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Michael Rustin
Michael Rustin © Soundings 2009
This is a revised version of the paper presented at the seminar, which will be published in Soundings 43 in November 2009
This article analyses the implications of the credit crunch - that is to say the severe crisis which has been afflicting the global economy for the past two years or so - through conceiving of these events as a 'conjuncture'. This is a theoretical term that refers to a critical turning-point or rupture in a political structure, primarily signifying a crisis in class relations. Classically, in Marxist and especially Leninist political discourse, these have been moments in which forceful political leaders - such as Robespierre, Lenin or Mao - have been able to seize hold of exceptional political moments. Such occasions of tension and disequilibrium have of course provided opportunities for counter-revolutionaries of the right - Mussolini and fascism, Hitler and national socialism - as well as for movements of the left. The concept of conjuncture had its most effective application, within the 'new left' tradition to which Soundings belongs, in analysing the crisis of the 1970s, which as everyone knows ushered in the thirty years or so of neoliberal hegemony which now may (or may not) be coming to its end.1
The concept of conjuncture was developed in the middle years of the last century as a way of thinking through the manifest misalignment with political realities of classical deterministic and economistic Marxist models of change. Contrary to classical predictions, western capitalism appeared, from the late 1950s, to be producing a rise rather than a fall in the living standards of the working class, and the working class was becoming more socially and politically divided rather than growing into a homogeneous and radical social force. Two fields of neo-Marxist theory contributed most to understanding the emerging situation
On the one hand there were Antonio Gramsci's ideas, which contributed an understanding of the complexity of regimes of class domination and subordination, and of the importance of the cultural dimensions of the social order in maintaining these. Further, Gramsci had theorised the necessity to adopt political strategies appropriate to a particular social configuration, as in his distinction between a 'war of manoeuvre' (of which Leninism was the classic proponent), and a 'war of position' - which he deemed the more appropriate political strategy within the more consensual civil societies of western Europe. Thus autonomous political action, undertaken in response to analysis of a particular societal configuration, was given a new emphasis within Marxist thought.
Complementary to the engagement with Gramsci's ideas was the influence of Louis Althusser. He also challenged classical notions of economic determinism, by proposing a complex and multi-levelled model of the social order, in which, as with Gramsci, the 'levels' of ideology and the organisation of the state exercised their own causal powers. The classical Marxist idea of determination through the agency of the means and relations of production was 'saved', in Althusser's account, by his assertion that this level of domination would prevail only 'in the last instance' - by which he seemed to be referring not to a final day of decisive political judgement but to a model of causal powers in which the economy ruled (if it did) only as the most weighty of a whole assembly of forces.2 The complex interrelations of 'levels and instances' of the social formation were held to be such that models of linear causal determination (such as that implied in the classical model of 'base and superstructure') did not work. The new explanatory model, rather, presupposed an ever-shifting interrelationship between contending and interdependent social forces. This complexity was characterised by instances of 'overdetermination' (and logically, therefore, under-determination too), in which causal forces could converge on a particular, often contingent, point of weakness or imbalance, and an opportunity for rupture thereby occur.3
This way of modelling social processes borrowed some of its conceptions of causal interdependency from the then-dominant sociological functionalism of Talcott Parsons et al, except that Althusser's primary purpose was to understand the possible occurrence of points of breakdown, whereas the functionalists sought to theorise the many reasons why patterns of social life might be expected to reproduce themselves in a stable mode. Furthermore, what was seen by the functionalists as a dominant, structurally necessary and virtuous value-system was conceived by Althusser as ideology - a distinct level of the social order whose main function was to maintain and legitimise class domination. To ideology Althusser counterposed a materialist, scientific mode of reasoning, through which underlying social relations could be understood, and perhaps surpassed.4
We can now see similarities between the theoretical model of complex interdependencies that Althusser evolved to enable Marxist analysis to cope with the emerging world of late capitalism, and the subsequent development by mathematicians, computer scientists, biologists and general systems theorists of what is known as 'complexity theory'.5 This way of thinking, or paradigm, was evolved to make it possible to understand complex systems in the physical, biological and social realms that were characterised by non-linear patterns of causation, disequilibria and drastic changes of state, and emergent properties. Kingsley Dennis and John Urry have recently sought to apply this methodology to understand what they see as the impending end of a socio-technical system based on the automobile and the consumption of oil, and its large potential consequences for global society.6 The 'tipping points' of complexity theory can be understood as the equivalent of 'conjunctures' - those moments, according to late Marxist theory, in which decisive transformations can occur. One might think of speculative bubbles as such complex systems.
