How many times does a mode of production die, and how many times is it resurrected? In the historiography of feudalism, we are well acquainted with the designation “Second Feudal Age” to denote the era marked by the “expansion of the money economy,” just as the entrenchment of export-oriented corvée labor across Central and Eastern Europe—predominantly in Bohemia (largely modern-day Czechia), Poland, and Russia—is termed the “second serfdom.” One can venture even further back and touch upon the ancient world: the southern plantation owners of North America were exceptionally adept at placing slavery at the service of the capitalist world market. While the coexistence of divergent modes of surplus-labor appropriation is hardly negligible in defining the overarching facade of a mode of production, it does not alter the fundamental trajectory to which it remains tethered.

Our subject is capitalism and what it does—and does not—resemble. This is intimately bound up with capitalism’s recurring cycle of death and resurrection. Particularly in the wake of the 2008 crisis, the literature chronicling the demise of capitalism spans thousands of pages. What is more, it is often impossible to discern whether what we have been handed is a death certificate or a certificate of inheritance. For this is hardly the first time the death of capitalism has been proclaimed. Setting aside revolutionary epochs—such as Europe in 1848, Russia in 1917, Germany and Hungary in 1918, France and Italy between 1945 and 1947, or Southern Europe and South Asia between 1968 and 1975—prognoses that capitalism would, by virtue of its own internal dysfunctions, yield to another mode of production, specifically socialism, were by no means unique to the pre-1848 optimism of Marx and Engels. In the wake of the 1848 Revolutions, and especially in fin-de-siècle Germany where the labor movement attained its zenith, the pessimistic conviction that “liberal indolence” was hurtling our world toward socialism held sway even among the quintessential mainstream intellectuals of the ruling classes. Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Pareto may be counted among them. In the twentieth century, a cohort of economists and sociologists—chief among them Schumpeter—believed that free-market, competitive capitalism had drawn to a close, and that advanced capitalist nations were now governed in a “non-capitalist” fashion under the hegemony of monopolies, colossal trusts, central planning, welfare provisions, and the “socialization” of the means of production, drifting toward a form of socialism.(1)

Depending on one’s disposition and economic creed, one could affirm or deplore this trajectory; one might even argue for its sheer inevitability.(2) This sentiment was palpable even in the libertarian backlash against the New Deal in the United States: a year prior to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Rose Wilder Lane, author of The Discovery of Freedom, extolled the libertarian ethos of the American frontier mentality, lauded its struggle against an ever-encroaching state bureaucracy, and suggested that this spirit could inspire her contemporaries in their battle against the New Deal, adding: “Social Security is National Socialism.”(3)

Thus, the “welfare state”—which had its genesis prior to the Second World War but burgeoned in its aftermath under the aegis of American hegemony and the systemic pressure of communism—signified, for some, the very demise of capitalism.(4) At the risk of repetition: just as there were those who celebrated this development, there were also those who denounced it, as evidenced by the aforementioned libertarians. Yet nearly everyone was convinced that the end of capitalism, of laissez-faire liberalism, or of “the world as we know it,” had arrived.

A Dialogue with Wolfgang Streeck on the End of Capitalism

It is well known that the notion of the “end of history” first gained currency during this period. European intellectuals spanning disparate political persuasions, such as Alexandre Kojève, Arnold Gehlen, and Raymond Aron, formulated ideas around a common motif. Subsequently, the Frankfurt School, and indeed Fredric Jameson in his Postmodernism, explored the cultural reverberations of this very conception.(5)

What did they mean? Particularly in Europe, the welfare state, full employment, tripartite compromises between labor, capital, and the state, a thriving consumer culture and society, and democratic institutions had all stabilized; meanwhile, the gold-pegged dollar system alongside institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN had underwritten international trade and security. American and European societies were expanding in tranquil prosperity. The boom-and-bust cycle that had historically scarred capitalism appeared to have finally broken.(6)

There were, of course, those who regarded this veneer of order and stability as an illusion. Integrating his own personal recollections, German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck writes that, owing to Adorno’s melancholic disposition, he always believed the scales would tip (or that once unsettled, equilibrium might never be restored). Streeck himself remains convinced that social orders are fundamentally fragile and unstable, and that “nasty surprises” are an ever-present contingency.

