Virtually all revolutions, up to this point in history, have come not from economic crisis of capitalist markets, but from government breakdown. The key component is fiscal crisis in the government budget itself, but this is usually independent of major crisis in the larger economy. This means revolutions can continue to happen in the future, through the narrower mechanism of state breakdown, the state-centered fiscal crisis, elite deadlock, and ensuing paralysis of state enforcement apparatus. State crises are more frequent than full-scale economic crises. What happens when we put this in the context of the long-term trend to technological displacement of the labor force? Several things are possible: revolutions can happen in particular states, not necessarily those with the greatest amount of technological displacement. Or, revolutions can happen that do not act on a policy of solving technological displacement. But also, revolutions can happen which do take an explicitly anticapitalist turn.
Since history is driven by multiple causes, the future is like rolling multiple dice, as in the Chinese game Yahtzee—waiting for sixes to come up on all five dice simultaneously. Thus we could have the general anticapitalist revolution sometime in the future, through the right combination of state breakdown, perhaps plus war defeat, plus the omnipresent technological displacement.
The crisis of capitalism sets the agenda. At some point the politically mobilized populace will have to deal with it. This could happen by the classic route of state breakdown: the legitimacy of the state is called into question; the state itself stops functioning (paralyzed by fiscal crisis and/or political splits within its own ranks, mirroring political polarization outside); the monopoly over organized violence breaks apart, as police and the military lose organizational coherence and factionalize. This may or may not produce extensive violence, whether in riots and crowd suppression, or in civil war. In some moments of revolution (for instance the French Revolution of February 1848) the period of tense crisis was resolved with relatively little violence, as the existing regime lost organizational coherence, no one wanted to take charge of continuing the existing regime, and a new parliamentary power was quickly constituted. Similarly in Russia in February 1917, after several days of sporadic violence and wavering between crowds and soldiers, the Czarist regime ended in a flurry of abdications and refusals to pick up the reins. These cases also show that in ensuing months and years the new revolutionary regime may have trouble consolidating power, especially when restorationist movements mobilize against it, and later violence is often more severe than the initial revolutionary transition. Separating the revolutionary moment from its aftermath, the process of revolutionary state breakdown need not be very violent. Political sociology has not yet taken up the issue of under what conditions postrevolutionary consolidation of government is peaceful or violent. All we can say is that the range of violence seen in historical revolutions and their consolidation would also be possible in the terminal crisis of capitalism. The most dangerous possibility is that the prospect of anticapitalist revolution, seen by its enemies as the threat of violent change, would give rise to a neofascist solution: an authoritarian regime supported by popular movements nostalgic to save capitalism, which would carry out enough redistribution so that the massively unemployed population would be kept alive, but under a police state constantly on the alert for subversion. We do not know how to estimate the chances of an attempted fascist solution, compared to a democratic postcapitalism. Wallerstein has conjectured that it may be 50–50.
But a favorable alternative may be quite likely: the institutional transformation from capitalism to a noncapitalist system of political economy—an institutional revolution—could come about through peaceful political process. If the crisis of capitalism is severe enough—a majority of the population structurally unemployed, robots and computers doing almost all the income-generating work but owned by a small number of wealthy capitalists, the economy in deep depression—at some point a political party could win electoral power on an anticapitalist program. Some governing party or coalition would have to replace capitalist production, distribution, and finances with a system that redistributes wealth outside the system of labor market and profit-taking.
This kind of electoral politics might seem far-fetched in the political atmosphere on the present—just twenty years after the fall of the Soviet bloc, coinciding with an enormous market expansion in nominally communist China and with the triumph of market ideologies everywhere. But political moods are prone to wide swings every twenty or thirty years: think back through each twenty-year segment of the 20th century. If the structural trend to technological displacement continues to deepen, a vast reversal of opinion another twenty years into the future is not at all unlikely.
A peaceful institutional revolution is possible. The deeper the structural crisis of the middle class, the more mobilization for electoral politics is facilitated. Along that route lies the prospect for a relatively nonviolent transition.
COMPLEXITIES OF HOW STRUCTURAL CRISIS WILL UNFOLD
The world is the product of multiple intersecting causalities. Everything is clothed in particularities of locality, sequence, and memory. Thus the structural crisis of capitalism will have many variations. What is at issue here are not the names, dates, and dramas, but the big dimensions of complication—major processes that can drastically change the nature of the crisis as capitalism becomes too self-destructive to continue.
A host of processes and problems will complicate the future: aging populations, explosion of medical costs, ethnic and religious conflict, ecological crisis, huge intercontinental migrations, perhaps wars of varying scope. To keep the focus on the central point: how will these affect the technological displacement crisis? Some of them will exacerbate it; some will add pressures for state breakdown and thus raise the chances of revolutions, the rolling of multiple sixes on the dice. Will any of these complications turn back technological displacement, increasing middle class employment, creating new jobs to offset automation and computerization, and in sufficient degree that capitalism will be saved? Let us consider a brief checklist of complications, with these questions in mind.
Global unevenness. The mechanisms driving capitalist crisis operate with different intensity in different countries and regions of the world. An advanced crisis of technological displacement of middle-class work in the United States or in western Europe would not necessarily coincide with the depth of such crisis in other parts of the globe—China, India, Brazil, or other places of significance in future decades. Is it possible to have a successful anticapitalist transformation inside particular states while the rest of the world remains capitalist? This would depend on the size and weight of that particular state’s economy in the world; revolutions in small states with minor economies would have little influence and might easily be overturned; those in big states with a large proportion of the world-economy would be more robust and trend-setting. Given the tendency for militarily strong regimes to intervene in other regimes, to protect their own economic interests, and to support their ideological cousins, the staggered sequence of anticapitalist regime changes could lead to interventions of the sort we have seen in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring. If there were a massive economic crisis in the United States, for instance, or the EU, in the year 2030, resulting in a shift to an anticapitalist regime, possibly some other still-thriving capitalist state (China, perhaps) would intervene to stop it. Whether such interventions are successful or not will depend on geopolitical factors of relative resources, logistical extension, and geographical position [Collins 1995].