A crucial context for the emergence of these new models of explanation lay in the events of May 1968, in which what seemed like a moment of proto-revolutional upheaval emerged in Paris 'from nowhere' - being first triggered off by grievances that seemed to have little to do with the economy (the threatened closing of the Cinemateque, police brutality, conditions in the university) - and seemed primarily to engage university and high school students before the uprising became extended to the factories and the organised working class. However, the exemplary deployment of this 'method' of analysis took place not in relation to that radical moment of transformation in which the left was the principal agent, but, as we have noted, in analysis of the developments in the late 1970s that led to the triumph of Reagan in the United States, Thatcher in Britain, and then to the thirty-year (and continuing) hegemony of what is widely called 'neoliberalism'.
In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (see note 1), Stuart Hall et al followed a thread first picked up in the response of the press in Birmingham to an alleged wave of 'mugging' (roughly defined as black-on-white street crime), which became a major moral panic in the mass media. The authors described the mobilisation of white anxieties about race as a key ingredient in the emergence of a new politics of the right, exploited by Nixon in the United States and by Thatcher, following Enoch Powell's example, in Britain. Presciently, they anticipated the possibility of a reconfiguration of working-class political loyalties away from the solidarities of class. They saw this being achieved in the context of the much broader state of delegitimation and disorder that had come to prevail throughout the 1970s. Hall and his colleagues here theorised the protracted crisis and failure of the entire 'class settlement' of the post-war welfare state. Successive governments of both hues had proved themselves unable to cope with the increasing levels of social tension that had found expression in rising levels of inflation and industrial conflict. Indeed three successive governments (Wilson in 1970, Heath in 1974 and Callaghan in 1979) had been defeated, in effect, by trade union resistance to governments' demands for wage restraint. Policing the Crisis described the long moment of 'corporatism', in which 'consensual' and 'centrist' resolutions of this fundamental disequilibrium of class relations were attempted, with increasing desperation, until public confidence in these approaches finally failed amidst the events of the 'Winter of Discontent' of 1978-79. The extremity of this 'conjuncture' was due in part to 'external' factors, such as the soaring price of oil, which was itself a lagged inflationary effect of the Vietnam War. But conjunctural analysis presupposes, by definition, elements of contingency and 'overdetermination', of which in this period there were many.
This was a moment in which it became possible to reconfigure political forces, and, in an unusually open situation, to construct by decisive action what turned out to become a lasting neoliberal hegemony. In Policing the Crisis, and in his subsequent seminal articles in Marxism Today and Soundings, on Thatcherism and its New Labour sequel, Stuart Hall clarified the significance of the ideological and political dimensions of the new right's successful project, leaving much of the analysis of the more economic and technological dimensions of this neoconservative reshaping of the world to other writers, in Marxism Today and elsewhere.
The present crisis
How might this method of analysis be relevant to an understanding of the
present crisis? What are the similarities, and differences, between the
events which led to the triumph of neoliberalism from the late 1970s until
recently, and events between 2007 and 2009 that have now administered at
the very least a major setback to this system?
The most significant difference between these two episodes is that the earlier one was the outcome of a decade or more of severe and prolonged conflicts between different groups of collective actors within capitalism, whereas the current crisis has emerged in the absence of major social conflicts of this kind. In the former crisis, a neoconservative counter-revolution sought to rescue capitalism from its presumed enemies; in the present conjuncture a neoliberal system of domination seems to have imploded not long after it achieved its greatest moment of triumph over its ideological enemies, the collapse of European Communism in 1989. How can one compare and analyse moments of structural breakdown of such apparently different kinds?
It is interesting to observe the key conceptual role of money in these crisis situations. In the 1930s Keynes advocated the injection of money into the economy as a remedy for the Great Depression. Then, following the doctrine of Milton Friedman, the Thatcherites argued that an excess of money was responsible for the inflationary pressures of the 1970s, with their various consequences of rising claims and demands of all kinds. They therefore deployed monetary contraction in the 1980s as an instrument of deliberate recession and de-industrialisation: the ideological construction of the money-supply as an inflationary engine was a means of redressing what had come to be seen by the right as a threatening balance of class forces. However, once this deflationary purpose had been accomplished, faith in the possibility or desirability of controlling the supply of money was abandoned. The supply of money was belatedly discovered to be hard even to define, let alone control. Indeed, once the battle against inflation had been won, the money-supply was allowed to expand exponentially through the creation of vast amounts of credit, both on a local and a global scale. And so long as this expansion of credit (virtual money) seemed to be leading to general profit, few objected to it. The issue about money turned out to have been not whether there was too much or too little of it, but rather into whose pockets it was flowing.
