The disaster contradiction of contemporary capitalism: Resilience, vital systems security, and ‘post-neoliberalism’

In the last few years, governments in the U.S. and Europe have responded to a series of events—from the Covid pandemic and energy shocks to a series of large-scale disasters—by directing trillions of dollars to measures that seek to bolster “resilience.” These interventions aim to ensure the function of vital systems by restructuring supply chains, investing in infrastructures, and providing governmental backstops for critical social and economic functions. The proliferation of such robust state actions challenges scholarly accounts—which were based on state practices of resilience in the 2000s and 2010s—that analyzed resilience as a philosophy of state inaction, or, at most, a norm of government actions to restore market self-organization following disruptions.

Drawing on the Marxist state theory of Claus Offe, this article analyzes the variable forms of resilience in terms of the coherent dynamics of a ‘disaster contradiction’ of contemporary capitalism. Contrary to the dominant assessment of recent scholarship, it argues that the increasing centrality of resilience as a governmental norm reflects an ongoing politicization of disaster outcomes: contemporary capitalist states are held responsible for ensuring the continuous functioning of vital systems, and for fostering adaptive adjustment to shocks. But this responsibility is pulled between contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, events that disrupt vital systems threaten capital accumulation and social welfare, catalyzing state actions to curtail the scope of markets or individual choice. In this moment of the disaster contradiction, interventions in the name of resilience impose social, economic, and spatial order. On the other hand, such interventions create rigidities, inefficiencies, and unintended consequences, including a heightened risk of future catastrophes, that result in what Offe referred to as crises of crisis management. In this moment of the disaster contradiction, resilience appears in critiques of planning and intervention, and as a norm of state actions to establish—or, following crises, restore—market self-organization. It is argued that government interventions in the name of resilience in the 2020s may be analyzed as a distinctive episode in the development of the disaster contradiction, in which resilience is emerging as a key mode of ‘post-neoliberal’ government.