Introduction: Late, Autumnal, Immiserating, Terminal

The essays in this special issue appear in two clusters. All of them address secular stagnation, orthodox economics' newly preferred account of capitalism running up against its limits. Rescued from the 1930s, the formulation has taken hold in variegated forms during its renascence. In its most mainstream version, secular stagnation refuses both ideological theories of developmentalism (capitalism as tending towards progress) and revolutionary theories of crisis (capitalism as tending towards collapse). Instead, secular stagnation imagines a zombie capitalism wherein a no-growth economic system neither falls nor is replaced, but simply continues limping forward in perpetuity. Refusing to produce an account of transition, such theories are thus able to imagine a capitalism whose enervation might not end in violence, an argument that seems less and less persuasive.

This contradiction expresses, in a distorting mirror, the tension between the two accounts of crisis bequeathed by Marx to the heterodox tradition: one of cyclical crisis, regularly tossing up "big storms on the world market, in which the antagonism of all elements in the bourgeois process of production explode"; the other of secular crisis, the long-term tendency of capital to exhaust and expel the very resources it requires to endure. These two offer, among other things, foundationally distinct dramatizations, those of the blowout and the impasse. This distinction—is the crisis punctual or permanent?—accounts for no small amount of contradictory appearance within both bourgeois political economy and the cultural forms that, among their tasks, try to apprehend the situation.

These two categories orient the two clusters. The first contains work that focuses on secular stagnation theory as itself a cultural phenomenon—a consequential assemblage of bourgeois economists' varied perceptions of what we might prefer to call not "the Long Downturn" but "the Long Crisis." While we suggest that bourgeois accounts of secular stagnation are largely symptomatic—in ways that are described below and throughout the issue—we also maintain that, though the idea of secular stagnation cannot itself provide an adequate account of capitalist crisis, it is nevertheless an important site for the expression of a tellingly prevalent cultural and political posture, an ambient affect tending toward narratives and images of decline, de-development, stasis, stagnation, ill health, and morbidity. It is evident in phenomena as apparently disparate as a crisis in neoclassical economics (is it possible, actually, that business as usual will not last forever?); a scientific consensus that, given the onset of climate catastrophe, nothing but a dramatic rejection of the ideal of growth is nearly adequate; and a generational fascination with images of ennui, directionless and failure, paired with a real rise in depression, drug dependency, extended adolescence and childlessness. The essays in our second cluster thus study expressive cultural forms—films, books, art photography, video games, and TV shows—that evince an inescapable consciousness of what secular stagnation theory has also attempted to explain and perhaps manage: the facts of rising wagelessness and economic insecurity, of decreasing faith in the language of enterprise and "success," of a prevalent negative futurity.

I. The Secular and the Whole

For the past few decades, Marxist cultural critics have debated ways to describe the crisis in contemporary capitalism. We have, for example, Ernst Mandel and Fredric Jameson on the lateness of late capitalism; David Harvey on crisis in its spatial dimensions and the rise of a "new imperialism"; Giovanni Arrighi and Fernand Braudel on the historical consistency with which each political hegemon confronts the economic "signs of autumn"; Robert Brenner's description of a "long downturn" caused largely by overproduction driven by inter-nation competition leading to ever-narrower profits; the German-based Wertkritik school—especially thinkers like Robert Kurz—with its account of the value form's inherent tendency towards terminal crisis; the politically urgent discussions of reproductive crisis offered by Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory; politically and geo-politically attuned analyses of rising surplus populations attended by arguments about the immiseration which attends late-stage capitalism; and many others.

Late, autumnal, down-turning, immiserating, terminal. These are all powerful, compelling accounts of today's capitalism. If they do not always agree...