would result, according to them. The logic of the expansion of capital does not imply any result qualifiable in terms of “development.” It does not suppose, for example, full employment or an amount designated in advance for the unequal (or equal) distribution of income. The logic of this expansion is guided by the search for profits by individual enterprises. This logic can entail, in certain conditions, growth or stagnation, expansion of employment or its reduction, can reduce inequality in incomes or accentuate it, according to circumstances.
Here again the sustained confusion between the concept of “market economy” and that of “capitalist economy” is at the source of a dangerous weakness found in critiques of the policies that are carried out. The “market,” which refers by nature to competition, is not “capitalism,” which is defined precisely by the limits to competition that the monopoly or oligopoly (for some people, to the exclusion of others) of private property implies. The “market” and capitalism form two distinct concepts. Really-existing capitalism is, as Braudel’s analysis has shown so well, the opposite even of the imaginary market.
In addition, really-existing capitalism does not function as a system of competition among the beneficiaries of the monopoly of property—competition among them and against others. Its operation requires the intervention of a collective authority representing capital as a whole. Thus the state is not separable from capitalism. The policies of capital, thus of the state insofar as it represents capital, have their own concrete logical stages. It is these logical stages that account for the fact that, at certain times, the expansion of capital entails an increase in employment, at other times a decrease in employment. These logical stages are not the expression of “laws of the market,” formulated in the abstract as such, but requirements of the profitability of capital in certain historical conditions.
There is no “law of capitalist expansion” which is imposed as a quasi-supernatural force. There is no historical determinism anterior to history. The inherent tendencies of the logic of capital always clash with forces which resist its effects. Real history is thus the product of this conflict between the logic of capitalist expansion and those logics that spring from social forces resisting its expansion. In this sense, the state is rarely simply the state of capital, it is also at the heart of the conflict between capital and society.
For example, the industrialization of the postwar period, from 1945 to 1990, was not the natural product of capitalist expansion but rather resulted from conditions imposed on capital by the victories of national liberation movements, which forced globalizing capital to adjust to this industrialization. For example, the erosion of the effectiveness of the national state, produced by capitalist globalization, is not an irreversible determinant of the future. On the contrary, national reactions to this globalization could impose unforeseen trajectories onto global expansion, for better or worse according to circumstances. For example, the concerns stemming from the environment, which are in conflict with the logic of capital (which is by nature a short-term logic) could impose important transformations onto capitalist adjustment. One could multiply the examples.
The effective response to the challenges can only be found if one understands that history is not governed by the infallible unfolding of economic laws. It is produced by social reactions to the tendencies expressed by these laws which, in turn, are defined by the social relations within the framework in which these laws operate. The “anti-systemic” forces—if one wants to refer to this organized, coherent and effective refusal to the unilateral and total submission to the requirements of these alleged laws (in fact, quite simply the law of profit characteristic of capitalism as a system)—make real history as much as the “pure” logic of capitalist accumulation. These forces govern the possibilities and the forms of the expansion which then develop within the framework that they have organized.
The method proposed here prohibits formulating “recipes” in advance that would allow the future to be made. The future is produced by the transformations in the social and political relations of force, themselves produced by struggles whose outcomes are not known in advance. One can nevertheless reflect on this process, in the context of contributing to the crystallization of coherent and possible projects and, consequently, help any social movement avoid false solutions. In the absence of such reflection, a movement could easily become bogged down in the pursuit of these “solutions.”
The project of a humanist response to the challenge of capitalism’s globalized expansion is by no means utopian. On the contrary, it is the only possible realistic project, in the sense that the beginning of an evolution towards such a response could rapidly win over powerful social forces capable of imposing a logic on it. If there is a utopia, in the banal and negative sense of the term, it is truly the project of managing the system, understood as regulation by the market.
2. POSTMODERNISM, IDEOLOGICAL ACCESSORY TO LIBERALISM
Postmodernist discourse is an ideological accessory that, in the end, legitimizes liberalism and invites us to submit to it.
The apparent triumph of liberalism—in its most simplistic and brutal North American form—does not express an impulse towards the rejuvenation of capitalism, restoring to it all the American vigor eroded by statism and the welfare state of old Europe. The opposition of “young America”—which has the future before it—to “old Europe” constitutes, as is well known, one of the favored themes of “pro-American” discourse.
The offensive of liberalism strives, in fact, to overcome, through brutality, the growing contradictions of capitalism, which has had its day and has no perspective to offer humanity other than that of self-destruction.
This obsolescence of capitalism is not expressed exclusively in the spheres of economic and social reproduction. Onto this decisive infrastructural base are grafted multiple manifestations both of the retreat of bourgeois universalist thought (for which new ideological discourses substitute a so-called postmodernist patchwork) and of regression in the practices of political management (calling into question the bourgeois democratic tradition).
The ideological discourse of postmodernism is sustained by these regressions. Recuperating every common prejudice produced by the disarray characteristic of moments such as ours, it methodically lays out, without concern for overall coherence, one argument after another encouraging suspicion towards the concepts of progress and universalism. But far from deepening the serious critique of these expressions of Enlightenment culture and bourgeois history, far from analyzing their actual contradictions, which are aggravated by the obsolescence of the system, this discourse is satisfied with substituting the impoverished propositions of liberal American ideology for a true critique: “live with your time,” “adapt to it,” “manage each day”—that is, abstain from reflecting on the nature of the system, and particularly from calling into question its choices of the moment.
The praise for inherited diversities proposed in place of the necessary effort to transcend the limits of bourgeois universalism thus functions in perfect accord with the requirements of contemporary imperialism’s project of globalization, a project that can produce only an organized system of apartheid on a world scale, sustained as it is by reactionary “communitarian” ideologies in the North American tradition. What I qualify as the “culturalist” retreat, which is at the forefront of the scene today, is thus implemented and manipulated by the masters of the system, just as it is equally often seized upon by the dominated peoples in confusion (under the form of so-called religious or ethnic fundamentalisms). This is the “clash of barbarisms,” as Gilbert Achcar has written, giving Huntington’s thesis a self-realizing character.
The totality of these manifestations of both confusion and retreat in relation to the past achievements of bourgeois thought results in a degradation of political practice. The very principle of democracy is founded on the possibility of making alternative choices. There is no longer a need for democracy, since ideology made the idea that “there is no alternative” acceptable. Adherence to a meta-social principle of superior rationality allows for the elimination of the necessity and possibility of choosing. The so-called principle of the rationality of “markets” exactly fills this function in the ideology of obsolescent capitalism. Democratic practice is thus emptied of all content and the way is open to what I have called “low-intensity democracy”—that is, to electoral buffooneries