At LARB: Chris Nealon on the End of Capitalism

At Los Angeles Review of Books, poet and scholar Chris Nealon considers the intellectual left and the possibility of the end of capitalism, reflecting on the book Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, by Paul Mason (FSG). (Nealon is the author of The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century.) “There is,” as Nealon quotes Mason, “no final crisis of capitalism”:

On the one hand, Mason is quite explicit that he does not imagine a simple, automatic, or necessarily peaceful transition to something beyond capital. He believes in taking crisis and class struggle seriously. On the other hand, he wants to distance himself from a leftist tradition of imagining each new crisis of capitalism as necessarily terminal. He is neither a techno-futurist nor an apocalypticist. Instead, he tries to tell a better story about the history of capitalism than what is available from either the oblivious optimism of mainstream economics or from apocalyptic-messianic strains of Marxism.

Postcapitalism’s solution is an eclectic blend of borrowings from dissident strains in 20th-century Marxist thought. Drawing on the work of Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev, Mason argues that we can usefully break down capitalist history into four-plus roughly 50-year cycles of accumulation, which are centered on a struggle to balance what Marx called the “forces” and the “relations” of production: that is, a struggle to pit technological advances against working-class power so as to maximize profitability without making the working class too poor to reproduce itself. These cycles, Mason suggests, can be intuitively understood as ages of technological development, though that’s only part of the story. The four periods run from the 1790s to 1848 (the era of the rise of factories, steam, and canal transport); from 1848 to the 1890s (the age of the railroad and telegraph); from the late 19th century to 1945 (the birth of mass production, wide use of electricity, and the rise of the “scientific management” of the work process); and from 1945 to the 2008 crisis (the rise of the transistor, mass production for consumers, and plastics). What drives the transition from one cycle to the next is the way the conflict between capitalists and workers reaches a crisis pitch that obliges capitalists to slough off unprofitable enterprise, regroup, and assemble new techniques of accumulation.

This “long wave” approach is supported by a great deal of research among historians of capitalism, though the Soviet state considered it heretical, since it implied that capitalism was capable of potentially endless mutation rather than prone to collapse.

Fascinating stuff. Read it all at LARB.