Does Capitalism Have a Future?

In the end, where do we agree or disagree? We share in common the assessment of our present world situation—including its intellectual and political climate—where we identify the blind spots and therefore the dangers of screwing up in the future. These agreements make up the main body of our concluding statement. But we are not hiding our theoretical differences regarding the ways in which we construe the world and its future prospects. In getting together to write this book, the immediate hope was that our unity as well as our differences would provide for a panoramic vision and a productive debate. The greater hope was that, if we succeeded in getting the attention of sufficiently many readers, we could also make a difference.

We agree that the world has entered a stormy and murky historical period which will last several decades. Big historical structures take time to shift or unravel. The recent Great Recession forces us all to think deeply about world prospects. The central question is not just the prospects for continued American economic dominance and geopolitical hegemony, nor where on the globe such dominance will pass to next, but whether major structural transformation is likely to happen. Although we disagree on some points of the prognosis, there is considerable commonality in our sociological vision. All of us are arguing on the basis of the accumulated scholarship in the realm of macrohistorical sociology—the comparative study of past and present broadly informed by Marxian and Weberian traditions focusing on the structures of social power and conflicts. We are sensitive to multiple dimensions of causality, and tend to agree on many features of how capitalism, state politics, military geopolitics, and ideology operate. Our disagreements are largely about the intersections of different orders of causality: on whether a particular dynamic sector can become so powerful as to overwhelm the other causal spheres, or whether the multicausal world always generates a high degree of unpredictability; and on whether an overarching perspective can display a higher-order system bringing together all the causal sectors into a larger historical pattern.

In this concluding chapter we will first outline the macrosociological way of describing current globalization, its origins and possible futures. The latter part of our conclusion is about social science in its mostly deadlocked present state and its potential for becoming more useful in the immediate future. In other words, we are going to sketch here what we all consider a more realistic picture of the world and the ways of arguing about it.

THE MAKING OF OUR PRESENT

The (so far) Western Great Recession marks the end of the medium-run historical phase that began some forty years earlier, in the crisis of the 1970s. This recent period was confusing enough, as evidenced by a multiplication of misnomers: neoliberal, postindustrial, post-Fordist, post-Cold War, postmodern, postconsumerist, etc. Since the late 1980s, globalization has become the most fashionable generic description of the current world situation. All these names seem to us problematic. Globalization is presented as the grand historical cause of what really were the geoeconomic consequences of the 1970s crisis and subsequent shifts in the world allocation of production processes, or simply what came to be called outsourcing. These labeling dilemmas, however, relate to the fact that the current phase in the long historical trajectory of capitalism has lacked coherence or true novelty. Even the arrival of the Internet, as Randall Collins argues, has revived the old dilemmas of machines displacing human labor and livelihoods. The major condition of the period from the 1970s to the 2000s period was not the emergence of any new structuring forces but rather the undoing of former ones. We mean primarily the exhaustion or extinction of all three Old Left currents: the social democrat and liberal reformism in the “First World” of core Western states; the communist revolutionary dictatorships of rapid industrial development in the “Second World”; and the national populist movements in the Third World.

The past triumphs of the Old Left had flowed directly from the geopolitical upheavals of the twentieth century: not from the abstract march of progress or even the growth of class consciousness per se but directly from the dire experiences of world wars and mobilizations on the homefront that gave opportunity to the peoples, both White and non-White, men and women. In this book Immanuel Wallerstein and Michael Mann, in their own ways, sketch the general lines of this transformation within capitalism, while Georgi Derluguian shows in greater detail what enabled the rise of the communist states and what processes and forces produced their divergent outcomes. The two world wars enormously boosted the long-running trend toward more extensive and invasive modern states. After 1917, in many countries leftist forces suddenly found themselves in a position to capture the wartime state machinery and redeploy its capacities for industrial growth and social redistribution. The intervening Great Depression in the 1930s opened to leftists—but also to fascists—windows of political opportunity by severely discrediting and bankrupting the residual aristocratic monarchies, the oligarchic liberal regimes and their colonial empires of nineteenth-century vintage. The Cold War after 1945 stabilized the results of this epochal transformation for several more decades. The Cold War (another misnomer, actually meaning the “cold peace” of multiple truces and implied diplomatic understandings) institutionalized the internal reformist compromise and welfare provision in the Western democracies, thus containing the specter of revolution long haunting the West. The same Cold War ensured peaceful coexistence with the Soviet bloc, thus containing the old Western specter of war. And by extending international political patronage and economic aid to the former colonies, the Cold War world order channeled the specter of anti-White revolt of colonial peoples into the optimistic and cooperative expectations of universal modernization. Those were the good times of generous payoffs for the trials and sacrifices of wartime decades.

The good times suddenly crashed in the 1970s. Craig Calhoun reminds us that the sequence of another political transition did not start from the resurgent Right. Rather, it was the youthful New Left that first challenged Cold War compromises by demanding still better times minus the official hypocrisies and sclerotic bureaucratism. True, contemporary establishments everywhere—West, East, and South—were showing many signs of bureaucratic pathology and despotism disguised with hypocrisy. Importantly, however, those detested establishments by the 1970s represented later stages of the various political regimes originating in the modernizing, socially reformist, anticolonial, or revolutionary takeovers of the earlier heroic epoch. For all the loudly proclaimed ideological differences, the wartime generation of states held in common their reliance on what the Americans called the triad of Big Government, Big Unions, and Big Business, or their functional equivalents in the Soviet industrial ministries and national republics. All these political and economic structures drew their power and legitimacy from the mass provision of modern education, housing, health and welfare services; typically lifelong industrial employment; and, not least of all, comfortable middle-class careers in the bureaucratic, military, and professional hierarchies.

Certainly many powerless social groups and peoples in different countries felt excluded from this bureaucratically organized prosperity. Typically, these were the racial, religious, immigrant, and gender minorities in the developed countries; the non-Russians and subproletarians in the Soviet republics; and the masses of recent rural arrivals in the sprawling shantytowns of the Third World. But such marginalized groups could rarely raise a political voice. Things would change, however, in the 1960s with the arrival of energetic student activists and dissidents in the intelligentsia spreading organizational techniques along with the ideologies and singable slogans of rebellion against “the System.”

The antisystemic movements of the New Left gained traction wherever they could tap (often without fully realizing it) into latent social tensions generated by conjunctures of many factors: industrial recessions, demographic transitions, the changing social geography of urban neighborhoods, repressed ethnic memories, even the sectarian religious fervors or the regional elite factionalisms previously marginalized by modernistic planners of new towns, industries, and states. Profoundly changing the historical pattern of revolutions, these anti-authority rebellions were diffuse, nonviolent in their preferred tactics, and centered on the demands for greater autonomy from bureaucratic regimentation and recognition for the many and greatly varied status groups that were now called identity politics. This meant a departure from the Marxian categories of economic classes as the basis of social struggle. What gave a semblance of common purpose to the disparate protests of the sixties was the universal presence of bureaucratic establishments, oftentimes presided over by the paternalistic and patronizing Big Bosses. For a short while, such situations were conducive to the sharply polarized confrontations of “us against them” performed in public spaces and on spectacularly massive scales. Recall the events of 1968 in the West, the tremendous anti-Shah marches in Iran during 1978–1979, the 1980 strikes in Poland and the 1989 rallies across the whole Soviet bloc, or, for that matter, the 2011 uprising against the Big Boss in Egypt.

