In times of crisis and resulting political polarization economists and political scientists will find plenty of opportunities to do something new. There will be whole new fronts of pathbreaking research, for instance, in the alternative organization of markets. The dismissal of market possibilities was a major theoretical and practical mistake of twentieth-century leftist movements. We treat with great respect the intellectual legacy of Joseph Schumpeter. But what will be the future uses of his theory of entrepreneurial dynamism? Who or what could play the role of entrepreneurs in the future, even beyond the crisis of capitalism? Is it possible to harness entrepreneurial energies toward more market creativity and less destruction?
No less seriously we take Karl Polanyi’s idea of ‘fictitious commodities’, like land, money, and human life, that cannot be traded. In the twenty-first century “land” broadly means the environment, “money” is global finance, and “human life” stands for the internationalization of the costs of social reproduction through the public support of decent and affordable healthcare, education, housing, pensions, and not least, physical security of our cities. Can a postcapitalist world economy be structured into sectors operating on different principles: the priority of social reproduction in the sector of broadly construed public utilities and the priority of market effectiveness in the sector of consumer goods and services? Moreover, the postcapitalist economic systems may themselves not be static. Periodic reversion to market economies with private property, in some degree or another, may well occur in the future. The world may see yet more swings between capitalist and noncapitalist arrangements of the economy. This too will have to be managed.
No less politically harmful than the aversion to markets is the aversion to the directing power of states. Far from coincidentally, the neoconservative restoration during the last decades of the twentieth century in the wake of collapses on the political left, relentlessly challenged state powers through deregulation and globalization. Capitalists grew suspicious of “Big Government” for the quite real reason that modern states potentially could be captured by the non-elite citizens—in democratic elections, street insurrections, or both—and used for the noncapitalist purposes of market regulation and social redistribution. Big welfare state had to be tolerated, to a degree, immediately after 1945 for the sake of resumed peace. But by the 1970s many capitalists, especially in America, had become emboldened by the opportunity to defeat the left and roll back postwar compromises. Now a major question for theorizing is whether the modern bureaucratic state can play a good role, bad role, or no role at all in steering our collective affairs through times of crisis and the looming systemic transformation. This big question falls into many subordinate questions, practical issues, and theoretical paradoxes that remain to be explored. Social scientists will have plenty of intellectual work of crucial importance in rising to these challenges.
CODA
This quintet of authors gathered to sketch the range of destinations where the world may be headed. We have summarized and refocused on the future many arguments from our previously written volumes. Intentionally, this is not a single-tune quintet. The hope was to achieve counterpoint and provoke each other into pursuing the implications of our individual themes. We have included the complexities, caveats, and dissents. We have not avoided the dramatic, even thunderous notes. Such tonalities seemed warranted by the enormity and gravity of the main themes. The coming decades will be anything but usuaclass="underline" that is, usual in the perspective of the last 500 years. The collective trajectory of humanity is taking a big turn, but not necessarily for the worse.
A rising note of optimism emerges in the finale. A big crisis and transformation, whatever its scenario, does not mean the world is coming to an end. There is no reason to believe, on the basis of the accumulated understandings of sociology, that history will ever end, as long as there are human beings connected in social organization. The direst scenarios involving a world nuclear war or environmental collapse, fortunately, seem avoidable precisely because collective extinction has been widely regarded as a real danger for some decades now. The end of capitalism is not a catastrophe of that sort. A crisis in the bearing structures of the modern world’s political economy is far from a doomsday prediction. Ultimately, the end of capitalism is a hopeful vision. Yes, it comes with its own dangers. We must remember how early twentieth-century attempts to foster anticapitalist alternatives in response to crisis developed totalitarian tendencies and ended in bureaucratic inertia. Nor should we forget how directly these anticapitalist projects arose from the state machineries and personnel constructed in the world wars. The crucial political vectors in the coming decades will have to be curbing militarism and institutionalizing democratic human rights around the planet. An impasse in the political economy of capitalism brings us to historical junctures where what has been long regarded utopian may yet acquire technically feasible foundations in a new kind of political economy. It may yet help us to deal better with threats to our planet’s biosphere, and many other tasks that humanity will be facing later in this century.
Those who worry about postcapitalism ushering in a period of deadly stagnation are surely wrong. Those who hope that postcapitalism will deliver a lasting paradise without its own crises are likely wrong, too. After the crisis—and, some of us predict, the postcapitalist transition of the mid-21st century—there will be a great deal happening. Hopefully, much of it will be good. We shall see, and soon enough.
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