Streeck has reflected deeply on the crisis of capitalism and the potential pathways out of it. Right at the opening of his book How Will Capitalism End?, he observes:

“Capitalism has always been an improbable social formation, rife with conflict and contradiction, therefore permanently unstable and mutable, and historically contingent and fragile, highly dependent on events and institutions that could be supportive as well as constraining. Capitalist society may be defined in short as a ‘progressive’ society in the sense of Adam Smith and the Enlightenment – one that ties its ‘progress’ to the continuous and limitless production and accumulation of productive capital, turning the private vice of material greed into a public virtue through the invisible hand of the market and the visible hand of the state.”

Noting that the tensions and contradictions of the capitalist “political-economic configuration” keep the specter of structural collapse and social crisis perpetually on the agenda, Streeck argues that securing economic and social stability under this mode of production hinges on exceptional conditions: technological innovations emerging at just the right time, perpetual economic growth, and the like.

In another work (Buying Time), Streeck designates the postwar order as “democratic capitalism,” portraying this era as a tenuous equilibrium sustained through concessions and perpetually liable to unravel. This form of capitalism was afflicted by impermanence and harbored its own crisis within its bosom.(7) Stating that the history of modern capitalism can be written as a “sequence of crises,” the German author highlights that the system weathered these crises only at the cost of profound transformations of its economic and social institutions, staving off bankruptcy through “unpredictable and often unintended ways.” In his view, “Viewed in this light, that the capitalist order still exists may appear not so impressive after all, given that it has spent so much time on the brink of ruin, that it had to change so much, and that it had so frequently to rely on contingent support from the outside where its own resources failed to do the work.” (How Will Capitalism End?, p. 17)

Streeck argues that the “gradual and 180-degree turnaround” from this “democratic capitalism” to neoliberalism was brought about by the crisis of the 1970s and the policy responses thereto. We will return to this, but several objections must first be registered. There appears to be a fundamental flaw in Streeck’s conception of the postwar “golden age” ascribed to capitalism. First, it flattens the undulating, tumultuous trajectory of the golden age into a uniform continuum; yet, for example, the “German miracle” did not materialize until the 1950s, the price and currency reform of 1948 met with fierce workers’ resistance, and the miracle was realized only courtesy of the Korean War. Second, and relatedly, it overlooks the continuous state of vigilance maintained against the systemic threat of communism in Western Europe. One need only recall the overt and covert interventions deployed against armed communist parties poised on the threshold of power, particularly in France and Italy. Third, the civil rights movement in the United States, which began to wane after 1968, had gathered steam in the latter half of the 1950s and developed explicitly anticapitalist vanguards. Fourth, Third World movements and the era of decolonization were convulsing both the former colonies and the metropolises long before the capitalist crisis erupted. Consequently, beneath the veneer of “stability,” a revolutionary ferment simmered across the globe.(8)

Nevertheless, it is evident that something shifted profoundly in the 1970s. The return of volatility and stagflation in economic activity dealt a devastating blow to the tranquil facade of the “golden age”—thrusting its fragility into plain view. According to Streeck, capitalism’s response to the crisis of the 1970s was an exercise in “buying time”: first through inflation, then via sovereign debt (privatized Keynesianism), followed by the deregulation and expansion of private debt markets, and ultimately through the absorption of sovereign and banking debt by central banks. In other words, money was used to purchase mass loyalty secured successively by inflation, public deficits, and household credit. Hand in hand with the crisis came a transmutation from Keynesianism into “Neo-Hayekianism.” Casting his critique in apocalyptic terms, Streeck identifies the three horsemen of contemporary capitalism’s apocalypse as (economic) stagnation, debt, and inequality.

