Transnational Temporalities: Capitalism, Crisis, Social Movements

In 1971, thirty-one-year-old Eduardo Galeano published in Montevideo Open Veins of Latin America: a grand economic-political narrative of the permanent nature of previous accumulation in South America, from the time of the conquest to the 1960s. A year later, in 1972, thirty-year-old Walter Rodney copublished in London and Dar El Salaam How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: an impressive materialist account of the continent's colonial subjugation, from the era of slavery to the struggles for national liberation. In both cases, the young authors and activists bring out the dense web that knots the history of the continents of the global South to that of the Western world; they vividly depict the hierarchical interdependencies that link the ongoing plunder of Africa and Latin America to the progressive blossoming of capitalism in Europe. Both reconstructions demonstrate the reproduction of the chains of command that generate these asymmetries, provoking powerful effects on the reader's geographical and political imagination: from this perspective, the development of some appears as the direct product of the underdevelopment of others. The epistemological framework of Eurocentric analyses, according to which the birth and subsequent spread of capitalism hinges on the British Isles alone, is thus undermined. Both works demonstrate how the brutality of English agrarian reform (enclosure of common lands plus savage discipline of expropriated peasantry) is not at all the ultimate foundation of the gradual deployment of capital across the planet, but one of its conditions of possibility. It is therefore not surprising that these essays played a decisive role in the cultural and political training of the 1970s anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements, contributing to the weaving of transnational networks between intellectuals and militants aimed at fighting Western domination. In this sense, these books still represent a formidable source of inspiration in exposing global dynamics, without which there can be no rethinking of internationalism commensurate with present-day challenges.¹

As Perry Anderson (2002) very convincingly argues, any analysis of the different experiences that have marked the history of internationalism cannot fail to take into consideration the forms, operations, and geographies of capital that are coeval with them. In this respect, Anderson's article is exhaustive and highly instructive, but open to criticism for at least two reasons that constitute useful starting points for this article. First, Anderson's reconstruction is decidedly historicist and linear: it starts with the First International of workingmen, continues with the Second International of the main socialist parties and trade unions, then moves on to the Third International of communist states, before arriving at the alliances of anti-colonial liberation struggles. Second, Anderson's analysis is entirely aimed at analyzing the institutions of revolutionary movements, mostly taking a top-down perspective. Although there is no space here to offer another history of internationalism,² our approach anchors itself in a multilinear view of history, attentive to the political productivity of struggles and their circulation from below.

The aim of the article is therefore to outline some features of the reconfiguration processes of contemporary social arrangements, attempting to update the approach whereby, on the world stage, the evolutions taking place in one socio-geographical context are co-implicated in the incessant redefinition of those of the others. Indeed, from its very beginnings, and despite its powerful universalizing action, capital has also enhanced the value of social and territorial singularities by producing and synchronizing differences, the pace of which is driven by the pressures of the global market. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true for the struggles and their internationalization: resistance practices should be contextualized within the very specific conditions of exploitation and oppression to which they respond; and often the (low) level and consistency of coordination between them is one of the main factors in their (in)success. This is even more so nowadays, when capital's conquest of the totality of the planet's surface not only has not eliminated the stripes and knots that affect global spaces but has even accentuated their scope. We live in a world that is more than ever characterized by an increasing intermingling of the “local” and the “global.” These spatial pluralities imply that the temporal experience of the present is similarly multifaceted and layered—as demonstrated in various ways throughout this special issue. This contribution situates the temporal aspects of contemporary political struggle in the context of a longer historical reading of capitalism's multitemporalities. In doing so, it challenges some of the dominant frameworks for understanding historical time in capitalism.³

The article is divided into three parts. First, the emphasis is on the heterogeneity and plurality of the spatiotemporal composition of capitalist development, which opposes liberal conceptions of historical time as “homogeneous and empty” and of social space as “flat and smooth.” More specifically, this section opens with an analysis of the Marxian critique of the world market, and then continues with an attempt to update such an approach, applying it to the current situation. In this regard, it highlights the fact that the post-2008 crisis scenario has been further accentuated the strategic function of institutional devices aimed at balancing the mismatches that characterize the logics of capitalist globalization (which is here defined as a multiverse, that is, a world made up of many worlds). The use of these devices, and the political violence that accompanies them, plays a crucial role in weaving transnational connections between disparate places, sectors, and subjects in order to set the best conditions for the pursuit of profit.

Second, two political reactions to the 2008 crisis are analyzed: the first is purely neoliberal; the second has a fascist matrix. The “extremism of the center” of the former, in its supposed axiological neutrality, actually turns out to be a force steeped in historicism, as it tries to bring the “backward” pieces of society up to speed with the “advanced” ones: it constitutes the political face of capital's synchronization operations; it provides the institutional violence necessary to harmonize the dissonant elements. Managers and technocrats proceed not only by imposing the standards deemed most advanced according to the “virtuous” models of best practices, but also by dictating the timeframe within which to conform. In this sense, rating agencies, benchmarking, the Brussels Memoranda, as well as the IMF's structural adjustment plans constitute various compliance devices that reflect a teleological worldview that has found in the crisis an opportunity to further intensify already existing trends. On the other hand, the rise of post- or proto-fascist movements can be read as a counterreaction, or a reaction to the neoliberal reaction. In its attempt to rehabilitate a pre-neoliberal temporality with reassuring hierarchies of gender and race, renewed xenophobic nationalism has in fact legitimized itself in different parts of the world as a viable alternative to the capitalist international. Beyond the falseness of this image, it is experienced as a movement of reestablishment and perpetuation “here and now” of the recent past, without any real impulse toward another horizon.

