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Copyright © 2010 by Kanishka Chowdhury and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087
Deflecting Crisis:
Critiquing Capitalism’s Emancipation Narrative
Kanishka Chowdhury
Much has been said about the recent economic crisis and the ways in which
capital has adapted to the exigencies of the present conjuncture, especially using this
moment of crisis to increase its assault on labor and public organizations. Little is
surprising about the sustained and systematic efforts to abolish collective bargaining
rights and slash social programs in the United States and Western Europe. However,
these hyperreal moments of crisis and reactionary policies should not distract us from the
core point that crisis is immanent to capital, and that for a majority of the world’s
population, especially in the Global South, crisis is an everyday occurrence. There,
capital constantly manages crisis through economic adjustments and political violence,
and it must continuously sustain the pace of capital accumulation by all means necessary.
As I attempt to argue in this paper, managing crisis, however, is not purely a matter of
policies and political actions, but an exercise that also involves redirecting or deflecting
discussions of crisis so that the business of accumulation can continue. One such exercise
is to generate narratives that can explain away crisis and contradiction, and clearly, there
are agents of capitalism, such as the global management firm, McKinsey & Company,
who perform this task with great assiduity.1 However, as I will claim in this paper, other
narratives, what I will call, neoliberal emancipation narratives, often function in similar
ways, even as they pose themselves as critical of existing practices within capitalism.
In the last decade, as the global economy has perpetuated increasing and vast
inequities, there has been an attendant rise in narratives such as “poverty alleviation” that
seem devised to address the inequities of capitalism. Many of these narratives, however,
make no attempt either to recognize the traditional node of production, Marx’s “hidden
abode of production,” or to engage with the structural basis of poverty or poverty’s links
to exploitation. Although these narratives do not always avowedly or overtly promote the
neoliberal ethic (indeed these discourses are sometimes framed as being in opposition to
1 McKinsey and Company is the most powerful global management consulting firm in the world, serving
two-thirds of the Fortune 1000.
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the free market system), they subvert a broader politics of revolutionary solidarities
within an ethos of “emancipation.” These narratives come in the form of literary texts,
films, self-help poverty alleviation programs, such as micro-credit, “greening” visions,
and so on. My point here is that many of these apparent emancipation narratives, at first
glance so seemingly critical of unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism serve a normalizing
function in the narrativization of crisis. They imply or suggest that crisis and indeed the
conditions affecting the well-being of millions around the globe can be alleviated by
attention to specific disjunctures within capitalism, eliding the need to transform
capitalism itself. David Harvey reminds us that during an economic crisis it is always
important to ask, “what is it being rationalised here and what directions are the
rationalisations taking, since these are what will define not only our manner of exit from
the crisis but the future character of capitalism?” (The Enigma 71).
In the spirit of Harvey’s question, then, I will briefly explore features of a couple
of specific emancipation narratives, deliberately selecting those that appear to be resistant
to the dominant neoliberal paradigm. I will then suggest some possible ways to forge and
to build on existing resistant solidarities, recuperating, in the process, the revolutionary
possibilities of actual emancipation. My purpose here is not merely to reclaim the
language of empowerment and emancipation but also to make transparent the hidden
logic of capital. The first example I will examine is the narrative of climate change. In the
version I highlight, the discourse of climate change is the default mechanism for
comprehending and simultaneously taming the chaos unleashed by capital.
