Contemporary Crises 11:9%106 (1987) © Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

The crisis as history as the present

JAMES O'CONNOR College Eight, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA

This article speculates on certain aspects of the modern world economic crisis. It attempts to describe the way that the crisis is commonly experienced in the postmodernist world. It also outlines the methodological significance of one major aspect of the crisis: the seemingly endless economic, social and political uncertainty which characterizes world economy in general and economic and social conditions in the USA in particular.

This is a difficult, even mysterious, subject which beleaguers people in power and bewilders the man on the street. Not that the history of USA economic and social crises has ever been perfectly transparent. The country has been trapped by its own mystique as the 'first new nation' and imagined model for the rest of the world. It has lurched through history oblivious to much of its past and mindlessly confident about its future. The blissful day- dreams which generations of Americans have accepted as knowledge of their own country and its past have been matched only by their arrogance and naivete about other countries and peoples. Especially today, the obfuscations cooked up by the managers of the national security state to cover up their high crimes and misdemeanors further deepen the enigma called American and world history. In ä country which has been unable to understand itself very weil under the best of conditions, Americans today see the rest of the world as a mindfield of international terrorists, bankrupt tyrants, unfair competitors, political fanatics, rebellious peasants and communist conspirators. This kind of perception has the makings of real tragedy because modern USA is merely one part - albeit the most important part because of its unique blend of economic, cultural, military, and political power - of world capitalism and global politics. The security of this country depends more than ever on the economic expansion and stability of wortd capitalism in similar ways that the security of world capitalism depends more than even on the economic wei1- being of the USA. Yet, neither this country not world capitalism are econom- ically stable or secure. There has occurred a relentless expansion of interna- tional debt and speculation; a huge but unknown level of Third World capital flight; unprecedented USA trade imbalances; dangerously high domestic consumer, business and Federal government debt; global economic and social polarization and ecological destruction; and universal political confusion.

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Economic policy makers appear to have run out of options and politicians seem to be bereft of any political goals. Perhaps most importantly, world leaders have failed miserably at their attempts to bring about economic and political cooperation and a measure of real friendship between the USA, Europe, USSR, the Third and Fourth Worlds (Japan and East Asia). These are obvious signs that world capitalism is in crisis.

This crisis has arrived as a new species economicus in history. It is not torture by the blunt instrument of a crash and depression of the kind and magnitude which threw country after country into chaos in the 1920s and 1930s. It resembles more closely an Eastern type of torment, more subtle and drawn out, causing mass psychological as well as physical hardship, in which there does not seem to be any pas to r future, only an infinitely expanded present which promises no relief or resolution, rather like a bad marriage in the years before divorce. In the overdeveloped industrial countries, no New Deal-type reformist solutions are in the works, still less fascism and wars of imperialist rivalry as 'solutions' to the present malaise of world economy. Few if any lessons learned in the past beyond the simple fact that international coopera- tion is preferable to world chaos and annihilation seem to apply to the present. Perhaps this is one reason that the past is forgotten so easily or for what Russell Jacoby has called 'social amnesia'. Few if any hopes for a brighter future seem to sustain those who are not ignorant of the morbid nature of the modern world. Not even simple maintenance of the economic system nor the ecolo- gists' fantasy of zero-or-sustainable growth are possible, thanks to the cardinal rule of capitalism - expand or die.

The crisis is perhaps above all a long period of uncertainty, when policy makers are bereft of alternatives, hence whistle in the dark, deluding them- selves that the 'Western way of life' is blessed with immortality. It is also a time when ordinary people tend to blind themselves more than usual to present realities or become frightened enough to withdraw further into private life and, increasingly, a Panglossian kind of spirituality. This is understandable because no one knows or can know whether there will reoccur a world economic breakdown and depression; or whether global capital organized within the fluid confines of the transnational corporations and steered by the bureaucracies of dozens of nation states and international organizations will ride a new wave of technological innovation into a decade or two or three of prosperity; or whether more 'time will drain into the present '1 and the years of uncertainty will multiply. This uncertainty, this period of danger and oppor- tunity, these years of world national, ethnic, racial, gender, and class struggles have in fact defined the modern crisis and legitimated the use of the word in theoretical discourse for the past twenty years. 2

