The new age of catastrophe
Blog: Progress in Political Economy (PPE)
The conjucture of the first few decades of the twenty-first century witnessed Alex Callinicos usefully mapping the contours of imperialism as set out in his pivotal book Imperialism and Global Political Economy. As somewhat of a successor text, this is now accompanied by The New Age of Catastrophe that seeks to address today's conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis), the conditions of which are situated as immanent to capitalism as a totality. The creativity of Imperialism and Global Political Economy flowed from Callinicos offering an innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin to propose a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical. The book bears repeated revisiting. Indeed, I have done so recently in an article for the pages of International Affairs (see 'Mainstreaming Marxism', International Affairs 99: 3, 2023). There I demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy (drawing from Nikolai Bukharin) and racial capitalism (drawing from C.L.R. James) have been silenced by mainstream imitators (namely, Kenneth Waltz and E.H. Carr). There is also much wider engagement with Callinicos' theorising on capitalism and the state-system in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-authored with Andreas Bieler.
As an 'antechamber' to the present, the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The New Age of Catastrophe offers a theoretical framing of the argument by recovering and reasserting a discussion of totality as a category in order to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Drawing from Lukács and others the method of totality is legitimised in order to constitute capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts. As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, 'even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality' (p. 8). This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as emblematic of a dialectical critique of the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge by mainstream perspectives.
In The New Age of Catastrophe Callinicos endeavours to engage with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments that encompass the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning gender and race as intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms). The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments in the present conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis of capitalism.
The main theme to pick up on for the rest of this review is the recognition of the conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism and how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics is treated in the book. Throughout The New Age of Catastrophe the long-term trend of neoliberal authoritarianism is addressed, whether it be through some of the earlier work on authoritarian [...]
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