Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega began a fourth consecutive term in office in January 2022, in the midst of a political and economic crisis that portends protracted instability in the Central American country. Since returning to office in 2007, Ortega and his wife, and vice-president, Rosario Murillo have dressed in a quasi-leftist discourse of “Christian, Socialist, and Solidarity”, their programme of constructing a populist multiclass alliance under the firm hegemony of capital and Sandinista state elites. This alliance began to unravel in the second decade of the century, and then collapsed entirely in the aftermath of the government's violent repression of a 2018 mass popular uprising. The repression – which according to Amnesty International involved excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, control of the media and the deployment of pro-government paramilitary squads against protesters (Amnesty International 2018) – left several hundred dead and sent tens of thousands more into exile.

With seven opposition presidential candidates imprisoned and held incommunicado in the months leading up to the November 2021 vote, and all the remaining contenders but one coming from small parties allied with Ortega and Murillo and his Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the results of the presidential elections were a foregone conclusion. In a complete breakdown of the rule of law, Ortega carried out a wave of repression from May to October, arresting, and detaining without trial, under various draconian national security laws, several dozen opposition figures. Among them were presidential candidates; peasant, labour and student leaders; journalists; and environmentalists. Several hundred others were forced into exile or underground.

Those arrested or forced underground in the pre-electoral crackdown included a number of historical revolutionary leaders, among them legendary guerrilla commanders Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres. Both had participated in the 1978 raid on the National Palace that forced the Somoza dictatorship to free 60 political prisoners, and Torres had also participated in the daring 1974 Christmas party raid that forced Somoza to release Daniel Ortega from prison. Among those exiled were celebrated novelist, and Ortega's vice-president during the 1980s revolution, Sergio Ramirez.

Capitalism goes through regular crises about once a decade, what we call cyclical crises. But the crisis that exploded in 2008 with the global financial collapse and the Great Recession points to a deeper structural crisis, such as we faced in the 1970s, and before that in the 1930s, meaning that the system can no longer continue to function in the way that it is structured. These types of crises are therefore restructuring crises. They must result in a restructuring of the system if there is to be any resolution to the crisis. Yet in such a conjucture the structural crisis has the potential to become systemic, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on the unpredictable element of contingency that always plays some role in historical outcomes. A systemic crisis is one in which only a change in the system itself will resolve the crisis.

Our world is burning. We face a global crisis that is unprecedented in terms of its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. This is a time of great upheavals, momentous changes, and uncertain outcomes; fraught with dangers, including the very real possibility of collapse as well as the growing threat of repressive social control systems that serve to contain the explosive contradictions of a global capitalism in crisis. Certainly the stakes bound up in the raging conflicts of our day are too high for the usual academic complacency. I believe that the most urgent task of any intellectual who considers him or herself organic or politically engaged is to address this crisis. If nothing else, we will all agree that global capitalism is a highly unstable and crisis-ridden system. If we are to avert disastrous outcomes we must understand both the nature of the new global capitalism and the nature of its crisis. This book is an attempt to contribute to such an understanding.

In this book I aspire to analyze and theorize the global crisis from the perspective of global capitalism theory. Wide-ranging debate continues on the nature of the twenty-first-century global order and its contemporary crises. I have been centrally concerned with these matters for over two decades, seeking above all to construct a theoretical framework for situating them – specifically, a theory of global capitalism. The world in which Karl Marx analyzed capital has radically changed. The global capitalism perspective offers a powerful explanatory framework for making sense of the crisis. Analysis of capitalist globalization not only says something about the nature of the crisis but is also a template for probing a wide range of social, political, cultural, and ideological processes in this twenty-first century. Following Marx, we want to focus on the internal dynamics of capitalism in order to understand the crisis. And following the global capitalism perspective, we want to see how capitalism has qualitatively evolved in recent decades. The systemwide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because world capitalism is fundamentally different in the twenty-first century.