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Worldwide, during the economic recovery of 1982-1986, total world com- modity production in fact expanded. Even in the weakest link in the chain of world capitalism, Africa, where economic cooperation and political unity has never been so remote, real production (GNP) increased by about four percent. In the second weakest link in the chain, Latin America, where dreams of common markets and regional cooperation and prosperity are in shambles, production grew by about six percent, thanks mainly to Brazil's economic performance (excluding Brazil, economic growth in Latin America was less than one percent annually). Meanwhile, most Western European economies were more or less stalled. Despite the European Monetary System and Euro- pean Parliament, the political economies of the pivotal West European coun- tries were so different (one is tempted to say 'antagonistic') that real economic cooperation and coordination proved impractical and 'Europe' remained merely a name. The Federal Republic of Germany, Europe's only world class economic power, lacks military autonomy and a consistent foreign policy. France, a weak industrial country highly dependent on agricultural subsidies, remains a leader in arms production and retains its status as an independent nuclear power. Britain, the weakest economy, is saddled with a nuclear deterrent which lacks substance, albeit bolstered by strong financial and commercial institutions which, however, are closely tied to the USA and Japan, mitigating against tighter links with other European countries.

In the same period, growth in the USA, where more power devolved to the States and the future of the Federai system became increasingly cloudy, was somewhat higher than Western Europa's. Meantime, Japan and East Asia, where collaboration between government and business assumed higher and more innovative forms, boomed; Asian capitalism expanded by over 30 per- cent by the single measure of total production.

Measured by per capita production, African and Latin American economy diminished (despite Brazil's expansion), more in the former than the latter continent. In the 1980s, per capita income fell by more than 10 percent in 14 Latin American countries and by more than 15 percent in 7 other Latin countries. 3 Since 1980, in two great Third World continents, then, the average family was poorer, income distribution more polarized, unemployment and underemployment higher, average size of peasant plots smaller, and ecologi- cal damage greater. In the Third World as a whole, taking into account various economic, social and political factors, the authors of an Economist study judged that there are three countries which have no future even worth guess- ing at; four hyper-risk countries; seven very high risk countries, and sixteen high risk countries including several important subimperialist powers - South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, Ghana and the Philippines. Only South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Brazil, Greece, and Portugal were con- sidered to be low risk. 4 The same may be said of the USA and major European

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countries, despite the fact that per capita growth of GNP was unusually modest. Established liberal democratic political institutions and the 'society of the spectacle' continued to promote stability in the overdeveloped countries. Finally, only in the high pressure, disciplined and tightly organized world of Asian capitalism, where normal capitalist social and economic contradictions have not been allowed to immobilize aggressive state economic programs and policies, and lessons learned from centuries of warfare and diplomay were routinely applied to the struggle for markets, productive labor, cheap and stable raw material supplies and new technology, did there occur economic expansion worthy of the name (per capital production in East Asia grew by 20 percent between 1983 and 1986). What more powerful evidence is there that the center of gravity of world capitalism is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the individualistic West to the collectivist East?

These statistics are particularly telling because world economic policy- makers scheduled the most recent economic recovery to be centered in the USA, once the reliable engine of the train of world economy, not Asia. During the peak year of 1984, GNP in the USA did grow at a rate of seven percent, higher than Japan's six percent and Western Europe's three percent. During the recovery as a whole, however, the USA turned in a mediocre economic performance (the growth rate of GNP was about 2.5 percent annually during 1985 and 1986) and world leaders became increasingly uncertain whether or not the train was being pulled by any engine at all. Short-run recoveries from the last four USA recessions have been successively weaker. Capital utiliza- tion in industry has failed to recover its high point preceding each previous recession and in each new recession capacity utilization has reached a new low. 'The cyclical recession troughs and recovery peaks of the rate of productivity growth also declined from each recession to the nex t . . . [and] . . . the rates and total amounts of unemployment rose in each recession relative to the preced- ing one, and the unemployment lows also rose from each recovery to the next, as the unemployment low of the preceding recovery was never again achieved in the succeeding one. '»

During the latest recovery, net investment was only seven percent of the gross national product, rauch less than in Japan (which contributed some of the savings which made the USA investment rate possible) and even in Europe. Over 90 percent of industrial investment was in office computer and automotive equipment - concentrated in a few high tech industries, many subsidized by Pentagon 'buy American' orders. Net industrial investment as a whole reached its lowest point since the depression of the 1930s. 6 At the same time, while slower global economic growth reduced inflation, public and private debt expanded to new highs, the USA trade deficit became un- manageable, and it became harder for central banks to prevent precipitous declines in the dollar. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, the Third World, and

