or non-change, he points out, ‘will be the outcome of struggles among various groups and classes’ which, however, he abstains from specifying. Nevertheless, Kotz sketches out four ‘future courses’: ‘continuation of neoliberal capitalism’, ‘transition to a business-regulated form of capitalism’, ‘transition to social democratic capitalism’, and ‘transition to democratic-participatory planned socialism’ – the final three being versions of regulated capitalism, their difference consisting in who will do the regulating: capital (especially finance capital à la Hilferding), capital and labour, or labour. This menu looks a little too neat to be true, due perhaps to social structure of accumulation theory positing more or less explicitly that whenever a social structure of accumulation becomes obsolescent, it must and therefore will soon be replaced with a more up-to-date successor. In this it is similar to French régulation theory, for which an unregulated world is inconceivable (although Kotz’s ‘continuation of neoliberal capitalism’ comes close to such a world). That the next phase in the history of modern capitalism may be a long period of chaotic interregnum – an age of indeterminacy – is precluded by both. Unfortunately, however, this is what may most likely be in store, due not least to the absence of historical agency strong enough to re-order a now profoundly disorderly capitalist world, a condition that Kotz seems implicitly to recognize when he speaks in all-too-general terms of ‘groups and classes’.
Seen from outside the usually optimistic American centre, the most likely scenario is one in which the United States, the historical host of twentieth-century capitalism, will be too weak to enforce its own order while remaining strong enough to prevent others from enforcing theirs. Assuming this to be our future, Kotz’s somewhat pedantic list of the pros and cons of ‘democratic-participatory planned socialism’ appears more than a little anachronistic. A brief look at global capitalism’s periphery may make clear what this might mean. In more and more countries – from Central America to North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, not to forget the Russian periphery and Russia itself – the Western model of ‘development’ has failed, and so have most local states, typically with the active contribution of their neoliberal American friends. Millions of people have given up hope for a better life in their home countries and are on the move to the United States, pace Donald Trump, and Western Europe, thanks to Angela Merkel. ‘Democratic-participatory planned socialism’ sounds good, but will there be a demos ready to participate in the planning? Will there be stable states maintaining stable institutions for the purpose, and for the implementation of the plan once it has been made? And what is it in the first place that would be planned in Pakistan and Palestine, in Algeria and Afghanistan, in Mali, Mexico and Mississippi, to name just a few?
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* David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. For the other side of the coin, see for example Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015; and Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
* On how American debt provides for external funding of American internal consumption, see Guido Giacomo Preparata and Domenico D’Amico, ‘The Political Economy of Hyper-Modernity: A Tale of America’s Hegemonic Exigencies Recounted through the Undulations of the US Balance of Payments, 1946–2015’, in Giacomo Preparata, ed., New Directions for Catholic Social and Political Research: Humanity vs. Hyper-Modernity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
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