A notable example of this sort of narrative is Paul Krugman’s recent column in
the New York Times, “Droughts, Floods, and Food.” In this piece, Krugman, the resident
economist, takes on the topic of spiraling global food prices. He acknowledges that these
soaring prices are “having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not
most of their income on basic foodstuffs” (A19). Krugman then sets out to answer an
important question, since that is what well-paid economists are supposed to do: “what’s
behind the price spike”? Krugman considers a couple of possibilities, among them right-
wing theories blaming “easy-money policies at the Federal Reserve” and blaming, as
French President, Nicolas Sarkozy chose to, the speculators. But, Krugman concludes,
the evidence “tells a different, much more ominous story.” The primary reason for the
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global food crisis and the soaring food crisis, according to Krugman, is that “severe
weather events have disrupted agricultural production.” Krugman concedes that
economic growth, bad energy policy resulting in rising meat consumption, and subsidized
production of ethanol, for instance, are also contributing factors, but ultimately (bring on
the apocalyptic drum roll), the “weather struck.” Krugman then catalogs a series of
weather disasters across the globe over the last year to explain rising food prices and
concludes that climate change is the key factor in understanding the crisis. The column
on the food crisis, written in the same week as the revolutionary events unfolding in
North Africa ends with a call for the reduction of green house gases and a reminder about
the need to take climate change seriously.
Now, it is quite clear that climate change is a factor in agricultural output and
food production. No one, in short, could dispute Krugman’s point that we need to pay
serious attention to and address expeditiously human-induced climate change or that
resultant weather events are factors in food prices. It is true, too, that corporate policies
and a reckless philosophy of “growth” are to a large extent responsible for climate shifts
that have had a devastating effect on global populations, particularly in the Global South.
These, too, should be acknowledged and opposed. However, what is so fascinating about
Krugman’s economic column is not so much his unwillingness to uncover the inevitable
links in any understanding of prices within a capitalist society to factors such as
decreasing wages, the expropriation of arable farmland by global companies, and the
need for ever expanding profit, but rather his apparent inability to do so. It is as if the
social relations of production, indeed the very abode of production, are completely
outside his theoretical purview. Thus he must adopt an extra-economic narrative that will
provide a justifiable explanatory framework for comprehending why a vast number of
people are unable to afford basic foodstuffs. Capitalism as the hegemonic, unquestioned
economic logic makes it impossible for him to get to the rational core within the mystical
shell. The only move he can make is thus encoded within capitalist logic, a logic which
deflects attention from critical economic relations and explains away crisis and
contradiction, attributing these instead to natural forces.
This deflection in Krugman’s piece is at the heart of the neoliberal emancipatory
narrative. Social and economic problems are accommodated within narratives of potential
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change that reside comfortably within the exploitative framework of capitalism. Krugman
can only address the current food crisis by taking refuge in the environmental
intervention narrative. In this narrative, humans who have created an ecological crisis can
effect change by electing the green alternative. Herein lies the potential for emancipation.
We can act within the boundaries of the existing system in an attempt to free ourselves
from the consequences of climate change, but this possibility is simultaneously
undermined by the image of environmental catastrophe. Neil Smith points out that much
as “greenwashing” was used in the 1990s to recode environmentalism for the purpose of
capitalist profit, the specter of climate change is “today deployed on behalf of a certain
nature-washing,” a “process by which social transformations of nature are well enough
acknowledged but in which that socially changed nature becomes a new super
determinant of our social fate” (245). Kurgman, however, is caught between
environmental determinism and emancipatory possibilty. He cannot resolve this
contradiction, nor is he able to answer his first question – “So what’s behind the price
spike?” – within the context of a systemic analysis of actually existing social relations.
Therefore, he can only conduct a rhetorical sleight of hand by creating another question.
Suddenly, the entire focus of the article shifts. For Krugman, “The question then
becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?”
Krugman’s strategy should come as no surprise to anyone with any familiarity
with Marx’s writings on commodity fetishism and his explanation of the ways in which
social relations are mystified when money enters into consideration and everything is
analyzed purely in terms of price. The physical – in Krugman’s case, nature and so-called
natural causes – becomes the fulcrum of causal analysis as if prices had nothing to do
with people existing together in specific class relations within particular social conditions
of exploitation and expropriation. Indeed, Krugman’s position on rising food prices is
hardly unique: in a report on the BBC news site on April 14, 2011, an article “Q&A:
Why Food Prices and Fuel Costs Are Going Up,” puts the blame squarely on weather
disruptions, even citing the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United
Nations) to emphasize that while speculators may have made matters worse, they were in
no way responsible for the rise in food prices.