The participants, commentators, and sympathetic researchers of these exuberant events focused overwhelmingly on the contentious side where all the energy and hope could be found. Contemporary analyses from the insurgent side typically ignored or took for granted what the embattled rulers were doing or actually not doing. In the majority of instances, bureaucratic establishments seemed oddly reluctant to unleash an all-out terroristic repression. This should seem quite startling because both “capitalist pigs” and “communist apparatchiks” certainly possessed the means and personnel for launching massive violence against unruly civilians in the manner of the interwar totalitarian decades. Grim exceptions still abounded in the stormy aftermath of 1968. We must not forget the brief throwbacks to European fascism that continued in Spain, Greece, and Turkey; Latin American dictatorships; the apartheid-era South Africa; coups and “emergencies” in Arab countries; and internal violence in the East Asian states of both communist and anticommunist persuasion, like Maoist China and South Korea under military rule. The immediate reasons for unleashing state terror in response to student-led activism were local and peculiar to each instance. Yet repression commonly occurred across the outlier world regions and semi-peripheral countries where states were inherently weaker and often newly established.

This contrast in the state reactions to protest points toward an important theory. In the West and in the Soviet bloc—but not in Latin America, Middle East, or East Asia—the political establishments by the 1970s had indeed become thoroughly bureaucratic. Their institutions and ruling personnel were forged in the enormous wartime mobilizations of the twentieth century and disciplined by the precarious balance of the Cold War. Their senior members still collectively remembered the run-away affair with fascist paramilitaries during the interwar period in Europe, or Stalinist purges, or the racial and labor conflict violence recurrently flaring up in twentieth-century America. Perhaps it was the overwhelmingly peaceful and civic tactics of New Left, in contrast to the revolutionary militias of Old Left, that denied the state security organs clear targets for violent confrontation. Perhaps the bureaucrats and politicians ensconced in highly institutionalized environments developed cautious dispositions that were conductive to avoidance of overt conflicts. Instead such “post-Machiavellian” rulers reckoned on the default bureaucratic tactic of muddling through. And this suggests an important and even hopeful insight. Leaping ahead, we should say that studying the conditions for violent action and its avoidance in modern bureaucratic states must be a priority for social science in the anticipation of bigger crises and possible revolutions.

In the seventies and eighties, establishmentarian politics of muddling through and evasion delivered a fix that has lasted until yesterday. The New Left movements flared up and burned out as fast as fireworks. But the damage was considerable, especially when viewed in the longer-run perspective. The discredited and momentarily disoriented rulers began shedding their erstwhile commitments to industrial modernization, full employment, and welfare. In the West political systems had enough strength and resources to do this in a controlled manner, all the while calling it a new age of postindustrialism, flexibility, and globalization. In the Soviet bloc the process got out of hand, causing panic in the political and industrial elites. The result was state fragmentation and colossal pillage. The dissident New Left had its Pyrrhic victory in the extinction of communism. But, unlike the Old Left which was an organized (more precisely, a bureaucratically organized) force, the insurgent energies of this new generation failed to translate into institutions and policies adequate to the tasks of seizing the power that was dropped on the floor. Moreover, the ensuing deindustrialization, and severe budget cuts in higher education, cultural institutions, and general welfare rapidly undid the bases of popular confidence and thus the bases of support for this new generation of antisystemic insurgents.

In the meantime a different kind of popular movement began emerging from the Right. The New Right snatched many of its tactics and even former activists from the dispirited New Left. This turn to the right marked the end of the long period dominated by class politics with its familiar symbols, tactics, and well-rehearsed rituals of bargaining. The political reaction flew the colors of identity, which introduced into politics a nastily passionate charge because matters of identity tend to be uncompromising and nonnegotiable. The New Right came in two varieties, though often meshing in practice: ethnopatriotic or religious-patriotic fundamentalism and libertarian market fundamentalism. Both called for the militant defense of fundamental matters of faith—or whatever was claimed to be the founding identities in their societies. Notice that both fundamentalisms directed their ire at state bureaucracies, blaming them for being too secular, removed, devious and taxing. It tells us something important about Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and other contemporary fundamentalisms that their suspicions and phobias virtually everywhere went hand-in-hand with extolling the virtues of small business, small town life, and the patriarchal family.

The Left was precipitously declining across the board, leaving its place in the popular imagination to be filled with either apathy or fundamentalist anger. This reversal in mass politics opened the window of opportunity for conservative factions among the Western capitalist elites. Neoliberalism, yet another misnomer, in fact grows from the old ideological belief of modern capitalists that everyone would eventually benefit from letting them do whatever they deem necessary in the pursuit and disposal of profits. World progress, the purported laws of human nature, and supreme rationality are but the nineteenth-century intellectual supports to this faith. The fundamentalist character of the neoliberal movement is revealed in its adamant refusal to recognize as capitalism anything except the purest unregulated markets—just as religious fundamentalists recognize only their own radical brand of faith as true religion. History, however, shows that the ideal type of free markets cannot be observed in any empirical situation; it is an ideological fantasy. Following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and Joseph Schumpeter, we argue that sustained profits always require a degree of state protection and market monopoly. Hegemonic monopoly is what in fact propelled the renewed surge of American power and finance at the turn of the twenty-first century. At the time Michael Mann and Immanuel Wallerstein publicly opposed the project for an American world empire, and both presented analytical arguments questioning its viability.[1] There is now enough hard evidence to see how these predictions squared with reality.

The forty-year period now ending falls into roughly equal parts. The decades of the 1970s and the 1980s were marked by the crisis and collapse of the twentieth-century Left projects along with the political and economic structures of state-led national developmentalism. In the following twenty years, bracketed by the symbolic dates of 1989 and 2008, the American power found itself freed from the external pressures of the Cold War and the internal constraints of social compromises. The booming enterprise of neoconservative commentaries propagated a bullish belief in the return to capitalist normalcy while presenting it as the new, endless epoch of globalization. The post-1989 triumphalism referred in fact to the kind of normalcy experienced before the year 1914 (not the 1950s, which, although often conservative, were shaped by increasingly strong states). Back in the epoch of fledgling leftist movements and conquered non-Western peoples, capitalists could pursue their goals largely unconstrained by the demands of national governments, the considerations of social policy, and, for the first time, in a truly global arena that was unified by new transportation technologies and secured by military and political structures of colonial domination.

