Crisis del Capitalismo Global o, Fin du Globe?

Abstract

In this essay I have tried to contribute to the fruitful debate on the crisis of global capitalism. The thesis developed is based on a succession of historical, convergent and organically dependent events. The crisis of Keynesian capitalism of the second post­war period converged –and contributed to deepen– with the crisis of developmentalism in Latin America and on the African continent. The rise of the neoliberal counterrevolution led by Thatcher-Reagan, along with her European Third Way disciples, converged with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the extraordinary rise of post-Maoist China. During the Deng Xiaoping era, which began in 1978, a state capitalism developed in the Asian country that two decades later, under politically communist control, had been transformed into a socialist regime with Chinese characteristics and neoliberal affinities. The consequences of this new world order are an­alyzed in the second part of the essay as central problems of the 21th century: the global existential inequality of a citizenry subjected by the logic of fictitious capital to implaca­ble debt bondage; the erosion of public policy; labor exploitation expressed simultane­ously in post-industrial economies and in the global South through the not so creative destruction of value chains and other forms linked to the expansion of the gig economy and silicon techno-utopianism; as well as the anthropogenic alteration, without historical precedent, of terrestrial biodiversity.