The ruling classes responded to the strike waves and wage-hike militancy of 1968 and its aftermath with an inflationary escape. The pie ostensibly grew (“money illusion”). As inflation persisted, holders of monetary assets withheld investment or fled into other currencies. By the 1980s, the restoration of monetary stability was wrought through the uncompromising severity of Reagan and Thatcher: the manufacturing of “sound money” in exchange for mass unemployment and the crushing of trade-union resistance at any cost.

Streeck asserts that it was capital, rather than labor, that triggered the crisis of the 1970s and mounted the primary offensive. This claim strikes me as questionable. Indeed, this Adorno-inflected pessimism in Streeck evolves into the thesis that capitalism post-2008 is bound to destroy itself. If the decline in profit rates at the close of the 1960s merely implies identifying capital as the reactive and crisis-generating element, I have no quarrel with that. However, when one considers that it was the ruling classes—above all the United States—who repelled the volcanic turbulence of the 1970s by mounting an immense counter-offensive, we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that this was a one-sided affair. Surveying the developments unfolding concurrently in Europe, the United States, and across the colonial world, the imperialist metropolises were seized by genuine panic that their world might collapse.

The Long Shadow of the Last Crisis

“The instruments used to master legitimacy crises by manufacturing growth illusions now appear exhausted; in particular, the monetary alchemy produced over the past two decades with the aid of an unchained financial industry has finally become too perilous to dare deploy once more to buy time. Barring another growth miracle, the capitalism of the future will have to manage without debt-financed consumerism. The utopia of contemporary crisis management, moreover, is to complete—by political means—the already far-advanced depoliticization of the political economy, and to anchor it firmly within reorganized nation-states subordinate to the control of an international governmental and financial diplomacy insulated from democratic participation, populated by citizens who, after decades of hegemonic re-education, are expected to have learned to regard the distributional outcomes of unregulated markets as fair, or at least devoid of alternatives.” (Buying Time, p. 85)

The demise of debt-financed consumerism; the rigid interlocking of reorganized nation-states alongside populations pacified into stupor under the dictates of finance capital—the policy apparatus deployed in response to the crisis of the 1970s and imposed upon the peoples of the world had reached its terminus with the 2008 crash. Streeck designates this as the “transition to the international consolidation state.” Moreover, unlike past crisis prescriptions, this transition is to unfold “without anesthesia” (p. 147). Fiscal consolidation proceeds in lockstep with the propaganda that the state will thereby reclaim the reins against the markets. The ruling elites of post-crisis Europe, epitomized by austerity, solicit consent by gesturing toward a promise situated in the distant future. Such is the pledge of neoliberalism: fiscal consolidation and discipline, austerity, robust growth, moderate inflation, and ultimately deliverance from the “tyranny of the markets.” Therein lies the tactical advantage of deregulatory policies in the face of crisis: long-term promises, counterbalanced—whenever those promises fail to materialize—by the pretext of structural obstacles that allegedly prevented deregulation from ever being “fully” implemented in the real world…

But is it still possible to “buy time” in the wake of the financial crash? Streeck terms this granting “a second spring to debt capitalism,” pointing to crisis therapies anchored in fictitious money. In his contribution to Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013), sociologist Randall Collins delineates five historical “escapes” that previously enabled capitalism to salvage itself, arguing that these exit routes are now sealed: i) compensating for technologically displaced labor; ii) geographic market expansion; iii) the escalation of finance, both speculative and “real”; iv) state intervention to absorb shortfalls in private employment; and v) educational credential inflation functioning as an engine of class mobility. For Collins, all five escape hatches are now shut, and capitalism has reached the end of its tether.

Rather than selecting one crisis scenario from among many and prioritizing it above the rest, Streeck’s response is a “diagnosis of multimorbidities, where different disorders coexist and occasionally reinforce one another.” Contending that numerous vulnerabilities have become acute simultaneously while many remedies have “either been exhausted or obliterated,” Streeck writes: “The end of capitalism can then be imagined as death by a thousand cuts, or by a multiplicity of ailments each becoming more incurable because they all demand treatment at the same time.” (How Will Capitalism End?, p. 29) Consequently, there is no need for a revolutionary alternative to overthrow capitalism or utopian visions of a post-capitalist society. Today, capitalism is disintegrating of its own accord, collapsing under the weight of its internal contradictions, precisely because it has vanquished all its alternatives!