The final section examines then several cycles of struggle that shook the past decade. Throughout the 2010s, social and political movements opposed these operations of economic-political synchronization/restoration, opening up on the construction of emancipatory future temporalities, which they try to establish, consolidate, disseminate, and reproduce. It is therefore on the basis of the irreducible plurality and heterogeneity of these presents fighting against the existing state of things that the organizational riddle of the asynchronicities to be accorded arises: not only the development of capital but also that of anti-capitalism depends on this knot. An internationalism that is up to the challenges of the present must, however, be able to avoid the double hurdle of historicism and the cynical prioritization of aims that have characterized many twentieth-century experiences, as well as the liberal inflections of a certain fin de siècle cosmopolitanism (Chatterjee 2016). Despite their limitations and failures, the alter-globalization experiments of the early 2000s and, above all, the multitude of the 2010s uprisings offer a concrete opportunity to rethink the practices of solidarity and political alliance beyond their specific living and working conditions and beyond the borders of individual nation-states. Like the canvas of a polyphony still being written, they help to prefigure what transnationalism for the twenty-first century can be.

The Smartphone as Method: Capitalist Synchronizations

The discovery of gold and silver in America; the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population; the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies; and the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theater (Marx 1990: 915).

This is how Karl Marx, in his famous chapter on the so-called Ursprüngliche Akkumulation, describes the opening scenes through which materializes the long transition to capitalism. They range from one corner of the planet to the other, showing how the history of the coming of capital into the world is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (Marx 1990: 875). The global chessboard is therefore the stage that manifests the original violence through which European capitals have fought by any means possible for natural resources, workforce, and market shares. For Marx, in fact, “the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself” (Marx 1857: 341); it is the cogency of the logic immanent to its development that leads it to subsume—formally or really—areas and territories located at every latitude and longitude. And it is precisely within this space that can be seen the plurality of histories, contexts, and subjectivities that capital tries to synchronize in order to sustain its own valorization. The coexistence of these different factors, therefore, does not take the form of a simple unrelated copresence but is produced in the course of history as an antagonistic process in which the different parts pose and presuppose each other in a contrasting way: each is both a condition and a consequence of the others; each co-appears with the others in the dynamic tension that binds them together. They are then not mere juxtaposed entities, but co-constitutive moments of an incessant and conflicting becoming.

This theme is addressed throughout Marx's theoretical and political trajectory. As early as the first half of the 1840s, the capitalist system is criticized as a “contradictory totality in process” (Monferrand 2023), in which different spheres (production, circulation, etc.), forms (private property, wage labor, etc.) and social domains (structure, superstructure, etc.) codetermine each other. This ontological framework, however, not only covers the level of “national” social relations but extends to that of global geography and geo-economics. As Marx illustrated on several occasions, the multiple relations of production present in the various regions of the world deeply interpenetrate one another. And if in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts the reflection still takes place mostly on an analogical level, in the writings of his maturity the analysis is elaborated in more stringent terms. In 1844, in fact, Marx limited himself to pointing out how the degradation of material living and working conditions—characteristic of peripheral economies—is increasingly spreading even in the most advanced capitalist countries. In this sense, capitalist progress brings with it a retreat in the living and working standards of the subaltern classes; or, to put it in a spatial metaphor with an internationalist resonance, “in each of their industrial towns England and France have already a little Ireland” (Marx 1844: 50). With Capital, however, Marx's theoretical reflection becomes more rigorous. The slave plantations in the South of the United States, for example, are not at all considered a mere residue of precapitalist forms of exploitation. On the contrary, they are considered as fully capitalist enterprises precisely because they are linked—within the global market—to the European textile industry. Indeed, as the great historian Eric Hobsbwam (1968: 34) argued, anyone who says “Industrial Revolution says cotton,” but anyone who says cotton says slave trade and slave labor.

