Does Capitalism Have a Future?

There were two crucial developments that contributed to this structural crisis. The first had to do with the long-term secular trends of the world-economy, which would now make it extremely difficult for capitalists to accumulate capital endlessly. And the second had to do with the conjunctural end of the dominance by centrist liberals of the geoculture, which would undermine the political stability of the world-system. Let me treat each in turn.

Long-Term Structural Trends

How does one accumulate capital endlessly in a capitalist system? The basic method, albeit not the only one, is via production, in which the entrepreneur-producer retains the differential between what it costs to produce the commodity and the price at which the producer can sell it. The lower the costs and the higher the sales price, the more profit is realized and can then be reinvested.

But how can the differential between costs and sales price be maximized? There are two necessary elements in this exercise. To maximize sales price, there must be a quasi-monopoly, a subject we have already treated. It is how one in addition minimizes costs that we must now discuss. We start with the reality that there are always three generic costs in any productive process. These are personnel costs, the costs of inputs, and taxation.

There are three different levels of personnel for whom the producer/owner has to pay: the unskilled and semiskilled workforce, the skilled workers and supervisory cadres, and the top managers. The costs of the least skilled workforce tend to go up in A-phases, as they collectively make demands on the employer in one form or other of syndical action. Employers during A-phases may make concessions to the least skilled personnel because avoiding shutdowns or slowdowns may be less costly than wage increases. However, eventually these costs become too high for the employers, particularly for those in the leading industries.

The solution for employers has historically been the runaway factory, that is, relocation to “historically” lower-wage areas during the B-period. There the workers are recruited from loci (usually rural) in which their real income is even lower than that offered by the newly installed (usually urban) production site. It seems to be a win-win situation for the worker and the employer. After some time, however, the transplanted workers feel more knowledgeable about their new situation and more aware of the low level of their wages in worldwide terms. They begin to engage in some syndical action. And sooner or later the employer finds that, as a result, the costs have again become too high. The solution is still another move.

The moves are costly but effective. Worldwide there is, however, a ratchet effect. The reductions never eliminate totally the increases. Over 500 years, this repeated process has virtually exhausted the loci into which to move. This can be measured by the degree of deruralization of the world-system, which has risen spectacularly in the last fifty years and seems to be proceeding apace.

The increase in the costs of cadres is the result of two different considerations. One, the constantly increased scale of productive units requires more intermediate personnel to coordinate it. And two, the political dangers that result from the repeated syndical organization of the relatively low-skilled personnel are countered by the creation of a larger intermediate stratum who can be both political allies for the ruling stratum and models of a possible upward mobility for the unskilled majority, thereby blunting its political mobilization. Their salaries significantly increase the overall personnel bill.

The increase in the costs of top managers is the direct result of the increased complexity of entrepreneurial structures—the famous separation of ownership and control. This makes it possible for these top managers to appropriate ever larger portions of the firm’s receipts as rent, thereby reducing what goes to the “owners” (shareholders) as profit or to the firm for reinvestment This last increase was quite spectacular in size during the last few decades.

The costs of inputs have been going up for analogous reasons. Capitalists seek to externalize as many costs as they can. This is an elegant way of saying that they are not paying the full bill for the inputs they use. The three main costs they are able to externalize are the disposal of toxic waste, the renewal of raw materials, and the construction of the necessary infrastructure for transport and communications. Over most of the history of the modern world-system, it was considered normal practice to externalize such costs. It was seldom a concern for political authorities.

In the last few decades, however, the political atmosphere has changed radically. Climate change is a very widely debated issue, as a result of which there has been much demand for “green” and “organic” products. The past “normality” of externalization is a distant memory. The explanation for the new political debate about toxic disposal is rather simple. The world has largely run out of vacant public domains into which to dump waste. This is equivalent in effect to that of the deruralization of the world’s work force, the running-out of new groups of potential low-wage workers. The impact on public health has become high and obvious. The result has been the growth of social movements making demands for environmental cleanup and control.

Secondly, public concern about the renewal of resources—another new political reality—is in large part the consequence of the sharp increase in world population. Suddenly, the world has discovered asset shortages of many kinds, already existing or soon to be felt: energy sources, water, forests, fish, and meat. There is debate about who owns what, who uses what, for what purposes the resources are used, and who pays the bill.

