breaking up indigenous communities, or denying Mexicans in
the newly conquered Southwest rights to communal holdings.

Contrary to popular opinion, capitalist history is therefore not so much a tale about the
seamless transmutation of one kind of worker, a peasant, into another, a waged factory
worker, but about widespread dispossession. As Michael Denning has explained,
“capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.”
Capitalism creates a sea of hungry unemployed people, torn from their traditional
patterns of subsistence, who then have no choice but to sell their capacity to work for
the money necessary to live. In this way, he continues, “unemployment precedes
employment, and the informal economy precedes the formal, both historically and
conceptually.”

As Emma Teitelman and I have shown for the American case, through this process, most
workers grew heavily dependent on capitalist wages to obtain life’s necessities, unpaid
reproductive activity was converted into monetized productive work, socially
reproductive labor was transformed into commodities like the dishwasher, and those
unable to find the money necessary to live grew increasingly reliant on the capitalist state
for social welfare. As writers like Maria Dalla Costa have argued, the managed capitalist
systems that emerged out of the crises of the 1930s and 1940s played a decisive role in
this regard. Although welfare states saved countless from poverty by subsidizing the
costs of social reproduction, their support came with the steep price – not only
segmenting the working class, or shoring up the patriarchal nuclear family, but rendering
working-class households more dependent on capitalist relations than ever before. Life
became coupled with capitalism.

If prior regimes of accumulation annihilated most non-capitalist forms of sustainable

social reproduction, forcing most people to depend, in some way or another, on
capitalism, neoliberalism’s contribution to this story has been to unilaterally devolve the
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costs of social reproduction onto working people. In the core countries of the North
Atlantic, ruling blocs dismantled public assistance programs, slashed funds, tightened
eligibility requirements, privatized social services, cut wages, destroyed unions,
weakened healthcare, and denigrated socially reproductive labor more generally. Having
grown so dependent on capitalist relations to survive, workers were increasingly cut off
from capitalist means of survival.

Meanwhile in the periphery, the IMF and the World Bank took advantage of debt crises
to restructure countless economies along neoliberal lines in the 1980s and 1990s, forcing
states to retrench social welfare, privatize industries, abolish subsidies, and welcome
transnational corporations. Unemployment skyrocketed, prices soared, inequality
widened, countless acres of land were given over to cash crops, and millions of
dispossessed and permanently unemployable people crowded into gigantic slums.

In fact, contrary to its own myths about free, fair, full employment, capitalism is
structurally incapable of fully employing everyone who depends on wages to live.
Capitalism, Karl Marx argued, produces “a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a
population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own
valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.” Without reserves, deprived of
alternative forms of social reproduction, and unable to find steady waged employment,
those condemned to exist as part of this “surplus population,” have no choice but to
resort to informal, illegal, and under-the-table work to survive.

Today, well over a billion people live out their precarious lives with the knowledge that
they will never be incorporated into the normal circuits of capitalist wage labor. While
some drift through the glitzy cities of the North Atlantic, most others scrape by in the
teeming slums of the Global South. To survive, they stitch together a couple gigs, salvage
garbage, sell knock-off handbags, hawk homemade jewelry, deal drugs, pirate media,
perform on the streets, peddle loosies, scam the wealthy, steal, send their children off to
work illegally, rent out their wombs for surrogate pregnancies, or in extreme cases sell
their organs.

So widespread is this way of life that the UN estimates these informal, unprotected
workers comprise nearly two-fifths of the economically active working population in
developing countries. In some places, like Karachi, the numbers are simply astounding,
with over 75% of inhabitants toiling away in the informal sector. So incapable is
capitalism of providing the humans it has proletarianized with steady, sustainable, legal
work that in some regions of the world, such as West Africa, the formal sector is
shrinking, even as the overall population skyrockets.