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even Japan, unemployment rose to higher levels. In the industrial OECD countries, total unemployment roughly doubled from each recession to the next; unemployment grew even during the 1975-1979 and 1983-1986 recov- eries. In the Third World, unemployment jumped sharply in the 1979-82 world recession and debt crisis, and continues to mushroom to this day. Despite the threat of deep economic recession on the near horizon, in the USA, policy makers remained blithely if moderately optimistic, at least in public, not only to cover up deep uncertainty, but also because of the 'unfounded belief in American economic might and invulnerability [which] precludes serious anal- ysis and effective policy'.7 The rapidly shifting sands of world capital, labor, and commodity movements, and the absence of a general crash and depression ensure both the uncertainty and the 'unfounded belief in American vul- nerability'. Meanwhile, public confusion and frustration are experienced in 'post-modernist' societies as more or less permanent - a long, vast stretch of 'present' in which the simultaneity of contradictory economic and social processes seems to dissolve our ordinary experience of time.

The world crisis defined in terms of a seemingly permanent uncertainty about the future in the context of the 'modernist and post-modernist experience' has, in effect, abolished time as it has been traditionally experienced. Over a century ago, Marx could plausibly write that 'there is only one fact, history'. History constituted a unity, the 19th century consciousness held a sense of continuity and change in a kind of normal tension. Today, the concept of history itself has become suspect. We tend to experience time as 'enlarged simultaneity rather than as a link with the past and future'. 8 In the crisis, it seems that 'there is only one time - the present'.

This is so for a number of reasons besides the experience of prolonged uncertainty which defines the crisis itzelf. Capitalism has established its near universal rule in the crucible of challenges by national and social struggles and revolutions in the 20th century. Traditional society no longer exists, not rauch memory of it. The idea of historical progress which sustained 19th an early 20th century optimism is dying or dead. So are the myths of a rational and reason- able mankind and a science and technology as the wellsprings of a brighter future (killed by 20th century genocides, the bomb, ecodestruction, world poverty, militarism). Every Enlightenment belief is regarded by thoughtful scholars and thoughtless politicians as questionable or already fulfilled in the 'first new nation', respectively. The scholars invent post-modernism and deconstructionism. The political leaders tacitly assume that justice, liberty, equality of opportunity, and freedom are already established. The myth is that the USA has realized its basic historical goals, hence that there is nothing which can be properly called 'political' to hope for or to strive to bring about. 'The future is now' - this might be the slogan of the blind ideologues of the late 1980s.

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Meanwhile, science and reason have created more, not less social domina- tion. And every experience associated with the Romantic movement, includ- ing the high value placed on spontaneity, immediacy, and expressiveness, has led millions to experience life as meaningless, empty, a kind of psychic death, a sense of aloneness as loneliness rather than calm solitude. God still sustains some, politics a few others. But the majority feel that they live in a void, a kind of historical time warp. Continuity with the past and future is compressed into an endless present. The politically immobilizing effects of this kind of con- sciousness are all too obvious.

There seems to exist only the 'here and now' - the vulgar and shameless present of the 'now generation', the cautious and mildly heroic present of those who live 'one day at a time'. The how-to-be-happy books speak of living in the present; their predecessors two generations ago explained how to build a future. The modernist experience has the result of forcing nearly all of us to think and feel in very different ways than our immediate forebearers- so much so that is might be said that we a r e a different species. It is hard for us to recognize ourselves in our parents, still more so in our grandparents, who we warehouse perhaps not because we are more than normally cruel but because we are so different from them.

The 'now' has been pulled and stretched into an infinity of dimensions by major economic, social and political forces of the 20th century. The mass media, satellite communication, the globalization of Madison Avenue - these have made possible and necessary the simultaneity of experience. The compu- ter reproduces information about the present at blinding rates of speed. The frightening and boring reality of two empires locked in a permanent struggle which neither can win, hence creating a 'future' which is merely a recycled present, also creates sameness of experience. The antinuclear themes and agruments heard today are in no way different than those put forth in 1945- 1950. 9 The global integration of capitalism; the instantaneous movements of money capital, speculative funds, purchases and sales from one place on the globe to another, the constant sameness of migrating workers getting on and oft cheap airflights and crossing borders in New York, California, Paris, San Juan, Singapore, and Hong Kong holds no future promises except for the lucky few. The sameness of freeways and cars, TV programs and bureau- cracies, the common experiences which bind and unify us, mitigates against a full sense that we had a real past and can expect to have a future.