Thirdly, capitalism as a system requires considerable infrastructure. Products produced for sale on the world market must be transported. Communication is a crucial element in commerce. Transport and communication are today far more efficient and much, much faster. But this has also meant that the costs have risen considerably. Who pays for this? In the past, the producers who have made the most use of the infrastructure have paid only a small part of the bill. The general public has paid the rest.

Today there is strong political demand that governments assume a new direct role in ensuring detoxification, resource renewal, and further infrastructure expansion. This would require that governments increase taxes significantly. In addition, there is no point in doing this if the causes of the negative realities go untouched. This means that governments would need to insist on more internalization of costs by entrepreneurs. Both increased taxes and, even more, requirements for internalization of these costs would cut sharply into the margins of profit of enterprises—a point that is constantly made by the producers.

Finally, taxation in all its forms has been going up over the historical life of the modern world-system. All the multiple political levels of government require taxation, both to pay the personnel and to pay for the expanding services these governments are expected to offer. There is also the expansion of what might be called private taxation—both the corruption of government officials and the predatory demands of organized mafias. Private taxation is a cost to the entrepreneur, just as much as is state taxation. As the size of governmental structures has vastly increased, particularly in the last fifty years, there have been more people to bribe. And as world economic activity has grown, there is ever more room for mafiosi operations.

Still, the biggest source of increased taxation has resulted from the political struggles of the world’s antisystemic movements. Their demands over the past two centuries have brought about the democratization of world politics. The program of popular movements has fundamentally been to obtain from the states three basic guarantees for the citizenry—education, health services, and lifelong revenue flows. The demands for each have steadily expanded in two ways over the past 200 years: the levels of services demanded, and therefore the costs; and the geographical locales in which the demands have been made. These expenditures are what we refer to as the “welfare state”—a form of which is now part of the normal political life of virtually every government in the world, even if the level of what is offered varies, in large part according to the wealth level of the country.

We can sum this up by saying that the three basic costs of production have risen constantly and have now each approached close enough to their asymptotes that the system cannot be brought back to equilibrium via the multiple mechanisms that have been used for 500 years. The possibilities for producers to achieve an endless accumulation of capital seem to be ending.

A Major Geocultural Change

The profit squeeze for capitalist producers has been compounded by a colossal cultural change. This is the end of the dominance of centrist liberalism in the geoculture, which is the meaning and the consequence of the world-revolution of 1968. The story of the world-revolution of 1968 is in large part the story of the antisystemic movements in the modern world-system—their birth, their strategy, their history up to 1968, their importance for the political operation of the modern world-system.

During the nineteenth century, the Old Left, as it came to be called during the world-revolution of 1968, consisted essentially of the two varieties of world social movements, the Communists and the Social Democrats, plus the national liberation movements. These movements grew slowly and with great effort, primarily during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time, they were weak and politically somewhat marginal. And then in the period 1945 to 1968, they became extremely strong rather rapidly, again in almost all parts of the world-system.

It seems somewhat counterintuitive that they should have achieved such strength precisely during the period of both the extraordinary Kondratieff A-phase expansion and the height of US hegemony. I do not think, however, that this was fortuitous. Recall that I argued that capitalists have a strong desire not to experience interruptions of their production processes (strikes, slowdowns, sabotage) when the world-economy is flourishing, especially those capitalists involved in the most profitable processes, the leading industries. Given that the expansion at this time was exceptionally profitable, the producers were ready to make significant wage concessions to their workers, believing that such concessions would cost them less than the profit losses resulting from such interruptions. To be sure, this meant middle-term rising costs of production, which would become a major factor in the decline of the quasi-monopolies in the late 1960s. But most entrepreneurs, then as always, calculated their interests in terms of short-term profits, feeling unable to predict or control what might happen after about three years.