The prospects of twenty-first century globalization appeared to its advocates even brighter. American hegemony now kept firmly in check the imperialist rivalries of the kind that had finished off the previous globalization in 1914. The outsourcing of labor-intensive production from the core of the world economy to cheaper “emergent” locales in the periphery subverted national labor and environmental regulations and pressed governments and their citizenries to become “globally competitive.” The dismantling of government regulations allowed the leading capitalist groups to focus on reaping superprofits from the devilishly complex games of global finance. Even popular revolutions, in a paradoxical return to nineteenth-century liberalism, turned from the nemesis of capitalism into its democratic promoters in previously closed countries. The capitalist-compliant democratizations were facilitated by a spate of nongovernmental organizations enthusiastically assuming the role of latter-day global missionaries. The politically and financially cumbersome colonialism of yesteryear was replaced in the newest era of globalization by the indirect controls of powerful institutions of debt and the global network of American military bases, as well as the softer power of international advising, global mass media, and shared norms inculcated in the younger peripheral elites by acquiring prestigious diplomas in business and government administration from American universities. To this list of novel disciplining institutions, we should add illicit opportunities for money laundering through the global archipelago of microjurisdictions functioning as tax havens. The few remaining noncompliant and intransigent “rogue states” could be relegated to the Axis of Evil and serve a useful ideological function as the atrocious other.

These splendid designs ran into the structural realities of the world-system that had been profoundly transformed during the twentieth century. There could be no return to the pre-1914 imperial normalcy. Even the unprecedented concentration of military force in a single superpower in the modern age could not deliver on its geopolitical goals. In our own day the cruel coercive practices of past empires were bound to backfire. Perhaps the American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stayed short of the methods of the Gestapo or, for that matter, Saddam’s own torturers. Nevertheless, these shameful images when publicized produced a storm of nationalist indignation across the Middle East and revulsion in the West. Such episodes, along with the post-1968 aversion of Western societies to casualties among their own military, put political constraints on the use of violence. Add here the sheer material costs of logistical overstretch that have not declined in the era of military high technology but have even increased; in effect, American campaigns of foreign policing became exceedingly costly and politically impossible to win.

Immanuel Wallerstein identified a different kind of constraint to American hegemony and its neoconservative globalization. Despite the persistent rhetoric of tax cuts and downsizing the government, the actual levels of taxation have remained roughly at the same historically high levels virtually everywhere. But wait, what about the stories of budget crises, cuts in public employment, shrinking pensions, and woefully underfunded education and social services? Behind this paradox we discover the reality of the continued redistribution of surpluses through state channels, official or not. Redistribution was now running in the upward direction, to people located in more powerful states and overwhelmingly to elites making political and financial decisions. The result was a huge accumulation of wealth in the hands of those who effectively became the oligarchs of our times. It is fairly simple to see how they did it. The cuts in social redistribution (in a broad sense, including policies of industrial growth and employment) freed the money still flowing through the gigantic state machineries and channeled it to the financial oligarchies. This could take the scandalous form of bailouts extended to corporations ostensibly too big to fail, yet in the main it was the endless generation of credit which in recent decades had been extensively used to cover the budget shortfalls of states and individual families.

Here comes the rub. The reason why governments and families had to be provided with ample credits is both nefarious (yes, greed and debt bondage) and clearly vital to capitalism. In the more distant past, capitalism was an elite operation catering to the fabulous consumption of higher classes and the expensive wars waged by states. In twentieth century capitalism, for the sake of large-scale market demand as well as political legitimacy, came to rely on popular mass consumption. Moreover, the twentieth-century experience of popular involvement in politics and reliance on the state set limits to how deep human misery could go without producing a disruptive backlash. This proved to be what is called the “ratchet effect” in the historical tendencies of the growing state functions in modern society.

Democratization has been a real, if not inexorable trend over the past two hundred years. This means that a great many people, including those most loyal to the existing order, came to expect three things in the course of their lives. The first is long years of education, the second is stable and reasonably rewarding employment, and, finally, pensions in older age. Housing could be added to this list of expectations, and efforts to provide housing have also been expensive. The widespread privatizations of housing in recent decades shifted financial burdens to the individual homeowners while transforming them into small capitalists who voted accordingly. But this shift inevitably led to ballooning mortgages while denying the prospect of home ownership to younger generations. The 2008 crash in the housing markets of many countries rendered this contradiction untenable.

States, on their side, needed skilled and reasonably healthy citizenry as workers, compliant taxpayers, and patriotic military recruits. In time, these historical trends would inescapably put pressure on private profits. Western capitalists responded to pressure with their own rebellion. The renewed market conservatism became its ideological platform and market globalization its main strategy. The political-economic ideology of New Right demanded that capitalists, through deregulation and government austerity, should be left to deal by their preferred means with the economic upheavals that began in the 1970s and never really abated. Globalization, first and foremost, meant the flight of large capital beyond the regulated confines of national states. Capital flight and pressures on tax revenues left the majority of governments with three unappetizing choices: printing money, going into debt, or unleashing repression by direct police brutality and slower economic suffocation. Each of the choices was fraught with its own dilemmas. Even repressing the poor, marginal, and rebellious required a lot of money to keep the loyalty of those morally consenting to repression and especially those actually doing it. But where would the governments get the money when so much of their financial flows were already committed to oligarchic interests?

Such were the main political and economic parameters of recent decades. If anything, the same dilemmas are bound to get worse in the short to medium run. Wallerstein’s theory of self-limiting capitalist aggrandizement thus parallels Mann’s argument on the present-day limits to geopolitical aggrandizement. In the absence of organized and effective opposition, the accumulation of financial resources at one pole can reach exorbitant proportions. But just as the military monopoly of the United States could not be exploited anywhere near its full potential in order to reach its imperial objectives, so the financial monopoly inevitably had to falter at some point like a house of cards. The accumulated sums of nominal money could not be used productively and thus were proven fictitious.

This big picture relates mostly to the West and former Soviet bloc. Would it change substantially if we bring in the rest? Of course, the miracle of China looms here very large. Some of us, however, are old enough to remember the times when the experts in economic development were generally dismissive of East Asia’s prospects. Their rising stars were rather the Philippines, the Shah’s Iran, or Nigeria and Senegal with their Western-modeled institutions, modern infrastructure, sizable domestic markets, educated technocrats, and middle classes. By contrast, the embattled “garrison states” of South Korea and Taiwan or the relic porto franco colonies of Singapore and Hong Kong were found lacking in almost everything: national sovereignty, middle classes, natural resources, and modern education. The East Asian states seemed to contemporary experts weighed down by overpopulation, destitute refugees, endemic cronyism and corruption, and other such allegedly immobile Asian traditions. Communist China, with its mad Maoist experiments and fanatical guerrilla cadres, was dismissed outright, virtually like North Korea now. Ironically, the same factors would be later cited as standard explanations for East Asia’s success: its abundant cheap labor, the shallow domestic markets suggesting openness to export opportunities, the fortuitous absence of a “resource curse” like oil, and moreover the same Asian values of discipline, hard work, support networks, and obedience to authority. Even these regimes’ authoritarianism somehow turned out to be stabilizing, or adaptable and even visionary, rather than cronyist and corrupt.