The simultaneity of modern social processes and events, a lack of discernible cause and effect relationships, makes it impossible for social theorists (the very category is modernist) to use time honored methods of study with any hope of achieving real results. Hence the theoretical Tower of Babel in the 1970s and 1980s; the theoretical relativism facing the young social scientist; the suspicion which more and more conventional sociologists have of traditional positivistic

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methods. How can these methods be used to study a society which has no stated goals other than the anarchy of 'individual opportunity'? What use are conventional methods at a time when the perpetual motion machine called 'capital' resembles the casinos in Nevada where there is no past and future, no history, not even any clocks, only the eternal present of the ringing slots, the gentle thud of dice on the crap tables, the flutter of cards, under the murmurs and manic laughter of the gamblers and losers.

It seems that everything happens every day 'all at once'. All that c a n

happens right now - hostages, bombings, terrorist scares, political scandals, highway deaths, drug programs, bizarre murders, debts and deficits, etc., ad nauseum are TV news fare, day after day. Has this not led modern historians to despair about finding sequences, logical chains of events, reasons, in modern history (if modernity can be even said to have a history)? Did the Tower Commission unravel any logical sequences in Irangate? Would Water- gate have been understandable without a more or less completes record on tape? Does anyone know what the Vietnam Holocaust was really about? Historians appear to have made the professional niches they have carved out for themselves into ditches, and, finally, tunnels with dim lights at the end - weak reflections of the spotlights and the torches of 19th century historiogra- phy; and so to hold their tongues about the present. What historian today has anything interesting to say about the hefe and now? What futurist is armed with anything but science finction, blind faith, and a computer filled with mute facts? How many poets and pundits believe that there can be no true knowl- edge of the traditional kind today - that, as Ortega y Gasset has written, history is only a question of the always idiosyncratic individual's point of view. That true collective history is nothing but myth or propaganda. How many theorists agree with Hayden White that history is simply the stories people teil one another, one no more valid than another? What better way to erase any real continuity with the past and destroy any bridges to a human future? Was there ever an age in modern times in which intellectual and moral and spiritual relativism, at bottom, a kind of nihilism, was so widespread and taken for granted?

'Time drains into the present', but the turnover time of capital or a global scale is so rapid that changes occur in the forms of the crisis, so blindingly fast that past 'events'do not seem able to explain them, and that the future seems to be over before we can register it self-critically. The moment we think we have grasped the nature of these changes, and have tried to understand and adjust to them, the changes themselves have changed. Once again bewildered, it may dawn on us that most if not all changes are merely new forms of the endless uncertainty which defines the modern crisis. Tomorrow seems to be very predictable in its sameness despite the highly unpredictable forms which the

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sameness take. There will be some bad economic news tomorrow - exactly what kind no one can say. There will be more registered BMWs and more unregistered homeless tomorrow - exactly where and how many is impossible to predict. There will be a new serial or mass murderer; a new feature story on the angst of contemporary women; a new military clash; a new TV series; a new Presidential photo opportunity. But we also recognize out times in Marx's line about the way that people experience historical events - the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

It bends our mind to wonder if the modern world has come to mirror in a strange way the universe itself. Our direct experience is useless in deciding whether the universe is expanding or contracting or collapsing. It holds together and changes because the mathematicians and physicists tell us so. Similarly, our experience of global economics, politics, and culture does not yield the tiniest clue whether or not 'the center is holding' - whether it is merely inertia (laziness, routine) which keeps the world together; whether there is any prospect that future international economic and political coopera- tion will yield visible results; whether politics at the base can be welded into a new pluralistic 'totality from below'. If we believe that the universe of world society in general and world capitalism in particular is a stable entity, it is because the politicians and economists tell us so. Certainly, within academia, system theorists, who model the 'subsystems' which make up the larger 'social system' in quantitative terms, are in the forefront of bourgeois social theory. The reason is perhaps that the corporation has become a system and that the world can be imagined in no other way than as a set of simultanous equa t ions- instantaneous equations premised on an eternal present. Reified and patho- logical as this kind of thinking is (society is not and cannot be a system), it may be that the mind of the systems theorist captures the shadow of truth. But how can the shadow vie with the sunshine, asked the sufist Ruft? The Jungian shadow self, the dark side which we are and are not at the same time, follows us everywhere so long as there is light. But we are quite ignorant of the light source which makes the shadow visible. Is it God, as more millions proclaim? Or libidinal energy? The collective consciousness? The fading lights of the TV? Or only the heat of our instinct for survival?