The hegemonic power thought about its interests in somewhat similar ways. Its primary concern was to maintain a relative stability in the geopolitical arena. Repressive activity on the world scene against the antisystemic movements seemed very costly. Where possible—it was not always possible—the United States favored a “decolonization” that was negotiated, resulting in a regime that presumably could be expected to be more “moderate” in its future politics. This had the effect of bringing nationalist/national liberation movements to power in a very large swath of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

In the great internal debates of the movements in the late nineteenth century—Marxists versus anarchists in the social movements in the industrialized countries, political versus cultural nationalism in the anticolonial movements—the Marxists and the political nationalists argued that the only credible program was the so-called two-step strategy: first take state power, then change the world. By 1945, the Marxists and the political nationalists had clearly gained the upper hand in the intra-movement debates and controlled the most powerful organizations.[3]

These relatively permissive attitudes of the megacorporations and the hegemonic power had the consequence that, by the middle of the 1960s, the Old Left movements had achieved their historic goal of state power almost everywhere. Communist parties were in power in one-third of the world, called at the time the socialist bloc. Social Democratic parties were in alternating power in most of another third of the world—the pan-European world.[4] And, by 1968, in almost all of the colonial countries, the nationalist and national liberation movements had come to power.[5]

However “moderate” many of these movements seemed when in power, the world-system was pervaded at the time by a significant triumphalism that all these movements affected. They felt and loudly proclaimed that the future was theirs, that history was on their side. And the powerful in the modern world-system were afraid these proclamations were accurate. They feared the worst. However, those who participated in the world-revolution of 1968 did not agree. They did not see the coming to power of the Old Left movements as a triumph, but rather as a betrayal. They said in essence: You may be in power (step one) but you haven’t changed the world at all (step two).

If one listened carefully to the rhetoric of participants in the world-revolution of 1968, and one ignored the local references (which were of course different from one country to another), there were three themes that seemed to pervade the analyses of those who engaged in these multiple uprisings, whether they were located in the socialist bloc, the pan-European world, or the Third World.

The first theme concerned the hegemonic power. The United States was not seen as the guarantor of world order; it was seen as the imperialist overlord, but one that had overstretched and was now vulnerable. The Vietnam War was then at its height, and the Tet offensive of February 1968 was considered to be the death knell of the US military operation. This was not all. The revolutionaries accused the Soviet Union of being a collusive partner in US hegemony.

The Cold War was, they believed, a phony facade. The Yalta deal of de facto status quo was the major geopolitical reality. This deep suspicion had been growing since 1956. 1956 was the year of Suez and Hungary—in which neither superpower acted in terms of Cold War rhetoric. It was also the year of Khrushchev’s “secret” talk at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a talk that undid Stalinist rhetoric and many of his policies, leading to a widespread “disillusionment” among the erstwhile faithful.

The second theme concerned the Old Left movements, which were attacked everywhere for failing to fulfill their promises (the second step) when they came to power. The militants said in effect that, since you haven’t changed the world, we must rethink a failed strategy and replace you with new movements. For many, it was the Chinese Cultural Revolution that served as a model—with their call to purge the “capitalist roaders” in the very top positions of the party and government.

The third theme concerned what might be called the forgotten peoples—those oppressed because of their race, their gender, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their otherness in all its possible guises. The Old Left movements had all been hierarchical movements, insisting that only one movement in any country could be “the” revolutionary movement, and that this movement had to give priority to a particular type of struggle—the class struggle in the industrialized countries (the North), the national struggle in the rest of the world (the South).

The logic of their position was that any “group” that sought to pursue an autonomous strategy was undermining the priority struggle and therefore was objectively counter-revolutionary. All such groups had to be organized within the hierarchical party structure and be subordinate to its topdown tactical decisions.

The 1968 militants insisted that the demands for equal treatment by all of these groups could no longer be deferred to some putative future time after the main struggle was “won.” These demands were urgent and the oppression they were combating was as important as that of the alleged priority group in the present. The forgotten peoples included prominently women, socially defined minorities (racial, ethnic, religious), persons of multiple sexual tendencies, and persons who gave priority to ecological issues or peace struggles. There is no end to the list of forgotten peoples, which has expanded and become more militant ever since. At the time, the Black Panthers in the United States were a very prominent example of this kind of group.

The world-revolution of 1968 (actually it occurred over a period going from 1966 to 1970) did not lead to a political transformation of the world-system. Indeed, in most countries, the movement was successfully repressed, and many of its participants abandoned their youthful enthusiasms as the years went by. But it did leave a lasting legacy. The ability of centrist liberals to insist that their version of the geoculture was the only legitimate one was destroyed in the process. Exponents of truly conservative and truly radical ideologies resumed their autonomous existence, and began to pursue autonomous organizational and political strategies.

