Of crucial importance is timing. The most careful predictions about the ecological crisis suggest that major destruction of human habitat would occur around AD 2100. It is at this point that sea levels will rise enough to inundate low-lying coastal areas; agriculture will be ruined in major populated regions; water shortages will become dire. But projections for full-scale capitalist crisis come sooner: around AD 2030–2050. The capitalist crisis will have priority, because it will hit crisis proportions first.
THE POSTCAPITALIST FUTURE AND POSSIBLE OSCILLATIONS AMONG ECONOMIC REGIMES
What comes after capitalism would have to redistribute massively from current arrangements of the private holding of wealth generated by capitalist enterprises and financial maneuverings; such redistribution would go to the large majority of the population displaced by the computerization and mechanism of all forms of labor, including much of what is now managerial and professional employment. The program of redistribution would also be the occasion to take control of what are now the financial institutions underpinning the disastrous trajectory of capitalism. Perhaps such postcapitalist institutions could be constituted in a more decentralized form than the classic 20th century experiments with state socialism.
Will the end of capitalism be the end of history? Certainly not. It will not eliminate politics. Hopefully postcapitalist regimes will be democratic; certainly there will be stronger efforts this time around, recognizing that democracy is not simply a bulwark of capitalism, but has value in itself. And politics always has the potential for new changes of direction.
Will the anticapitalist revolution make people happy? Durkheim [1893] argued that the level of happiness in human history is always about the same (perhaps we should say the level of unhappiness); new situations create new desires and new levels of comparison. In any case, conflict is intrinsic to human organization. One thing we have learned from the history of socialist regimes in the 20th century is that they have their own struggles, and that we should not expect too much from them. Chiefly they have the merit of not being capitalist, the merit of escaping from capitalist crisis.
I would not even predict that anticapitalist regimes would be permanent. Quite possibly they themselves will change, either through electoral shifts, or future revolutions another fifty to one-hundred years down the road. There is no deep reason why socialist regimes should be more peaceful than capitalist ones. As Max Weber argued, all organizations of state power strive for power prestige, when opportunities in the world-arena exist; and the military-expense path to revolution can be repeated again—in fact it was what brought down the U.S.S.R. [Collins 1995]. Far from being the end of history, future centuries may see a series of oscillations between capitalist and socialist forms, and perhaps others not yet envisioned.
It has been argued that the experience of state socialist regimes has been too unpleasant, not to say disastrous, for them to become attractive again. That has to be put in balance with the potential horrendousness of a future capitalism where a tiny elite owns all the big businesses and sells or operates all the computer equipment and the robots, leaving the great bulk of the population to scrap among themselves for jobs servicing the elite and their machines. I am not predicting the revival of utopian socialism with its grandiose hopes, but only a phase when political actors, recognizing the flaws of the alternatives, choose the escape route when one system becomes too crisis-ridden to bear. When capitalism gets bad enough, there will be turns to socialism. When state socialism has cleared up the problems for a while, its own onerous characteristics may well give rise to a reaction. Hence oscillations between the two kinds of systems of political economy, over future centuries.
Postcapitalism likely will not end all economic inequality. Past experience with socialist regimes shows they have cut the level of inequality by about one-half—compare Gini coefficients of socialist and capitalist societies, and the drastic increase in inequality following the downfall of the U.S.S.R. After socialism does something to fix the rampant inequality generated by capitalism, and to restore decent terms of employment to the majority, people may well become bored and disgruntled. Another fifty years down the line, there could be a repeat of the disenchantment with communism that took place in the 1980s. The centralized planned economy of the future may or may not be authoritarian; certainly it would have all the computerized technology, the robots, and means of coordination and surveillance to produce a heavy-handed social presence, even in its more benevolent forms. Power politics inside this kind of system will not go away, and that is another pathway toward future contention.
In addition to disgruntlement with future socialism, there would likely be rebirths of the market. If spaces are allowed inside a planned economy (and presumably in liberal, mixed forms there would be), trading networks would grow up, entrepreneurs would generate new enterprises, perhaps trumping centralized planning with their greater innovativeness. The snake in the garden, investment and finance, could make its reappearance, setting off new rounds of speculation and pyramiding meta-structures of financial manipulation. If socialist regimes are sufficiently democratic, capitalist movements might vote themselves back into office, and dismantle part or all of state direction of the economy. If the regimes are more authoritarian, the theory of revolution is back in play, waiting for circumstances that bring about state breakdown and openings for regime change. If in the distant future—for instance, the 22nd century, or the next—capitalism is restored, that too is not the end of history. If it is restored with the same tendencies to self-destruction as current capitalism, the world would see yet another repetition of swings between capitalist and anticapitalist arrangements of the economy.
In sum, the long-range future—however many centuries forward one can imagine—is likely to be a series of swings between the respective weaknesses of centralized state planning and rampant market economies. We are most certainly not looking at the emancipation of humanity, either way, but at a realistic oscillation between the horns of a socioeconomic dilemma.
CONCLUSION
I want to underline the schematic nature of my analysis. I have concentrated on a long-term structural trend in capitalist labor markets, which is at the crux of the growing inequality inside capitalism. The ongoing phase of high-tech innovation—computerization, robotization, the replacement of human communicative labor with machines—is in full swing today, and will surely become much more extreme with each passing decade. Fully advanced Artificial Intelligence does not yet exist that would closely mimic human capacities for flexible and creative cognition. The nearer AI gets to that standard, the higher the ranks of the workforce it will be able to replace. One can envision a future, perhaps less than fifty years from now, when almost all work is done by computers and robots, with a few human technicians and repair personnel. Robots are the equivalent of working-class manual labor, and factory robots have already contributed to displacing the bulk of decently paying manufacturing jobs. More advanced robots, with capacity for mobility and equipped with sensors and onboard computers, could develop into humanoid robots that would take over upper-working-class and middle-class skilled work, and then displace managers and expert professionals as well. This will not resemble the thrilling fantasies of science fiction. The real threat of the future is not some Frankensteinian revolt of the robots, but the last stage of technological displacement of labor on behalf of a tiny capitalist class of robot-owners.