Michael Robbins
Just wanted to post, belatedly, a link to Ms. Dark’s excellent interview with Gopal Balakrishnan in Lana Turner, since I have of late found myself nonplussed by the skepticism with which what seems an utterly uncontroversial, even trivial, claim is too often met—that capitalism will come to an end.
The failure of this phase of capitalism, presaging maybe wider problems and failures of capitalism, is that end [of history], again, posing the question what it means for something to come to an end. Capitalism, one is fairly sure, will not come to an end in the same way the Roman Empire did or Feudalism did or even the Soviet Union did. So we should be able to track the vectors of a declining system in ways that allow us to grasp the specificity of our own situation, to gauge, as it were, the various levels and dimensions at which a system can be continuing forward and then other levels at which it might be flat-lining. And so I think we’ll have very complex problems of both thought and political practice in this coming period.
But I would encourage everybody not to think about the historical problem of the future of our way of life: capitalism. Is it long for the world? How much longer? What might we do both to improve conditions in the here and now and to think about alternatives to it. Everything, as we know, all modes of social life, eventually come to an end and I think we’ve been a bit too accustomed in this period that we’re just coming out of to think that that truth, while certainly true of everything that came before, might not be true of us. And if it were true of us, it might somehow be the case it would only matter in the very long term. And I think we might increasingly be confronted with evidence that that is not the case.