The consequence of this cultural-political change for the operation of the modern world-system was enormous. Having entered into a critical situation in terms of the ability of capitalists to pursue the endless accumulation of capital, the political stability of the modern world-system was no longer guaranteed by the overwhelming strength of centrist liberalism with its assurances of an ever-better future for everyone, provided only one patiently submitted to the wise actions of the persons with the specialized capacity to bring about this ever-better future, eventually.

The Chaos That Ensued

The world-revolution of 1968 was an enormous political success. The world-revolution of 1968 was an enormous political failure. It seemed to spread and flourish across the globe, yet by the mid-1970s seemed to be extinguished almost everywhere. What had been accomplished by this wild brushfire? Actually, quite a bit. Centrist liberalism had been dethroned as the governing ideology of the world-system, the de facto only legitimate ideology. It was now reduced to being simply one alternative among others. In addition, the Old Left movements were destroyed as mobilizers of any kind of fundamental change. Still, the immediate triumphalism of the revolutionaries of 1968, liberated from any subordination to centrist liberalism, proved shallow and unsustainable.

The world right was equally liberated from any attachment to centrist liberalism. It took advantage of the world economic stagnation and the collapse of the Old Left movements (and their governments) to launch a counteroffensive, which we call neoliberal (actually quite conservative) globalization. The prime objectives were to reverse all the gains of the lower strata during the Kondratieff A-period. The world right sought to reduce all the major costs of production, to destroy the welfare state in all its versions, and to slow down the decline of US power in the world-system. The onward march of the world right seemed to culminate in 1989. The ending of Soviet control over its east-central European satellite states, and the dismantling of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, led to a sudden new triumphalism of the world right.

The offensive of the world right was a great success. The offensive of the world right was a great failure. With the onset of the world economic stagnation in the 1970s (the Kondratieff B-phase), large capitalist producers did shift significant amount of productive activity to new zones, which did seem to “develop” significantly. But however beneficial this was to the local middle strata in these countries, whose numbers now expanded considerably, the amount of capital accumulation, seen at a global level, was not all that impressive and did not begin to match what these corporate producers had been able to accumulate during the 1945–1970 period.

To maintain a level of massive appropriation of world surplus value, capitalists had to turn to obtaining it in the financial sector—what has come to be called the “financialization” of the world-system. As suggested previously, such financialization has been a cyclically recurring feature of the modern world-system for 500 years.

What was sustaining the accumulation of capital since the 1970s was the turning from seeking profits via productive efficiency to seeking profits via financial manipulations, more correctly called speculation. The key mechanism of speculation is encouraging consumption via indebtedness. (This is of course what has happened in every Kondratieff B-phase.) What was different this time has been its scale and the ingenuity of the new financial instruments used to pursue speculative activity. The biggest A-phase expansion in the history of the capitalist world-economy has been followed by the biggest speculative mania.

It is not hard to follow the successive targets of indebtedness, each producing a bubble and each finally collapsing. The first big one was the OPEC-induced large oil price rises in 1973 and 1979. The OPEC price rise was sponsored not by the radical members of OPEC but by Saudi Arabia and Iran (of the Shah), the two closest allies of the United States among the OPEC members. There has long been reason to believe that the United States encouraged their moves.

In any case, the financial consequences of the oil price rises were clear. A great deal of money flowed into the coffers of the OPEC countries. This had a double negative effect on non-oil-exporting states in the South and the socialist bloc. They had to pay more for the needed oil and all products made with oil, and their export income was reduced because of the recession in North America and western Europe. The balance of payments difficulties of these countries were leading to popular unrest.

The OPEC countries could not utilize immediately all of the increased income and deposited the rest in Western banks. The banks sent emissaries to the countries of the South and the socialist bloc to offer them loans to alleviate the balance of payments difficulties, which almost all of them readily accepted. These countries found it difficult, however, to keep up with repayments to the banks, eventually causing the so-called debt crisis. It was publicly signaled by Mexico’s default in 1982. Actually, however, it really started with Poland’s near default in 1980. The austerity measures that the Polish government put into effect in order to make debt payments were the trigger for Solidarność.

