The Tragedy of Capital and the Re-Opening of Futurity
Richard W. Coughlin
Capitalism once promised futurity. In his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren, Keynes rejected the economic pessimism of the era and argued that capitalism was on the cusp of overcoming scarcity and economic necessity. The major challenge of life would not be survival, but the creation of meaning in a post-materialist world. As we approach the centennial of Keynes’ essay, the promise of futurity appears increasingly bleak. One particularly bleak forecast emerges with William Robinson’s Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (2025). Robinson’s book can be situated within a proliferating literature of capitalist decline, such as Wolfgang Streek’s How Will Capitalism End (2016), Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism (2022), Malm and Carton’s Overshoot (2024). For each of these texts, the problem of the present is that capitalism is spinning out of control, dissolving its own material foundations of existence. The tragedy in all of this is that capital, in developing itself, destroys the world. Capital becomes the catastrophic telos of history unless there is enough class consciousness in the world to direct another outcome - and about this prospect, Robinson is skeptical.
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The tragedy of capital is implicit in the very logic of capitalism. Marx has already captured much of this logic. Capital would consume and dispossess labor. The ongoing logic of accumulation that would destroy all precapitalist societies and then progressively realize itself through the exploitation of labor and the consignment of workers to structural irrelevance as capital absorbs and expels labor power. In Robinson’s account, this outcome has already materialized in the emergence of a “surplus humanity,” increasingly redundant to the needs of capital. A similar fate has befallen the natural world. The 1972 Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth, envisioned the limits to growth while the neoliberal governance served as the midwife of environmental overshoot. By 2011, 90% of all known species were headed towards extinction. Between 1975 and 2015, the world lost one third of all its arable land due to pollution or erosion (154). Since 2000, human societies have poured more carbon emissions into the atmosphere than all previous generations combined (155).
Both labor and nature become degraded and exhausted through their insertion into an expanding arc of accumulation. For Marx and Engels, the very intolerability of these outcomes mitigated against their consolidation. In The Communist Manifesto, they write: “Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.” The historical failure of capitalism to sustain society would lead to its revolutionary transformation. What is terrifying about Robinson’s account is the possibility human societies will, in fact, be dissolved by the tragedy of capital. That dissolution will likely - in Robinson’s view - occur through the epochal crisis of capital, the point where capitalist movement becomes exhausted.
Capitalism normally moves through the business cycles that generate economic crises that can be resolved within the framework of a particular structure of accumulation. Structures of accumulation emerge from the crisis of previous structures and move from facilitating accumulation to impeding it. The history of capital is a sequence of different structures of accumulation, but this sequence has an end point, which emerges with neoliberal capitalism. In Robinson’s account, neoliberalism is the last great structural transformation of capitalism. Beyond this threshold, capitalism loses the capacity to renew itself. Neoliberalism brings us to the threshold of what Robinson terms epochal crisis - the point at which capital’s degradation of the world exhausts its capacity to expand while the degradation of both labor and nature undermine the possibilities for human flourishing in a post-capitalist world. Epochal crisis brings with it the onset of a new dark age. Or does it? Does the exhaustion of capital entail the exhaustion of history? Or does the exhaustion of neoliberalism release history from capital’s grip? To answer these questions, we need to understand how this neoliberal grip was maintained.
Many Worlds
Neoliberal capital dissolved the limits of Fordist/Keynesian capitalism and engaged in a new round of global expansion whereby it consolidated itself as global capital rather than dispersed nation capitals. This unification unfolded through the creation of a “rules-based” order. Free trade agreements, structural adjustment, and regulatory harmonization fabricated the space of flows in which capital could move. At the core of this formation exists a fusion of information technology firms - the digital infrastructure of global capitalism - and the emergence of a transnational financial system, which exercises control over the allocation of capital in the global economy (38). Capital circulates outward from this structural core, pursuing its own self expansion through the construction of transnational supply chains that commodify labor and nature in the pursuit of profit.
