Introduction

The material we present in this book supports and illustrates our core argument: that capitalism has a permanent tendency towards crisis, that this has engendered other crises – notably epidemiological crises and the escalating climate crisis – and that while capitalism remains the global economy’s primary mode of operation, these crises will continue and will worsen. The crisis of capitalism is visible across societies, communities and cultures, but our focus on work is quite deliberate: work is at the centre of the operation of capitalism; indeed, it is the thing that generates the profits of capitalism that maintain its momentum and purpose. At the outset, we need to identify what we mean by ‘crisis’ and, specifically, if we think that a crisis is an extraordinary event, something that marks a turning point or is an emergency, whether it is possible to be in a permanent state of crisis.

The permanent tendency to crisis

Hay notes that while the concept of crisis is ubiquitous in political discourse from the 18th century to the present day, it is a concept that has received little analytical attention, remaining diffuse and underdeveloped (Hay, 1999). Hay attempts to rectify this, at least for political theory, by describing ‘crisis’ as ‘a moment of decisive intervention in the process of institutional change’ (1999: 320). Placing the state at the centre of any particular crisis is, for Hay, an important move, and we may want to follow aspects of this definition in considering our three crises; after all, in the UK the state is the actor with the most power – economic, military, symbolic – and the most agency. Hay uses this definition of state intervention at a crucial moment to understand the UK, and other, government responses to the 2007–9 ‘debt crisis’ (Hay 2013), and it is clear that without this dramatic state intervention global banking systems would have collapsed.

The 2007–8 global financial crisis was the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Vermeiren, 2021: 1), plunging capitalism into chaos across the globe. Initially seen by many on the left as the possibility for a complete change in how economies operated, it soon turned into a victory for finance capital as central banks and governments poured money into shoring up capitalist institutions and the whole capitalist system itself.