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David Harvey, objecting to arguments by critics such as James O’Connor, that
focus on barriers in nature as the second contradiction of capitalism, points out that “there
is always a danger in overemphasizing supposedly ‘pure’ natural limits at the expense of
concentrating upon the capitalist dynamics that force environmental changes in the first
place and on the social (particularly class relations) that drive those dynamics in certain
environmentally perverse directions” (The Enigma 77).2 Of course, Harvey is right about
this misplaced overemphasis, but Krugman in the New York Times column is not forming
an analysis at the “expense” of understanding “capitalist dynamics.” Krugman is
unwilling and unable to consider capitalist dynamics or contradictions in capitalism in the
first place.
While the narrative of climate change deflects any real engagement with the
ethics of neoliberal capitalism, the discourse of poverty alleviation directly engages the
social ground of capital. There are many versions of this narrative, and one can pay
attention to the policies of NGOs (Non-governmental organizations), aid organizations,
micro-credit institutions, and so forth. Clearly, the narrative of poverty alleviation has a
long history and is allied with the discourse of development so dear to the World Bank
and to other Northern financial institutions. For my argument, I will briefly consider two
prominent ways in which the narrative of poverty alleviation is performed.
One performance is positioned within “the people” themselves and is located in
the ethos of “empowering” people. This version of the narrative relies on the notion that
those in poverty are natural entrepreneurs, held back primarily because of the absence of
capital. An obvious example of this model involves the institution of micro-credit loans.3
The strength of this narrative lies in the word “empowerment,” which indicates the
potential freeing of poor people, transforming them into engines of enterprise.
Empowerment, as Aradhana Sharma points out, “has become a ubiquitous term and a
buzzword in transnational development circles. An anti-imperialist, radical, leftist, and
feminist language that arose out of social movements, empowerment has now been
embraced as a panacea – a means and an end of development” (2). However desirable,
2 For a discussion about the ecological limits to capitalism, see also Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in
Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century.
3 For an extended analysis of the practices of microfinance in the global South, see Ananya Roy’s Poverty
Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development.
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according to Sharma, “Strategies of empowerment, self-help, and self-esteem are a
critical part of the neoliberal development package in that they enable the actualization
. . . of the goals of the free market” (17). Of course, no mention is made in this narrative
about the actual role of capitalist social relations as integral to an understanding of
poverty, or, as Sharma puts it, to “the willful roles that powerful people and institutions
play in the disempowerment and subjection of those on the fringes” (27). Instead, poverty
alleviation narratives generally rely on a “naturalized picture of poverty and
powerlessness, where certain people lack the requisite attitudes and means to become
rational, economic agents” (Sharma 27). The implied argument in the empowerment
narrative is that the cause of poverty is the lack of capital and access to capital.
More problematically, the focus on the individual and on self-governance
enshrined in this narrative effectively replicates the neoliberal distrust of the state. Of
course, as we well know, the neoliberal state by its very definition acts mostly on behalf
of the guardians of international capital. However, the state must constantly be posed as a
barrier against the “natural” laws of the free market since it remains a potential source for
populist reinvention. Consequently, such an erasure of the state ignores the fact that
individual betterment outside the context of macroeconomic changes and structural
transformations can only be partial. In a country such as Bangladesh, where social
spending has been severely curtailed as a result of structural adjustment programs, for
instance, it takes only one health emergency to wipe out any gains that may arise from a
micro-loan. This emancipation narrative, however, elides these concerns, sidestepping the
essentially predatory nature of capitalism with its faith in individual actions. Indeed, these
loans operate with a predatory logic of their own since the interest rates for repayment
range from ten to over twenty percent. Recently, many of these programs have come
under attack for precisely such practices.4 The point I am making here, however, is not so
much about the fairness or viability of these programs, but rather about the nature of the
emancipation narrative itself, functioning as it does as an empowerment story that papers
over the contradictions inherent in the very system that produces the poverty in the first
place.
4 See Vikas Bajaj’s “Microlenders, Honored With Nobel, Are Struggling.” New York Times. January 11,
2011 and Leo Hornak’s “Why the Dream of Microfinance is Turning Sour.” The Independent, May 8,
2011.