Perhaps one could suggest that what mainly differentiates these different crises are the underlying structures of class relations of which they are an effect: different kinds of class equilibrium, or disequilibrium, have generated their typical forms of 'excess'. High levels of wage inflation, such as were seen in the 1970s, are a symptom of the pressure on profit levels of working-class demands, in conditions of full employment or scarce labour supply. Speculative manias, by contrast, are the excesses brought about by the unfettered power of the propertied. The motivations of individual self-interest that are fundamental to capitalism become transmuted into delusions about the unlimited prospects for gain (what the former Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan called 'irrational exuberance'), as the reality constraints sometimes imposed by markets melt away (for example the need to reach negotiated accommodations with labour if steady production is to take place). The main reality that is denied by the powerful in these excesses is the significance of other social actors, and the larger totality of social relations on which all economies depend.
At this point it will be useful to make use of another valuable theoretical resource, the contrast between 'system' and 'social' integration' set out by David Lockwood in his seminal paper on this theme.8 This was an attempt to develop functionalist sociological theory to take account of the prevalence of deep-seated class conflicts within European social structures, and to incorporate into functionalist discourse ideas of contradictions and class consciousness drawn from Marxist theory. Lockwood developed these ideas in the context of the rise of class tensions in the 1960s, when he and John Goldthorpe developed their distinction between instrumental and expressive solidarity, which proved invaluable in understanding the evolution of working-class consciousness in an 'economistic' direction in that period. It also did much to explain the later susceptibility of skilled working-class voters to Thatcher's advocacy of free wage bargaining in the late 1970s, in opposition to the Wilson-Callaghan governments' clumsy attempts to impose incomes policies, justified in part on egalitarian and solidaristic grounds.
Lockwood differentiated between states of disequilibrium in the social order that were the outcome of 'objectively' incompatible forces, and states of disequilibrium that resulted from conflicts between groups of social actors pursuing incompatible goals. In the crisis of the 1970s, social conflicts between class and other, emergent, collectivities and cultures (those of gender, race, generation, religious and, in Northern Ireland, nationalist identification) generated high levels of political tension, even leading to the belief in the political establishment - and elsewhere - that Britain was becoming 'ungovernable', in consequence of heightened social demands that the governmental system was unable to meet.9 These contradictions were both 'social' and 'systemic' in their nature and effects. Heightened working-class demands in conditions of prolonged full employment, and rising levels of welfare expenditure resulting from political demands for 'social guarantees', gave rise to falling levels of profit and to a changing balance between state and private expenditure.10 These were highly unwelcome to the interests of capital, as the verdicts on the British economy by international agencies such as the IMF and OECD made clear. It was thus the conjunction of both 'system' and 'social' contradictions that led to the crisis of the post-war welfare settlement, and to the 'counter-revolutionary' project of the new right, which found and then made its opportunity in this crisis.
In contrast to all this, the present crisis has plainly not been brought about by manifest social conflicts of a class-based or any other kind. If the neoliberal system has now encountered a crisis in its growth and development, it is not because it has been shaken by the opposition or resistance of the social forces it set out to defeat. Indeed, as contributors to Soundings have frequently pointed out, one of the greatest successes of the neoconservative counter-revolution has been the demobilisation of class resistances to capital, and the successful co-option of the political parties originally set up to represent working-class interests to the task of co-managing the marketised social and economic model. Not only was the financial meltdown not preceded by political or economic demands from below, but no sense of heightened political consciousness has so far emerged in response to the crisis itself. The dominant political mood, in Britain at least, is one of widespread disenchantment with the system of governance in its entirety.
Thus what we are seeing is not so much the explosion of conflicting social forces, as the implosion of a largely unchallenged political and economic system. In this respect, as many observers have pointed out, the nearest parallel to the present crisis is the crash of 1929 and the following depression. Indeed, one of the best ways of understanding what has been happening between 2007 and 2009 is to read about the 1929 events in J.K. Galbraith's The Great Crash. Galbraith's description of the operations of the banks and other financial agencies at that time, and of the rise and fall of speculative 'bubbles', shows extraordinary similarities between the events of that period and the patterns we have seen unfolding in the last year or two.
