How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System

Upon reading this collection of essays (the title of this post) from Wolfgang Streeck and then contemplating our current world, The Second Coming of William Butler Yeats comes to mind:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity…

Streeck has been a sensible critic of modern political economy for a long time, and his recent summing up is very useful today.  Here he seeks to “inspire more concrete thinking on how the modern-capitalist global system might in the not-to-distant future come to an end, even without a successor regime in sight, as a consequence of its internal contradictions unfolding.”  The eleven essays include “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” “Citizens as Consumers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption,” “Why the Euro Divides Europe,” and “The Public Mission of Sociology.”  All of them repay reading.

In his description of capitalism lie the seeds of its instability and ultimate decline and dissolution:

Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society, and through unending expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets, on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market-opening policies both domestically and internationally…Capitalist society is distinguished by the fact that its collective productive capital is accumulated in the hands of a minority of its members who enjoy the legal privilege, in the form of rights of private property, to dispose of such capital in any way they see fit, including letting it sit idle or transferring it abroad…(thus)…the vast majority of the members of a capitalist society must work under the direction, however mediated, of the private owners of the tools they need to provide for themselves, and on the terms of those owners in line with their desire to maximize the rate of increase of their capital.

This, of course, has led to precarity for the masses (including the Professional Managerial Class/PMC, much to their coming surprise) who are becoming less and less comfortable with their position as contingent beings at the mercy of “The Economy.”  But more fundamentally, infinite growth is not possible in a closed material system.  It may seem strange that this simple accounting error, described by Alyssa Battistoni in Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025), may lead to the end of the world.  But this is a possibility.  And the commodification of all life – food, family, work, community, recreation, business, entertainment, education, health, science, art – has led to alienation and anomie that consumerism cannot relieve in either the short term or the long term:

The vast majority of…members [1] of a capitalist society must…convert their ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process, because of economic or technological restructuring, into acceptance of the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power generated by the capitalist economy.  For this, highly complicated and inevitably fragile institutional and ideological provisions are necessary…(including)…the conversion of insecure workers – kept insecure to make them obedient workers – into confident consumers happily discharging their consumerist social obligations even in the face of the fundamental uncertainty of labor markets and employment.

“Consumer” is Neoliberal-speak for “citizen.”  The systematic disorders of capitalism covered by Streeck include stagnation, oligarchic wealth redistribution, plundering of the public domain, corruption, and global anarchy.  Secular stagnation is inevitable as the previously empty world fills up with our products and our waste.  For example, more carbon has been emitted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that in all previous human history.  And then there is plastic.  The transnational fossil fuel corporations knew long ago what would happen to the ecosphere of planet Earth as a result of their output.  As a friend who worked for one of the largest oil companies put it to me once, they did not hire stupid engineers and chemists.  However, they did hide their research.  Is it any wonder that the predicted effects of anthropogenic global warming are arriving now to some surprise?  Or denial?

Wealth redistribution upward and corruption have gone hand in hand for much of the history of capitalism.  Corruption leads to the plundering of the public domain.  None of these failures can be attributed to only the notional left or the notional right.  Both are implicated, especially in our current Neoliberal Dispensation [2], in which there is only one party, the Property Party, in the US and the UK and most of the rest of the world.

Unlike in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which is a favorite of the traditional right going back to Russell Kirk:

Under financialized capitalism the private vice of greed is no longer magically converted into a public virtue – depriving capitalism even of its last consequentialist moral justification.  Stylizing owners and managers of capital as trustees of society has lost any remaining credibility, their much publicized exercises in philanthropy notwithstanding.  A pervasive cynicism has become deeply engrained in the collective common sense, which has become as a matter of course to regard capitalism as nothing but an institutionalized opportunity for the well-connected super-rich to become even richer.  Corruption…is considered a fact of life, and so is steadily growing inequality and the monopolization of political influence by a small self-serving oligarchy and its army of wealth defense specialists…Elite calls for trust and appeals to shared values can no longer be expected to resonate with a populace nursed on materialistic-utilitarian self-descriptions of a society in which everything is and out to be for sale.

