Back to the ‘30s?

Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy

Jeremy Rayner, Susan Falls, George Souvlis, Taylor C. Nelms, Jeremy Rayner, Susan Falls, George Souvlis, Taylor C. Nelms

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030415853
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030415860
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s?  In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and facing a dramatic rise of right wing, authoritarian politics across the globe, the events of the 1930s have acquired a renewed relevance. Contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars address the relationship between these historical moments in various geographical contexts, from Asia-Pacific to Europe to the Americas, while probing an array of thematic questions—the meaning of populism and fascism, the contradictions of constitutional liberalism and "militant democracy," long cycles and crisis tendencies in capitalism, the gendering and racialization of right wing movements, and the cultural and class politics of emancipatory struggles. Uncovering continuity as well as change and repetition in the midst of transition, Back to the 30s? enriches our ability to use the past to evaluate the challenges, dangers, and promises of the present.  

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

J. Rayner et al. (eds.)Back to the ‘30s? https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41586-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Back to the 30s?

Jeremy Rayner¹ , Susan Falls², George Souvlis³ and Taylor C. Nelms⁴

(1)

Centro de Economía Pública y Sectores Estratégicos, Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, Quito, Ecuador

(2)

Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia

(3)

Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

(4)

Filene Research Institute, Madison, WI, USA

Keywords

Historical comparisonGreat Depression and Great RecessionEconomic long wavesAuthoritarianism and right-wing populismFinancialization and financial crisesDemocratic deconsolidationRadical democracyCritical theoryHegemony

End Abstract

The 1930s are a major preoccupation of contemporary public culture. To be sure, the decade never really went away: Economic catastrophe, fascism, genocide, antisemitism, racism and xenophobia, rampant militarism, deep social and economic divisions—these all haunt our collective memory as preeminent examples of the worst that capitalism and the modern state have to offer, regularly invoked in ways both serious (e.g., Agamben 1998) and trivial (e.g., Godwin 1994).¹ But at the end of the twenty-first-century’s second decade, comparisons to the 1930s have become more frequent and more urgent, raised by apparent similarities between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, historical fascism and today’s right-wing “populism” (Fig. 1.1). While few would deny that there are lessons to be learned from the study of the past, there is also concern that a culture of comparison might reductively misread or even sensationalize the present. Controversies about whether or not it is appropriate to refer to certain politicians as “fascists ,” or to contemporary right-wing movements as “Nazis,” or to the spectacle of engineered human suffering on the US southern border as “concentration camps” (rather than “migrant detention centers”), indicate some of the rhetorical and ethical stakes involved.

Fig. 1.1

Silkscreen by Vera Bock [between 1939 and 1941] as WPA federal art project

Often, debate over the appropriateness of the comparison seems to displace suffering and fear in the present. But some of our most fundamental concepts—of change, progress, agency, economy, democracy—do seem to be in play. It is worth recalling that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, received opinion held that the future belonged to liberal democracy and that monetary policy had forever tamed the business cycle—both variants of a linear, progressive telling of history that has arguably been the predominant temporal consciousness of capitalist modernity. Against this, the suggestion that the past has in some sense returned (or that we have returned to the past) is inherently unsettling—yet possibly also galvanizing, as Walter Benjamin (1968, 253–264) claimed, writing at the brink of death at the end of the cataclysmic 1930s. A sudden curve in what seemed a straight road brings promise as well as danger.

The essays in this volume take on the question of what we might learn by holding the interwar period and the contemporary moment up to each other, while remaining attentive to the complexities and nuances of both. This approach sets the contributions of this book apart from the increasingly commonplace comparisons between these periods. In line with the standard division of intellectual labor and habits of thought, most approaches isolate economics from politics, taking up either the comparison of the Great Recession and the Great Depression or that of contemporary right-wing populism and interwar fascism. No secret that such a separation of politics from economics, whether analytical artifice or ideological maneuver, renders the economy politically neutral and the political process innocent of class and money power. Indeed, thinking through crises of economics and politics separately facilitates their tractability within reigning liberal capitalist histories, epistemologies, and policy frameworks. Reduced to two-dimensional caricatures or presented as abstract logics that can be extracted from their respective moments, financial crisis and fascist politics can seemingly be avoided through sensible policies and a recommitment to liberal ideals and institutions. As if the political system can be expected to act in the general interest to contain economic disaster, while the crisis of liberal democracy can be addressed without confronting capitalism’s systemic inequalities.