Randall Collins in his earlier research pointed to the indigenous medieval origins of East Asian capitalism growing from the organizational economies of Buddhist monasticism.[2] It is now firmly established that East Asia for a thousand years or more has been a world region or world-system of its own, boasting some of the most extensive and dynamic markets of the epoch. The inherited skills, assets, and social networks of East Asia reemerged during the twentieth century in a variety of contingent and often violent pathways. It was the expansion of Japanese imperialism prior to 1945, and later the American wars to contain communism, that fostered in their wake a series of developmentalist dictatorships. Georgi Derluguian shows that the ultimate joining of continental China into this export-oriented capitalist dynamic was occasioned essentially by the conjuncture of international and domestic political accidents, albeit the sort of accidents that were structurally waiting to happen.

Free-market ideologists seek to enlist recent East Asian examples as their major proof of unfettered markets eliciting a wonderful burst of entrepreneurship. Such claims lack historical analysis and empirical evidence. East Asia has long been the prime example of regulated corporatist states. If the policies of neoliberal deregulation had anything to do with the reemergence of East Asia, it was by draining even more productive activities from the West and sending them into locales with cheaper labor. However, this does not mean that labor was not regulated at the new investment destinations. There are many other countries with large impoverished populations willing to accept, as a start, working long hours for low wages. But labor first had to be organized and disciplined in order to be put to work. The ambitions and greed of local elites had to be organized and disciplined as well. This is where the coherence of formal state institutions and less formal infrastructural capacities to regulate the social realm through accepted practices and networks could make a crucial difference. Corruption scandals reveal a central element in corporatist state compacts. The kickbacks from businesses in such states form a major part of officials’ remuneration. Yet, as the old-time New York politician George Washington Plunkett famously put it, there is “honest graft, and there is dishonest graft.” State capacity in this case largely turns on its ability to select officials on the merits of performance, including loyalty to the hierarchy and paternalistic sharing via “honest” graft. This provides a predictable sort of institutional environment that capitalists find attractive.

The cultural and economic legacies of East Asian history, however peculiar they might be, are not entirely unique in their kind. As the global flows of capital continue shifting in the search for new production locales, we can expect more miraculous economic renaissances. India and Turkey already remind us that the past economic geography of Asia was never limited to China. A whole different sector of possibilities seems now emerging from the leftist turn in Latin America where Brazil is laying the tracks. Whatever the ideological rhetoric and tactics of the civic, socialist, nationalist, or indigenous popular movements, in effect they are disestablishing the traditional Latin American politics of oligarchic and military factionalism predicated on foreign dependence. The highly contentious and uneven process spanning the whole continent is now forging, for all its contradictions, genuinely national states. When the leaders of social movements reach state power, they can prevail only by curbing the local powers of provincial notables along with their paramilitary forces, including the drug cartels. One way of doing this is through the imposition of democratic civilian supervision over the armies and police. Another and related way for the consolidation of new democracies is through integrating their citizenry in the centrally sponsored institutions providing for the defense of human rights, social welfare, land tenure, and jobs. Perhaps this is not socialism. It is rather a new and decidedly better variety of capitalism. In the twenty-first century Latin America could at last catch up with social democratic and corporatist state transformations resembling earlier Western patterns, thus also laying foundations for a new wave of industrial development.

A lasting recession in the West, Japan, and the former Soviet bloc, unless things get truly disastrous, might yet boost the industrial ascendance of the former Third World zone. In the past the peripheral and semiperipheral countries often benefited from turmoil in the core because such crisis helped to lower the costs of importing advanced technologies, loosened political controls over world markets, and opened profitable niches to producers with lower labor costs. It is not incidental that the earlier wave of the import-substitution industrializations along the perimeter of the European continent and in Latin America took off in the 1930s–1940s; the export-oriented industrialization of East Asia after the 1970s was fed by outsourcing from the deindustrializing core, and the export markets and drain of resources from the former Soviet republics ought to play a role in the economic expansion of China and especially Turkey.

All five of us consider the narrowing of global inequality gaps a desirable and realistic prospect. In Wallerstein’s words, this would minimize pain in the shorter run and maximize the potential for a better world transformation in the medium to longer run. Michael Mann finds here a major source of continued market vitality or even the foundations for a more egalitarian and prosperous world capitalist order modeled on the post-1945 social democratic recovery in Europe. This looks like a good prospect, but can it be compatible with the political economy of capitalism as measured by the rationale of private profit? Neither Wallerstein nor Collins considers the “rise of the rest” as contradicting their hypotheses regarding the future demise of capitalism. To the contrary, the proliferation of new capitalist players in the world markets or the mobile and globally competing educated middle classes would aggravate the dilemmas of capitalism.

So far we remain in the mode of extrapolating the near-past into the near-future. What about major structural shifts, either within high-tech capitalism, in the global world-system, or in the ecology of the planet?

SYSTEMIC LIMITS VERSUS ENDLESS INTENSIFICATION

Michael Mann advances an optimistic view of the survival of capitalism, but a rather pessimistic view of environmental crisis. The “rise of the rest” opens virtually limitless new frontiers for capitalism, at least in the foreseeable future. World demographics, and therefore much of the world politics and economy now profoundly affected by the massive growth in the poorer countries and the resulting global migrations into towns, will eventually stabilize. Mann is skeptical of the existence of pansystemic structures and cycles. Instead, he suggests a kaleidoscopic recombination of the four non-congruent and distinctly shaped networks of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. Leaving his prognosis underdetermined as a matter of principle, Mann refrains from making specific predictions except that capitalism will continue to be resilient, especially if it is steered by more pragmatic liberal-labor politics.

Nevertheless, Mann theorizes from a structured viewpoint elaborating on Max Weber. Wielding his four-dimensional template of power, Mann shows that events become turning points when leading power sources intersect. In the early twentieth century it was the combination of world war with capitalist crisis exacerbated by ideology and politics. In the twenty-first century the combination of rampant capitalist growth with the stalemate of pluralist politics and national self-centeredness points toward ecological crisis. Degrees of contingency exist, but within the structural tendencies laid down by historical development of the four sources of power. It is chiefly because there are multiple causes that unpredictable intersections occur. Here Mann disagrees with Collins and Wallerstein on the importance of crisis in the economic institutions of capitalism. Instead he emphasizes that environmental strains will rise to catastrophe, unless political mobilization prevails to do something about it. Thus Mann’s big contingency is in the intersection of the environmental (economic in the largest sense) and the political spheres.

Craig Calhoun agrees with Mann about the centrality of external, especially environmental threats to capitalism. Like all of us, Calhoun argues that the future is not fully determined and therefore it is open to political action. He argues, though, both that internal system risks are more challenging to capitalism than Mann suggests, and that for capitalism to survive there must be a renewal of social institutions that on the one hand enable and facilitate capitalism and on the other hand compensate for the costs and damages it now externalizes as burdens for society at large. The question then is, in the thinking of Wallerstein and Collins, whether such globally escalating costs could be at all sustained by capitalism. The question is not rhetorical. Social scientists should be watching and measuring the dynamic capacities of capitalism to see whether the costs are being met by the generation of new wealth along with the growth or decline in political mechanisms for spreading benefits across the globally connected social structures.