To the heterogeneity of capital's spaces corresponds a plurality of labor figures, each of which has its own particular history (Mezzadra 2011). Beyond the examination of concrete cases of “unequal and combined development,” Marxian criticism often insists on the articulation between the different forms of subsumption, which discredits any unilinear reading of capitalist development. In the unpublished chapter 6 of Capital, Marx speaks explicitly about the combination of formal and real subsumption relations. Formal subsumption relates to the ex-post appropriation of the products of labor, without any essential interference in the labor process, with respect to which it remains fundamentally external. Real subsumption, on the contrary, is intimately immanent to it: it takes place at the moment when the labor process is pervaded from beginning to end by the logic of capital; it is expressed through a redefinition of the very modalities of the labor-power leasing-out, which is entirely subordinated to the demands of valorization. This does not mean, however, that the two forms of subsumption are mutually exclusive, nor does it mean that the latter supplants the former in a progressive and linear fashion. Formal subsumption, typical of the so-called antediluvian forms of capital—usurious capital and mercantile capital—is in fact reproduced within the capitalist mode of production “as parallel and transitional form.” And there is nothing to prevent it, logically and historically, from exhausting its functions once and for all. Real subsumption, on the other hand, beyond the rationalizations it introduces into working time, “can in turn form the basis for the introduction of the first in new branches of production” (Marx 1864).⁵

As can be deduced from these remarks, the concepts of formal and real subsumption were elaborated by Marx to account for the transition to large-scale industry and, consequently, the spread of capitalist circuits to the whole of society and the whole planet. It is true, however, that they have long been used in a historicist, mechanicist, and teleological way by the institutions of the official labor movement and its organic thinkers, who eventually turned the two categories into a dichotomy. Nevertheless, in recent times they have become the spearhead of the renewal of the theoretical and political grammar of critical Marxism.⁶ Instead of reading these two concepts as embodying the automatic and epochal transition from a less evolved stage of capital development to a more mature and accomplished phase, they reveal the interconnection between a plurality of exploitation and domination logics of living labor at the level of the global market. Moreover, the articulation between relations of formal subsumption, relations of real subsumption, and hybrid forms of control of labor power shows the mutual interdependence between the practices of subjugation of a multiplicity of living labor figures, which are specifically incorporated within the global dynamics of capitalist accumulation.

Let us take one of the most emblematic cases, which highlights this melting pot of aspects: the smartphone. This good involves a combination of R&D carried out by cognitive workers in the hi-tech laboratories of Silicon Valley, extraction of rare minerals undertaken by slave miners in Central Africa and Latin America, transportation (very often by sea) performed by logistics workers of the hardware parts in the mega-factories that abound on the southeastern coast of China and their neo-Taylorist assembling by migrant workers from the four corners of the country, software programming in the engineer workshops of the Indian subcontinent, and the distribution and sale of the good all over the world. But also, upstream and downstream of the production of the commodity, stock market valuation in the financial sphere, communication and marketing in the infosphere, and then the wide variety of possible uses, including as an object of leisure and personal consumption producing myriads of data that can be exploited at will, as a means of production that provides its services 24/7 to senior managers as well as to the proletarians of platform capitalism, and so on. This stylized picture is far from exhaustive, and yet it already reveals an intricate framework in which the superposition and stratification of these multiple relations of capital valorization are intertwined with the invasion of all spaces and moments of social and individual life. It is then clear that the simultaneity and articulations between the multiple relations of subsumption (formal, real, etc.) express a polysemy of voices, which thwarts the hegemonic quest of the subject.

And it is exactly the threads of these plural histories that capital tries to interlace with the rhythms imposed by global competition. The temporal, spatial, and social gaps that make up the capitalist multiverse must therefore be bridged and enhanced by a long and complex series of economic and political operations, the aim of which is to coordinate the plethora of subjects caught in the meshes of capital. This has several consequences. The first is related to real subsumption: if we provincialize Europe and relativize the scope of the Keynesian and Fordist epoch, the centrality (economic, social, and political) of the wage earner, with his distinctive anthropological (the heterosexual white man) and legal (the citizen of the Western nation-state) traits, is inexorably eroded. As Global Labour History⁷ has shown so well, the broadening of the spatiotemporal perspective allows us to appreciate the heterogeneity of the forms of labor subsumption under capital that characterize the modern and contemporary era. From this point of view, “free” wage labor appears simply as one of the different ways in which capital transforms labor power into a commodity, showing to what extent the social composition of the global working class is—and has always been—constituted by a plurality of diverse forms of “dependent labor.” Second, the multiple ways in which labor power is subjugated and subsumed under capital reveal the vast array of devices and techniques that are used—as Althusser would say—to organize the encounters between labor and capital. Beyond the silent compulsion of contractual constraints, the stakes of these “encounters” have to do with the (more or less) violent imposition of abstract labor as a measure of value and as a key element in determining how capital appropriates labor power. These encounters also remind us that capitalist reproduction is never self-evident, that it is not given once and for all, and that it constantly requires the external intervention of ideological, security, and political institutions. The role of the latter is precisely to prepare the ground so that the cooperation and valorization of subjects, social relations, and territories are as profitable as possible—that is, that their plural histories “walk together,” that they “get in tune.” This is true everywhere and at every moment in history, but all the more so in times of great crisis.

So, to summarize, let us stress these two introductory insights, before delving more deeply into them. These two aspects in fact play a crucial role in fine-tuning any diagnosis of the present, as well as any reflection on current struggles:

1. Subsumption side: what emerges from a first, quick analysis of the capitalist multiverse—in which a wide plurality of heterogeneous histories and worlds codetermine each other—is the importance of reckoning the diverse figures determined by the multiplicity of labor that are differentially subsumed in the production processes that unfold on a global scale.