The contributors to this volume are attentive to the lessons to be gained from seeing crises of capitalism and liberalism as aspects of a common historical process. “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism,” Horkheimer famously wrote in 1939, “then you had better keep quiet about fascism” (cited by Gandesha, this volume). Importantly, as a group, they also consider the economic and the political together with the social and the cultural, including the dynamics of social reproduction—of race, gender, and generation—at the heart of both the micropolitics of everyday interaction and the systemic contours of domination. The particular approaches taken, and problems emphasized, are diverse and varied. The chapters that follow offer up histories of ideas, structural analysis and critique, and national and regional case studies. They feature topics that do not often appear in predominant discourse on the two periods, from prostitution to poetry , as well as geographical areas that are often left out of the comparative frame, such as Latin America and East Asia. They are also flexible in terms of periodization. The “1930s” in our title can be taken literally or as a convenient synecdoche for the interwar period, or even for a longer period of “systemic chaos” (e.g., Arrighi 2010), depending on the national and regional context, empirical focus, and analytical approach. The contemporary moment is similarly open to distinct temporal interpretations. The effort is, not to put too fine a point on it, a “timely” one, for the goal is less the parsing of years than the simultaneous mobilization and interrogation of timeliness as it manifests in historical comparison.

Comparative Structures: Homogeneity, Continuity, Repetition

In fact, the question of the relationship of the 1930s to our contemporary moment again raises fundamental questions of how we understand the structure of temporal comparison, indeed the very relationship of “structure” to “event” (see, e.g., Koselleck 1985; Roitman 2013). The presentism that predominates in social science (and in capitalist modernity generally) arguably assumes the question away; the present is either entirely distinct or all time is “homogeneous and empty,” as Benjamin famously put it (1968, 261). Many discussions of the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s follow this temporal framework: The past may be an explanatory resource, a source of lessons that can be imported into the present, but there is no organic relationship between these moments. As if financial crises, authoritarian populisms, and genocidal xenophobia, were simply things that happen from time to time.

The essays in this volume move in different analytical directions. One of these directions—a second approach to comparison—is to outline a temporal structure of historical regimes or institutional configurations that knit together a panoply of political, economic, social, and cultural processes across time. Some of the structures considered go back much further than the 1930s: capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy. Nevertheless, for most of our authors, the 1930s (or the interwar period) was a pivotal moment in the unfolding of the longue durée, as well as for the emergence of regimes and institutions, even if these expressed enduring relations and imperatives. This includes, of course, historical fascism, which, despite being essentially destroyed as a regime by the end of the Second World War, nevertheless left important residues behind (see, e.g., Finchelstein 2017). It also includes that form of capitalist regulation known as “Fordism” or “embedded liberalism” that emerged out of the crisis (Aglietta 2001; McDonough et al. 2010). Much of that institutional order is still with us, despite the transition to a neoliberal regime after the 1970s. There are of course other forms of periodization possible: for now, it is enough to note that many of our authors deploy a temporal structure of systemic continuities, albeit with points of inflection, transition, or mutation.

A third temporal s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Back to the 30s?
• Part I. Crises of Capital and Hegemonic Transitions
• Part II. Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
• Part III. People in Movement: Practices, Subjects, and Narratives of Political Mobilization
• Part IV. Body Politics/Political Bodies: Race, Gender, and the Human
• Correction to: Hungarian “Populism” and Antipopulism Today through the Looking Glass of the Interwar “Populist” Movement
• Back Matter