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A similar function is apparent in the other reigning narrative of poverty
alleviation. Unlike the previous narrative, this one attempts to correct the deficiencies of
neoliberalism from the top down. This form is best exemplified in the notion of social
business and social entrepreneurship. In a recent Public Broadcasting series, “The New
Heroes,” social entrepreneurs are described thus: “social entrepreneurs act as change
agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to improve systems, invent
and disseminate new approaches, and advance sustainable solutions that create new
value. Unlike traditional business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs primarily seek to
generate ‘social value’ rather than profit.” In this model, then, profits are apparently not
the goal; instead, the emphasis is on the ethical task of business, which is apparently to
work as “change agents” for the social good. I will briefly allude to one version of this
narrative method, partly because of its links to the first narrative of poverty alleviation.
This method of poverty alleviation is associated with the name that one most
associates with micro-credit as well, Muhammed Yunus, who recently has been
dismissed from his position at the Grameen Bank. His book, Creating a World Without
Poverty reveals some fundamental ways in which the narrative of poverty alleviation and
emancipation work. In this text, he puts forward the doctrine of “Social Business,” which,
he argues,
is basically the same as the existing PMB [Profit Making Business]. But it differs
in its objectives. Like other businesses, it employs workers, creates goods and
services, and provides these to customers for a price consistent with its objective.
But its underlying objective – and the criterion by which it should be evaluated –
is to create social benefits for those whose lives it touches. (21-22).
Creating social benefits, however, does not preclude the importance of profitability:
“Wherever possible, without compromising the social objective, social businesses should
make profit for two reasons: First, to pay back its investors; and second, to support the
pursuit of long-term social goals” (24). Nevertheless, Yunus is at pains to distinguish
PMBs from social businesses. His position is best elucidated on his website, “Yunus
Centre.” It is important to quote him at some length here since doing so allows us to see
how this narrative functions:
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In fact, the inclusion of Social Businesses alongside PMBs in the business world
will give free market capitalism a larger, nobler and a more fulfilling
purpose. One thing is very clear to me – that with the Social Business taking off,
the world of free market capitalism will never be the same again, and it then will
really be able to deliver a deathblow on global poverty. I am sure, many business
wizards and successful business personalities will apply their abilities to this new
challenge – the challenge of creating a poverty-free world within a short time.
There are many interesting elements to Yunus’s language here, but perhaps the one that is
most noteworthy is his attempt to separate the goals of social business and those of what
he calls PMBs. According to Yunus’s logic, while the goal of the latter is to generate
profit, that of social businesses is to perform social good. What is entirely elided in
Yunus’s binary is the fact that social businesses form another node in the continuum of
the financialization of development. As in the case of the micro-credit institutions, these
businesses implicitly aid in minimizing the work of the state and in directing economies
toward greater privatization. These narratives suggest that while it is possible for the state
to assist in alleviating poverty, it is best that they “get out of the way.” Similar to the
discourse regarding empowerment, the state is written off as hopelessly bureaucratic and
interventionist. Another problem with Yunus’s rosy narrative is that these so-called social
businesses are based on the same structural rules of capital – wage labor, surplus
production, expansion, and exploitation – as their “for profit” counterparts. Needless to
say, whatever the social good produced by these businesses, they function entirely within
the institutional productive rules of capitalism. As Alain Badiou puts it, “All the efforts to
construct an alternative economy [of this sort] strike me as pure and simple abstractions,
if not simply driven by the unconscious vector of capital’s own reorganization. . . .
Capital is indifferent to the qualitative configuration of things. So long as it can be
transformed or aligned in terms of market value, everything’s fine” (106). In Yunus’s
narrative, social businesses will address the “problems of society,” empowering those
who live in poverty, once again attempting to banish forever into the margins the crisis
that is, in fact, irresolvable.
