Converging Crises: Reality, Fear and Hope

Abstract

Although the G-20 and other official bodies have so far refused to acknowledge the fact, we are not simply living through a financial crisis, however grave the financial aspects of the current upheaval may be, but a multiple crisis whose component elements all strengthen and reinforce each other. For that matter, it's not even a 'crisis', which in uncorrupted language is a relatively brief moment between two possible outcomes-in an illness, for example, between recovery and death. We're in for a much longer period but here we will bow to the now-standard vocabulary.Beyond finance, one should recognise that inequality within and between countries and citizens has reached unsustainable levels in both developed and developing countries. Poverty is spreading and deepening, food and water scarcities are worsening, conflicts thrive in increasingly stressed societies, and catastrophic climate change-advancing much faster than experts predicted-looms over the whole.These aspects can no longer be envisaged separately: to provide just a few pump-priming examples of connections, we may note that the rich have huge, dinosaurian ecological footprints and despite their relatively small numbers arguably cause far more damage than hundreds of millions of poor people. As Jared Diamond shows in his book Collapse, a major reason for the ruin of past societies under environmental stress was the consumption of the elites who continued massively to use up resources long after their far poorer compatriots had felt the pinch, and thus drove their societies over the brink. Global warming hits the poor harder than the rich as well, simultaneously exacerbating social inequalities and food and water shortages. The financial crisis grinds down the poor: one need only think of the tidal wave of foreclosures in the United States that has thrown millions of families onto the streets, deepening their insecurity and poverty. 1 Prices for the very food staples the poor most depend on for their daily tortillas or chapattis may double overnight when financial speculators move into commodities markets or governments and large landholders place massive land resources under cultivation for agro-fuels. And how can one even imagine fixing the economy when millions have less money in their pockets and have been hard-hit by the financial and job meltdown?

Suministro de las principales fuentes de energía, proteína y grasa en México, 1961–2010

“…Asociado a lo anterior, actualmente se ha venido dando un aumento general en los precios de los alimentos básicos que genera, entre otras cosas, que las personas de bajos ingresos reduzcan drásticamente su consumo y que se vean vulnerables a los movimientos del mercado 6 .…”

Authoritarian governmentality through the global city: contradictions in the political ecology of historical capitalism

“…In his recent book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2015), David Harvey discusses a number of dynamic contradictions in the capitalist mode of production. Some of these contradictions ought properly to be considered strategic components of those 'converging crises'principally in food, energy, and financethat seem increasingly to define our epoch (George, 2010;McMichael, 2012;Moore, 2015, pp. 2, 40, 112).…”

Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society

“…Consequently, we can see how this portrayal of the crisis as 'moral' is actually an 'ideological displacement' (Hall et al, 1978); 3 for we are living in the midst of a multifaceted, global crisis. Besides the economic and financial dimensions, common concerns include the climate crisis, the energy crisis and the food crisis (Mueller and Passadakis, 2009;Houtart, 2010;George, 2010). For our purposes, three particular aspects are key: the crisis of capital accumulation (or economic growth); the crisis of social reproduction; and the fiscal crisis of the state.…”