Authoritarian Capitalism Is the world transitioning to a post-democratic market system?
By Ingar Solty
President of the Republic of Brasil Jair Bolsonaro signs guestbook at the White House. CC BY 2.0, Palác Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (English website), 20 August 2019, online: https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/40881/authoritarian-capitalism/
Capitalism changes with its organic crises and the way the state manages these crises. From the Long Depression (1873–1896) arose organized capitalism set in a world of interimperialist rivalries, from the Great Depression (1929–1939) emerged Fordism, and from Fordist capitalism’s great crisis (1967–1979) emerged globalized financial market capitalism. And in 2007 globalized financial market capitalism, sometimes described as “neoliberalism”, entered into the fourth organic crisis in the history of capitalism. The question is: is this crisis over? And, if so, has a new capitalism already arisen out of the crisis of global financial market capitalism? At the onset of the crisis, some variant of “green capitalism” was long regarded as the most viable project. The need to prevent a global financial meltdown then to be followed by a Great Depression 2.0 necessitated multilateral coordination and statecraft and the implementation of historic stimulus programs. This was the so called “Keynesian resurgence” of the early 2000s. It was nurtured by the desire to prevent the same historic mistakes from the Great Depression, when states’ austerity policies (Hoover in the US, Brüning in Germany, etc.) depressed economies and led to a downward spiral of diminished demand, deflation, and layoffs, while the increasing misery of the masses helped pave the way for the rise of fascism and other far-