The Runaway System and the Future for Humanity
Anthony Giddens published a book with a strange title in 1999 at the high point of illusions in globalisation and the "new economic paradigm" . He was (and still is) Britain's best know academic advocate of the "third way" that ditches old social democratic attempts to tame capitalism and was aptly described as "Tony Blair's court sociologist" .1 Yet the title was The Runaway World. It conveys the image of a bolting horse, which governments, social movements and individuals alike cannot stop but have to try to balance on precariously. The best they can do is to try to influence where it is taking them by spurring it on with investments in social capital on the one side and reining it in with cutbacks in welfare expenditures on the other. Yet the succession of crises and wars that have punctuated the last four decades show the futility of such efforts.
The runaway world is, in fact, the economic system as Marx described it, the Frankenstein's monster that has escaped from human control; the vampire that saps the lifeblood of the living bodies it feeds off. Its self-expansion has indeed led it to encompass the whole globe, drawing all of humanity into its cycles of competing in order to accumulate and accumulating in order to compete.
Its expansion has been marked, as much in the 21st century as in the mid-19th century when Marx did his research for Capital, by fits and starts, by frenzied forward motion suddenly interrupted by deep crises. Running through the cycles of expansion and recession has been the other feature Marx pointed to: downward pressure on profitability causing capitalists to try to cut back on wages and welfare benefits at the same time as pressuring people
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