The Ongoing Aftermath to the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession. A Review Essay

Abstract

This paper discusses the consequences of the financial crisis that started in 2008 in the West, and particularly in the United States, as a manifestation of neoliberal capitalism’s multiple failures. In doing so, we focus on the scholarly contributions of Manuel Castells and his colleagues in two important books: Aftermath. The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (2012) and Another Economy Is Possible (2017). Both books are collective works led and edited by Castells. We also include in our review a third book by Castells, Rupture. The Crisis of Liberal Democracy (2018), which can be read as a statement on some of the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and a report on the current crisis of liberal democracy.

Our contention is that Castells et al make an important contribution to the socio-economic literature on the financial crisis, its consequences, and the interpretation of the societal changes that ensued and are key to understand our contemporary world. Such contribution, as observed in the three books under review, can be summarized as follows:

(1) Castells and colleagues provide cases and examples from around the world in a broad comparative fashion, thus expanding our understanding of a crisis that was essentially a crisis of the West with ramifications in other countries but never a truly global crisis;

(2) the approach of Castells and colleagues is interdisciplinary and goes beyond purely economic arguments to include sociological, political and cultural ideas and insights that help us understand the complexity of the historical period under analysis; readers develop an awareness of the systemic character of the crisis, where all events were closely interrelated; in particular, both micro and macro processes leading to the crisis converged into a mutually dialectical and reinforcing relationship that warrants the contention by the authors that “economies” are “cultures.”

(3) the authors in both Aftermath and Another Economy is Possible focus on the (long) aftermath of the crisis, which is still ongoing as of September 2019 around the world; in fact, one of Castells’s main points is that the financial crisis brought about irreversible societal change, ongoing and clearly visible today, as it triggered a significant restructuring of global informational capitalism;

(4) the authors provide a focus on one of the reactive consequences of the crisis: alternative economic practices developing in the aftermath of the crisis, under the premise that we might be witnessing the rise of a new economic model based on new, alternative values;

(5) Castells provides a discussion (in Rupture) of aspects of the contemporary political landscape a decade after the outset of the financial crisis and the great recession.