2. Synchronization side: any examination of labor exploitation cannot be limited to a simple critique of so-called abstract domination, but must also concretely consider, within and beyond labor relations, the mobilization of the institutional apparatuses essential to the reproduction of capital, in both their biopolitical and repressive traits.

Between Authoritarian Historicism and Dark Obsolescences

The 2008 crisis—like every major crisis—triggered a conjuncture change; it further accelerated and radicalized the dynamics that had been in place since the mid-1970s, leading to an internal transition within the neoliberal paradigm: the shift to a harsher and more violent phase of neoliberalism, which further exacerbated social antagonisms. Indeed, the negative consequences of the crisis did not fall in the same way according to class, gender, and race; they affected regions and territories in different ways, further deepening the fractures already present within societies—social, economic, political, and geographical fractures that go beyond the nation-state's demarcation lines.⁸ The 2008 crisis, in other words, has acted as a dilator of contradictions; it has contributed to further destabilizing an already highly precarious system. But like all moments of profound crisis, it also gave rise to the possibility of practicing “existential” decisions, bearing on the very nature of its evolution. As always, in order to face great difficulties, the ruling classes have at their disposal a wide and varied arsenal, which—depending on the balance of power—can range from the most reactionary turns to the most progressive openings. However, as it has been clear from the outset, the response adopted has been one of neoliberal discontinuity: a greater expropriation of social wealth, a higher rate of exploitation, and lower protection of democratic guarantee.⁹

In this regard, it is interesting to analyze the discursive production that accompanied the implementation of the devices through which the further neoliberalization of societies took place after the unleashing of the subprime bubble. The strengthening of the capitalist command was expressed through an inflection of terminology, which, however, reiterated the urgency of forcing the steps of privatization and liberalization as the only way to relaunch the economy. The creative force of the communicative action of rating agencies, central banks presidents, government representatives, CEOs of large corporations, and so on, has thus become impregnated with an ever grayer and more contemptuous historicism, but not for that reason less violent. On the one hand, the simple public announcement of a good (or bad) rating, a change in interest rates, or the implementation of certain policies (monetary, fiscal, social, or entrepreneurial) continued to produce immediate repercussions on a large scale: “how to do things with words,” to put it with J. L. Austin. Very often, in fact, the declarations of one of these institutional figures, before being concretely implemented, have generated real effects that have in turn become self-consolidating.¹⁰ This clearly demonstrates the extent to which the linguistic functioning of the public sphere—particularly within the financial community—exerts a “cognitive constraint” on the multiplicity of subjects, by pushing them to act in this or that way. On the other hand, the lexical choices and the philosophy behind these proclamations have been based on the tired bureaucratic-administrative refrain of “reforms.”¹¹ It is a question of making companies more competitive on the world market or keeping the country up to date—at the risk of social, political, or economic collapse. In this respect, it is imperative to open up to the world, to innovation and technology, but above all to streamline the workforce, review social rights, or reduce budgets. The rhetoric of modernization has become increasingly linked to that of lightening the burdens of the past, without, however, being able to unleash the oneiric atmosphere of the roaring 1990s. The anonymous demands of the market and finance now dominate: the entirely neoliberal impossibility of thinking up even the slightest alternative; the reign of pure necessity that has supplanted that of the mildest forms of freedom and planning.

This semantic displacement is symptomatic of the depletion of power of the “ideals” being mobilized. Nowadays, the synchronizations needed by capital are not accompanied by the dream of a better world or the myth of a liberated humanity, but neither by the euphoric certainty of unlimited growth margins or the bold conviction of quick, easy, and secure profits. Between the 2008 crisis and the pandemic, it was a question, at best, of making up for competitive disadvantages, of plugging the technological gap, of moving forward more quickly with more courageous measures, or, at worst, of avoiding bankruptcy and remaining solvent in the short/medium term. In short, the art of governing has got rid of all narrative frills and has limited itself to operating as dryly and efficiently as possible. Certainly, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the international spread of so-called corporate governance¹² standards triggered unrealistic rises in stock prices. But from the 2010s onward, with the sovereign debt crisis, the reformism of capital has manifested itself above all through the communications of general restructuring plans and the proclamations of “austeritarian” maneuvers aimed at redressing the treasuries of indebted countries. The change in vocabulary and emotional tone is not trivial. However, what matters most is that, in both cases, these packages of rules prescribe ready-made and uniform recipes that attempt to homogenize the behavior of their targets, while reassuring investors that, sooner or later, everyone will have to fall in line with the technocratic/managerial orders. The norms contained in these announcements thus prove to be a prodigious behavioral control device (conduite des conduites, Foucault would have said); they encourage the adoption of the same gestures and the same policies. One could even say that it is through them that the market despotism takes shape, because, through them, investors literally dictate the programs that must be put in place.