Mann and Calhoun both suggest that a deep environmental crisis could come soon and challenge a still economically viable capitalism. Collins and Wallerstein see the environmental risk as longer term and capitalist crisis more imminent. Collins reads the scientific consensus of environmental projections as pointing to major crisis around the year 2100. Mann argues that severe ecological damage will threaten some countries’ survival already by 2030–50. Yet Collins and Wallerstein project full-scale capitalist crisis in the decades around 2040. They thus suggest that we will confront capitalist crisis before environmental limits become terminal. If one holds the Collins/Wallerstein view, it is tempting to speculate that a socialist resolution to a capitalist crisis would change political structures to such a degree that the ecological crisis could be reasonably handled, as it might well not be if capitalism continues as usual. Mann has a different take on this. Any major capitalist crisis would considerably lower GDP levels, thus easing the environmental crisis (provided warming had not already gone too far). He sees three villains producing climate change: not just capitalism, but also the nation-state and the ordinary mass-consuming citizen. A solution to the crisis would involve reining in and reforming all three. Whether capitalism or socialism (or anything else) emerges viably from the crisis, they would have to be in radically new forms.

Second, both Mann and Calhoun place more emphasis on capitalist dynamism outside the West. Indeed, for Mann, it is not the end of capitalism, but rather the ecological crisis that is global. Hence it cannot be argued that while capitalism and geopolitical hegemony will decline for the United States and Europe, world leadership will pass to other triumphant regions of the globe such as East Asia or a coalition now going under names like the BRICS. However, environmental scientists hold at present that the worst environmental catastrophes will begin in China, South Asia, and Africa. This projection questions the prospect for emergent global leadership providing an alternative to the West. The ecological crisis, according to Mann, could be the end of everybody. Less rhetorically, we have to consider not two alternatives but three: terminal crisis of capitalism as a world-system; decline of the older capitalist hegemons and their replacement by new ones; and global-scale ecological shock, with resulting transformations yet to be envisioned. Collins and Wallerstein argue for the first of these; Mann for the third.

Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins read the picture in different yet mutually compatible ways. They see capitalism as a global system or, if you wish, a hierarchical ecology of economic food chains and market niches. Like any complex system, it has its interrelated structures, dynamic trends, and therefore it must have its ultimate limits. Even if the systemic limits could be expanded thanks to new geographies and technologies of production, they cannot be altogether abolished. Nobody can now specify the institutions and parameters of the world coming after capitalism. Here Craig Calhoun interjects by reminding us how much in such world transitions depends on the contested political choices. Nevertheless Collins and Wallerstein insist that capitalism is nearing its limits, and they make one big prediction: there will be a world transition. They both clearly specify what structural processes are pushing toward the predicted transition, thus opening their hypotheses to critical scrutiny and the possibility of empirical testing. Georgi Derluguian presents the Soviet example as a theoretical and empirical test of what has worked or did not work in the past predictions of Collins and Wallerstein. The trajectory of the Soviet bloc shows how a large systemic unit reaches the limits of its own success and perishes from a combination of structural weights and purely contingent factors.

The differences between the predictions (or future-approximations) of Mann on one hand and those of Collins and Wallerstein on the other correspond to the two sides of the dynamic model of human societies developed by evolutionary anthropologists. In technical terms, it is the “bearing capacity” of a human ecology versus its “productive intensification.” According to this model, all hitherto existent human societies tended eventually to fill their environments to saturation, or their bearing capacity. Such limiting crises left three dramatically different possibilities. The first was simply death. A recurrent catastrophe over the entire span of history has been a partial or even total extermination of human groups through famines, epidemics, and genocidal warfare. It is the tragic cycle of Malthusian demographic adjustments in the numbers of humans to be fed. The phases of declining population created conditions for resuming the productive activities on an unchanged basis until the environment was once again filled to bearing capacity, thus provoking another phase of hard times. The second possibility is diversification. It led our ancestors to the discovery and adaptive colonization of new geographic frontiers in the northern tundra and tropical islands, in the steppes, deserts, mountains, and forests—until the human race filled up the planet. Finally, the third possibility is what is usually called progress (i.e., qualitative intensification in the entire technological toolkit), enabling humans to gain ever more from their resources. The latter escape has been the main driving force of evolutionary innovation in human societies.

The complex class societies and first states rose in the productive locales that were too good to abandon, such as the fertile river valleys flanked by the deserts and mountains. The celebrated expression “caging effect” was in fact invented by Michael Mann in his earlier study of ancient empires, markets, and religions.[3] It means that moving away became impossible. Historically, such situations forced some human groups into the qualitatively new, more extensive and elaborate forms of social organization (i.e., new civilizations) that could increase the extraction and exchange of surpluses from the long-occupied locales. The verb “forced into” is intended to stress that many humans would rather not have become slaves, serf peasants, and tribute payers—but they were “caged” by the lack of escape and active coercion from the warrior and priestly elites. In the past, the intensification of productive techniques never came alone but in conjunction with major political and ideological reorganization. These transformative processes were always fraught with considerable conflicts.

In the present book, Michael Mann takes the position that capitalism remains resilient. Once again, Calhoun mostly agrees, though with greater stress on the ways capitalism must change to renew itself. Calhoun also stresses the difference between capitalism in general and the disproportionately financial capitalism that has lately exacerbated systemic risks. Capitalism, according to Mann, has virtually inexhaustible capacities for self-intensification through productive innovations as well as the globalization and deepening of consumer markets. If anything can ever finish capitalism, it will be an outbreak of warfare reaching its destructive limits in the nuclear age, or the planetary crisis of the natural environment. The former operates through causal chains largely independent of the dynamics of capitalism, and thus is contingent (i.e., unpredictable from the standpoint of an internal analysis of capitalism). In the main, this is what separates the positions of Mann and Calhoun from the projections advanced by Wallerstein and Collins. Environmental crisis, however, is one consequence of capitalist development, intersecting with political and cultural factors. Thus in a roundabout way, capitalism may generate its own downfall, even if, by virtue of intersecting causalities, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Randall Collins and Immanuel Wallerstein argue that capitalism is nearing its structural limits. Both acknowledge the extraordinary capacity of capitalism to expand and intensify its own political economy. Capitalism has created the first true world-system encompassing the entire planet with all its populations and productive resources. The displacement of agricultural and industrial jobs by machinery during the nineteenth century did not result in pauperization and revolution in the West, as predicted by Karl Marx in his age, because the development of modern managerial, professional and clerical occupations within private and government bureaucracies created a comfortable cushion of modern middle classes. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century these spatial and internal reserves will finally be exhausted. If the model focusing on the effects of oligarchic overaccumulation and the distress of the middle classes has relevance across different historical epochs, the terminal crisis of capitalism would actually be a succession of various crises within a protracted period of decline.

Ultimately, however, we all agree that Michael Mann forces us to consider three imponderables: climate change, pandemics, and nuclear warfare. They are not imponderables in the dangers they pose for all of humanity. They are imponderables in terms of the timing of disasters. Our knowledge about each of these is extensive but there are enough uncertainties and differences of views among those who have studied these issues that we cannot be sure what exactly will happen. Climate change seems an unquestionable reality, except for those who reject this reality for political or ideological reasons. Furthermore, everything that has been causing climate change is actually accelerating rather than slowing down. The political differences between wealthier and poorer states as to what should be done about climate change make an accord that would mitigate the risks appear unattainable, at least for now.

