Savage Inequalities: Capitalist Crisis and Surplus Humanity

ABSTRACT

The escalation of worldwide inequalities reflects a crisis of global capitalism that is as much structural, one of over-accumulation, as it is political, one of hegemony. This article explores the current restructuring of global capitalism and global labor. Capitalist globalization has undermined earlier redistributive arrangements at the level of the nation-state, unleashing unprecedented global social polarization and also aggravating over-accumulation pressures. The transnational capitalist class has turned to several mechanisms to sustain accumulation in the face of stagnation: financial speculation, the pillaging of public finance, and militarized accumulation. Digitalization is driving new world capitalist restructuring that is resulting in increased precariatization and the expansion of surplus labor or surplus humanity. This precariatization includes cognitive workers who are atomized and isolated as the labor process has become individualized, which poses new challenges for working-class consciousness and solidarity among multilayered members of the global working class. The crisis poses a danger of twenty-first century fascism and a global police state but also new possibilities for emancipatory projects. An emancipatory project must bring together surplus humanity and its struggles in the margins and at points of social reproduction with workers inserted into the circuits of global capital under precarious work arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Precariat
• global capitalism
• global inequalities
• surplus labor
• capitalist crisis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

William I. Robinson is professor of sociology, global studies, and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (2019). His professional website is http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/robinson/.

Yousef K. Baker is assistant professor of international studies at the California State University, Long Beach, where he is also the co-director of the Global Middle East Studies Program. He writes about global capitalism and the Middle East and anti-Muslim racism.

Notes

1 Guy Standing (2011) popularized but did not coin this term. Standing’s social democratic conception is seriously flawed. He suggests that the precariat is “a new class” rather than part of the working class experiencing a condition faced by expanding sectors of the working class. He does not conceive of this condition as an instance of the capital–labor relation. He takes a First World/Eurocentric view of the global precariat—what we could call “methodological Westernism”—and appears unable to combine class with racial, ethnic, and cultural analysis. His liberal orientation does not critique capital as a relation causal to the rise of the precariat as much as the state as an inadequate regulator of the market and its social consequences. For discussion, see inter alia, “Roundtable on the Precariat” (see, https://www.greattransition.org/publication/debating-the-precariat-a-roundtable?highlight=WyJ3aWxsaWFtIiwid2lsbGlhbXMiLCJpIiwiaSdtIiwiaSdkIiwiaSd2ZSIsImknbGwiLCInaSIsInJvYmluc29uIiwicm9iaW5zb24ncyIsIndpbGxpYW0gaSIsIndpbGxpYW0gaSByb2JpbnNvbiIsImkgcm9iaW5zb24iXQ==).

2 UNCTAD (2017, 62), estimated that more than 85% of all retails and service workers in Indonesia and the Philippines were at risk of losing their jobs to digital automation.

3 In the United States and perhaps elsewhere, higher education is becoming a strategy for deferring unemployment. There has been an unprecedented increase in university enrollment of over five million since 2001 and enrollment numbers are expected to climb another 15% by 2015, while the price for tuition and fees has jumped 157% in private institutions and 237% in public schools (Starzmann 2018). Student debt approached $1.5 trillion in 2018, over twice the total US credit card debt (see Student Loan Hero 2018). See Soederberg’s (2014, 79–132) brilliant analysis in Chapter Five, “Debtfarism and the Student Loan Industry.” This debt is a claim on the future wages of these students, and in at least 20 states debtors can be denied drivers licenses and professional licenses if they do not maintain debt payments. Their precarious situation creates the conditions for lives as precarious workers in the future, while training becomes more and more disconnected from income.

4 There is a burgeoning literature on work, social organization, culture, and consciousness in the digital era that we cannot discuss here. But see, inter alia, Betancourt (2016), and Stiegler (2017).

5 See, inter alia, Aronowitz and DiFazio (2010), Ford (2015), Srnicek (2016), and Rivkin (1995).

6 The phrase is from Davis (2006).

7 See, inter alia, discussion in Portes, Castells, and Benton (1989).

8 For the figure on those in vulnerable employment, see ILO (2011). For the figure on the unemployed, see ILO (1997).

9 On twenty-first century fascism, see Robinson (2019).

10 See Robinson (2019) and Robinson’s (2014, 158–213) Chapter Five, “Policing Global Capitalism.”

11 For detailed discussion, see Robinson (2018b).