In both cases, then, the reforms aimed at preparing businesses and the social fabric for financial capture have been imposed through a bipartisan consensus capable of nullifying any prospect of change that deviates from neoliberal precepts and their dichotomous unilinearism: first cuts, then (perhaps) growth. Having enjoyed almost total unanimity for several decades, they have been able to have such a deep impact on the social body that they have led to a radical transformation of production relations, the form of the state, and the entire ideological compartment. In this sense, institutional coalitions across the center-right and center-left have been so obstinate in their practice of the neoliberal cult that they have been regarded as “extremism of the center,”¹³ whose violence has exercised a genuine constituent power extending from the world of work to the authoritarian twisting of the state apparatus. However, the brutality through which neoliberalism has pursued its objectives since 2008 is not only heedless of the minimum forms of democratic legitimacy typical of liberal-parliamentary regimes but is also responsible for closing any horizon of transcendence of the present. Until the pandemic broke out, in fact, the future was increasingly configured as a reproduction of what already exists to the nth degree: less welfare and more relocations, more precariousness, and less employment—all by means of decrees and impositions variously defined by critics as “a-democratic,” “post-democratic,” or substantiating increasingly advanced “processes of de-democratization” (Dardot and Laval 2017; Crouch 2004; Brown 2015).

It is “within and against” this asphyxiated and self-referential framework that the rise of the so-called alternative right has been expressed. Whereas neoliberal authoritarianism has used all the power at its disposal (financial, institutional, police, legal, media, etc.) to obliterate the achievements of the past by crushing the future on the present, the new radical right-wingers boast of serving the needs of the people (strictly defined on an ethnic-racial basis), addressing the downgrading brought about by globalization. In doing so, however, they are committed not to reopening the field of the possible, but rather to a more or less indefinite return to the status quo ante: from the nostalgic feelings of Brexit to the resentful frustrations of “make America great again,” part of the disaffection with the antisocial and antidemocratic practices of the neoliberal establishment has clung to the ghosts of the imperial and Fordist past. Unlike classical fascism, in fact, the far right that emerged after the 2008 crisis does not make use of a powerful transformative imagery capable of fusing “archaism” and “futurism” in an explosive mixture. Rather, it resorts to a symbolic repertoire that draws on the whole spectrum of sad passions to reestablish old lost securities. Thus, the political subjectivation of contemporary right-wingers passes mainly through the strenuous defense of national sovereignty, economy, borders, and identity against what Marine Le Pen calls the top-down globalism of transnational elites and the bottom-up globalism of planetary migrations. The traditional myths of the New Man, the race purification, or the regeneration of the nation—born out of the heat of the Great War and the titanic clash against dying liberalism and the Bolshevik revolution—no longer serve any totale Mobilmachung. The enemies to be opposed today are those who undermine the residual rights of the lower and middle classes and the certainties of the past: on the one hand neoliberal reduction of politics to the administration of the existing and on the other the new subjectivities that have arisen in the wake of the 1960–70s uprisings.

The constellation of post-fascist forces is in fact based on the “revolt of the included” who tend to be increasingly excluded (Revelli 2017: 4). As such, it does not aim to break the dominant relations, evoking the demons of the past to shape a new future. Rather, it merely wants to turn back the clock a few decades, to a time when the economy grew steadily, the world was divided into good and bad, the peoples of the South did not rebel against those of the North, women against men, young people against adults, and sexual minorities against the codes of heterosexuality. No utopian tension, therefore, but a weak reactionary force.¹⁴ In this regard, the historian Enzo Traverso defines these movements and parties as post-fascist. On the one hand, they are not, in fact, intent on updating the ideological and organizational armamentarium of traditional fascism to subvert the present with the support of big capital and the high state officials (what in France is called the noblesse d'Etat). It could be claimed that not only have they not—for the moment at least—made any real inroads into the hearts of the ruling classes,¹⁵ but they do not even appear to constitute a real subversive threat.¹⁶ Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that they represent a serious danger, especially for the most exposed to social and political violence. Furthermore, post-fascist forces—the effect and cause of the rightward shift of public debate and policies—exacerbate xenophobic (particularly Islamophobic) drifts that affect racialized subjectivities, as well as misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic ones. If, therefore, “the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality,” that of post-fascism “emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation” (Traverso 2019: 4).

