Envisioning alternatives to capitalism: On recent debates from the great recession to the global pandemic

Abstract

The 21st century has been a century of historic crises with deep socioeconomic and political consequences.Before the end of its first decade, the world was hit by the 2007-2009 Great Recession, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, followed by the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. While the ecological crisis with its colossal levels of human and environmental devastation continues to break every historical record, we entered into the third decade of the century with a global pandemic, the worst since the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu.The new century has also seen some of the longest, deadliest, and most widespread wars since the Second World War. These crises have underpinned the emergence of morbid backlashes in the form of far-right movements and authoritarianism (Tooze, 2018). A glance at the rise of far-right political parties and populist politicians around the world is enough to see that democratic backsliding and xenophobic, racist, sexist, and elitist politics are threatening not only unconsolidated and fragile democracies but also those political regimes that were considered as the most stable of liberal democracies.As alarming as these developments are, they certainly cannot be identified as temporary anomalies in the long history of capitalism seen from a global perspective. Capitalist development since its inception in the 16th century has always been riddled with systematic exploitation, economic recessions, colonial oppression, genocidal wars, and ecological devastation, all the while generating the most massive expansion of productive capacity and monetary wealth in human history. Nevertheless, the scale of its crises and the extension of its consequences into the core capitalist countries, particularly after the Great Recession have led to a renewed interest in the critique of capitalism and theorization of alternative socioeconomic models. Critical discussion on contemporary capitalism is no longer confined to the radical left (e.g.,