Stephen Gill York University, Toronto, Canada

1
Stephen GillYork University, Toronto, Canada

• Visiting Jane and Aatos Erkko Professor in
  Studies on Contemporary Society, University of
  Helsinki
• Lecture to University of Tampere16/10/09Lecture
  will be posted on http//www.stephengill.com

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• GLOBAL ORGANIC CRISIS
• THE POST-MODERN PRINCE

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Outline

• Part 1 Two Concepts
• Part 2 The Crisis of Accumulation The Global
  Organic Crisis
• Part 3 Political Alternatives the Post-Modern
  Prince

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Part 1

• Organic Crisis Post-modern Prince
• The old is dying and the new is being born, and
  in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms

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Global organic crisis

• A wide-ranging combination of economic, social
  and ecological crises characterizes the present
  global conjuncture
• Present crisis is more deep-seated than an
  economic depression or a cyclical crisis of
  capitalist accumulation or economic growth.
• It involves emerging challenges to the dominance
  of neo-liberal market civilization capitalist
  globalization.

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The Post-modern Prince as collective political
agency

• This concept is grounded in a reading of
  Machiavellis Gramscis concepts of political
  agency.
• It seeks to conceptualize some of the real and
  imagined aspects of progressive politics in the
  21st century.

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The Prince (1513)

• Machiavelli sought to analyze the national
  global power relations of his time place --
  weakness of a divided Renaissance Italy vis à vis
  the geopolitical power of France Spain
• Spoke not to those in the palazzo but in the
  piazza to those not in the know he
  demystifies power
• Political power the centaur was based on
  force and persuasion. The Prince as a new type of
  sovereign would found a new and united Italian
  state.

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The Modern Prince (1927-36)

• Workers should create a new hegemony, an ethical
  democratic form of state culture with the
  revolutionary party as a solution to Fascism
  the 1930s organic crisis.
• The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a
  real person, a concrete individual.
• It can only be an organism, a complex element of
  society in which a collective will, which has
  already been recognized and has to some extent
  asserted itself in action, begins to take
  concrete form
• (Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, 1971 ed Q Hoare
  my emphasis).

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The Post-modern Prince

• Combines the old and the radically new in a
  search for a new global progressive hegemony
• Still in development yet part of global
  progressive movements that have emerged over
  centuries.
• Responds to global organic crisis in concrete
  form e.g. World Social Forum/ Left Forums
• Goes beyond traditional left politics
  internationalism of elite vanguards or the
  primacy of industrial working classes
• Non-hierarchical -- multiple organizations
  processes, leadership is diverse not easily
  incarcerated or decapitated.
• Embodies new universal political myth of social
  ecological sustainability diversity, democracy
  and equality of peoples as a universal project.

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Part 2

• Beyond The Crisis of Accumulation
• Elements of Global Organic Crisis Today

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Crisis of Accumulation the orthodox view

• Source Barry Eichengreen Kevin H. ORourke 4
  June 2009
• http//www.voxeu.org/index.php?qnode/3421
• The slump of 2008-09 matches the severity of
  1930s collapse in some respects it is worse
• World industrial production tracks closely the
  1930s fall, with no clear signs of green
  shoots. Unemployment rising.
• World stock markets and world trade initially
  follow paths far below those followed in Great
  Depression
• Dow 10,000 the Obama rally is it a double
  dip recession?.

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Global priorities capital comes first
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Political Ethics Global Priorities capital
comes first

• EU US UK bailouts macroeconomic stimulus
  US17 trillion (figures drawn from The Economist,
  IMF other sources).
• This is over 22 times the total planned funds for
  UNs Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
• MDGs seek to provide minimum basic health
  education for billions of the worlds poorest
  between now and 2020.
• Billions for the banks, pennies for the people
  (Juan Somavia ILO Director in Financial Times
  April 2009).