While capitalism might be coming to an end because of internal contradictions rather than external forces, the problem is that no logical or practical successor is approaching.  The manifest successes of capitalism recognized by Karl Marx himself (e.g., high relative standards of living in the Global North) have nevertheless led inevitably to an increase in social entropy – a state of public, social, and governmental disorder that increases with every passing political season, including on this, the twenty-seventy day of a US government shutdown.  When I first began reading this collection, Gramsci came to mind, and he appeared in due course:

The social order of capitalism would then issue, not in another order, but in disorder, or entropy – in a historical epoch of uncertain duration when in the words of Antonio Gramsci, ‘the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born,’ ushering in ‘an interregnum  in which pathological phenomena of the most diverse sort come into existence’ – in a society devoid of reasonably coherent and minimally stable institutions capable of normalizing the lives of its members and protecting them from accidents and monstrosities of all sorts. [3]

Increasing entropy is indeed the order of the day, which translates into a life in the “shadow of uncertainty, always at the risk of being upset by surprise events…and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck.”  Yes, people are responsible for themselves and their families.  But this can be glorified as a life of freedom and liberty unconstrained by society, culture, or their institutions.  But:

The problem with this (fundamental) neoliberal narrative is that it neglects the very unequal distribution of risks, opportunities that comes with de-socialized capitalism, including the ‘Matthew effect’ of cumulative advantage. [4]

The behavioral program of the post-social society during the post-capitalist interregnum is governed by a neoliberal ethos of competitive self-improvement, an untiring cultivation of one’s marketable human capital, enthusiastic dedication to work, and cheerfully optimistic, playful acceptance of the risks in a world that has outgrown government.

So, what is likely to “keep an entropic, disorderly, stalemated post-capitalist interregnum going in the absence of collective regulation containing economic crises, limiting inequality, securing confidence in security and credit, protecting labor, land and money from overuse, and procuring legitimacy for free markets and private property through democratic control of greed and prevention of oligarchy?”

Streeck lists the following responses to the coming interregnum, or “inconvenient apocalypse,” in another formulation.

• Coping: Individual responding with new improvisations and stopgaps to the successive emergencies in the entropic interregnum.
• Hoping: Individual mental effort to imagine and believe in a better life in coming possible future. Dreaming might be an adjunct of hoping and a way of coping better.
• Doping: This helps with coping and hoping and can involve substance abuse, both performance-enhancing and performance-replacing. [5]
• Shopping: Rich capitalist countries with saturated markets for consumer goods must “get individuals whose needs are covered to develop desires that give rise to new desires the moment they are fulfilled. This is old news, though, covered exceedingly well by William Leach in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)

What we can expect during the interregnum is “individuals-as-consumers adhering to a culture of competitive hedonism, one that makes a virtue out of the necessity of having to struggle with adversity on one’s own.”  This, of course, is the libertarian’s view of a big, beautiful world.  By definition, this libertarian (and classical Liberal) has the Matthew Effect on his side but does not understand this simple fact.

So, what is to come after the interregnum if we survive climate catastrophe with a modicum of civil society left in our new world?  In Streeck’s analysis, increasing social and political entropy will continue to lessen the power of institutions to mediate between conflicting goals and to ameliorate the disruptions that will follow.  We have been on this course for nearly fifty years and a continuing slide seems likely.

But this is not a foregone conclusion.  Our human world will get smaller as the room for expansion of the economy ends – we exceeded the carrying capacity of planet Earth some time ago.  Capitalist democracy has always been a problematic concept, but for a short time through the Great Compression following World War II, it functioned as an engine of economic and social progress, even if this progress was uneven and certainly not universal.  On the other hand, Neoliberal capitalist democracy is the perfect oxymoron.  But as our world shrinks there will be opportunities to improve life at the local, regional, and national levels, while letting “global” take care of itself in the coming multipolar world.  Yes, our presuppositions are huge here, but they underpin hope.

