Does Capitalism Have a Future?

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Coming decades will deliver surprising shocks and huge challenges. Some of them will look new and some quite old. Many will bring unprecedented political dilemmas and difficult choices. This may well begin to happen soon and will certainly shape the adult lives of those who are young at present. But that, we contend, is not necessarily or only bad. Opportunities to do things differently from past generations will also be arising in the decades ahead. In this book we explore and debate, on the basis of our sociological knowledge of world history, what those challenges and opportunities will most likely be. At bottom, most troubling is that with the end of the Cold War almost three decades ago it has become unfashionable—even embarrassing—to discuss possible world futures and especially the prospects of capitalism.

Our quintet gathered to write this unusual book because something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession, which might in retrospect seem only a prologue to a period of deeper troubles and transformations. Immanuel Wallerstein explains the rationale for predicting the breakdown of the capitalist system. Over the next three or four decades capitalists of the world, overcrowding the global markets and hard pressed on all sides by the social and ecological costs of doing business, may find it simply impossible to make their usual investment decisions. In the last five centuries capitalism has been the cosmopolitan and explicitly hierarchical world-market economy where the elite operators, favorably located at its geographical core, were in a position to reap large and reasonably secure profits.

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