But if the present crisis is not the outcome of conflicts between politically conscious collective actors, what are its causes? What analysis will enable us to understand the 'system contradictions' that have brought us to this situation, and what, if any, political conclusions can we draw from this?
Systemic contradictions in the marketised system
Central to debate about the current crisis is, of course, the role of the
financial and banking sectors. This is unsurprising, since it was the collapse
of banks such as Lehman Brothers in the USA, and RBS and Lloyds in the UK,
and of mortgage lenders such as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac in the USA and
Northern Rock and the Bradford and Bingley in the UK, which triggered the
crisis. These collapses were brought about by the weight of bad debts that
were accumulated in a vast wave of speculative investment. The insolvency
of the banks has led to a general liquidity crisis, and the withdrawal of
borrowing facilities from both businesses and individuals; and the outcome
of this situation has been a substantial downturn in economic activity.
The risk is that, as companies lay off workers to protect their profit-levels
(and perhaps to avoid bankruptcy), consumer demand will fall further, and
more redundancies follow, in a classic deflationary cycle.
An important difference between the present crisis and that of 1929 is that most governments have understood much sooner, and better, than their predecessors the need for concerted remedial actions by the state. Gordon Brown has been to the fore in international efforts to stave off a deep recession through counter-cyclical measures (cutting interest rates, programmes of public investment, 'printing money'); and these measures offer some prospect that the current recession will be less catastrophic than that of the 1930s. He has won support for his efforts from contemporary successors of Galbraith, such as Paul Krugman. The conventional wisdom appears to be that the structural causes of this crisis lie principally in the excesses of the financial sector, and that if the banks and other financial agencies can be subject to greater restraint and regulation it should be possible before long to return to 'business as usual', with only minor adjustments to the way global and national economies function.
However, there seems good reason to believe that this analysis of the problem is superficial, indeed false. The financial system is not merely a rogue element in an otherwise well-functioning economic system, and its near-meltdown was not a merely contingent event. The reality is that the malfunctioning of the financial sector in late capitalism is a symptom as much as a cause of the current crisis. The 'system contradictions' at the core of the matter are those which explain why the financial sector has become so hyper-inflated, in relation to the rest of the productive economy. These are issues of structure, not of mere irresponsible performance, and only if these can be addressed is there any hope of a lasting solution to the current problems.
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff have provided the most insightful analysis of the fundamental problem.11 They argue that the hyper-expansion of the financial sector, especially in the United States, is the consequence of the decline of profitable opportunities for the investment of capital, other than financial speculation, since the 1980s. The over-development of the financial system is thus the effect, more than the cause, of the primary economic problem. Investors have engaged in parasitic speculative financial investment because there have been no better profitable opportunities; in the US financial profits have been growing as a proportion of gross profits since 1985. And the reason for the decline in opportunities for profitable investment is the stagnation, or decline, over a twenty-year period, in the real incomes of the majority of people with average or lower incomes. The consequence of declining real incomes among the worse-off was vividly manifested in the role of 'sub-prime loans' in triggering the financial crisis, but it is of more general provenance than this.12
To understand how this situation has come about we need to go back to the neoconservative resolution of the inflationary crisis of the 1970s. It was a deliberate purpose of the neoliberal offensive to shift income and power away from labour and towards property and capital, and to diminish the role of the state as an agent of redistribution and social justice. The deregulation of capital flows was designed to create a globalised market, and to expose the allegedly over-protected labour forces of the 'advanced' economies to competition from lower-wage economies. (The policies of the European Single Market pursue these objectives on a more restricted regional basis, its redistributive social programmes having a minor countervailing role.) Technology, especially information technology, which permits vast instant flows of money, also played a role in this globalising process, as well as the declining relative costs of transport. Far from being an embarrassment to the holders of power in this neoliberal system, inequality was actually celebrated, most notoriously in Britain in Peter Mandelson's 'we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'. A relative decline in average consumption was thus a concomitant of the marketisation and globalisation of the economy. But the inequalities that the neoliberals and globalisers sought as an object of policy have now become a major source of dysfunction and implosion for the entire market system.13 The chosen resolution of the social conflicts and contradictions that underlay the earlier crisis has now been revealed as a primary source of the systemic contradictions that underlie the current conjuncture. Although different in their form, these two crises are, after all, connected.
