After mass politics: the logic of structural crisis in contemporary capitalism

The concept of ‘polycrisis’ identifies a multitude of interacting crises in contemporary capitalism but offers little analysis of their shared roots and limited engagement with crisis theory. Returning to crisis theory in political economy literature, this article develops a structural theory of political crisis with mass politics at its centre. While constructivism valuably emphases the political character of crises, we argue that Gramscian and Marxist state theory frameworks are better suited to explain the underlying social conflicts driving an enduring structural crisis in advanced capitalist democracies. Based on an historical analysis of major crises of twentieth-century capitalism focused on the Anglosphere, we underscore the novelty of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which was resolved through a restoration of the pre-crisis model of accumulation but without a mass political force to establish a new social compact. Amidst rising inequality, this has produced an ongoing legitimation crisis without a political resolution. This crisis is compounded by the structural contradiction of climate change which exacerbates discontent with political elites while threatening catastrophic disruptions to accumulation in the near future. Without rebuilding mass political agency to instigate socio-ecological transformation, the political and climatic chaos of the current conjuncture is likely to persist.