Volatile, uneven and combined capitalism

Introduction This chapter seeks explanations for the last period (roughly three decades) of volatile global capitalism in order to advance strategic resistance. The merits of ‘classical political economic theory’ include the identification of crisis tendencies at the core of capital's laws of motion, tendencies which are met by countervailing management techniques. Crisis displacement techniques became much more sophisticated since the 1930s freeze of financial markets, crash of trade, Great Depression and inter-imperial turn to armed aggression. The chapter documents the global economy's vast credit expansion and the use of geographical power to move devaluation to Third World and emerging market sites, as well as vulnerable markets in the North that have suffered substantial ‘corrections’ in past years. Extra-market coercion including gendered and environmental super-exploitation has intensified in the process. The result is an ‘uneven and combined’ capitalism that concentrates wealth and poverty in more intense ways, geographically, and brings capitalist markets and the non-market spheres of society and nature together in ways adverse to the latter. As for resistance, popular movements across the world are divided on strategies and tactics. While there are some crucial sites of national state control by anti-capitalist forces in Latin America, we can consider the options faced by the popular movements in terms of three alternative orientations: (i) ‘autonomism’, (ii) ‘global governance’; and (iii) ‘decommodification’ of life/nature alongside the ‘deglobalization’ of capital.