https://spectrejournal.com/what-are-we-waiting-for-2/
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Despite having theorized crises for some 150 years, Marxists have found it difficult to translate these insights into a coherent socialist crisis policy when real crises shake the world. When crises erupt, socialists tend to retreat into either revolutionary phraseology or Keynesianism. How can socialists chart a clear path forward in stormy weather?
This, the second part of the essay, focuses on how we can think about economic crises in the twenty-first century. The first part of the essay proposed a reconceptualization of crises as societal paroxysms and identified current challenges—both in terms of the use of history and conceptual chaos—when discussing tomorrow’s crisis. This second part discusses what we should do. How can we work towards a socialist approach to crisis?
In the first part of the essay, we saw that economic crises are complex phenomena, and there is always much we cannot know about the next crisis. Here, we focus on something we can know—namely that all economic crises under capitalism include and are formed by class struggle. So what could a working-class response to crisis entail? Since economic crises bring with them creative destruction, it is time to ask what a socialist version of that might look like.
If socialists fail to discuss what to do before a crisis hits, it might already be too late. In moments of shock, we tend to act more on reflex, navigating between already established ideas. Such moments are rarely suited to deep intellectual or political reflection. When the world is on fire, it is difficult to seize control of the situation—unless one is ready.
I fully understand that many people may feel that there are issues that are more immediate and important than speculating about a future economic crisis. And indeed, there are also limits to how detailed plans for future crises can be. But I will stress that when the next crisis emerges, it is absolutely crucial to have already developed policies, slogans and plans—and ideally, a strong class consciousness—so that we know exactly which direction we are heading.
Point of departure: Beyond naïve optimism
Crises help us expose capitalism: suddenly we can see clearly the lies behind the theories of market freedom and self-regulating economies. While such insights are important, knowledge is not the main driver of historical development. Crises might help us expose capitalism theoretically, but they are, in actuality, central to the reproduction of capitalism.
Liberals often try to preserve the purported “sunny side” of capitalism (growth, progress, optimism) and mitigate (or eliminate) the persistent recurring disasters, either through active state policies and regulations (as with Keynesians and social democrats) or through privatization and deregulation (as with neoclassical and neoliberal thinkers). This liberal dream has been repeatedly shattered throughout history.
Marxists often succumb to an inverse image of this liberal dream. But the dream that the next crisis will lead to the collapse of capitalism and the age of socialism has been dashed just as many times as the liberal dream of a world without crises. While Marxist and socialist theories are useful tools for understanding crises, in actually existing capitalism the system is reproduced one crisis after another.
In 1959, John F. Kennedy noted that the Chinese word for crisis is composed of two characters: danger and opportunity. This “great wisdom” has since become commonplace in liberal and even some progressive circles. Commenting on the climate crisis in 2015, Al Gore notes that: “We all live on the same planet. We all face the same dangers and the same opportunities; we share the same responsibility for charting our course into the future.”2Cited in Robinson Meyer, “Al Gore Dreamed Up a Satellite – and It Just Took Its First Picture of Earth,” Atlantic, July 20, 2015. The idea that we all face roughly the same opportunities and dangers in economic crises is wrong, in the case of climate change, the statement is morbid.3According to Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature, Kennedy was wrong even linguistically, as the second character does not mean opportunity, but rather “incipient moment” or “decisive point.” Thus, not necessarily a time for optimism or a good chance of advancement, but certainly a period of change. See Victor H. Mair, “‘Crisis’ Does NOT Equal ‘Danger’ Plus ‘Opportunity’: How a Misunderstanding about Chinese Characters Has Led Many Astray,” pinyin.info, September 2009.
