The Future of Global Capitalism: Crisis, Financialization, and Digitalization

The current moment in world capitalism is defined by three key developments. First, the system has become universal through globalization processes that date to the late twentieth century. Second, the system is undergoing a new round of restructuring and transformation based on a much more advanced digitalization and financialization of the entire global economy and society. Third, the system faces an unprecedented capitalist crisis that is as much economic, or structural, one of overaccumulation, as it is political, one of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. This crisis is also existential because of the threat of ecological collapse as well as the renewed threat of nuclear war and the danger of future pandemics that may involve much deadlier microbes than coronaviruses. Despite much talk of “deglobalization” and the breakdown of global supply chains in the wake of the coronavirus economic meltdown, world trade reached a record high in 2021. Transnational elites are pinning their hopes on a new wave of capitalist expansion and prosperity through digitally driven restructuring. Even if a new period of digitally driven expansion displaces the structural crisis temporally into the future, global capitalism will continue to generate social crises of survival and well-being for billions of people.