Under neoliberalism, the world experiences its final wave of capitalist expansion. Structural adjustment opened the doors to waves of corporate investment, which uprooted billions of people from rural societies, generated gargantuan waves of rural to urban migration, but only selectively and temporarily incorporated the uprooted into productive circuits of capital. Here Robinson’s account of Nike is illustrative (89). The corporation began producing sports shoes in Oregon and then shifted to chasing cheap labor through different production sites in East Asia and has finally settled on “engineering labor out of the product” by resorting to robotics. What it leaves behind is an accumulating army of surplus labor that must either eke out survival strategies within the informal economy and find some other way to insert itself into the circuits of productive capital.
Capitalist dispossession and exploitation generate resistance, but capital has at its disposal the means to suppress this resistance by means of the deployment of Robinson terms of the global police state. Robinson specifies how the global police state is intertwined with trajectories of capitalism by means of militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. In the first case, the production of weapons systems, surveillance systems, detention centers and heavily armed police and military security forces absorbs surplus capital, funding it through the expansion of public debt. These repressive capacities then carve out new niches for accumulation. At work here is a kind of iron law of accumulation in which “every capitalist on the planet needs a global police state to repress and control the working and popular classes while every capitalist state serves this mandate” (112).
Robinson maintains that capitalist states have to sustain accumulation on terms dictated by the transnational capitalist class (TCC), which is what the global police state enables. But he does not recognize the contingency of political contestation because of how the imposition of order emerges in place of politics. In this respect, Robinson’s global police state bears a resemblance to Mark Neocleous’ (2025) account of pacification where security practices fabricate the social order, conceived as order wrested from chaos. This formulation reminds us of the existence of an outside to capitalism and that the reproduction of capitalism depends upon its continuous suppression. Pacification regards whatever does not fit its preferred mode of order as rebellion and sedition. R.B.J. Walker’s One World, Many Worlds (1989) suggests how we might reconceptualize dissent in terms of the existence of many worlds, which introduce new developmental possibilities into history. The difficulty here is that Robinson elevates capital into being the subject of universal history. As capital makes history, multiple histories fall from view. Robinson does not deny their existence but he does discount their salience in front of the juggernaut of capital.
This interpretive disposition can be understood as a consequence of how neoliberalism turned states into instruments of capitalist expansion. At the center of this process was the United States, imposing order through power projection, weapons transfers, military training, and military assistance programs. All of this formed the space in which the TCC could form and operate. But what happens when the TCC’s protective shell of hegemony begins to crack? Consider, in this regard, the ambitions of U.S. policy planners to design regional spaces - such as the greater Middle East and North America - as platforms for deepened economic integration and accelerated growth. Today, the greater Middle East is shattered by war while NAFTA style immigration in North America is in the process of unraveling. The outcome of the U.S./Israeli war against Iran has eviscerated the presumption of the Carter Doctrine - that the U.S. could guarantee the flow of fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf. Capitalist circulation has become uncoupled from the U.S. imposed order. In the case of North America, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, has announced Canada’s unwillingness to remain within the unstable economic and security orbit of the United States while Morena led governments in Mexico are asserting Mexican autonomy through a revival of economic planning. Both Canada and Mexico are mediating order and accumulation in ways that were utterly unanticipated a decade ago. The neoliberal mold of the region is cracking. What we see across different regions of the world is - to go back to Walker - the emergence of histories that were previously suppressed or incipient.
Political Mediations
What are we to make of this geopolitical fragmentation? With regard to Robinson’s account, there are two interpretive possibilities. The first is that economic integration of the TCC is able to overcome geopolitical fragmentation and indeed continue to operate through it. Populist authoritarian states that have emerged around the world in the last ten years continue to serve the interests of plutocratic capitalists through political strategies that mobilize national constituencies against combinations of liberal elites and foreign adversaries. What is lost here, though, is the contingency of politics. What makes the ideology or politics work is not so much forces that propel them, but the meaning they produce. That meaning is contingent and opens the possibility for the introduction of something new in the world.
On this point, there is a second interpretive option to consider, which is that the fragmentation of geopolitics is indeed real. Not only, for example, is the United States weaponizing interdependence; so are other states (Farrell and Newman 2023). What this suggests is growing entropy of capital. Not only is capital unable to create a world in its own image, but it is increasingly incapable of creating anything but a world of deepening disorder. This is certainly the way in which Robinson views emerging planetary disorder. Here, Marx and Engels’ analogy of the sorcerer’s apprentice comes to mind. Like the apprentice, capital has called up from the netherworld forces that it cannot control, including the unleashing of planetary forces, undermining the idea that nature as the inert substrate for capital’s development. All of this testifies to how capital engenders disorder rather than progress and how its ultimate legacy is a broken world. In the end, the world is both integrated by capital, but increasingly broken by virtue of that very integration.