Beyond the debate—by no means nominal—on the most appropriate definitions, one cannot consider today's extreme right as a merely compensatory phenomenon.¹⁷ Its rise, in fact, brings out very clearly the asynchronous nature of historical and social change and the spatially and socially centrifugal outcomes of political and institutional action. The alleged depoliticization (highly political in reality) of the social produced by the neoliberal turn has highlighted the temporal divergences between the ultra-accelerated trajectory of financial capital and the much slower trajectory of vast sectors of the contemporary world, which have remained entangled in a pre-1968 reality (Keynesian, heteronormative, and racially hierarchical) in which their own voice counted in the present while the future did not hold any anxieties, uncertainties, or insurmountable difficulties. In the words of Massimiliano Tomba (2021), such “social strata are strangers in their own country and do not share the same present with others.” The atomization and anomie perpetrated by the disintegration of social ties have therefore provoked a need for (more or less) imaginary communities for large sections of the electorate, fomenting their political activation in a reactionary direction. And as is often the case, these temporal discrepancies have a very precise sociogeographical implication: they are anchored in the territories where the gap between “before” and “after” has been felt the most, marginalizing the subjects who live there. With regard to Brexit and Trumpism, for example, the spatial dimension of the phenomenon does not appear any less significant than the social one: in the first case, it was mainly the big cities suburbs, the countryside, and the deindustrialized North that voted for “Leave”; in the second case, on the other hand, it is the rust belt and the Midwest that contributed to electing the real estate tycoon.¹⁸ This reactionary outcome, however, is not a condemnation. Throughout the 2010s, in fact, the hardening of social relations and the memory of the recent past were not only the prerogative of alternative right-wingers, but they have also promoted genuinely progressive or even revolutionary protest movements.

For a New Transnationalism

No phenomenological survey of the past decade can fail to focus on the wide proliferation and transnational circulation of various movements, which also arose “within and against” the scenario inaugurated by the 2008 crisis. From the struggles of the Chinese workers in 2010 to the variegated multiplicity of uprisings during the first waves of the pandemic (countless workers in different national contexts, the over 250 million strikers in India, the anti-racist upheavals in the US), via the Arab springs; the occupations of the squares in Greece, Spain, US, Brazil, and Turkey; Black Lives Matter; the migrants exoduses around the world; the transfeminist strikes; the climate marches in the global North; or the popular unrests that have agitated half the world since the end of 2018 (France, Algeria, Ecuador, Chile, Catalonia, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, etc.), social and political conflict of the last decade has been antagonized on almost every continent. Despite their irreducible heterogeneity, these protests share a number of objective and subjective characteristics that allow them to be grouped into various “cycles,” each of which has unfolded according to its own time frame, radiating other scenarios of struggle beyond the borders of individual nation-states. Indeed, it is interesting to note how, in many cases, the more or less sudden emergence in one country (Tunisia, Spain, Argentina, France, Sweden, etc.) triggered repercussions in other contexts, giving rise to original reappropriations of watchwords, practices, and claims that resonate with one another. This concomitance shows not only the similarity of the subjugation conditions but also the simultaneity of the forms of oppression and exploitation, raising the difficult question (theoretical and organizational) of the articulation/synchronization of the resistance dynamics, beyond their specific and national instances.

This is why, if we consider capitalism on a global scale, one of the main political stakes of any liberation perspective consists in valorizing to the maximum the reciprocal influences between struggles—the transmission of counter knowledge, autonomous forms of organization, effective modalities of action, and so on—while underlining the limits at work between the different contexts: temporal lags, lack of coordination, insufficient support, loss of interest, and so on. And indeed, what used to be called internationalism is nowadays experiencing promising reincarnations, without having been able to cope with the reproduction of the crisis and the spread of its harmful consequences. So far, the social movements have certainly produced an accumulation of subjective, practical, and theoretical experiences that have positively updated the archive of the post-1968 left; they have more or less effectively impeded the workings of neoliberalism, while unleashing the hatred and resentment of reactionaries all over the world. However, the power they have achieved is far from being commensurate with the challenges of the present—as the diffusion of the pandemic, the urgency of climate change, and the wars in Ukraine and Palestine make more obvious every day.¹⁹

As the monographic literature on the 2010s social movements is now very extensive,²⁰ in the following pages we will limit ourselves to highlighting some of the nodes and tendencies common to different struggle experiences at the transnational level. This approach, still underexplored, is decisive for outlining an overall view necessary to elaborate a preliminary, albeit partial, balance sheet on the various cycles of the past decade, in order to underline their strengths and weaknesses. Such an approach not only contributes to enriching the debate concerning the different social movements (workers’, migrants’, feminist, ecologist, anti-racist, etc.) from a specific perspective, namely, that of their inter- or transnational circulations, but also aims to renew the way in which the history of internationalism has traditionally been read. In exploring across different contexts, we will be particularly concerned with the core question of why the articulation/synchronization of struggles is so crucial. The following three arguments are central to this investigation.