“What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a prolonged interregnum – not a new world-system equilibrium à la Wallerstein, but an extended period of social entropy or disorder (and for this reason precisely a period of uncertainty and indeterminacy). How a society will and can turn for a significant period of time into less than a society_, into a_ post-social society or an ephemeral society_, so to speak, and whether and how it will ever recover to become a full-fledged society again, are interesting questions for sociological theory.”_ (p. 30)

According to one well-known adage, capitalism had rendered itself so devoid of alternatives that it became easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Streeck upends this aphorism, though not in the way one might expect: he equates the end of capitalism with the end of society itself. It recalls the myth of the “Dark Ages” following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Curiously enough, the remedy (or katechon) Streeck devises to forestall this demise—which arrives in the form of a long, drawn-out whimper (or apocalypse)—converges, albeit for different ends, with those on the Old Continent who advocate fracturing supranational sovereignties to salvage Western civilization: exiting the European Monetary Union (EMU), or more commonly, the Eurozone.

Indeed, the post-capitalist (or post-apocalyptic) landscape imagined by the author evokes cyberpunk-libertarian fantasies. In his view, a society in the post-capitalist interregnum will be “a deinstitutionalized or under-institutionalized society” where “expectations can be stabilized only temporarily by local improvisation,” and “for this very reason, such a society will be essentially ungovernable.”

“Contemporary capitalism, then, appears as a society whose system integration has been critically and irreversibly weakened; the continuation of capital accumulation will therefore have to rely – for an indefinite medium term – on nothing other than the opportunism of individualized individuals, collectively incapacitated as they struggle to defend themselves against accidental and structural assaults on their social and economic status.” (p. 31)

Moreover, even within this post-capitalist imaginary, the burden of organizing daily social existence at the micro level need not fall solely upon the individual. Streeck speaks only of the individual, yet he overlooks an array of sub-national institutions. Hierarchies of family, religion, gender, and race are summoned to duty by Silicon Valley-style capital and its ideologues to regiment the masses in the face of this invoked apocalypse. Yet Streeck hits upon an accurate observation: in the behavioral software of this non-society of the interregnum, the “neoliberal ethos of competitive self-improvement” has become thoroughly internalized. One might term this the capillary infiltration of Social Darwinism throughout the interregnum society. This pseudo-sociality, radiating outward from the individual and articulated along the axes of family, religion, gender, and race, can reproduce itself within a zero-sum game plagued by economic stagnation only by rendering itself more competitive than the rest. Pre-modern socialities facilitate the adaptation of individuals to the imperatives of “economic necessity” in the post-apocalyptic landscape of late capitalism. “Capitalism in an interregnum, stripped of sociality,” writes Streeck, “relies on the improvisational performances of structurally self-centered, socially disorganized, and politically disempowered individuals.” (p. 67)

Financialization Against Neoliberalism

Yet could it not be that the emergent order following the interregnum is being organized on the bedrock of a virulent “hyper-liberalism” and Social Darwinism? Is it not plausible that among the ruling classes’ escape vectors, the traditional architecture of promissory pledges has been superseded by a sugarcoated narrative of defeat, mediated through hyper-financialization?

In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou investigates how finance and “populism” have converged and materialized in figures like Trump and Modi. The author highlights the potency of financial speculation, whose core tenets of swift maneuvering and “governing through chaos” stand opposed to neoliberal technocratic rationality and its “liberal slowness” in decision-making. Invoking Max Weber’s analysis of speculation, Komporozos-Athanasiou notes that the German sociologist did not condemn speculation outright as “immoral gambling”; rather, he viewed it as both encompassing and transcending the “instrumental rationality of homo economicus”:

“Speculation may at first glance appear as the embodiment of capitalism’s ‘mimetic,’ ‘atavistic,’ and ‘substantive irrationality.’ Yet for Weber, the speculator is a fascinating, ‘charismatic,’ and socially embedded figure who synthesizes both tradition and personal authority, both passions and interests.”

