Ever since the 1990s, when to the longstanding cooptation of the Western working class by social democracy was added the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the saying has been popular among the chattering classes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” As McKenzie Wark has noted, there was this weird consensus among both its partisans and its critics that “Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence.”

Lately, however, there have been attempts to meet the challenge of imagining the end of capitalism.

One of the early efforts was the 2014 essay titled “How Will Capitalism End?” by Wolfgang Streeck, the eminent former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Taking the bull by the horns, Streeck asserted, “I suggest we think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place. It is a Marxist—or better: modernist—prejudice that capitalism as a historical epoch will end only when a new, better society is in sight, and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind.”

Streeck’s angle of approach to the question was quite original, one derived from his familiarity with the work of the great Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi. This was that capitalism had been so successful in commodifying everything—or converting not only land and labor but also formerly fenced off areas like knowledge, public infrastructure, and the environment into commodities for market exchange—that it was eliminating the very social, cultural, and political conditions needed for its reproduction. A central assertion was that the demands of profit-making had become so intense that capital was destroying the very basis of sustainable capital accumulation—labor—by pushing down living standards in the center economies while allowing only extremely low wages in the economies of the Global South to which it had fled.

Streeck was one of the first to advance the idea of a “polycrisis,” that is, that owing to capitalism’s ability to erode the traditional brakes put on its ability to transform everything into commodities, crises were breaking out along different dimensions of societal existence, and these crises had a negative synergy, enhancing the impact of one another and thus magnifying their collective impact. These interacting crises were producing what Streeck called the “five disorders”—economic stagnation, oligarchic distribution, the annexation of the public domain to private property, corruption, and global anarchy.

Richard Westra advances a similar argument in his book The Political Economy of Post-Capitalism. Capital accumulation can only take place if the profits extracted in the production process are devoted not only to capitalist consumption and investment but part of it is channeled into wages that enable those that produce surplus value to physically reproduce themselves. He agrees with Streeck that the social conditions for the reproduction of the labor force are disappearing at a global level, as capital flees to the poorer countries to avoid the high wages of workers in the advanced economies while paying the bare minimum to workers in the Global South.

But equally important, Westra asserts, is the fact that the industrial/manufacturing sector where the extraction of surplus value traditionally takes place has become, for all intents and purposes, a secondary part of the economy, one that is increasingly subordinate to the part of the economy that produces not commodities but “intangibles” like patents, databases, and design, where the cost of production is conventionally estimated at or near zero. More and more, profits are derived from the “intangible economy” compared to the tangible economy, and these are channeled not into the productive sector but into speculation, so that those who monopolize information technology that reproduce the intangible assets via patents and copyrights, such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, become exponentially richer, contributing to the creation of that steep inequality of income and wealth characteristic of our times.

The much-reduced role in capital........

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