As Mike Davis writes in his harrowing account of the slums of the Global South, “informal
survivalism” is the “new primary mode of livelihood in a majority of Third World cities.”
The struggles of these highly vulnerable people to live is heroic, and their capacity to
improvise and self-organize new forms of life in such abject conditions is remarkable.
But without basic services, legal protections, or any reliable means of income, they live on
the edge. Each new event threatens to push them over – a drought, monsoon, war, or a
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virus like corona. In fact, the executive director of the World Food Program had already
anticipated that 2020 would be the “worst year since the second world war,” predicting
that a staggering 135 million people would face imminent starvation, in addition to the
821 million already chronically hungry. This is roughly equivalent to saying the entire
population of Russia would die off in the next year from hunger. And this was all before
corona.

This is the structural crisis of capitalist social reproduction: after a centuries-long process
of obliterating other alternatives in order to force working people across the globe to
depend entirely on capitalism for survival, ruling classes are now withdrawing the very
capitalist means that so many people depend on to live – wages, welfare, stable
employment, even commodities. Capitalism requires the labor power of humans to
survive, but capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form, has made it close to impossible
for tens of millions of those very workers to continue living, while condemning countless
more to a life of perennial unemployment. An unprecedentedly massive swathe of
humanity, living in unprecedentedly precarious conditions, with unprecedentedly few
reserves, now ekes out a life just a hair’s breadth away from annihilation.

Fourth Circle: Epochal Crisis of Planetary Life

The final crisis we experience today is the impending climate catastrophe. This, too, has
deep origins, stretching back hundreds of years.

Many scholars trace climate change back to the earliest days of capitalism, arguing that
the drive to increase profits pushed capitalists to exploit natural resources at an
unsustainable rate, the need to control labor power led to dangerous technological
innovations like coal burning, or that the imperative to create smooth commodity flows
led to the disruption of biomes. While no doubt true, it’s also worth noting that major
contributors to the present climate crisis were also those non-capitalist societies, like the
USSR, claiming to be transitioning to communism.

Whatever its diverse origins, it’s undeniable that here, too, neoliberalism has deepened
the epochal crisis that preceded it. As Naomi Klein explains, since the 1980s, newly
deregulated corporations run wild, private firms race to extract rare earth minerals,
companies burn fossil fuels at breakneck speed, the drive to transport goods across the
world as fast as possible pollutes the air, the fossil fuel industry pours money into
climate change denial, and the erosion of democracy hamstrings all efforts to combat
climate change. It’s no coincidence that the height of the neoliberal era coincides with
the most rapid degradation of the environment.

Today, the picture looks grim. The sea level is rising at its fastest rate in over three
millennia. There is more carbon dioxide in our air that at any point in human history. The
average size of vertebrate populations declined by 60% in the last four decades. The
world’s tropical forests are shrinking at a rate of nearly 30 football fields a minute. An
island of garbage in the Pacific is now larger than the size of Texas. Every year is hotter
than the next. The arctic may have its first completely ice-free summer in just two
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decades. By the middle of this century perhaps half of all the species on this planet will
disappear. In sixty years from now, the Earth’s soil may no longer sustain life. In eighty
years, major cities like London, Miami, and Shanghai may be underwater.

The climate crisis is admittedly the most challenging of these four crises to confront. It
does not have a singular root cause, and its effects are staggeringly multiform,
manifesting as floods, droughts, monster hurricanes, or brush fires. Its temporality is
especially hard for many to comprehend – we know the crisis is already happening, but
because it has not yet directly affected people living in the affluent countries of the
Global North, it is not often taken seriously. And its enormous scale, the eye-watering
stakes, and the extraordinary measures required to stop its advance drive into despair
even those who know we must act now.

The climate crisis will likely not take the form of a single, sudden event, like a nuclear
bomb exploding, but as an uneven collapse of the ecosystem. Although we are now likely
beyond the point of no return, it’s definitely still possible to mitigate the disaster. Even if
we cannot “solve” climate change in the same ways that we may “solve” the other crises,
we should not throw our hands up in the air in resignation. While the epochal crisis of
planetary life certainly operates at a different order of magnitude, it’s just as possible –
and, given its articulation with these other crises, necessary – to address it.

The Articulated Crisis

Although each of these crises possesses its own relative autonomy, all are deeply
imbricated, each effectively amplifying the other, from the first circle to the last.