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Morbid symptoms global crisis rising hunger

• Almost unnoticed behind the economic crisis, a
  combination of lower growth, rising unemployment
  and falling remittances together with
  persistently high food prices has pushed the
  number of chronically hungry above 1bn for the
  first time. Financial Times April 6 2009.
• In fact we live in a world where half the worlds
  population suffers from malnutrition 25 are
  over-fed, many of whom over-weight and obese,
  with 25 underfed or starving
• So what are the causes some of the other
  consequences of the spike in food prices?

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Example world capitalist markets increasingly
determine food prices level of starvation

• Broader consequences include
• Increased corporate control of global agriculture
  more rapid turnover time of capital
• Energy fertilizer intensive production
• Export-orientation creates crop monocultures
  damages the biosphere
• Decline of local self-sufficiency means world
  market determines food security

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Proximate causal factors?

• US production of subsidized grain export floods
  the world market in the 1990s wipes out many
  small Third world producers e.g. Mexico after
  NAFTA (1994) 1.17 million Mexicans are displaced
  from agriculture following trade liberalization.
• A perfect storm? No -- recent price spike is
  mainly caused by man-made factors including
• Shift of US grain production to bio-fuels creates
  global supply shortages.
• Global futures trading e.g. in Chicago New York
  markets, linked to speculation rising food
  prices

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Global prices food sovereignty

• 1 in 7 people in the world is starving. 2005-8,
  food prices rise 83 are still 60 higher than
  in 2006. 37 nations experience intense food
  crises 2008 world-wide riots break out.
• Via Campesina, Landless Workers Movement in
  Brazil (MST) other grassroots peoples
  organizations continue to press for food
  sovereignty, organic production a new society.
• April 2009, 58 Third World governments agree to
  redirect agriculture to support small scale
  farmers, women, to support local knowledge to
  counter global warming G20 Gates Foundation
  respond to preserve world market in food
  alleviate hunger.

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Rethinking the concept of organic crisis today

• What are some differences between 1930s today?
• Crisis of accumulation is truly global a second
  Great Depression on a wider scale USSR was
  outside world capitalism in 1930s.
• G8 responses reveal that macroeconomic
  interventions are one-sidedly favourable to big
  capital and the plutocracy, especially to Wall
  Street.
• There are no obvious communist alternatives to
  the dominance of global capitalism by neo-liberal
  forces since the fall of the USSR in 1989.
• However some new forms of left-wing political
  agency are emerging in the longer context of
  national global struggles, e.g. the Post-Modern
  Prince

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Global organic crisis today some further
defining elements 1-5

• Turnover time of capital accelerates, profits
  boom rates of exploitation of people nature
  increase.
• Growing subordination of states to capital
  (following some socialization and nationalization
  of the means of production 1917-1989).
• Privatization of profits and socialization of the
  risks for corporations the strong (e.g. huge
  bail outs). Increased privatization of risk for
  the weak the majority (small firms, workers),
  especially as social provisions for social
  reproduction (provisions for families,
  education).
• Political power of free enterprise the
  propertied fully restored, unprecedented growth
  of a global plutocracy.
• Acceleration of extreme inequality of income,
  wealth life chances.

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Distribution of world GDP 1990

• UN Human Development Report 1992
• Richest 20 had 82.7 of world income poorest
  20 had 1.4

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Global inequality global power

• December 28, 2006 Financial Times asks how,
  without reading Marxs Capital, could one
  possibly explain how the worlds richest 2 of
  people now owned more than 50 of the world's
  global assets.
• In fact the top 1 owned 40 of total global
  assets 37 million wealthy people.
• The bottom 50 (approx 3.3 billion people)
  collectively owned less than 1 of total wealth
• The World Distribution of Household Wealth, by
  James B. Davies et al (UNU-WIDER December 2006)

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Further elements of global organic crisis 6-9