An affirmative orientation toward risk and uncertainty constitutes, according to the author, the hallmark of speculative communities. An ethnographic study conducted among Tea Party supporters in Louisiana offers crucial insights into the nexus between the “common folk,” finance, and speculation. Party members appeared to reject the neoliberal logic that envisions risk-taking as an investment toward one’s precarious future. Their political instincts did not seem to align with the narrative of an “atomized and anxious entrepreneurial” subjectivity so prevalent in critiques of financialization. Although Tea Party adherents held little sympathy for interventionist measures aimed at “risk management” and “regulation,” their responses to the radical uncertainties confronting them departed from the premise that all problems possess a solution—a conviction the author considers “in sync with the fantasy of the neoliberal mind.”

Thus, speculation can be understood as a complex reaction to the precariousness of economic life under capitalism: an attempt to confront uncertainty through both hedging and wagering. Derivative instruments and their markets appear pivotal in this regard: a derivative is fundamentally a promissory document—a contract resting upon projections of the future that reflects a deliberate anticipation of incalculable unknowns and future unpredictability. In this light, derivatives break free from the “prison of probabilistic thinking” and enter the wild domain of “contingencies.” And here lies the most crucial juncture for our inquiry: one of the seminal transformations wrought by derivative markets is the inversion of neoliberalism’s own logic of promise. To quote Komporozos-Athanasiou directly:

“In politics as in derivative markets, the future no longer typically holds a promise of redemption that legitimates present sacrifice (the logic of austerity); rather, it increasingly signifies a space-time of negation. Speculation can thus be understood as an act of endorsing a broken promise—or, put differently, entering into an intentionally breached contract.”

In a world where labor is precaritized, housing grows increasingly unattainable, household and sovereign debt soar to astronomical heights, and political volatility becomes the baseline norm, finance is the escape hatch proffered by the ruling classes against this tangled web of “radical uncertainties.” Yet, as is evident, there remains a fundamental continuity. Indeed, according to Komporozos-Athanasiou, this contemporary “aristo-populist” alliance has been enabled precisely by the decoupling of finance’s speculative imagination from neoliberal technocratic reason. The collectivization of the sense of uncertainty has prompted the re-summoning of stabilizing narratives and reassuring political mythologies. Consequently, the ascendance of nativism, ethno-nationalism, and gender hierarchies proceeds hand in hand with the vanguard of financial (and digital) technologies—to say nothing of fetishizing our radical ignorance of the future, conjoining an appetite for risk and fatalism with astrology and irrationalist tropes.(9)

Simultaneously infatuated with the future and imprisoned in the present. This is precisely what certain thinkers, who eagerly proclaim the definitive death of neoliberalism and depict capitalism as being, at best, in its death throes, offer to humanity. In their investigation into “financial eschatology,” Samman and Sgambati demonstrate that the self-iterating dynamics of finance capital implant a distinct form of eschatology squarely at the center of everyday life: a financialized eschatology founded upon the infinite circulation and leverage of debt. Nihilistic repetition and apocalyptic obsession operate as two intertwined, potent drives within this dynamic. Echoing Komporozos-Athanasiou, the uncertain future is envisioned as a “source of openness and change,” yet ubiquitously devolves into an “unfulfilled promise.” Indebtedness and the rolling over of debt constitute an endless loop, summoning the apocalypse. A lengthy quote, but well worth quoting:

“On the one hand, there is the mindless repetition involved in the tendency to manage, service, or invest in a debt obligation; on the other hand, the apocalyptic hope that sustains the entire enterprise—the idea that any debt sufficiently leveraged will one day be repaid. Historically speaking, the result is a paradoxical temporality wherein the infinite, cyclical qualities of financial society become the product of a contemporary eschatological imagination: an endless apocalypse based on the end of finance itself.”

