Capitalism is fueled by crisis. Whether persistent or recurring, local or global, environmental or financial, crisis drives capitalism. It strengthens it, enabling it to adapt. Some view the uprisings that have exploded in recent years as signs of a new global resistance. They are mistaken. The uprisings index the global force of capitalism. For the most part, they are reactive expressions of hardship and declining expectations.
Organized resistance, particularly in a form strong enough to shift the balance of power, is hardly enough to register. When it does flare up, power uses the opportunity to justify the expansion of anti-terrorist infrastructure, contributing more to strengthening the capitalist state than to building the Left opposition. Small scale solutions - localism, co-ops, wind turbines and solar panels - while often pointed to as evidence of a possible alternative future, in themselves say nothing of the form of social relationships within which they exist. If anything, they co-operate with capital in creating new commodities, and providing new opportunities for the expansion and intensification of market relations. When they reinforce the given order of things, local, voluntary, and “green” solutions are embraced by power. When they don’t, they are ignored, abandoned, submerged, or quashed.
Capitalism is the only game in town. There is no alternative.
There are nonetheless indicators of some level of coordination occurring between movements, lessons that seem to be transferring from one uprising to the next, some connected infrastructure, some amount of collective self- awareness.
