Commentary: “The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism Signposts for Latin America”

This is an engaging piece aimed at a popular audience. It brings together the frenetic and dizzying contemporary developments in global capitalism and geopolitics and relates them to the current conjuncture in Latin America in a way that is passionate, well-written and accessible for anyone interested in world politics.

Those familiar with Robinson’s classic work on Latin America and Global Capitalism will recognise its imprint on the framing of this piece. Robinson describes the even greater concentration and centralization of global capital since he started writing about this phenomenon over a quarter of a century ago, as well as the responses, strategies, alliances and contradictions of the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) in the face of the ‘epochal crisis’. A closer reading further reveals that Robinson has dropped the more problematic (and oft criticised) notion of the Transnational State. He notes the TCC is ‘backed by capitalist states’— a far more plausible notion given the current context of inter-state rivalries and conflict than that of the ‘end of nation states’ that Robinson had adopted in his earlier work. It might be added that Robinson’s emphasis on capitalist accumulation on a planetary scale is also a counterpoint to the methodological nationalism associated with dependency theory, which has recently undergone a significant revival in LAPs.

The positive contribution of this ‘big picture’ piece is the hope that it will encourage those worried about the rise of far-right authoritarianism, extractive violence and the increasingly precarious livelihoods of working people to situate these political dynamics and struggles in the context of contemporary capitalism. On the other hand, it is also worth emphasising the blind spots and problems—methodological, analytical and political– in its account of global capitalism’s ‘epochal crisis’ and the political responses that should inform further debates and analyses. In the remainder of this commentary I will briefly elaborate on three points, all of which refer to longstanding debates on issues raised in Robinson’s piece.

The first is the heated topic of crisis. In his reference to “long-term secular decline in the average rate of profit” Robinson is adopting the theory of stagnation associated with Robert Brenner, Dylan Riley, Michael Roberts and others around the New Left Review. I will not reiterate the discussion in its entirety here, but only point out that the empirical problems with measuring rates of profit mean that this phenomenon is not as self-evident as Robinson suggests. More to the point, the prediction that neoliberal capitalism is on a death spiral has been put forward since at least the 2008 crisis without actually coming to fruition. What this thesis neglects is that neoliberalism has proven extremely resilient and effective in keeping profits up and wages down—which is just what it set out to do. We could well be in Robinson’s “unbreachable chasm,” but unfortunately it is hard to know until we fall out the bottom. The discussion is worth following not least because it has important implications for the type of alternative political projects we might support, in particular the feasibility of progressive policies within capitalism like those of the old and new Pink Tide.

My second point concerns method. Robinson’s claim is that ”Global Trumpism” is correlated to the transformations in global capitalism and the response to crisis. Far-right figures in Latin America like Bolsonaro, Milei, Bukele appear as epiphenomena of Global Trumpism —symbolizing “the rise of new transnational political dispensations in the face of mounting crisis” or ‘the globalization of “Plan Bukele.”’ However, this account is grounded on quite monolithic assumptions regarding capitalist crisis and its political response. In economic geography it has long been axiomatic that to research neoliberalism is to investigate spatiotemporally variable processes rather than static things (hence the talk of neoliberalization rather than neoliberalism). I would argue a similar case could be made for replacing Robinson’s rather homogenous “Global Trumpism” with an approach emphasizing variegation, geographical unevenness and path-dependency in the rise of the far-right. Students of contemporary Latin American politics would do better to look at historically and geographically specific contexts and the agency of social actors– reconfigurations of mining, agrarian, industrial and financial class factions, their alliances and conflicts with Pink Tide governments, how governments responded to the end of the commodities boom, imperialist interventions and the willingness and capacity of social forces to defend against the rise of the far-right. The political conclusions to be drawn from this revised analytical approach are important: Latin America has a long history of its own home-grown far-right authoritarianism that long predates Trump’s arrival on the scene.

These two considerations should shed light on my third point: Robinson’s dismissal of the potential for progressive alternatives from Pink Tide governments. If, as Robinson argues, capitalism is only and inevitably destructive, it seems to follow that any state project seeking progressive reforms within capitalism is doomed only to reproduce neoliberalism, extractivism and violence– to act “as transmission belts for the structural power of transnational capital.” The only apparent difference from right-wing governments is the Pink Tide’s capacity for “absorbing rebellion into the capitalist state” and “neutering the anti-systemic potential of one uprising after another.” The problems of Pink Tide governments– their top-down and even repressive tendencies, how they sewed divisions among social forces (many of which were then unwilling to defend them when the commodity boom went bust) are well-established. But it was also a weakness of the proliferation of left academic critiques of progressive governments that they failed to fully account for the dynamics of imperialism and the structural vulnerabilities and constraints facing Latin American countries as a result of their subordinated position in the global economic and political order as well as the internal and international power struggles they faced. Much of the literature dismissing Latin America’s left as “neoliberal” and “extractivist” was quite voluntaristic and naïve as to the structural and political constraints that Pink Tide governments were grappling with that made it more difficult to implement progressive, post-extractivist development projects than critics presumed. A more nuanced analysis of these power dynamics, of the state as a social relation and not just a ‘transmission belt,’ would give a clearer picture of where we are in the “crossroads” and what the exit options are.

To sum up, I would strongly encourage anyone interested in Latin American politics to read Robinson’s work, but also to do so with a critical eye and read debates beyond it.