Where finance is concerned, it is never Apocalypse Now, but rather Apocalypse Later. Economics is forced to speak the tongue of the Holy Scriptures. Because end-times anticipation commands both the present and the future, eschatology usurps the place of science. It is on these grounds that Samman and Sgambati justly critique Streeck’s explorations into the demise of capitalism as a form of “eschatological disappointment”: it is as though Streeck is rueful that a capitalism perpetually “buying time” stubbornly refuses to meet its end; yet “this time” is supposed to be different, and the system must yield to “something,” even if not to socialism. The crisis that erupted in 1973 and the protracted malaise of 2008 allegedly herald a protracted, terminal depression; capitalism is supposedly gasping its last breath.

Yet, according to the authors, money cannot exist without the co-presence of an unpayable debt that can never be extinguished. The perpetual impossibility of clearance, redemption, or amortization means that Judgment Day is indefinitely deferred. Bearing the full weight of the implication, the authors pose these provocative questions: “What if contemporary capitalism is not attempting to escape long-term stagnation through further debt accumulation? What if the monumental swell of global debt is not a fragile house of cards doomed to collapse? What if the ‘autumn of the system’ signifies not a winter death followed by a vernal rebirth, but an unending winter—a dark age condemned to permanent indebtedness?”

The “final reckoning” between creditors and debtors never takes place “today,” but always “tomorrow.” Because “today” is perpetually the “eve of tomorrow,” the contemporary apparatus of finance feeds daily on apocalyptic lore, “generating and staging millions of endings and terminal points around which countless lives and livelihoods are organized.” While the poor must labor today and service their debts today lest they die bankrupt tomorrow, the wealthy demand the deferral of the apocalypse until tomorrow for the sake of the revenues to be captured today; yet all the while, they know their fortune hangs on borrowed time, harboring the gnawing awareness that one day—perhaps sooner than tomorrow—the hour of reckoning might strike. Yet they have no intention of ever settling accounts. To this end, they flee to far-flung redoubts or perceive the opportunistic silver lining embedded in fantasies of extinction: when the apocalypse strikes, the debts of the wealthy will be wiped clean.(10)

Consequently, abandoning the pledge altogether—and indeed treating a broken promise as a mark of triumph—has become the trademark of the “exit” ideologies incubating in Silicon Valley and digital technology corridors. Nor should this be dismissed as a phenomenon confined to the fringes: across the globe, “post-neoliberal” politicians tread precisely this path. In their examination of how blockchain technologies and libertarian escapisms chart avenues of “new urbanism,” Lynch and Muñoz-Viso deploy the concept of “techno-political failure.” Analyzing the fiascos surrounding “charter cities” and “libertarian city” ventures, the researchers conclude that these escapist narratives trade in notions like the “sovereign individual” and the “opt-in state.” As these concepts become normalized and embedded within broader political discourse, they facilitate a “covert revolution” that erodes democratic norms and ideals. It is for this reason that the collapse of a seaborne “city” off the coast of Thailand is characterized as a “successful failure.”

***

I recount all this not to argue that an exit is impossible. On the contrary, my aim is to underscore that the narrative proclaiming capitalism’s autonomous, self-induced collapse is ideology in the most pejorative sense of the term. What is far more terrifying to the ruling classes is the prospect of capitalism exiting the historical stage through an upheaval stemming from its internal contradictions, yet irreducibly exceeding them. While capitalism’s molting—or the sheer prospect of its transmutation—is read by some as its death knell, the ruling classes weaponize this very perception against the oppressed. Such a sense of an ending induces the resource-starved dispossessed to enlist in the ruling classes’ scrambles for their piece of the pie. Indeed, the quest for an exit strategy spearheaded in the United States—at the apex of this global architecture—threatens to shatter the paradigm of the snake devouring its own tail. In the next essay, we shall embark on a historical excursion to examine American capitalism’s blueprint for escaping the apocalypse.