The crisis of planetary life, for instance, allowed this tiny virus to become a pandemic. As
Rob Wallace has noted, without destabilized natural habitats, intensive capitalist
agriculture, dispossessed local communities driven deeper into the hinterland,
uncontrolled urbanization, or globalized logistics networks it’s hard to imagine corona
having this widespread of an impact.

At the same time, the conjunctural crisis of corona has deepened the crisis of capitalist
social reproduction. It will catastrophically upend the lives of hundreds of millions of
precarious slum dwellers across the globe. How can they wash their hands if they have
no regular access to water? How can they practice social distancing if families live in
tightly packed slums? How can they stay at home if their livelihood depends on hustling?
If Ecuador, where the pandemic has proven so overwhelming that corpses litter
sidewalks, streets and doorsteps, is any indication, the coronavirus threatens to wreak
havoc in these regions of the world.

Meanwhile, in the same way that neoliberalism accelerated the epochal crisis of life, so
too is the climate crisis now exacerbating the organic crisis of neoliberalism. It is
rendering entire regions of the world uninhabitable, fueling migration, which the
xenophobic right will try to capitalize for political gain. It is creating extreme weather
patterns, leading to drought, famine, and food shortages, which in turn heighten
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tensions between states. It is poisoning millions of people, putting extra strain on an
already broken global healthcare system. It is devastating many national economies,
exacerbating the global economic crisis. Climate change is an omnipresent background,
supercharging every other fracture.

By underfunding hospitals, weakening healthcare, and enshrining a world of precarious

employment, neoliberalism has created prime conditions for the virus to wreak havoc. At
the same time, corona has catalyzed the brewing crisis of neoliberalism. Even more than
that, it’s given this organic crisis a specific shape. The pandemic is how the crisis of
neoliberalism is now being lived. Even if the forces of order succeed in containing the
pandemic while staving off dramatic social change, it will have irreversibly colored the
deeper crises destined to outlast.

Our Response

Although we stand before a monumental crisis ripe with possibility, there’s no guarantee
that anything will change.

Without a coherent subjective intervention offering a viable alternative, the existing

order will likely modernize itself, preserving, and even heightening, the existing
inequalities of this world, leaving us with something worse.

We also cannot expect the objective crisis to automatically generate this emancipatory
subjective force. Worsening conditions will not spontaneously transform scattered
individuals into subjects. The subjective element must be created of its own accord.

How we invent this second variable so necessary for real social change is the greatest
question of our time, and I don’t presume to offer an answer here. Organizing a
response to the crisis can only be a collective endeavor, based in the many movements
that have already taken shape, the cornucopia of new forms of struggle mushrooming
around us today, and the vibrant ecosystem of self-organizing that will certainly emerge
in the near future.

There’s much we don’t know, but mapping our crisis does make one thing clear: the
complexity of the crisis we are living through today forces us to reflect on the kinds of
political strategies we have to develop.

This means, most immediately, that we must resist the temptation to focus all our efforts
on the coronavirus alone. After all, the virus has been so destructive because it has
catalyzed much deeper crises that will outlive it. Even when the pandemic ends, the
structural crises that corona inflamed will continue to rage, ready to explode again in the
near future.

At the same time, we need to avoid the opposite reflex: to treat the coronavirus as
merely epiphenomenal, and instead mobilize around what we perceive to be these more
consequential crises. As serious as they may be, these other crises are being lived

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through the conjunctural crisis, which is irreversibly shaping their development, and so
cannot be ignored.

Similarly, we can’t isolate the organic crisis from the others. While some may be enticed
into prioritizing the crisis of neoliberalism, arguing that building a new political bloc
capable of seizing power is the precondition for addressing these other crises, we must
recall that today’s organic crisis is not somehow separate from these other ones. Since
neoliberalism’s crisis is so deeply imbricated with the conjunctural crisis of corona, the
structural crisis of social reproduction, and the epochal crisis of climate, building a new
bloc in response to the organic crisis necessarily means addressing these other crises
from the start.

The only way forward, then, is to collectively craft a response that can address all aspects
of today’s articulated crisis. It is through this struggle, fought on a variety of distinct
fronts, that we can build ourselves into a unified, albeit diverse, collective subjective
force able to master this crisis to change the world.

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