Trying to get an empirically informed grip on “how capitalism falls” and related macro questions, I do quite a bit of reading. For example:
From all that, I’ve mashed up some plausible scenarios that ought to pass both theoretical and Fat Tony pragmatic smell tests. Of course, due to complexity, chaos, Black Swans, etc. I’m not “predicting” anything. Just trying to aim in the most promising directions.
The big heavyweights that say the most to me are Kojin Karatani and Peter Pogany. Karatani shows how the current system is locked in. He calls it Capital-Nation-State. Pogany shows how on global scales it was bound to break down (he wrote that in the 2010s), very much as it is in fact breaking down (in the 2020s). Karatani and Pogany both point to better global structural arrangements available to the future.
Let’s start with the material economy - Pogany’s forte. First, we need to live within entropic boundaries. So GDP is of course a bad metric, and something like a Nate Hagens Great Simplification will be required. But as for the global money economy, fiat money issued by Westphalian nation-states has to go. Hard money - tied strickly to physical and bio-captial - has to come in, and that money must be issued through global multilateral structures. Karatani, commenting on Kant and many others, suggests the mechanics of how such global multilateral structures may come into play. To get there, Karatani (a post-Marxist, mostly), leans on Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan! Not exactly a “kumbaya” sort of vision, there. The gist of it is, Karatani is placing political “realist” bets that nation-states will value their own survival above all else, and will yield to a global super-state in the interests of preventing nuclear-armed war of all against all. Thus Karatani shifts the Hobbesian analysis from warlike individuals in the theoretical state of nature to warlike nation-state actors in the current pragmatic world we empirically have.
What I like about this is all anyone needs to believe about human motivations is that people want to survive and will do what they must. That’s a very low Hobbesian bar to leap over. Of course, people in general may be even worse than that, in which case we are all very screwed. If we are indeed going full Mad Max, nothing to do about that but stock up on spikes and leather! But let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that even rapacious political and economic elites see value in their own survival. For that, Pogany-Karatani offers the basic outlines of a plan.
Where something like Second Renaissance comes in, IMO, is in creating the cultural preconditions that will allow something like Pogany-Karatani hard multilaterialism to win the day over nationalist or race-base populism (which is currently enjoying its moment). Capital-Nation-State has no incentive whatsoever to adapt until it hits Pogany’s entropic wall or confronts a balance of terror so daunting that people are willing to readjust in their own heads what “pragmatism” and “realism” really add up to the current situation. France not invading Germany any more, and Germany likewise not invading France, is a promising step in the right direction. Can we generalize that more globally? Maybe it will work, maybe not. But in any case, it’s the best idea I’ve been able to identify through a rather considerable review of the literature.