The truth lies in the whole, it is said. Today, the present is the whole, hence the truth lies in the present. Dates and times taust be used in any work on the crisis, to give authors and readers something familiar to hang onto. 'How hard it is', Roger Shattuck continues, 'to go beyond out faith in chronology, in sheer periodization, as if time itself, through degrees of simultaneity, presents the last stand of unity in human thoughts and actions'. 1° But periodization may obscure, not illuminate reality. Cause and effect methods may have to be eschewed in favor of an interpretation of the present extended over space and consciousness, exterior space and interior geography of the mind, based on

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common underlying factors or forces producing sumilar but different pro- cesses and events. No easy sequencing of time into past, present and future seems possible, which all but rules out a conventional narrative. Nor can any clear connections between human intentions and the effects of human actions be easily made, which rules out already censored tales told by men of power. Instead, we must be satisfied with accounts of fragments of the world crisis, archeologists puzzling over a shaped stone or chard or grain, or social artifacts. Or so we are told by 'discourse' theorists for whom nothing is sacred but the particular, the unique. A more oldfashioned view, however, is that theoretical circles need to be drawn around events and relationships and processes precisely because they are experienced as separated, broken and isolated. Because there is no integrated whole in fact (only perhaps an imminent one), a theoretical totality alone can be said to exist. 'Nothing is related to anything else'; many things happen at the same time which seem to have nothing to do with one another- this is the poststructural worldview of deconstructionism as conveyed by the Heideggerized mass media. So the work of the theorist searching for meaning, connections, drawing imaginary circles around seem- ingly disparate processes and events, must be merely and perhaps impotently theoretical. These connections do not exist in experience, nor are they regis- tered in or by state policy, nor still less in or by organized interest groups and social struggles and the popular consciousness. It may be so, therefore, that today the truth eludes experience and action and instead more than ever lies in theory. And who will make the theory besides the theorists? Those tortured souls who understand that knowledge lies under the sign of power and that experience in a broken world remains untrustworthy; thus, those who are reduced to their intuitions, their aesthetic sensibilities, their beliefs in curses and blessings, as weil as to the awful task of sorting out the great dump of historical, analytical, critical and methodological raw materials which rate has decreed still remain in our poor brains. Out of this 'unstructured totality', this pluralism of sensibilities and sentiments, this barely disguised intellectual anarchy, this selective memory of experience and fact and personality, this method which is not a method in any conventional sense of the word - out of this certain individuals whose dues have long been paid but who still suffer the malaise of 'modern man' and who recognize that for every good idea there are twenty bad ideas in circulation - certain individuals may be able to generate both light and heat, and perhaps energy, as weil.

Notes

1. Roger Shattuck (1986) 'Being Bohemian', New York Review of Books, p. 70. 2. James O'Connor (1987) The Meaning ofCrisis: A Theoreticallntroduction. Oxford and New

York. Basil Blackwell.

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3. New York Times, 8 September, 1986, citing the Annual Report of the Inter-American Development Bank, Economic and Social Progress in Latin Ame ica. According to the IADB, manufacturing output was lower in 1985 than in 1980, and the quality of employment in the cities (where two-thirds of the population lives) sharply declined.

4. Cited in San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January, 1987. 5. Andre Gundar Frank, 'Is the Reagan Recovery Real or the Calm Before the Storm?' Paper

delivered at Round Table 86, "Socialism and Economy", 20-24 October, 1986, Cavtat, Yugoslavia. The years of the last four USA recessions were 1967, 1969-70,1973-75, 1979-82.

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. 'Being Bohemian', op. cit., p. 70. 9. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the

Atomic Age. New York: 1985. Randan House. 10. 'Being Bohemian', op. cit., p. 70.