Although neither the notional Left nor Right do so, we must always remember that markets and business civilization are not the same thing as capitalism.  Business makes life as we know it possible, and has since the Middle Ages.  Business, small and large, lives in the real world of people and places, just as education, medicine, science, art, and virtually every other thing that makes a humane life possible.  As our world becomes more local and regional, business and industry will of necessity become less extractive and more functional, fair, and legitimate (which they approached, with the normal caveats, during the Great Compression).  This more humane, more social environment that is local and regional makes ecological, cultural, political, and economic sense.  Democracy exists only from the ground up, and to the extent we have ever had democracy it has been local. [6]  This so-called democracy could also be inward looking and less than fair.  But that was not a requirement then and we know better now, despite our current, hopefully fleeting, distemper.

We can start with food and then go further with other necessary goods, durable and otherwise.  Genuinely free and transparent markets and small business civilization are essential to a fair and just world.  Will this necessary project work?  Or was Mark Fisher correct when he wrote “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (with credit to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek)?  Unless one wants to join the misanthropic darlings of Big Tech and AI, this project must work.  One person, one subject, one problem at a time worked on by one billion people at a time.

Oh, and also with a little of Bakunin thrown into the mix: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”  With a bit of anarchism from Proudhon, through the late, great James C. Scott, and, contra Yeats, anarchism is “mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule,” instead of a stupid vandalism on offer from nihilistic thugs with no political sensibilities whatsoever.

Returning to the great Irish poet, unless the best of us, from wherever we come and whatever we do and whatever we believe, regain real conviction and real intensity informed by good will and seriousness of mind, Mark Fisher’s lament will come to pass and there will be no one to pick up that which has fallen apart.  Alas.

Notes

[1] Membership of all in society is essential for human flourishing, no matter what TINA says.  Robert Putnam was correct in Bowling Alone.  Long before the book was published, in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors was proud that his company was the largest employer in the United States and provided a “middle class” life to hundreds of thousands of union workers and their families.  True membership in society and politics was unevenly distributed, but its reach was increasing up through the early days of the neoliberal transformation during the second half of Jimmy Carter’s one term as president.  Contrast with the current largest employer, which surpassed GM long ago without a thought for its workers, many of whom need SNAP and Medicaid, or the people.  Not that any CEO has a great love for unions, but the ethos of post-war capitalism did not admit of a return to the rapacity of the previous iteration of capitalism characterized by Jay Gould, who said that he could always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.  Whether Gould actually said this is uncertain, but the malignant extent of his and his fellow robber barons’ antipathy to the working class writ large is certain, even if working people made them wealthy beyond imagining, from the 1870s into the twenty-first century of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Musk.

[2] Neoliberalism is a protean concept.  Wendy Brown and Quinn Slobodian (here, here, and here) offer outstanding, accessible expositions.  A short description of neoliberalism might be: The market is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured, in a political economy in which people are for the economy rather than having an economy for the people in which human flourishing is the objective.  Being able to buy a 6-pack of tube socks made by mistreated people somewhere on the far side of the world for $18.99 at retail is not living better by saving money.

[3] I defer to Streeck and the original Italian that I am not competent to translate, but my preferred version of this quote from the Prison Notebooks is “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

[4] The Matthew Effect was coined by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman when they showed that eminent scientists get more credit than they deserve.  I first read their work during my long laboratory apprentice in a lab that was connected to the Science Library.  They were correct about the distribution of rewards in science.  The simple statement of the Matthew Effect is, “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”  This is an apt description of our neoliberal world.  Cumulative advantage in the real world comes to those who had the good sense to pick their parents wisely.  The signal blindness of conventional liberals and libertarians in the PMC of both the notional Right and Left is they fail to see their head start in life as unearned but very real secular grace.

[5] Streeck describes our society very well here: “Doping is closely connected to corruption.  Most of the substances used to enhance performance one way or other are highly profitable legal products of (Big Pharma).  Performance-replacing drugs, on the other hand, as consumed mostly by losers are mostly illegal…(and they are)…sent to prison or die in comparatively large numbers from overdose.”  Richer users of performance-replacing drugs are sent to rehab, with the sympathy of the court.

[6] For a view of how regionalism makes for a more humane society and democratic economy within the larger world, the essays and fiction of Wendell Berry point the way while showing what membership in a community means, without eliding the difficulties of community.