Yunus’s rhetoric about free-market capitalism and “freedom” within it is perhaps
not uncommon in this day and age. Like many who are committed to the notion of
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“responsible” capitalism, he imagines that its goal is to “deliver a deathblow on global
poverty.” Obviously one need not take this statement literally, but rather as a rhetorical
ploy to accommodate two sets of audiences. One is the “many business wizards and
successful business personalities” who have to be wooed, while the other is a more
general audience who have to be convinced that whatever the current crisis of capitalism,
if there are enough good people to invest in the social good, then capitalism can still work
for the benefit of the poor. What, of course, cannot be addressed or reconciled is that the
tyranny of continual accumulation depends upon systemic and sustained acts of violence;
that the practices of so-called social businesses are within the exploitative circuits of
capitalism, not outside them; that profit is generated by value-producing labor.
I want to clarify that my critique of these emancipation narratives does not
suggest that all reform activities within capitalist societies are doomed by the weight of
their contradictions. Clearly, movements to gain workers’ rights, or to agitate for health
reform, or to oppose corporate influence are worthwhile and important projects. Indeed,
attempts to shorten the working day or efforts to fight for a greater share of corporate
profits, for instance, are one of the most fundamental forms of class struggle, and such
struggles mark transformational moments in forging a revolutionary consciousness.
Therefore, in this essay, I am not interested in replicating the age-old discussion about the
reform or revolution binary, choosing one over the other. Let me turn to Rosa
Luxemburg, and in particular to a debate that took place towards the end of the nineteenth
century, to clarify my position. In a series of articles in Neue Zeit (1896-98) and in his
book Evolutionary Socialism (1899), Eduard Bernstein, a prominent leader in Germany's
SDP (Social Democratic Party) considered whether reform or revolution was the best
way to confront the global scale of capitalism. Bernstein concluded that capitalism had
been transformed and could be further transformed through reform. Luxemburg's
response was equally unequivocal, but more dialectical: she refused the apparent
simplicity of this binary; there was no either/or for Luxemburg; both reform and
revolution were necessary in order to chart the path toward socialism. What she clarified
was something Bernstein did not address. “Legislative reform and revolution,” she said,
are “different factors in the development of class society. They condition and
complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north
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and south poles, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat” (Reform 89). They are different “not
in the space of time they take up, but in their essential characteristics.” “Revolutions,”
according to Luxemburg, were “a qualitative change, the transformation from one social
order to another: Therefore, whoever opts for the path of legal reform, in place of and in
contradistinction to the conquest of political power, actually chooses not a calmer and
slower road to the same aim, but a different aim altogether” (Reform 90) The reform
narratives of Krugman or Yunus, although addressing crucially important crisis points in
capitalism – the rise in food prices and rampant inequality of income – are qualitatively
different from a narrative that recognizes the fundamental contradictions inherent in
capital: these reform narratives postpone crisis, or externalize it, in effect supplementing
the divisions of class society rather than resolving them.
A related question of interest is why these narratives are displacing existing
revolutionary narratives at this particular juncture. Certainly, it is no coincidence that
these narratives are proliferating at a time when revolutionary activities across the globe
are increasing in number. Therefore, we must pay attention to these discourses and
strategies to manage crisis and contradiction, partly because, as David Harvey puts it, in
the Global South, “we are not confronting any simple ‘export’ of neo-liberalism from
some hegemonic center. The development of neo-liberalism must be regarded as a
decentered and unstable evolutionary process characterized by uneven geographical
developments and strong competitive pressures between a variety of dynamic centers of
political-economic power” (Spaces 41). According to Harvey, neoliberalism is
characterized by a general sense of unsettlement. It is, after all, “an unstable and evolving
regime of accumulation rather than a fixed and harmoniously functional configuration of
political economic power” (Spaces 29). Perhaps these emancipation narratives reside in
these in between spaces of accumulation, both inside and outside the “dynamic centers of
political-economic power.” More importantly, it must be stressed that since crisis can be
relatively deflected in the metropolis by shifting the burden to the Global South, the cost
is greatest in these parts of the world. Thus, it seems logical that the challenge to
neoliberal methods will likely continue to come from the societies in which these regimes
of accumulation are being implemented with the greatest ferocity.