The next set of debtors was the wave of large corporations which, beginning in the 1980s, issued the famous junk bonds as a means of overcoming their liquidity problems. This led to acquisitions by a group of ravenous investors, who made their money by stripping the enterprises of material value. The 1990s saw the beginning of extensive individual indebtedness, especially in the North, made possible by extensive use of credit cards and then later investment in housing. The first decade of the 21st century saw the remarkable rise in public indebtedness of the United States resulting from the combination of enormous war costs and large-scale reduction in tax income. With the collapse of the US housing market in 2007, the world’s press and politicians took public note of a “crisis,” the efforts to “bail out” the banks and, in the case of the United States, to print currency. This was followed by the ever-widening circle of indebtednesses of governments, leading to pressures everywhere for austerity measures to reduce state debt, which reductions simultaneously have reduced effective demand.

The first decade of the 21st century has also seen the geographic relocation of capital appropriation. The rise of the so-called emergent countries, notably the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), is the kind of slow reordering of the hierarchy of the modern world-system that has been seen regularly before. However, this presumes that there is room in the system for new productive leading industries, something the generalized profit squeeze seems to counterindicate. Rather, the rise of the BRICS has involved a widening of the numbers of persons involved in partaking of the distribution of world surplus value. This actually reduces, not increases, the possibilities of the endless accumulation of capital, and intensifies rather than counteracts the structural crisis of the world-system. Furthermore, the austerity measures now so widespread are reducing the customer base for the exports of the BRICS.

The most likely financial result of the economic turmoil will be the final eviction of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, followed not by another currency performing this function, but a multicurrency world that allows for the constant fluctuations of exchange rates, a further inducement to the freezing of the financing of new productive activity.

Meanwhile, and simultaneously, the decline of US hegemony became irreparable after the blowback caused by the political-military fiasco of the neocon program of unilateral military machismo undertaken in the period 2001–2006 by the administration of President George W. Bush. The outcome has been the reality of a multipolar world, in which there are eight to ten centers of power, sufficiently strong that they can negotiate with other centers with relative autonomy. However, there are now too many centers of power. One consequence is the frequent tentative geopolitical realignments, as each of these centers seeks maximum advantage. Fluctuating markets and currencies are thereby reinforced by fluctuating power alliances.

The basic reality is unpredictability not merely in some middle run but very much in the short run. The sociopsychological consequences of this short-run unpredictability have been confusion, anger, disparagement of those in power, and above all acute fear. This fear leads to the search for political alternatives of kinds not entertained before. The media refer to this as populism, but it is far more complicated than this slogan term suggests. For some the fear leads to multiple and irrational scapegoatings. For others, it leads to the willingness to unthink deeply ingrained assumptions about the operations of the modern world-system. This can be seen in the United States as the difference between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The main concern of every government in the world—from the United States to China, from France to Russia to Brazil, not to speak of all the weaker governments on the world scene—has become the urgency of averting an uprising of unemployed workers joined by middle strata whose savings and pensions are disappearing. One reaction has been that the governments have all become protectionist (while vigorously denying this). The reason for this protectionist thrust is that governments are seeking to obtain short-term money, however they can and at whatever price they have to pay. Since protectionism is insufficient to overcome unemployment, governments are also becoming more repressive.

This combination of austerity, repression, and the search for short-term money makes the global situation even worse. It accounts for an ever-tighter gridlock of the system. Gridlock in turn will result in ever-wilder fluctuations, and will consequently make short-term predictions—both economic and political—ever more unreliable. And this in turn will aggravate the popular fears and alienation. It is a negative cycle.

The Political Struggle over the Replacement System

The question before the world today is not in what way governments can reform the capitalist system such that it can renew its ability to pursue effectively the endless accumulation of capital. There is no way to do this. The question therefore has become what will replace this system. And this is a question both for the 1% and the 99%, in the language used since 2011. Of course, not everyone agrees, or phrases it this way. Indeed, most people still assume that the system is continuing, using the old rules, perhaps after amending the rules. This is not wrong. It is just that, in the present situations, using the old rules actually intensifies the structural crisis.

There are however some actors who are quite aware of the structural crisis. They are aware that while we cannot maintain the present system, we can contribute to deciding which prong of the bifurcation the world will take, what kind of new historical system the world will construct. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are living amidst a struggle for the successor system. While complexity studies insists that the outcome of such a bifurcation is intrinsically unpredictable, nonetheless the options between which the world will choose are quite straightforward, and can be sketched in broad terms.