Robinson offers a deeply structural account of capitalism and ignores how the contradiction he has so powerfully depicted may be subject to political mediation. Such mediations might include a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the decline of U.S. hegemony, the capacity of the middle power countries to articulate strategic autonomy within an increasingly fragmented international order. Robinson thinks that any mediation that does not disable the logic of accumulation is just a matter of trying to redirect its trajectory. Such strategies, where they succeed, can only defer the catastrophic exhaustion of capital and the onset of epochal crisis. A major question that arises from Epochal Crisis is whether political mediation of capital accumulation matters in the long term. Is such political mediation capable of transforming capitalist drives toward endless expansion?
As the protective shell of U.S. hegemony crumbles, new political mediations of accumulation arise from different corners of the world. These mediations emerge at the point where relationships that constitute a particular conjuncture are reproduced. Consider, in this regard, the relationship between speaker and audience. Speech acts that name events as security issues are contingent on the felicity conditions that connect political actors with one another or with different kinds of constituencies. These acts are moments of indeterminacy in which the relationships that sustain a particular order may be reproduced, reconfigured, or contested. In this sense, they function as political mediations.
These mediations may be intersectional, cumulative, and transformative. They may proceed from the spaces of political governance to accumulation. Consider an example of mediation between states. The Quincy Institute’s Better Order Project (BOP), suggests how states may renovate the international legal order to escape the mutual vulnerability they face from one another as the shift to a multipolar world deepens. The BOP’s recommendations range from Security Council reform, to nuclear weapons, to economic sanctions, to transnational planetary threats. The significance of such projects lies not simply in their policy prescriptions but in their attempt to reconfigure the political relationships through which sovereignty itself is exercised. Importantly, they upend the conception of sovereignty focused on freedom from external constraint.
Sovereignty itself must become a mediated practice. BOP’s reforms might be regarded as the weigh station enroute to a more systematic revision of nation-state sovereignty along the lines suggested by Blake and Gilman’s Children of a Modest Star (2024). Here the authors focus not on the exhaustion of capitalism but rather the exhaustion of the nation state paradigm. Defined as the absence of external constraint, sovereignty has become increasingly uncoupled from human interests. As Blake the Gilman writes, “any sovereignty worth having must enable the community to achieve its ends” (207).
Even if we define this community as the nation - following the formula that self-determination means that every nation can program their state - the negative conception of sovereignty still comes up short because it cannot control forces that are external to the state. As Robinson notes, neoliberal capitalism has activated planetary forces while generating the accumulation of a vast surplus of humanity. State responses to planetary forces amount to adaptation, a capacity that is unequally distributed. The limits of sovereignty manifest themselves as the eclipse of futurity. The space of progress that was supposed to open from within the state and perhaps expand - via liberalism - into the international order is becoming overwhelmed by external forces. States no longer offer progress and security; now they counsel resilience.
These developments might posit new truths - for example, the recognition of planetary necessity - that may inform new modes of governance. This possibility emerges on the basis of a logic distinct from the one that Robinson posits. For him, neoliberal integration of capital leads, as we have seen, to epochal crisis. But Walker's (1989) insistence that multiple histories coexist within global modernity suggests that capital cannot be treated as the sole author of historical change. Geopolitical fragmentation may therefore signal not merely the exhaustion of capital but the emergence of alternative historical trajectories. The economic and political interests that sustain accumulation remain powerful, yet they are embedded within a world of pluralistic possibility. If the neoliberal era appeared to close off alternative futures, the exhaustion of both capital and sovereignty may paradoxically reopen them.
Dr. Richard W. Coughlin received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1993 and is currently a Professor of Political Science at Florida Gulf Coast University. His writings have appeared in E-IR, Latin American Perspectives, NACLA, and Coyuntura y Intervencion. He is also the author of Fragile Democracy: A Critical Introduction to American Government.