There is also a major global aspect to this situation. One might have expected that enhanced purchasing power in the emerging economies of the south and east, which were (sometimes) beneficiaries of globalisation in terms of the financial flows and investments of globalisation, would offset the stagnation of incomes in the affluent north and west. But this counter-cyclical expansion in demand is yet to occur. This is because the emerging economies owe much of their competitive advantage to their low wages and severe labour discipline. They are for the most part in a different phase of development from that in the affluent west, still giving their priority to savings, capital accumulation and investment, where the west has long since been immersed in its devotion to mass consumption. A consequence of this juxtaposition of contrasting but interdependent economic worlds is the bizarre situation whereby China has become the major funder of the large American current accounts deficit (and thus its continuing high levels of consumption) through its loans to the USA of the vast surpluses earned by its exports.
This unexpected symbiosis between the over-consuming United States and the under-consuming People's Republic of China seemed to work for a period, in a time of economic growth, but it seems highly unlikely that expanded borrowings from China will now serve as the engine to lift the economies of the west out of their recession. It is widely recognised that China must now turn its attention to the expansion of domestic demand. A recent Financial Times article argued that a public commitment by China to the creation of a universal system of public health would make a crucial contribution to global economic recovery.14 This is because it is only when a welfare 'safety net' exists that citizens feel secure enough to expand their consumption at the expense of savings. What a remarkable coincidence it is that both China and the United States are currently seeking a solution to problems of underconsumption (among other purposes) in major reforms of their health systems!
That the 'system contradictions' have been near-catastrophic in their effects, while there has been a much weaker presence of overt 'social contradictions', suggests that we might think of the impoverished - both in the United States and elsewhere in the world - as constituting a kind of 'shadow class', a passive but nevertheless significant factor in the situation. This 'shadow class' (or, as Marxists used to say, a class 'in itself but not for itself') has featured as the prime constituent of the 'sub-prime' mortage market, and also as the large segment (47 million) of the US population who cannot afford health insurance: a post-industrial economy also has its large working class, however it may perceive itself. In China and India, this 'shadow class' is that huge population who provide the low-cost labour for their industries, but cannot afford to buy their products.
To a degree, governments have recognised the problem that these inequalities now pose to the stability of the (capitalist) system. For example, the advantages of the 'automatic stabilisers' of the welfare systems of Western Europe in staving off severe deflation are widely acknowledged. But it is notable that government efforts to remedy this situation are taking place without much organised pressure from below, and are in fact jeopardised by the feebleness of collective voice. Thus, for example, in the US health reform debate, the eloquence and rationality of President Obama are having to compensate for the absence of any sufficient social coalition to impose this and other necessary reforms. In effect a large political price is now being paid for the political disenfranchisement, during the long years of neoliberal hegemony, of what used to be called the working class. The instruments of that disenfranchisement include the dissolution of many of the democratic structures of the Labour Party in Britain, and the plutocratisation of political representation in the United States.
Geopolitical dimensions of the crisis
There are also geopolitical risks in the current crisis. These arise from
the changing balance of relative power between the established economies
and powers of the west, and the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil,
and others. We know from the experience of the 1930s that major readjustments
in the relative power and prosperity of states can lead to serious conflicts
between them, and to severe turbulence in their internal politics. The outcome
of the great crash and the great depression was that cooperative relationships
between nations largely broke down during the 1930s, in economic protectionism,
ideological polarisation and world war. While this does not seem to be the
destructive direction in which international relations are currently headed,
one serious danger lies in the difficulties faced by the United States in
negotiating, in its internal politics, an inevitable decline in its relative
power. Although the recent electoral victory of Obama and the Democrats
represents a source of hope, the continuing intransigence of the Republican
opposition, and the possibility that a failure of the Democrats in government
might bring to office a president with a political outlook like that of
Sarah Palin, is a cause for concern. A substantial block of opinion in 'Middle
America', urged on by its ideologues, believes that the solution to the
crisis brought about by neoliberalism and by the over-reaching of American
power is even more of the same. Whether in individuals, groups, or nations,
the experience of downward mobility and humiliation can give rise to very
destructive states of mind.