First of all, the 2010s movements have managed to break down any rigid dichotomy between the global North and the global South—a rigid dichotomy that, by the way, is increasingly obsolete for capital accumulation itself. The occupations of the squares started on the southern coast of the Mediterranean before circulating through most of the Maghreb and the Middle East, then transiting through Greece and Spain, to finally cross the Atlantic Ocean and arrive in the US before resurfacing two years later in Turkey and Brazil. The new global women's movement had a similarly far-reaching trajectory: emerging in Poland and Argentina in the fall of 2016, it soon reached the US, Spain, and Italy, then Turkey and many Latin American countries, before exploding into the global #metoo phenomenon. And even if we take such a sui generis case as the Yellow Vests, we can see how the traditional geographies of French politics have been disrupted: the mobilization that emerged from the peri-urban areas, the near suburbs, and the diffuse peripheries (the inner margins of the republic) was immediately met with great enthusiasm in the overseas territories (the “remains” of the colonial empire), and later—especially during the Saturday demonstrations—in the gilded hearts of all of France's largest cities. These examples show us that from now on we can no longer establish a priori a site (the North or the South, the West or the East, the “center” or the “periphery”) as the privileged space from which struggles will be born. Today's world is much more complex and interwoven. It is a similar lesson, moreover, that we can draw from such an extraordinary uprising as that of the protests against police violence in the US in spring 2020: within the very “heart” of the empire, racialized people still must fight against the ongoing legacy of slavery, that is, the structural character of racism, white supremacy, and so on. All this demonstrates how the old coincidence established by Workerism between technical and political composition (Lenin in England), as well as the old Third Worldist credo, is no longer relevant; now we cannot think of betting everything politically on the most advanced point of development, or, on the contrary, on the weakest link of the command. The spatiotemporal composition of contemporary capitalism calls for a change of perspective.

Second, the movements of the past decade have always tried to join a targeted struggle to broader projects of social upheaval. Whether it was the overthrow of a tyrant, opposition to an austere social restructuring, revolt against the effects of financial speculation, protest against an urban redevelopment plan, contestation against the rising costs of public transport, the fight against gender-based and sexual violence, or generalized frustration with the “high cost of living,” tax injustices, police brutality, corruption of the political regime, and so on, the movements that emerged throughout the 2010s aimed to go beyond the (more or less) restricted framework of their specific struggle to challenge the crisis of the capitalist system as a whole and its antisocial and antidemocratic fallout. Despite all their limitations and difficulties, they have been able to show the structural character of the forms of domination they are struggling against, while always remaining capable of raising the generality of political perspectives. This shows us how no single instance can aspire a priori to occupy the center of the stage, determining the rhythms and stakes of the uprisings and pushing everyone to recompose themselves around it: social and political rights, of course, but also the decried identity politics or, even more so, the many facets of the ecological crisis. Each of these causes, in the heat of the events, can de facto provide a rallying point around which to launch broad mobilization dynamics. It is therefore the strengths and limits/weaknesses of the really existing movements that should be considered, examining in detail and from a radically immanent point of view the particularity of each concrete situation, without regretting, from a position of exteriority, the good old days when social movements dared to scare and hurt the state and capital for real.

Third, we must consider the question of the combination between struggles against exploitation and struggles against oppression, on the one hand, and between constituent practices and antagonistic practices, on the other. Once again, without having any illusions about the power relations really at work, the new social movements have given several precious indications. In Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madrid, or New York, the “economic” battle against absolute poverty, the dismantling of the welfare state, the crumbling of the labor market, or the noose of indebtedness was not dissociated from the “political” need and desire to take charge of the decisions concerning the production and reproduction of the material conditions of collective life. With the global transfeminist strike we see the transposition into the economic sphere of the temporary cessation of all labor activity—monetized or not, such as housework or emotional work—of gender issues such as abortion, rape, feminicide, and so on. Concerning contemporary practices, anti-racist movements, for example, have not hesitated to experiment with a “plurality of tactics” (confrontation with the forces of order, riots, looting, burning, but also occupations of public space and the setting up of assemblies based on direct democracy) to reveal the many stratifications of racism (in the workplace, in schools, in imprisonments, in access to health care, to housing, etc.) starting with the homicides of young non-white men. As for the popular uprisings of 2018–19, most of which were triggered by increases in the price of basic goods and services, the insurrectional peaks, the blockades of economies and metropolises, and the invention of horizontal forms of self-organization were able to hold together conflictuality and counterpower, by demanding more money and reappropriating politics. In all these cases, the need to resist multiple relations of domination (at home, at work, in the streets, etc.) was not dissociated from the desire to assert new ways of living in the world and with others, alluding to the dissolution of certain dichotomies that have structured the revolutionary tradition, such as those between tactics and strategy or between reform and revolution. Indeed, in their very unfolding, recent movements demand the implementation, here and now, of practices that prefigure an emancipated future, renouncing the old subordination of means to ends or the hierarchization of the motives of struggle.

Now, all this is certainly not enough, but it is not anecdotal either. The 2010s were not only a decade of violent neoliberal reaction or of the dangerous growth of the far right; they also constituted a formidable laboratory of subjective, organizational, and discursive experiments that brought the critique of neocapitalism up to date. It is therefore based on these social movements that collective intelligence must set to work politically. In this respect, the cartography of present struggles allows us to reframe three important issues that are giving rise to crucial debates, which are fed by contemporary social movements as much as they can feed them in turn. The plurality of the struggles that have emerged throughout the past decade, the heterogeneity of their practices and claims, and their global circulation therefore require us to take a fresh look at (1) the redefinition of the concept of class, (2) the renewal of the theory of organization, and (3) the actuality of internationalism. All of these issues, as we will sketch it shortly, are linked to the constituent role of multitemporalities, which provide the best suited ontology to the now more urgent than ever rethinking of politics and internationalism.