Framing crisis as “danger and opportunity” hides its class character: the opportunities accrue to those with economic, political, and ideological power, while the dangers fall on the rest of us. In crisis, the poor suffer, or die, first.4Ernest Mandel formulated this well in 1978: “[Any crisis] strikes the weak more harshly than the strong, the poor more harshly than the rich. This is true within the imperialist countries themselves, as the crisis affects the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It is true within the employer class vis-à-vis the small and middlesized companies on the one hand and the great monopolies on the other. And it is true on a world scale, vis-à-vis the semi-colonial and dependent countries on the one hand and the imperialist countries on the other” Ernest Mandel, The Second Slump: A Marxist Analysis of Recession in the Seventies (London: NLB, 1978), 46). As a general rule, economic crises under capitalism have not been opportunities for working class and progressive movements. People might become angrier, but that anger can be mobilized in different directions. Without food on the table, it is difficult to dream of a better world and it is far easier to dream of food on the table. People desperate to find or keep their jobs will have more immediate problems than making revolution. Building on Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, we can argue that those with political, economic, ideological, and military power are most likely to be able to use the crisis to their advantage.5Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2007). If opportunities are occasions that make it possible to do something, we must acknowledge that the crises of capitalism are not mainly opportunities for the working class, the environmental movement, or the political left.
Still, the left seems to have a hard time letting go of the idea that crises are opportunities. In a recent Jacobin paper “Don’t Cheer a Recession,” Meagan Day rightly points to the social problems that a coming recession will bring to the working class. She then presents “two theories of how crises affect social change,” one optimistic and one pessimistic, and concludes that “history offers no clear verdict on which is correct,” and gives “mixed signals about whether downturns help or hurt our cause.”6Meagan Day, “Don’t Cheer a Recession,” Jacobin.com, April 4, 2025. This is not true. History provides a clear verdict. To exemplify the “optimistic theory,” Day mentions the Russian Revolution and Sweden’s response to the Great Depression. But the Russian Revolution was not primarily a consequence of an economic crisis and certainly not a modern capitalist economic crisis as we know them today. The main factor was Russia losing a war, not an economic crisis. Additionally, as Clara E. Mattei shows in The Capital Order, the economic recession of 1920 was a crucial event that stopped the revolutionary wave in Europe in 1918 and 1919.7Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022). As for Sweden, Kjell Östberg shows in The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy that the economic recovery in the 1930s was due mainly to trade with Nazi-Germany, and social investments, or reforms.8Kjell Östberg, The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy (London: Verso, 2024). The big welfare programs we normally associate with the Swedish model were mainly rolled out after the war.
The arguments that the crises in the 1970s and 2000s can be read through the “optimistic theory” because they contributed to resistance and demonstrations miss the massive difference between demonstrating and actually winning politically. The main conclusion from the economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch, for example—who studied economic crises in relation to over eight hundred elections—is that people demonstrate more after financial crises, but voters are attracted to parties that blame the problems on immigrants or minorities.9Parties on the far-right increased voter support by 30 percent on average after what the authors defined as financial crises. Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch, “Going to Extremes: Politics after Financial Crisis, 1870–2014,” CESifo Working Paper, No. 5553, (2015): 8–9, 33–4, and Appendix D, 53–5.
Historically, crises have tended to be opportunities for the ruling class, and problems for the working class and progressive social movements.10This is further developed in Ståle Holgersen, Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (London: Verso, 2024). Note that this is a tendency, not an iron law. Exceptions exist, and the New Deal in the United States is perhaps the better one (even though this is a highly complicated matter).11Also developed in Holgersen, Against the Crisis. Our aim is to make more exceptions, with the final aim of mobilizing a socialist movement against the crisis.12For an interesting discussion, see also James Cairns, “The Worse, The Better: A Critical Commentary,” Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, April 2025, 19(1), https://doi.org/10.18740/ss27366. But in order to do so, we must have a map that fits the terrain.
Solidarity in Headwinds
Crises are times when we need solidarity, but historically actual and active camaraderie within the working class, especially internationally, seems to become harder during crises. Notably, the class character of crises is frequently obscured by nationalism, national chauvinism, and racism. Nation-states always play central roles in crises for both institutional and ideological reasons. Institutionally, as crises come with demands for immediate crisis policies, nations and nation-states hold the power needed to immediately and effectively intervene into the economy. Ideologically, nationalism becomes a reflex among powerholders (as well as the far right) in turbulent times. The next economic crisis will likely unfold during a period of escalating militarization, geopolitical tensions, and warfare—as in the midst of the horrific livestreamed Zionist genocide in Palestine.
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