There is a further emerging crisis, arising from the multifarious consequences of global warming, which poses deep problems for the resolution of the general economic turbulence being considered here. This interconnection arises from the fact that the 'Keynesian' remedies of an increase in demand, and of a more equal pattern of consumption, on a global as well as a national scale - remedies which would 'normally' be appropriate in economic terms, and which are to some degree being followed by governments - now run up against a contrary need drastically to change current modes of consumption and production, in order to curtail discharges of carbon and other contaminating gases into the atmosphere. Here is another 'system contradiction': the need for more material outputs for one purpose is now negated by the need for lower outputs for an even more pressing reason. Although governments rightly see opportunities for new forms of production and consumption in renewable energy and energy-saving investment, the fact is that a much greater transformation in the economic system may be needed than can be achieved through growth in these sectors alone. There needs to be a major shift, in already-rich societies, in the accepted definitions of well-being, away from the production and consumption of commodities, and towards satisfactions that are less materially greedy - on a scale which is hardly yet recognised.
Gramsci showed that 'organic crises' could sometimes take many decades to resolve themselves, in situations where neither side in an underlying conflict of social forces could obtain a decisive advantage. Such a case was the French Revolution of 1789. 'A crisis appears which sometimes lasts for decades', he wrote. 'This exceptional duration means that incurable contradictions have appeared (have come to maturity) in the structure, and that the political forces working positively for the preservation and defence of the same structure are exerting themselves nevertheless to heal them within certain limits and to overcome them.'15 This seems exactly to describe the present situation, where although there have been exceptional interventions in the economy by governments, the restoration of 'business as usual' still seems to be the overriding goal. Social forces are so finely balanced that plans for necessary reforms (for example in the finance and tax systems, or in the use and production of energy) are immobilised.
Politics now
What are the implications for British politics of these intersecting problems?
What ways forwards can be expected or hoped for?
One of the larger problems is that the mentalities and expectations induced by thirty years of neoliberal dominance are now deeply ingrained, not least in many of the attitudes of the Labour government itself. The culture of individualism and inequality, the preference wherever possible for market solutions, and the dependence of the British economy on its financial sector as the leading-edge source of growth and profits, work against the solutions that are now needed. These call for a willingness to sacrifice short-term private interests for the public good, a more equal distribution of income and wealth (essential, for example, if housing is to become affordable for those on lower incomes), and the giving of greater priority to the well-being of future generations. Although Labour has of late been making some moves in a positive direction (at last, something like a radical policy on energy; a redirection of investment towards public transport proposing the replacement of much domestic air travel by high-speed trains; some recognition of the costs of neglecting the manufacturing sector; attempts to regulate financial institutions effectively; some higher taxation on the very rich), these developments do not yet amount to a coherent strategy for the redirection of the economy.
Furthermore, at the time of writing (September 2009) it seems unlikely that Labour will survive in office after the general election which is due in less than a year's time. But whatever one may think about Gordon Brown and his government, there seems virtually no respect at all in which the policies of Cameron's Tories are likely to be an improvement on Labour's. For all Cameron's presentational liberalism, it seems (increasingly) likely that a Tory government would be even more market-oriented, more inegalitarian, and more nationalist than even New Labour has been.
There is much despair about Brown's prime ministership, although one should recognise the 'over-determination' of the orchestrated denigration of him, and the exploitation of his weaknesses by those whose primary aim is to defeat Labour. Like Wilson before him, Brown is derided and feared as much because of what are believed to be his vestigial commitments to statist and egalitarian ways of thinking as for his more everyday weaknesses and failings. It is easy to be drawn into the media fixation with personality and presentation, and to be persuaded that a leader more adept in that dimension of politics might be an improvement from Labour's point of view. But it should be noted that in all the interminable discussions of a possible change of Labour leadership, changes in policy and direction have had no place at all, excepting only in the advocacy by ex-Blairites of a return to the even more market- and business-oriented agenda of the Blair era. In few respects do any of the mooted leadership alternatives to Brown offer an improvement to the policy agenda of his government.
But the time-frame of the British electoral cycle, and that within which the larger economic crisis is working itself out, are significantly different from each other. The general election will be decided within a year, but who can imagine that the larger crises described above will be resolved in so short a period? In this respect the crisis of the 2000s is like that of the 1970s - the Thatcher governments took six or seven years (and the Falklands victory) to develop and impose their radical agenda. The 'big bang' of financial deregulation took place in 1986, only after the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985. Whatever government takes office in 2010 (and in regard to that prospect Brown's resilience and far-sightedness should not be discounted), it will face severe problems which will take several years to resolve.
