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. 

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. 

Neoliberal capital dissolved the limits of........

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