Emerging from the crisis of capitalism or emerging from capitalism in crisis

Abstract

This article addresses the crisis of late capitalism and ‘barbarous globalization’ through an analysis of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and the relation between ‘endless accumulation’, exponential growth, and pauperisation. It analyses the contrast and conflict between the affluent societies of the centre (of the world system) and the societies of the dominated peripheries, as the central axis of the alternative between ‘socialism and barbarism’. The strategies of expansion of the present financialised oligopolies and plutocracies of late capitalism are pauperising the peasantries of the periphery via large scale expropriation, and plundering of natural resources. Thus, a ‘new agrarian question’ is at the heart of the challenge in the twenty-first century. The dispossession of the peasantry of the global South and the rapacious exploitation of the South's natural resources destroys the prospect of any ‘development’ worthy of the name for the peoples in question. As the crisis deepens, this process of accumulation by dispossession induces possible radicalization of struggles and a new internationalism.