The new age of catastrophe

In it, Callinicos's innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin underpinned a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power or two forms of competition: economic and geopolitical.In a recent article, I revisited Callinicos's originality to demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy and racial capitalism have been silenced by mainstream imitators, namely, Kenneth Waltz and E. H. Carr (see 'Mainstreaming Marxism', International Affairs 99: 3, 2023).As something of a successor, The new age of catastrophe seeks to address today's conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis) of capitalism.In his latest book, Callinicos engages with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments: the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning whether gender and race are intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms).The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments within the current crisis of capitalism.The introduction and chapter one offer a theoretical framing of the argument.Callinicos recovers and reasserts a discussion of totality as a category so that he may overcome the atomization of the effects of capitalism.Drawing from Marxist philosophers such as György Lukács, the method of totality frames capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations, rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts.As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, 'even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality' (p.8).This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as a dialectical critique of how mainstream perspectives tend to slice up knowledge.Throughout the book, Callinicos recognizes conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism, and it is worth mentioning how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics are treated in the book.The author addresses the long-term trend of neo-liberal authoritarianism, through some of the earlier work on authoritarian statism on the eve of the neo-liberal era (drawing from Nicos Poulantzas); the COVID-19 pandemic (drawing from Paul Passavant); and the rise of the far-right under neo-liberal authoritarianism (drawing from Priya Chacko and Kanishka Jayasuriya).One conclusion, for Callinicos, is that 'all advanced capitalist states are structurally racist' (p.134).The final chapter of the book assesses the intersection of race and class through movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), and how class antagonisms are interwoven with race and gender.According to the author, the 'BLM explosion is suggestive of how the racial fracture increasingly condenses all the antagonisms of contemporary society' (p.161).