Whatever the details of the technologized future turn out to be, the structural trend—the technological displacement of labor—pushes toward capitalist crisis, over and above whatever short-term, cyclical or contingent crises occur. This tendency toward increasing inequality also will undercut consumer markets, and thus eventually make capitalism unsustainable. Schematically the only way to solve the crisis will be to replace capitalism with a noncapitalist system, which means socialist ownership and strong central regulation and planning. How and where the transition will occur is much more historically singular and complicated than my theoretical scheme.
The bottom line remains: technological displacement of the middle class will bring the downfall of capitalism, in places where it is now dominant, before the 21st century is over. Whether these transitions will be peaceful or horrific remains to be seen.
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3
THE END MAY BE NIGH, BUT FOR WHOM?
Michael Mann
INTRODUCTION
Historical sociologists like myself are good at predicting the past, but the future is another matter. It is especially difficult to predict the future of major social institutions like the nation-state or capitalism. It becomes easier if one believes that the institution in question is a “system” with its own internal logic of development, its own cycles, its own contradictions. Then we could identify the current logic of development and project a likely future. Many do believe this is possible in the case of capitalism. Neoclassical economists believe that capitalism involves regular business cycles with an inherent tendency to move toward equilibrium. So after the present difficulties of capitalism, there will come recovery, then another crisis followed by another recovery, all probably on an overall upward trajectory of development. Those who perceive deeper, less frequent but more threatening cycles, like Kondratieff or Schumpeter, have also seen them as having some internal regularity and (in the case of Kondratieff) predictability. Even Keynes, who regarded the concept of equilibrium with some skepticism, did not deny that in the long run it would be reestablished, though with a little help from the state. These models tend to convey the image of capitalism as eternal (though not Schumpeter). Marxists also see capitalism as having an inner logic of development, but they see it—as they see all modes of production—as possessing systemic contradictions which will eventually bring it down.
The systemic element is explicit in what is called world-systems theory, whose major theorist is Immanuel Wallerstein. The only difficult part of prediction for such Marxists and systems theorists lies in the question of what will succeed it (for many of them have lost their confidence that the future is socialist). Since most intellectuals pontificating about capitalism come from the West, and since Western capitalism is obviously experiencing contemporary difficulties, doom scenarios for capitalism are currently increasing in popularity.
I wish I could share these confident visions of the future, whether optimistic or pessimistic. There are three reasons why I cannot. First, the main obstacle is my general model of human society. I do not conceive of societies as systems but as multiple, overlapping networks of interaction, of which four networks—ideological, economic, military and political power relations—are the most important. Geopolitical relations can be added to the four as a distinctive mix of military and political power, the mix varying between what are conventionally called “hard” and “soft” geopolitics. Each of these four or five sources of power may have an internal logic or tendency of development, so that it might be possible, for example, to identify tendencies toward equilibrium, cycles, or contradictions within capitalism, just as one might identify comparable tendencies within the other sources of social power. Take, for example, the cycles of attack versus defense, or mobility versus solidity, or the continuous escalation of firepower, all of which are internal tendencies of military power relations; or the long-term growth of the modern state, or the replacement of empires by nation-states, which are predominantly tendencies internal to political power relations. Ideologies, however, have distinct cycles of development, according to whether a dominant ideology seems to “work” or not, and which of the alternative ideologies currently on offer as a solution to crisis is adopted.