• Expropriation or dispossession of producers of
  their means to subsistence parallels early
  capitalist enclosures and colonization (ongoing
  primitive accumulation). Enlarges the size of the
  global proletariat free to sell its labour to
  capital.
• The coercive, arbitrary use of coercion
  military force ( torture) and its use with
  impunity becomes a regulative principle in
  world affairs, especially during Bush II
  administration.
• Growing contradictions between legality and
  legitimacy provoke challenges to global
  governance international organizations the
  search for new and more democratic political and
  social forums
• All of this is occurring as market civilization
  is spreading and as threats to the biosphere
  the ecology of livelihoods are increasing

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Part 3

• Political Alternatives the Post-Modern Prince

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After the emergency return to a reformulated
neo-liberal orthodoxy?

• Some limited progressive initiatives
  incorporated, e.g. by Obama. Yet his program
  one-sidedly favours Wall Street.
• Exit strategies -- after the bail-outs
  reintroduction of mechanisms to justify lock in
  a return of fiscal discipline, austerity,
  privatization, cuts in provisions for social
  reproduction.
• Reinforcement of market discipline on
  individuals, workers and families e.g. through
  growing debts (personal loss of wealth, lower
  incomes, reduced pensions).
• IMF grows resumes debt imperialism via donor
  country conditionality and stabilization
  programs.

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Authoritarian tendencies in the emergency? The
Global North

• Bailouts stimulus may not work, e.g. in Japan
  US UK interest rates now effectively zero huge
  deficits and even more government debt on the way
  -- who will pay the costs?
• Efforts to manage the crisis particularly if
  they fail may reinforce tendencies towards a
  more reactionary authoritarian capitalism as in
  the 1930s.
• Note the effects on state apparatuses associated
  with the war on terror (the option to suspend
  civil liberties, impose martial law etc.) might
  be used against revolts from below crush
  protests.

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The Global South

• The organic crisis in the South is a continuing
  crisis, mediated by external (imperialist)
  institutions and political forces e.g. continues
  1980s debt crises.
• Riots protests not simply over free elections
  but over neo-liberal policies. end of food
  sovereignty repression of trade unions.
• Western media seems to give these little
  coverage.
• Countries driven to IMF EBRD may be subjected
  to a new round of externally imposed
  conditionality austerity, further undermining
  their sovereignty

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State capitalist responses to the organic crisis
in the Global South

• Rising Third World powers such as China, Brazil
  India seek to create alternative geopolitical and
  economic links more multi-polar world order,
  e.g. use aid economic leverage to challenge
  dominance of the US dollar the G8 consensus.
• Yet much of this is aimed at reforms within
  global governance within the dominant
  frameworks of action configured by global
  capitalism.
• Nevertheless some new state actors in Third
  World, e.g. Venezuela Bolivia, are seeking to
  produce socially progressive systems
  livelihoods, so far on a regional basis.

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The Post-Modern Prince and the Global Organic
Crisis - 1

• The present crisis is more than a crisis of
  capitalist accumulation or a necessary
  self-correction aided by macroeconomic
  intervention and bailouts.
• It involves a state of global economic emergency
  political discourse opens up but if the crisis
  worsens it may lead to reactionary outcomes.
• Crisis reflects intensifying contradictions of
  market civilization a consumerist, privatized,
  energy-intensive ecologically myopic pattern of
  social development crisis is social and
  ecological.
• New progressive forces the global lefts (in
  the plural) are combining and must combine
  further to address the global organic crisis.

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The Post-Modern Prince and the Global Organic
Crisis - 2

• Progressive organic intellectuals numbering in
  the millions seek to develop a new hegemony in
  national and global civil society.
• Many organic intellectuals are developing a new
  language of politics in ways that go beyond
  orthodox left-wing politics policy agendas --
  E.g. they are rethinking social and ecological
  sustainability and the meaning of civilization.
• Therefore to pose the global political question
  today we might say Old forces are dying (but
  are not yet dead) new forms of political agency
  are still being born but in the interregnum,
  the organic crisis with its morbid symptoms is
  intensifying.