However, the earth’s ecological complexity is so great, and these changes so extensive, that we do not know what kinds of readjustments will occur. It seems clear that water levels will rise and are already rising, and that this threatens the drowning of vast land areas. It also seems clear that the average temperatures in various parts of the world will change and are already changing. But this can result in shifting the location of agricultural production and energy sources to different zones in ways that might compensate for the acute damage to other zones.

The same thing seems to be true of pandemics. The enormous advances of world medicine in the last hundred or so years that have seemed to bring so many diseases under control have simultaneously created a situation in which humanity’s ancient enemy, the germ, has had to find new ways to be resistant. Once again, our knowledge seemed great but, when all is said and done, it turns out to be pitifully small. In this race against time, how fast will we learn? And how much must we unlearn in order to survive?

There remains the specter of extermination from nuclear weapons. Ever since the end of the Cold War and the hubristic attempt to impose an American unipolarity, nuclear proliferation has become virtually unavoidable. There might not be imminent danger in terms of interstate warfare. Indeed it is almost the contrary. Nuclear weapons are essentially defensive weapons and therefore reduce, not increase, the likelihood of interstate wars. Nevertheless, there remain several imponderables. The motivations of nonstate actors are not necessarily the same as those of responsible officials. No doubt there are some who would like to get their hands on nuclear weapons (as well as on chemical and biological weapons) and use them. The limited ability of many states to protect such weapons from seizure or purchase may facilitate their acquisition by nonstate actors. And the possibility of a rogue state agent, the Dr. Strangelove of fiction, is never to be ruled out.

It is quite possible that the world will weather the global transition without any of these catastrophes occurring. But it is also possible that it will not. A lot will depend on what will be the new political structures and how soon they can emerge. Conceivably such new structures will take the kinds of measures that can reduce, even eliminate, the likelihood of global disasters. Let us be clear, these are not just natural disasters. Famine, pestilence, nuclear terrorism are decidedly political challenges to humanity. That is why we call them imponderables. The search for effective counter-measures means making political choices. One major way in which many people react to these dangers is to pull inward in a heavily protectionist and xenophobic way. We see this tendency already almost everywhere. It means that those who seek a system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian have to work harder at developing political strategies that will counter this trend.

TRANSITIONS

One big thing we all agree on is that in coming decades the familiar configurations of global political economy are bound to change in significant and not immediately evident ways. Politicians, social movements, and media commentators will be at a loss trying to steer through the coming years on the old conventional wisdom. Governments and once dominant business corporations are going to find their levers of power weakened, their well-practiced moves in the political and ideological repertoires useless or presenting ever new problems down the road. The protesters might feel as outraged as ever. But they will be much less sure against whom to protest, what to demand, how to organize, and with whom to ally themselves. Our theoretical knowledge of the past historical transitions will prove only an imperfect adviser. In the years ahead our theories will require considerable corrections and additions. (But isn’t this the nature of scientific knowledge?) In part, this is because many problems and prospects appear unprecedented in human history. In the main, however, we know that major historical transitions occur simultaneously at several different levels. Business as usual becomes impossible in times of transition. American imperial hegemony is visibly faltering, as geopolitical theory has long predicted. Its biggest reserves in the productivity, finances, and political compliance of China and the European Union are running out. A big question is how precipitous or gradual will be the coming decline of the West. Our best hope perhaps is a negotiated (i.e., nondestructive) equalization in the shares of power and wealth between the historical West and the rising rest of the world.

The key point of agreement, to stress it again, is that the future is not preordained in any great detail. Open-ended political struggles will play a crucial role in selecting the routes and collective destinations. Moreover, social science can make a difference in the coming years. Macrohistorical theories warn against disastrous future possibilities. A middle-ground possibility is fragmentation and involution (i.e., continuing along essentially the same lines only in a lessened, crippled, and worse off shape). Here the recent fate of the Soviet Union serves as the nearest example. Still another nasty possibility is a fascist-like dictatorship supported by social movements of aggrieved nationals and reliant on a militaristic and highly invasive police state. Unfortunately, the record of twentieth-century fascism shows that it could produce, at least for a few decades, viable political economies where large groups of people benefit from oppressing other large groups of people. The exceptionally vicious and megalomaniac Nazi regime in Germany perished from the external war, not from internal political transformation or revolution.

Yet the same theories point to a strong possibility of more hopeful pathways through the chaotic years ahead of us. Our hopes derive from the theoretically grounded observation that human responses to the big structural crises in the past tended to build up qualitatively new and more extensive collective powers. This trend developed through periodic collapses and bursts of human inventiveness (though far from always peaceful) that would eventually pave the way for new periods of stabilization and prosperity.

The human race is now facing another such sequence, and this time it is the entire humanity populating the planet. Our late friend and colleague Giovanni Arrighi used to say that systemic problems call for systemic solutions. In his analytical model, the trajectory of historical capitalism went through several cresting waves of spatial expansions and restructurings.[4] European capitalists had originally secured themselves and their enterprise by acquiring their own national states—with the armies, navies, and the taxation machinery that support them—amid the formative chaos of the sixteenth century. In more analytical terms, capitalism obtained its historical breakthrough in the internalization of protection costs. The next wave brought the deepening of capitalism and its tremendous colonial expansion based on the internalization of production costs, or what is commonly known as the British-led industrial revolution of the 1780s–1840s. But that epoch also ushered in multiple crises flowing from the effects of the business cycle, the institutionalization of revolutionary and reform movements, and the competitive geopolitics of industrial imperialism that in 1914 nearly killed capitalism. The American hegemony of the twentieth century helped to tame these crises by adding another layer of complexity: the internalization of transaction costs. The acute need to stabilize the capitalist system against multiple dangers is what after 1945 determined the elaborate and imposing architecture of modern governments, economic corporations, and international organizations.

Logically then, the epochal accomplishment remaining for the twenty-first century is the internalization of the costs of social and environmental reproduction to be achieved at a truly planetary level. Consider a fact that seems too big to enter the usual policy debates. During the last ten thousand years or so the majority of humankind lived in villages. The invention (rather, the repeated inventions) of village community marked a major reorganization in collective human capabilities. It made possible what archeologists call the Neolithic revolution, and thus agrarian societies. The pattern of village life permitted midsized groups of nonrelatives to organize their common affairs in a robust and comprehensive manner. It took care of everything that mattered for social reproduction: division of labor, the traditional regulation of resources, daily life tensions and conflicts, the transmission of culture and skills, the ideological (or even cosmological) rituals of group solidarity, from the highly mystical to the mundane village dance. In sum, village community organized the functional and emotional aspects of the human life cycle from birth to death. And self-organizing villages served as tributary bases for all the subsequent complex societies, from tribal chiefdoms to city-states and empires.

