In its defence, capitalism can point to an impressive record, at least so far. Having faced crises almost every decade for two centuries, amid the ferocious pace of constantly accelerating change, it has always found ways of extracting profit and, eventually, improving living standards. Capitalism has survived, evolved and prospered through the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, protectionism, two World Wars, the end of the gold standard and the demise of the Bretton Woods Agreement. Little more than a generation ago, much of the world was under the political influence of the former Soviet Union, with it and the United States seemingly destined to face of in nuclear confrontation. And yet that never came to pass and, as Fukuyama would later write, a divided world was replaced by one where markets prevailed and liberal democracy would reign supreme.
This explains why, in spite of manifest crises, those who champion the status quo are as confident as they are. Ours may well be a world of low growth, declining living standards and rising geopolitical tensions, but capitalism’s staunchest advocates draw strength from knowing similar problems have been dealt with before.
But besides those issues are challenges seemingly harder to overcome. In isolation each is historically significant, yet taken together they can be viewed as threats whose scale is civilisational, holding the potential to undermine the ability of capitalism to reproduce itself as a system based on infinite growth, production for profit and wage-labour.
There are five such crises, which at times overlap. They are climate change and the consequences of global warming; resource scarcity – particularly for energy, minerals and fresh water; societal ageing, as life expectancy increases and birth rates concurrently fall; a growing surplus of global poor who form an ever-larger ‘unnecessariat’; and, perhaps most critically, a new machine age which will herald ever-greater technological unemployment as progressively more physical and cognitive labour is performed by machines, rather than humans.
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chaos under heaven