(1) In his periodization of capitalism, Sombart distinguished between early (merchant), high (industrial), and late capitalism, anticipating Ernest Mandel’s taxonomy as early as the 1920s and 1930s. Hilferding, for his part, viewed the transition from industrial capitalism to the hegemony of finance capital as a transition to something other than capitalism. Meanwhile, James Burnham’s seminal study, The Managerial Revolution, would serve as an intellectual wellspring for all subsequent theses arguing that “organized” capitalism, having undergone bureaucratization, had ceased to be capitalism at all.

(2) Though we shall address this in detail in the subsequent essay, it cannot pass unmentioned: just as (former) Southern slaveholders in the United States viewed desegregation as the end of the world, libertarian polemicists and members of Congress who decried Puerto Rico’s postwar “social-democratic” constitution as an invitation to catastrophe belonged to the very same chorus.

(3) We know that Isabel Paterson—who, alongside Lane and Ayn Rand, constituted the “Three Musketeers” of American libertarianism—harbored identical sentiments regarding social security. Paterson was outspoken enough to proudly assert that, for the minimal-state frontiersman, the only good Indian was indeed a dead Indian.

(4) Lest this essay become overly unwieldy, I deliberately bypass the heated contemporary debates surrounding neo-feudalism, an issue I hope to address in a future piece. For now, it suffices to note that theorists of neo-feudalism may well be conflating rent—their primary economic category—with, say, the turnover time of capital.

(5) One can detect in Jameson the implication that the uneven development of capitalism—or the incomplete realization of real subsumption under capital, as analyzed in Capital—in other words, a historical epoch characterized by the uneven coexistence of disparate modes of production within a hierarchical arrangement, furnishes the necessary fertile ground for revolutionary breakthroughs and the projection of a revolutionary horizon capable of transcending capitalism.

(6) Wolfgang Streeck posits that economic growth under this regime was secured by underwriting aggregate demand. By extending this premise to his diagnosis of crisis, Streeck arrives at an underconsumptionist model. It goes without saying that this formulation has been subjected to robust Marxist critique.

(7) According to Streeck, the neo-Marxist crisis theories emerging from the Frankfurt School around 1968 paid virtually no heed to banks and financial markets because no one had anticipated the “financialization of modern capitalism.” Moreover, these theories fetishized technocratic methods and Keynesian instruments, envisaging a “welfare machine that could be operated in a balanced, crisis-free manner” through regularized corporatist cooperation between states and enterprises. These prognoses failed to hold:

“While the material reproduction of capitalist industrial society thus appeared secure and the crisis tendencies of capitalist development banished, not a trace could be found, even in the longest run, of the ‘pauperization’ of the working class still anticipated by orthodoxy.” (Buying Time, p. 56)

(8) Revolutionaries in the colonies viewed their wars of national liberation as a direct continuation of the anti-fascist struggle of the Second World War, equating Britain, France, or the United States with Nazi Germany.

(9) Komporozos-Athanasiou highlights the affinity that financial titans like J.P. Morgan had for astrology, occultism, and agnostic ideologies. Today, astrology applications rank among the prime frontiers of venture capital investment in financial and digital technologies. The prominent astrology platform Co-Star operates under the banner of “Hyper-personalized, Real-time Horoscopes” and explicitly proclaims the necessity for “irrationality to invade our techno-rationalist way of life.”

(10) The libertarian and neoliberal literature dedicated to profiting from impending financial collapse is voluminous. Quinn Slobodian, whose work I cited extensively in an earlier series, provides abundant examples in his Crack-Up Capitalism. One might also recall “short selling”: a critical financial mechanism that demonstrates how astronomical gains can be harvested not merely from price volatility, but from market crashes themselves.

Works Cited:

Amin Samman and Stefano Sgambati, “Financial Eschatology and the Libidinal Economy of Leverage”, Theory, Culture & Society, 40(3), 103-121.

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World, The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Wolfgang Streeck, Satın Alınan Zaman Demokratik Kapitalizmin Gecikmiş Krizi, çev. Kerem Kabadayı, Koç Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2016, İstanbul.

Wolfgang Streeck, Kapitalizm Nasıl Sona Erecek? Aksayan Bir Sistem Üzerine Yazılar, çev. Bülent Doğan, Tellekt, 2021, İstanbul.