What have been largely 'system contradictions' may well before long take on the form of severe 'social contradictions', as governments encounter public resistance to - for example - cuts in public spending, further rises in unemployment, and other proposals for unequal sacrifices to meet the costs of recovery. A Conservative government could meet severe difficulties, and encounter disillusionment, once the novelty of a government which at any rate will offer fresh faces has worn off. There may be three or four years in which an alternative political perspective could be built, encompassing not only Labour but also the smaller parties of the centre-left (Lib Dems, Greens, Scottish and Welsh Nationalists), which might then represent a more convincing way forward out of the crisis of neoliberalism than it seems that the Cameron Tories are likely to offer. This crisis impels is to think in a time-frame longer than that of a single election.
Notes
1. The classic text for this kind approach is S. Hall. C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, Macmillan, 1978. See also the series of articles by Hall in Marxism Today, which can be found at http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm.
2. As he put it, 'from the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the "last instance" never comes'.
3. Althusser, through the influence of Lacan, drew on Freud's ideas of 'condensation' and 'displacement' to understand the different forms of determination and contradiction in social formations. As Ben Brewster puts it in his useful glossary for Althusser's For Marx (Verso 1965): 'In periods of stability the essential contradictions of the social formation are neutralised by displacement; in a revolutionary situation, however, they may condense or fuse into a revolutionary rupture.' (No better example of such a neutralising 'displacement' can be imagined than the recent diversion of public rage about the greed and irresponsibility of the bankers into the less disruptive scandal of the MPs' expenses. Indeed the expenses controversy has had the effect of weakening the agencies of government which would be indispensable to any effective constraint being set upon the financial sector.) Althusser was at pains to say that he was not interested in analogies between the substantive objects of psychoanalysis and historical materialism, but rather 'in the possibility of revealing epistemological analogies between Marx's theoretical work and Freud's' (Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, Verso 1968, p243). Laclau and Mouffe (in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso 1985) took up this methodological analogy through their concept of 'suture'; and Slavoj Zizek (in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso 1989, pp 87-130) has taken this much further, for example in his discussion of the Lacanian idea of 'points de capiton' (or quilting points) to understand the fixing of nodes of meaning and contradiction in the social order.
4. Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and their subsequent writings, pushed this argument for the relative autonomy of the ideological and the political spheres much further, rejecting the presupposition of any ultimate determination of political outcomes by reference to economic or class structures. However, while one should not assume such determination a priori, this is not to say that as a matter of fact it never happens.
5. See, for example, I. Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature, Free Press 1996.
6. K. Dennis and J. Urry, After the Car, Polity 2009.
8. D. Lockwood, 'Social Integration and System Integration', in G.K. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds), Explorations in Social Change, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1964.
9. 'Ungovernability' became the theme of a large academic and political debate at that time. Two influential views of the situation were, from the left, Jurgen Habermas's Legitimation Crisis (1976), and Claus Offe's Contradictions of the Welfare State (1984,); and from a different perspective, Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976).
10. On the falling rate of profit see P. Armstrong, A. Glyn and J. Harrison, Capitalism since 1945, Fontana 1984.
11. J.B. Foster and F. Magdoff (2009), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, Monthly Review Press 2009.
12. In Britain, Ann Pettifor has also argued that a deficiency of purchasing power among those on lower incomes lies at the root of the mortgage crisis and the financial havoc this has caused (see 'Bring Back Keynes', Guardian Comment is Free, 30.12.08). It is interesting to note that to the ethical case against the negative consequences of inequality for health and other public goods (powerfully made by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Allen Lane 2009) can now be added an economic case against inequality, as giving rise to a financial crisis whose origins lie in underconsumption.
13. Robin Murray has pointed out to me that it is not only underconsumption which lies at the core of this situation, but failures in the growth of production and productivity in the United States and Britain in particular. It has seemed that more money could be made in the financial sector, by avoiding the tedious constraints of manufacture and the complex social relations that technologies usually involve.
14. J. Authers, 'Long view: China's health gives rise to fresh growth theory', Financial Times, 5.6.09; http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a324a9b0-51f2-11de-b986-00144feabdc0.html.
15. Stuart Hall has reminded me of this passage - see The Modern Prince and other writings, Lawrence and Wishart 1957, p166.