Mann and Calhoun both suggest that a deep environmental crisis could come soon and challenge a still economically viable capitalism. Collins and Wallerstein see the environmental risk as longer term and capitalist crisis more imminent. Collins reads the scientific consensus of environmental projections as pointing to major crisis around the year 2100. Mann argues that severe ecological damage will threaten some countries’ survival already by 2030–50. Yet Collins and Wallerstein project full-scale capitalist crisis in the decades around 2040. They thus suggest that we will confront capitalist crisis before environmental limits become terminal. If one holds the Collins/Wallerstein view, it is tempting to speculate that a socialist resolution to a capitalist crisis would change political structures to such a degree that the ecological crisis could be reasonably handled, as it might well not be if capitalism continues as usual. Mann has a different take on this. Any major capitalist crisis would considerably lower GDP levels, thus easing the environmental crisis (provided warming had not already gone too far). He sees three villains producing climate change: not just capitalism, but also the nation-state and the ordinary mass-consuming citizen. A solution to the crisis would involve reining in and reforming all three. Whether capitalism or socialism (or anything else) emerges viably from the crisis, they would have to be in radically new forms.
Second, both Mann and Calhoun place more emphasis on capitalist dynamism outside the West. Indeed, for Mann, it is not the end of capitalism, but rather the ecological crisis that is global. Hence it cannot be argued that while capitalism and geopolitical hegemony will decline for the United States and Europe, world leadership will pass to other triumphant regions of the globe such as East Asia or a coalition now going under names like the BRICS. However, environmental scientists hold at present that the worst environmental catastrophes will begin in China, South Asia, and Africa. This projection questions the prospect for emergent global leadership providing an alternative to the West. The ecological crisis, according to Mann, could be the end of everybody. Less rhetorically, we have to consider not two alternatives but three: terminal crisis of capitalism as a world-system; decline of the older capitalist hegemons and their replacement by new ones; and global-scale ecological shock, with resulting transformations yet to be envisioned. Collins and Wallerstein argue for the first of these; Mann for the third.
Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins read the picture in different yet mutually compatible ways. They see capitalism as a global system or, if you wish, a hierarchical ecology of economic food chains and market niches. Like any complex system, it has its interrelated structures, dynamic trends, and therefore it must have its ultimate limits. Even if the systemic limits could be expanded thanks to new geographies and technologies of production, they cannot be altogether abolished. Nobody can now specify the institutions and parameters of the world coming after capitalism. Here Craig Calhoun interjects by reminding us how much in such world transitions depends on the contested political choices. Nevertheless Collins and Wallerstein insist that capitalism is nearing its limits, and they make one big prediction: there will be a world transition. They both clearly specify what structural processes are pushing toward the predicted transition, thus opening their hypotheses to critical scrutiny and the possibility of empirical testing. Georgi Derluguian presents the Soviet example as a theoretical and empirical test of what has worked or did not work in the past predictions of Collins and Wallerstein. The trajectory of the Soviet bloc shows how a large systemic unit reaches the limits of its own success and perishes from a combination of structural weights and purely contingent factors.
The differences between the predictions (or future-approximations) of Mann on one hand and those of Collins and Wallerstein on the other correspond to the two sides of the dynamic model of human societies developed by evolutionary anthropologists. In technical terms, it is the “bearing capacity” of a human ecology versus its “productive intensification.” According to this model, all hitherto existent human societies tended eventually to fill their environments to saturation, or their bearing capacity. Such limiting crises left three dramatically different possibilities. The first was simply death. A recurrent catastrophe over the entire span of history has been a partial or even total extermination of human groups through famines, epidemics, and genocidal warfare. It is the tragic cycle of Malthusian demographic adjustments in the numbers of humans to be fed. The phases of declining population created conditions for resuming the productive activities on an unchanged basis until the environment was once again filled to bearing capacity, thus provoking another phase of hard times. The second possibility is diversification. It led our ancestors to the discovery and adaptive colonization of new geographic frontiers in the northern tundra and tropical islands, in the steppes, deserts, mountains, and forests—until the human race filled up the planet. Finally, the third possibility is what is usually called progress (i.e., qualitative intensification in the entire technological toolkit), enabling humans to gain ever more from their resources. The latter escape has been the main driving force of evolutionary innovation in human societies.
The complex class societies and first states rose in the productive locales that were too good to abandon, such as the fertile river valleys flanked by the deserts and mountains. The celebrated expression “caging effect” was in fact invented by Michael Mann in his earlier study of ancient empires, markets, and religions.[3] It means that moving away became impossible. Historically, such situations forced some human groups into the qualitatively new, more extensive and elaborate forms of social organization (i.e., new civilizations) that could increase the extraction and exchange of surpluses from the long-occupied locales. The verb “forced into” is intended to stress that many humans would rather not have become slaves, serf peasants, and tribute payers—but they were “caged” by the lack of escape and active coercion from the warrior and priestly elites. In the past, the intensification of productive techniques never came alone but in conjunction with major political and ideological reorganization. These transformative processes were always fraught with considerable conflicts.
In the present book, Michael Mann takes the position that capitalism remains resilient. Once again, Calhoun mostly agrees, though with greater stress on the ways capitalism must change to renew itself. Calhoun also stresses the difference between capitalism in general and the disproportionately financial capitalism that has lately exacerbated systemic risks. Capitalism, according to Mann, has virtually inexhaustible capacities for self-intensification through productive innovations as well as the globalization and deepening of consumer markets. If anything can ever finish capitalism, it will be an outbreak of warfare reaching its destructive limits in the nuclear age, or the planetary crisis of the natural environment. The former operates through causal chains largely independent of the dynamics of capitalism, and thus is contingent (i.e., unpredictable from the standpoint of an internal analysis of capitalism). In the main, this is what separates the positions of Mann and Calhoun from the projections advanced by Wallerstein and Collins. Environmental crisis, however, is one consequence of capitalist development, intersecting with political and cultural factors. Thus in a roundabout way, capitalism may generate its own downfall, even if, by virtue of intersecting causalities, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Randall Collins and Immanuel Wallerstein argue that capitalism is nearing its structural limits. Both acknowledge the extraordinary capacity of capitalism to expand and intensify its own political economy. Capitalism has created the first true world-system encompassing the entire planet with all its populations and productive resources. The displacement of agricultural and industrial jobs by machinery during the nineteenth century did not result in pauperization and revolution in the West, as predicted by Karl Marx in his age, because the development of modern managerial, professional and clerical occupations within private and government bureaucracies created a comfortable cushion of modern middle classes. Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century these spatial and internal reserves will finally be exhausted. If the model focusing on the effects of oligarchic overaccumulation and the distress of the middle classes has relevance across different historical epochs, the terminal crisis of capitalism would actually be a succession of various crises within a protracted period of decline.
3
Michael Mann,