Capitalism originally emerged into what was still a world of villages. The market and geopolitical dynamism of capitalism soon began undermining village communities because the villagers were needed elsewhere as labor, colonists, and soldiers. On their side, the villagers themselves often found it impossible to stay in their poor and constraining rural locales. The causes of village extinction go by many different names such as modernization, urbanization, industrialization, agrarian overpopulation, the spread of literacy, or imperialism and military revolution. The net effect eventually would be the same everywhere—first in the West, next in Japan, the Soviet bloc, and now all over—draining the countryside of its once numerous inhabitants and moving them into the cities or, even more commonly, into the slums.

The transition from village to town as the main organizing locus of human life appears irreversible. Its implications help explain why the crisis of capitalism is so hard to solve. Something must step in to resume the comprehensive provision of normative order, social regulation, daily security and welfare in the new agglomerations of humanity. Moreover, these tasks must be now performed not only on a vastly larger scale but also better than the villages used to do. Lest we forget, villages provided intimate coziness and shelter that meant, by extension, intrusive supervision and the social caging of individuals. The protective inertia of traditions, the inequalities of age and sex inscribed in the patriarchal households, the denigrating and violently vengeful attitudes toward strangers and outsiders were part and parcel of village life, too.

The modern history of mass migrations, demographic transitions, and the creation of new political communities brought enormous costs and traumas. The overseas emigration of European settlers helped to improve the ratio of demographics to resources at the cost of the displacement, enslavement, and downright extermination of the indigenous peoples in the colonies who lacked guns and immunity to the germs brought by the invaders. The emergence of modern nations often implied the oppression and expulsion of the “non-national” minorities. After 1914 the radical mutation of nationalism into militarist and virulently populist strains of fascism escalated the same historical vectors into the Holocaust. In a different kind of radical escalation, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture sacrificed human lives by the millions for the sake of achieving industrialization and modern life for the children of survivors. Only after 1945 were the former peasants and working classes of the West and Soviet bloc factored into social security and prosperity by their national states. In total, this amounted to several hundred millions of people. But are there now the resources, let alone political will, to factor in several billion people from the global South?

Enthusiasts of globalization hail our moving into a global village. This sanguine claim should be evaluated soberly. Cosmopolitanism is a longstanding project that has had its liberal and socialist versions.[5] But it means something different as a complement to a world of stable states. And there exist other, more conservative projects for directing globalization that derive their energies from imperialist ambitions, nationalisms, anti-immigrant rejections, religious fundamentalism, and their combinations. The very possibility of an arena of global governance and a common human identity may well become the main focus of political contention in the coming decades. The outcome is too early to predict. Systemic crisis at a world scale will sow havoc, panic, and nasty reactions. But it will also elicit collective coping strategies going in the direction of a more democratically accountable, organizationally flexible, and capable global governance. Humanity can still escape a catastrophic backslide in the complexity and extent of its collective organization. Perhaps enough lessons of twentieth-century revolutionary and socially reformist movements have withstood the neoconservative ravages of recent decades. Or it could be something profoundly changing in the complex and contradictory institutional architecture of the modern states themselves. At the very least, here is yet another topic for fruitful investigation by social scientists.

We are reluctant to call the “state,” let alone “global state,” the political structure of a better future. This is in fact the biggest unknown. Let us make just a couple of observations regarding the pattern of politics in a more hopeful future. Most of us doubt that existing international organizations add up to the prototype of such structures. The United Nations, the European Union, the IMF, Davos, G-8, G-20 and other such clubs belong to the epoch of capitalist integration and American hegemony. At present these institutions are weakened or compromised by political manipulation and technocratic aloofness. Some of us, however, see the only solution to environmental crisis in a much stronger network of relations between states—a Super United Nations. Others of us doubt that this political integration can be achieved fast enough, and it is not without its own worries. Still, the post-1945 epoch of relative world peace and prosperity set an important precedent that may prove more lasting than its political institutions.

The changing structures and directions of future politics will surely deliver big surprises. The majority of people regard extension of prior experience as most plausible. The inexorable growth of national states has been indeed a major reality during the entire modern period. But what if the novel recombination of seemingly familiar factors at a planetary level turns out differently? After all, this is exactly what Randall Collins argues regarding the newest technological displacement. Although none of us considers anarchism a very realistic strategy, we must admit that the antiestablishment spirit of 1968 proved one of its most enduring legacies, both on the left and on the right. Perhaps this calls for taking more seriously the values and organizational alternatives represented by the nonstatist movements tenaciously surviving in the margins. The major transformative mobilizations of state powers and peoples in modern times have been associated with wars and violent revolutions. Anarchist or libertarian calls could not be politically effective in such situations. But what if the future delivers a major nonmilitary emergency, be it frightening extinctions of biological species or middle-class jobs? Let us seriously consider what makes us believe that states or interstate alliances will prove up to the task of organizing billions of people for the altruistic enterprise of planting trees and developing new technologies or educating the children, caring for the elderly, and overall sustaining life? A self-organizing dynamic might become rather the order of the day. Who knows? This might even open common grounds for bridging the hostility between the popular movements now raging on the right and left. Here we may identify another moving front of social science inquiry into the dynamics of contemporary ideology and popular politics.

SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A TRANSFORMATIVE FUTURE

Are political hopes blurring our theoretical visions? Our answer is this: Reflexively admitting a connection between our hopes and our hypotheses is a necessary component of theoretical honesty in social science, especially when dealing with our own times. Social theory is often likened to lenses of various cuts that enable us to discern patterns in human action. When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological. Such lenses, commonly worn in politics and public debating, function more like blinders. Theory is different because it has to be testable. What constitutes tests in social science has been a matter of controversy. We are methodological pluralists insofar as we doubt attempts to legislate the one right way of doing social science. Yet we are not complete relativists. Different kinds of problems and scales of analysis leave researchers the choice of investigative techniques. Experiments and statistical correlations have an important place in the toolkit of social science but their role cannot be universal. Disciplined ethnographic observation is often more revealing in studying localized social environments. At the macrohistorical level, which is where we work, the main method might be likened to connecting the dots in a big puzzle. Another test for macrohistorical theory are counterfactuals, the alternative roads that seemed possible at one historical juncture but were not taken. In other words, we must show both how we get from one historical situation to another and what are the actual range of structural possibilities and the factors on which events turn. This is perhaps as close we can get to an experiment in our kind of research.

Historical social science from the outset has dealt with conflict, transitions, and mutations. Hence the main question of this book: What if the future is fraught with major crises? Social landscapes are fluid and often turbulent, perhaps more like weather maps. Local events are inherently contingent even if in retrospect we can explain them by pinpointing which structures had shifted or broken down, and what human action, emerging from specific positions, ended up taking the emergent opportunities. Predicting events in the longer run is futile, but predicting structural configurations is not. Take the weather analogy. It would be irresponsible to predict that next year, say, on the 13th of January it will snow in Chicago. This is the “short” time of contingent events. But it would seem trivial to predict that it will snow in Chicago next January. This statement belongs to the longer-run time of structures. However, what about several decades into the future when Chicago climate might come to resemble hurricane-prone Florida or, alternatively, frozen Siberian tundra?

