These days the world seems to end with staggering regularity. From the financial crisis to Brexit to Trump to a climate apocalypse to coronavirus: new eras are born faster than old ones can die. And yet, despite it all, the proletariat still haven’t bothered to rise up and overthrow capitalism. Worse still, many of them voted for an old Etonian with the middle name ‘de Pfeffel’. When will the oppressed masses learn?
Perhaps, just perhaps, such questions aren’t helpful. For the left-wing political scientist Francesco Boldizzoni, rather than banging on about class consciousness, it’s time that a new consciousness dawned on a class of intellectuals who have confidently predicted capitalism’s downfall for two centuries, only to see it adapt and thrive. When will they learn, and why are they so bad at forecasting?
Before he gets to that, Boldizzoni takes us on a 200-page tour of capitalism’s critics, from the well-worn fields of Marx, Mill and Keynes through the wilder thickets of critical theory. Much of the history smacks of Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front sketch. For it’s with weary recognition that we read about democratic socialists fighting the social democrats, or the orthodox Marxists firing on the reformed Marxists. Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Boldizzoni eventually zooms out from these myopic tussles and presents a taxonomy of ‘the prophets of doom’. He sees four overarching schools. Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, subscribe to ‘theories of implosion’, where capitalism collapses under ‘the weight of its contradictions’ (although these are rarely spelled out); others, such as Mill and Keynes, favour ‘theories of exhaustion’, where capitalism dies off once it has delivered maximum prosperity (whatever that means) or hits an environmental limit. Then there are those favouring ‘convergence’, who think technological evolution will push capitalism and socialism together until they’re indistinguishable.
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