In 2003 I co-organized a conference in Santa Barbara, California, titled Towards a Critical Globalization Studies. The conclave brought together some 100 leading scholars worldwide on globalization with leading activists and intellectuals from the global justice movement. Our objective was to explore what a critical study of global society involves and how such a study is related to struggles for social justice around the world. I argued that there is no such thing as free-floating academics and that all intellectual labor is organic in the sense that studying the world is itself a social act, committed by agents with a definite relationship to the social order. Intellectuals who consider themselves revolutionaries should have as their task analyzing the system of global capitalism, I continued, exposing its myths and lies, unmasking its legitimating discourses and ideologies, and identifying the forces that benefit from the continuation of this system. If we are to contribute to movements for social justice through our intellectual labor, then we should seek to aid those directly organizing mass struggles around the world to transform this system by applying our training and experience to elucidating the real inner workings of the social order and the contradictions therein. Central to this undertaking is putting forward a cogent and systematic critique of global capitalism. For her part, the scholar-activist Susan George cautioned at the Santa Barbara conference that academics who wish to be relevant should study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless.

Theories of a “new imperialism” proliferated in the years following the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon and the subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These theories argued that the United States set about to renew a U.S. empire in order to offset a decline in its hegemony amid heightened inter-imperialist rivalry. So popular were new imperialism theories that they came to be seen as common sense; critics were seen as heretics or nut cases, and alternative explanations nearly disappeared from the intellectual and political radar. Yet these theories rested on a crustaceous bed of assumptions that must be peeled back if we are to get at the root of twenty-first century global social and political dynamics. The lynchpin of “new imperialism” theories is the assumption that world capitalism in the twenty-first century is made up of “domestic capitals” and distinct national economies that interact with one another and a concomitant realist analysis of world politics as driven by the pursuit by governments of their “national interest.” Realism of this sort sees each national economy as a billiard ball banging back and forth against the others. This billiard image is then applied to explain global political dynamics in terms of nation-states as discrete interacting units (the interstate system). The realist paradigm that dominated the study of international relations during the post–World War II period lost much of its luster as globalization unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s, but then made a powerful comeback following the events of the 2001 and renewed U.S. interventionism.

Any understanding of the global crisis requires an inquiry into how the reproduction of global capitalism is possible – or indeed, if it is possible at all. An examination of the mechanisms of such reproduction involves analysis of the institutions in global society that make it possible, in actuality or in theory. How are the class relations of global capitalism institutionalized? What are the system’s institutional and political authority structures? How can we understand the political constitution of the dominant classes in global society – in particular, the TCC? How does the TCC organize itself in order to pursue its interests around the world?

Institutions are social interactions systematized – that is, institutionalized – by a system of norms and rules enforced by distinct coercive mechanisms, while structures organize sets or matrices of institutions. Hence social practices take place through institutions, and social groups and classes organize themselves through institutions; all but the most entirely coincidental social relations are institutionalized. One of the most important of these institutions is the state. Political institutions have secured economic reproduction ever since human beings moved beyond communal societies. The rise of the state in conjunction with the appearance of significant surpluses and the division of society into classes constitutes the central political instance in the development of class societies. There is therefore a historically constituted inner connection between state forms and production processes that we want to analyze with respect to capitalism and its transnational phase.

Responses to the Crisis

How have social and political forces around the world responded to the global crisis? When we observe that the structural crises of the 1870s, the 1930s, and the 1970s had been resolved through a restructuring of the capitalist system, this does not mean that things necessarily got better for the mass of humanity. “Resolved” means that restructuring allowed for the resumption of sustained accumulation. As I have emphasized thus far, crises open up the possibility of change that can go in many different directions. How a crisis unravels depends, among other things, on the agencies of the constellation of social forces that come together in particular conjunctures, the correlation of force among classes in these conjunctures, distinct projects that are put forward in response to the crisis, political conditions, and contingency – all within the bounds of what is structurally possible. Here I identify three responses to the crisis that are in dispute, although this does not mean that there are not, or will not be, other responses not addressed here.