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Uneven geographical development, however, is not merely a causal offshoot of
metropolitan capitalism; in Harvey’s model, the Global South too often looks like a
largely passive object of western capital. Rosa Luxemburg reminds us of the examples of
the Russia and China of her time, societies that “carry over outmoded pre-capitalist
claims while on the other hand they already embody new conflicts which run counter to
the domination of capital” (The Accumulation 399-400). Implicit in Luxemburg’s insight
is the importance of internal social mechanisms of so-called underdeveloped societies in
undermining the domination of capital. One of the challenges capital faces in the present
is to carry on the task that Luxemburg indicated as provoking a potential crisis for capital
in her own time: to simultaneously underdevelop and violently incorporate into the world
system those economic structures that do not fully serve the needs of capital. As Partha
Chatterjee puts it, the universalizing role of capital has a
differential impact on pre-capitalist structures – sometimes destroying them,
sometimes modifying them to fit in with the new demands of surplus extraction
and the new procedures of governance, and at other times keeping intact, perhaps
bolstering, pre-existing productive systems and local organizations of power
while merely establishing a suitable extraction mechanism. (347)
Acknowledging Chatterjee’s description of the complexity of this process and the actual
agency of those resisting capital’s impact means moving beyond Harvey’s more abstract
and western-centered characterization of uneven development and resistance. What might
it mean for people in the Global South to assume, as does Harvey, that “it is the
profoundly anti-democratic nature of neo-liberalism backed by the authoritarianism of the
neo-conservatives that should surely be the main focus of political struggle,” or that their
struggles are merely “expressive of some version of democratic values” (68)? Already in
South Asia, for instance, the promotion of so-called emancipatory poverty alleviation
programs has been overshadowed by the rise of revolutionary movements, movements
that directly address the root causes of poverty. The farmers, the landless laborers, and
the fisher folk who are fighting for their land against the takeover by the steel company,
POSCO, in Orissa, or the Adivasis fighting government forces in the mass movement in
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Lalgarh, West Bengal need no lessons in emancipation from bankers, nor are they
waiting for Social Businesses to pay attention to their needs, nor are they interested in
mere reform.5 They are conscious agents who know that the existing class society is
fundamentally antagonist to their basic economic rights.
In his speech at the Fourth Moscow City Conference of Non-Party Working
Women in September 1919, Lenin criticizes the emancipation movements in Western
Europe that have called for equality between men and women but have been unable to
accomplish this goal because they have kept intact all the social relations of capitalism
that help men retain their privileges. In the Soviet Union, however, within the framework
of revolutionary change, Lenin refers to emancipation in an entirely different context:
“We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers
themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancipation of working women is a matter
for working women themselves” (79). In Lenin’s view, true emancipation comes from the
people who are coming into consciousness through revolutionary knowledge and action.
In the present conjuncture, we must continue to challenge and work against
neoliberal narratives of emancipation and poverty alleviation, pointing out the
inextricable connections between these apparently oppositional strategies and the “stern
laws of economic process,“ as Luxemburg would put it. We must emphasize that these
strategies are not separate from the “realm of capital’s blistering violence.” They, too,
participate fully in creating the conditions for the reproduction of capital (Luxemburg,
The Accumulation 433). It is this important link that must be reinforced in our appraisals
of these narratives.
As I write these words, news about yet another uprising arrives. Street
demonstrations in downtown Kampala in Uganda, in response to rising food prices,
intensify, and troops fire on the protestors, killing at least five people. President Yoweri
Museveni’s reaction to the peoples’ protest is telling: “Nobody,” he claims, “can take
over power through an uprising. Whoever thinks like that, I pity such a person”
(“Protests” A8). Those, like Museveni, who are locked within the hallucinatory walls of
capitalist illusions may well think so and may well continue to revel in narratives that
deflect crisis and contradictions. The people, however, may have other ideas.
5 Partho Sarathi Ray provides a detailed account of the movement in Lalgarh in Sanhati.
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