Confronting multiple global crises: a political economy approach for the twenty-first century

The purpose of this paper is to develop a political economy approach able to examine the multiple, global crises of our times, a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology. Based on the philosophy of internal relations, I make three claims in this paper. First, we need a historical materialist approach to comprehend the historical specificity of capitalism. Second, we need an expanded conceptualization of capitalist accumulation, understanding that capitalist reproduction depends not only on the exploitation of wage labour in the sphere of production, but equally on different forms of expropriation in the sphere of social reproduction. Third, to reveal the internal relations between these different crises, we need to focus on class struggle in our analysis, defining both class struggle and labour movement broadly when doing so.