On the first point, we can look to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's recent development of the concept of the “multitudinous class” or “class prime”—that is, the class after the multitude; or, to put it differently, what the class is after the encounter with the multitude. What is an “intersectional class,” a class that does not ignore the dimensions of gender, sex, and race? In this respect, they speak of C-M-C—class-multitude-class—as in the general formula of Marx's capital, where “the importance rests on the transformation undergone at the center of the process” (Hardt and Negri 2019). The relative autonomy of each of the structures of domination, their reciprocal irreducibility, in fact does not call for the sacrifice of one component at the expense of the others. On the contrary, it reveals their simultaneity, opening up a politics of articulation that does not separate gender-race-sex oppressions from labor exploitation, without limiting itself to a simple addition of the different forms of domination, as worker + woman + black + lesbian, by going in search of the most exploited/oppressed subjectivity. From this point of view, it is not a question of imagining external alliances or simple coalitions between a plurality of different subjectivities, each of which supports the struggles of the others without allowing itself to be intimately transformed by them from within. It is about keeping in mind the fact that class is shaped throughout by the dimensions of race, gender, sex, spatial and environmental inequalities, and that ecological, transfeminist, anti-racist struggles, and so on, are constitutive of class struggle. As a result, the subjectivity and identity of the collectives involved cannot remain untouched, as “an intersectional coalition is a space of convergence for a multitude of diverse and heterogeneous people, within which new subjectivities and even identities are continuously fabricated in a common struggle for liberation” (Mezzadra 2021).

This raises the urgent question of political organization, a brief treatment of which will allow us to bring the article to conclusion by further elaborating the political stakes of the transnational temporalities mapped so far. Rodrigo Nunes's recently published book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, is particularly helpful here. The text unfolds through the philosophical-political deconstruction of a long series of binarisms, which have limited the practical potential of those who oppose the present state of affairs: verticality/ horizontality, centralization/decentralization, unity/diversity, party/movement, organization/spontaneity, micropolitics/macropolitics, molar/molecular, hegemony/autonomy. All too often, in the history of social movements, these conceptual pairs have been thought of—and continue to be thought of—as “exclusive disjunctions,” “paralysing dualisms” (Nunes 2021: 13), such that if you adhere to one perspective you must necessarily renounce the other. On the contrary, the crucial point is to start from the irreducible subjective pluralism present within a given environment. A vision which involves thinking in eco-systemic terms the political organization, with the awareness that one is an integral part of the milieu in which one is immersed. And this means that not only do our actions affect everyone else in the ecosystem and the ecosystem itself, but also the actions of others affect everyone implicated in the ecosystem as well as the ecosystem as a whole. This approach has extremely rich spin-offs for our arguments concerning the simultaneity of the forms of domination and the articulation between different and singular struggles. In this regard, the following points from Nunes are essential: (1) by acting on the shared environment, the components of an ecology can indirectly shape the field of possibilities of others; (2) functional differentiation is one of the fundamental characteristics (and strengths) of an ecology; (3) the wealth produced by a node or cluster does not belong exclusively to it, but is also available to the ecology as a whole; (4) thinking ecologically about organization implies not conceiving it as a zero-sum competition between the parts; (5) no one wins alone; (6) approaching the competition between the parts as a conflict between forces rather than as an irreconcilable contradiction makes it possible to consider this tension as a matter of relative strength and not an absolute opposition (Nunes 2021: 166–73).

Now, it is in the light of what has been said so far that the question of the relevance of inter- or transnationalism should be reconsidered.²¹ On the one hand, the history of the twentieth century has shown the difficulties of nationalist variants of revolution, as well as the Stalinist usurpation of the hypothesis of “socialism in one country.” On the other hand, the global harmonization of the struggles’ temporalities cannot remain the fruit of a messianic and spontaneous wait-and-see attitude, nor must it become the conditio sine qua non for political action. There have been moments in history—1848, 1917–20, 1968–73—when in various national contexts there has been a disruptive synchronization of resistance practices, which has opened important breaches in the wall of the existing. These rare phases, in which popular uprisings spread rapidly from one country to another, are particularly propitious for the triggering of sequences with potentially revolutionary implications: it is precisely in such periods, in fact, that the temporalities of historical events suddenly accelerate and that the conflict level can make a qualitative break from one moment to the next. From this point of view, what we have witnessed in the 2010s is certainly not—mutatis mutandis—a scaled-down version of the golden years 1848, 1917, or 1968. Rather, the 2010s were punctuated by an almost uninterrupted series of cycles of struggle, which expanded from one socio-geographical context to another, crossing the borders of nation-states and spreading imagery, watchwords, and practices on a global scale that resonated in the hearts and heads of people thousands of kilometers apart. Although these mutual calls, despite the strength of their echoes, have not yet succeeded in activating processes of subjectivation/organization capable of breaking the status quo, they do, however, give us a horizon toward which to strive: that of a bond to be empowered at every possible opportunity, between subjects living at different latitudes, opposed to specific logics and processes of domination, but whose parallel histories sometimes manage to meet mysteriously on common ground.

Notes

References