One kind of possible new stable system is one that retains the basic features of the present system: hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization. Capitalism is far from the only kind of system that can have such features, and the new one could be far worse than capitalism. The logical alternative to this is a system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian. This latter has never yet existed; it is only a possibility. Of course, none of us can design either alternative in institutional detail. Such a design will evolve as the new system begins its life.

I have given symbolic names to the two possibilities. I call them “the spirit of Davos” and “the spirit of Porto Alegre.” The names themselves are unimportant. What we need to analyze are the probable organizational strategies on each side in this struggle that started more or less in the 1970s and will continue in all probability to circa 2040 or 2050.

The political struggles of a structural crisis have two basic characteristics. First, there is a fundamental change of the situation from that of the “normal” operation of an historical system. During “normal” life, there exists a very strong pressure to return to equilibrium. That is what makes it “normal.” But in a structural crisis, the fluctuations are wide and constant, and the system is ever further from equilibrium. This is the definition of a structural crisis. It follows that however radical are “revolutions,” during “normal” times their effect is limited. In contrast, during a structural crisis, small social mobilizations have very great effects. This is the so-called butterfly effect, when free will prevails over determinism.

The second politically significant characteristic of a structural crisis is that neither alternative “spirit” can be organized such that a small group can fully determine its actions. There are multiple players, representing different interests, believing in different short-run tactics, and coordination among them is difficult to achieve. Furthermore, the militants on each side must spend energy persuading the always larger group of potential supporters of the utility of their actions. It is not only the system that is chaotic. The struggle for the successor system is also chaotic.

What we can perceive, up to now, are the strategies that have been emerging in practice. The camp of the “spirit of Davos” is deeply divided. One group favors immediate and long-term harsh repression, and has invested its resources in organizing a network of armed enforcers to crush opposition. There is however another group who feel that repression can never work over the long term. They favor the di Lampedusa strategy of changing everything so that nothing changes. They talk about meritocracy, green capitalism, more equity, more diversity, and an open hand to the rebellious—all in the spirit of heading off a system premised on relative democracy and relative equality.

The camp of the “spirit of Porto Alegre” is similarly split.

There are those whose tactics for the transition period reflect their image of the world they want to build. It is sometimes called “horizontalism.” In practice, it seeks to maximize debate and the search for relative consensus among persons of divergent backgrounds and immediate interests. It is a search to institutionalize a functional decentralization of the movement and the world. And this group has also emphasized the reality of what is often called a “civilizational crisis,” by which is really meant a rejection of the basic objective of economic growth and substituting for this objective the search for rational balances of social objectives that will result precisely in relative democracy and relative egalitarianism.

Arrayed against them is the group that insists that, in a struggle for political power, vertical organization of some kind is a sine qua non, without which the group is doomed to failure. This group also emphasizes the importance of achieving significant short-run economic growth in the less “developed” areas of the present-day world in order to have the wherewithal to redistribute benefits.

Thus the picture is not one of a simple two-sided struggle but rather of a political field with four groups. And that is very confusing to everyone. The confusion is at one and the same time intellectual, moral, and political. And this reinforces the uncertainty of the outcome.

Finally, this kind of uncertainty heightens the short-run problems of the existing system. Such uncertainty is both exhilarating (the feeling that action makes a difference) and paralyzing (the sense that we can’t move since the short-run consequences are so uncertain). This is true both for those who benefit from the existing system (the capitalists) and those who are the vast underclasses.

So, to resume, the modern world-system in which we are living cannot continue because it has moved too far from equilibrium, and no longer permits capitalists to accumulate capital endlessly. Nor do the underclasses any longer believe that history is on their side, and that their descendants will necessarily inherit the world. We are consequently living in a structural crisis in which there is a struggle about the successor system. Although the outcome is unpredictable, we can feel sure that one side or the other will win out in the coming decades, and a new reasonably stable world-system (or set of world-systems) will be established. What we can all do is try to analyze the historical options, make our moral choice about the preferred outcome, and evaluate the optimal political tactics to get there.

History is on nobody’s side. We all may misjudge how we should act. Since the outcome is inherently, and not extrinsically, unpredictable, we have at best a 50–50 chance of getting the kind of world-system we prefer. But 50–50 is a lot, not a little.