Readers seeking exact future scenarios in this book may feel frustrated. Their frustration is unwarranted. Lack of precision in social forecasting means that collectively we face a certain freedom of action on a spate of structurally available options. The options are rather limited in normal times although even then there exists political choice between somewhat better and somewhat worse outcomes. But the options become vastly magnified in periods of crisis when the usual mechanisms of status quo are breaking down. Such times call for a conscious strategy of systemic transformation. Humans do make their futures, in conflict and association with other humans, even if not in the circumstances of their own choosing. Social science should clarify what are the circumstances and emerging possibilities, especially when the possibilities may be opening and closing rapidly.

On this score we are critical of contemporary social science for its willful abstraction from structural possibilities of historical change. Our charges equally apply to two very different mainstream currents—postmodernism and neoclassical economics—that have come to dominate academic social sciences since the 1980s. Both, in their own ways, reflect the nameless period following the crisis decade of the 1970s, the decline of leftist movements, and the relaunching of American hegemonic ambitions in the project of neoconservative globalization.

Various intellectual currents, stronger in the humanities and summarily grouped under the rubric of postmodernism, became extremely skeptical of any big theories or what they called “master-narratives.” Instead they celebrated doubt, irony, lived experience, deconstruction of beliefs, and the minute interpretations of cultural practices. This intellectual movement grew directly from the revolts of 1968 and the demographic shifts in the composition of academia with the advent of women and minorities. The shift of attention to the ways in which humans imagine themselves and envision their social universes helped to instill a new critical awareness of the matters of faith that had hitherto remained unspoken and unexamined. The postmodernist movement stirred many stagnant waters, but it left them muddied.

On the opposite side, the field of social science fell under the domination of neoclassical economics and its formalistic emulators in other disciplines. The structures underpinning this situation are not too different from the erstwhile influence of astrology. A healthy dose of Swiftean parody may be in order here. Astrology before modern times, like economics today, was established expertise. It enjoyed the ears of the rulers in virtually all civilizations, East and West. It brought generous remuneration because the highest remuneration is commanded by the experts in the areas of highest human uncertainty and anxiety. In the imperial and feudal political structures based on the familial control of rent, the greatest elite anxieties were associated with dynastic succession and rapidly turning luck in warfare. In much the same way, capitalist anxieties derive from uncertain investment choices, market volatility, and the popular opposition that their operations occasionally generate. Astrology, like neoclassical economics, both functioned as ideological disciplines conforming to the common sense of the contemporary dominant classes. Astrology at its heyday, however, was more than merely a reflection of elite ideology. At its best, astrology was a highly mathematized discipline based on centuries-long accumulation of empirical observations which became the foundation of modern astronomy. Since things turned out as predicted only about half of the time, practical forecasting was subtly corrected by intuition and political acumen. A successful astrologer had to master the demeanor of an astute courtier. Much the same applies to practicing business advisers and government economists in our day.

In times of crisis and resulting political polarization economists and political scientists will find plenty of opportunities to do something new. There will be whole new fronts of pathbreaking research, for instance, in the alternative organization of markets. The dismissal of market possibilities was a major theoretical and practical mistake of twentieth-century leftist movements. We treat with great respect the intellectual legacy of Joseph Schumpeter. But what will be the future uses of his theory of entrepreneurial dynamism? Who or what could play the role of entrepreneurs in the future, even beyond the crisis of capitalism? Is it possible to harness entrepreneurial energies toward more market creativity and less destruction?

No less seriously we take Karl Polanyi’s idea of ‘fictitious commodities’, like land, money, and human life, that cannot be traded. In the twenty-first century “land” broadly means the environment, “money” is global finance, and “human life” stands for the internationalization of the costs of social reproduction through the public support of decent and affordable healthcare, education, housing, pensions, and not least, physical security of our cities. Can a postcapitalist world economy be structured into sectors operating on different principles: the priority of social reproduction in the sector of broadly construed public utilities and the priority of market effectiveness in the sector of consumer goods and services? Moreover, the postcapitalist economic systems may themselves not be static. Periodic reversion to market economies with private property, in some degree or another, may well occur in the future. The world may see yet more swings between capitalist and noncapitalist arrangements of the economy. This too will have to be managed.

No less politically harmful than the aversion to markets is the aversion to the directing power of states. Far from coincidentally, the neoconservative restoration during the last decades of the twentieth century in the wake of collapses on the political left, relentlessly challenged state powers through deregulation and globalization. Capitalists grew suspicious of “Big Government” for the quite real reason that modern states potentially could be captured by the non-elite citizens—in democratic elections, street insurrections, or both—and used for the noncapitalist purposes of market regulation and social redistribution. Big welfare state had to be tolerated, to a degree, immediately after 1945 for the sake of resumed peace. But by the 1970s many capitalists, especially in America, had become emboldened by the opportunity to defeat the left and roll back postwar compromises. Now a major question for theorizing is whether the modern bureaucratic state can play a good role, bad role, or no role at all in steering our collective affairs through times of crisis and the looming systemic transformation. This big question falls into many subordinate questions, practical issues, and theoretical paradoxes that remain to be explored. Social scientists will have plenty of intellectual work of crucial importance in rising to these challenges.

CODA

This quintet of authors gathered to sketch the range of destinations where the world may be headed. We have summarized and refocused on the future many arguments from our previously written volumes. Intentionally, this is not a single-tune quintet. The hope was to achieve counterpoint and provoke each other into pursuing the implications of our individual themes. We have included the complexities, caveats, and dissents. We have not avoided the dramatic, even thunderous notes. Such tonalities seemed warranted by the enormity and gravity of the main themes. The coming decades will be anything but usual: that is, usual in the perspective of the last 500 years. The collective trajectory of humanity is taking a big turn, but not necessarily for the worse.

A rising note of optimism emerges in the finale. A big crisis and transformation, whatever its scenario, does not mean the world is coming to an end. There is no reason to believe, on the basis of the accumulated understandings of sociology, that history will ever end, as long as there are human beings connected in social organization. The direst scenarios involving a world nuclear war or environmental collapse, fortunately, seem avoidable precisely because collective extinction has been widely regarded as a real danger for some decades now. The end of capitalism is not a catastrophe of that sort. A crisis in the bearing structures of the modern world’s political economy is far from a doomsday prediction. Ultimately, the end of capitalism is a hopeful vision. Yes, it comes with its own dangers. We must remember how early twentieth-century attempts to foster anticapitalist alternatives in response to crisis developed totalitarian tendencies and ended in bureaucratic inertia. Nor should we forget how directly these anticapitalist projects arose from the state machineries and personnel constructed in the world wars. The crucial political vectors in the coming decades will have to be curbing militarism and institutionalizing democratic human rights around the planet. An impasse in the political economy of capitalism brings us to historical junctures where what has been long regarded utopian may yet acquire technically feasible foundations in a new kind of political economy. It may yet help us to deal better with threats to our planet’s biosphere, and many other tasks that humanity will be facing later in this century.

Those who worry about postcapitalism ushering in a period of deadly stagnation are surely wrong. Those who hope that postcapitalism will deliver a lasting paradise without its own crises are likely wrong, too. After the crisis—and, some of us predict, the postcapitalist transition of the mid-21st century—there will be a great deal happening. Hopefully, much of it will be good. We shall see, and soon enough.