The World in Danger

The journal Foreign Affairs surprised many in its first issue last year by dedicating itself to a reflection about the future of capitalism. After all, this is one of the emblematic publications of American power, of the ever-challenging vision of the place the U.S. empire has and must have in a world in an unquestionable state of recession.

Led by renowned political economist Branko Milanovic, now with the Graduate Center at the City University of New York City and formerly an economist at the World Bank and other institutions, a select group of scholars clarifies some of the outlooks left us by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and its harsh sequel of late and unequal recoveries. Without having imagined it, Milanovic’s thoughts are undergoing new trials of greater depth and urgency in the heat of the pandemic and the economic collapse that has posed a real existential challenge to the world. As Francisco Fernández Buey stated: “[F]or the first time in the history of mankind, the word ‘world’ has acquired full meaning: our world, the world which we talk about, is today really the five continents.”

Capitalism was left alone, as Branko postulates in his important book “Capitalism, Alone,” but that solitude is not the same as the undisputed exercise of its former hegemony: among other reasons because, apart from having been the epicenter of the collapse, the U.S. has lived through a crushing health tragedy and a no less spectacular political crisis which has placed its celebrated, complex and sinuous democratic structure up against the wall.

The world is in danger because, besides what has happened in these terrible months, it is already undeniable that not only can other, even more aggressive, pandemics follow this one, but also a major dislocation of the planet as the global effects of climate change erupt. Donald Trump may have been left behind, but not those who share his destructive irrationality and deny the threats of change. They are there, crouching or not, waiting for capitols to besiege and assault.

Democracy is fragile. Nobody has a magic recipe. That’s how President Joe Biden seems to think about it in his struggle with the specter of economic depression, the pandemic that continues taking its toll and the political fracture that makes national unity feel like a distant goal.

A new Franklin D. Roosevelt-style contract lies in the hearts and minds of the Democrats who carried Biden to the presidency, but for almost everyone it is clear that those times of collapse and rebirth of the American “soul” will not return; no, at least not the basic structure that allowed the great FDR to build his spectacular political and human experiment.

Today, interests are extremely complex and their ramifications carry threats of greater shocks and collapses; confrontations and games of fire and hunger. The world has shrunk, but its human geography has become ever more complex.

There is no cause for fun and games here, and that is why the silences and dirty tricks regarding the vaccine that were apparently handed on to the president and his people left everyone, followers, adversaries and enemies, on edge. The entrepreneur seems to be on his way to a ceremonial show of force, in spite of multiple calls for prudence and for some type of agreement with the president, although it would be on unimportant issues and areas. All of the parties, those of the government and the opposition, suffer from something more than allergies to trafficking in democracy. Anchored in an exotic limbo, they are not capable of living up to the diversity required by the political system, much less rethinking the county, its economy and its own system in which, through action and omission, the disadvantaged have become further disadvantaged.

Like bumps on a log. It is as if through their silences and shameful passivity they could protect themselves from the storm that threatens to become a devastating tsunami.

But no matter how fixed the scene is, it is still necessary to imagine movement, to imagine that the entrepreneurial spirit just seems to be sleeping, that within the political continent, made by and for democracy, there are “animal spirits” prepared to build a new covenant that involves everyone. To weave new types of relationships that sustain a political economy for “the public purpose,” such as John Galbraith imagined, through cooperative use of innovation, investment and institutional design united by a mission. Mariana Mazzucato would say, in our case this mission is the reconstruction of the economy and of the state; the reinvention of the mixed economy and the social understandings capable of deliberating and agreeing on new and secure ties of remuneration and redistribution throughout the productive and distributive chain.

It must be assumed that, along with the rescue of the most affected, our task is to reconstruct our fragile, damaged systems. It is also of irreplaceable relevance to reimagine better futures, with well-being and security. With coexistence and protection, with security, health and education.

The world pales and its centers spread fear throughout the world, close for some, still alien to many.

Capitalism triumphed and imposed itself as the only reality and power. For that reason, it is critical to rethink its reform as a reform of the state and the economy. For capitalism as a whole, this task is as challenging as it is vital.