Review
“William Robinson offers a concise, authoritative, and persuasive account of the ills, economic, ecological, and geopolitical, afflicting global capitalism, and shows that they are potentially fatal to both humankind and the system itself – compelling reading for anyone who wants to decipher the gathering storm clouds.” ALEX CALLINICOS, Professor of European Studies, King’s College, London
"Few scholars are better qualified than William I. Robinson to summarize the Marxist economic critique and to apply it to the current terminal crisis of the capitalist system." KEES VAN DER PIJL, States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check
“Every paragraph of Can Global Capitalism Endure? sizzles with insights. Here is William I. Robinson at his best: empirically sensitive, theoretically original, politically committed”. JASON W. MOORE
"This short book delves into some of the most important questions facing progressive and left activists: globalisation, financialisation and digitalisation. William I. Robinson has been here before. But his latest contribution deepens his consideration of the Green New Deal, splits in the ruling bloc of transnational capitalism, and alternative strategies to the crisis of global capitalism. The work offers an analysis of systemic contradictions, as well as posing challenging political questions...an essential work to help guide left activists and thinkers towards an effective strategy that can build counter-hegemony, challenge capitalism, and move us towards the emancipatory project the world so desperately needs." JERRY HARRIS, Race & Class
About the Author
William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Among his many award-winning books are Latin America and Global Capitalism (2008), Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014), The Global Police State (2020), and Global Civil War (2021). He has written hundreds of articles, commentaries, and book chapters on politics, economics, world affairs, and globalization, and has worked for many years with social justice movements in Latin America and the United States.
Jason W. Moore is a historical geographer and environmental historian at Binghamton University, USA, where he is professor of sociology. He is author or editor of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? and with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. He is co-coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. Many of essays, in English and nearly two dozen languages, can be found on his website, https://jasonwmoore.com/.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Financialization has made it possible to turn the global economy into a giant casino for transnational investors. As opportunities dry up to reinvest overaccumulated capital elsewhere in the global economy the TCC has turned to unloading trillions of dollars into speculation in global commodities markets, stock markets, currency markets, futures markets, leverages, every imaginable derivative and short, cryptocurrencies, “land grabs,” and urban real estate, among other speculative activities in the netherworld of shadow banking. These speculative markets become outlets for global investors to “park” their overaccumulated capital. As a result, the gap between the productive economy of goods and services and fictitious capital has grown to an unfathomable chasm. Fictitious capital refers to money thrown into circulation without any base in commodities or in production. A major portion of the income generated by financial speculation is fictitious, meaning (here in simplified form) that it exists on paper or in cyberspace but does not correspond to real wealth in the world, that is, goods and services that people need and want, such as food, clothing, houses, and so on. The accumulation of fictitious capital through speculation may offset the crisis temporally into the future or spatially to new digital geographies and new population groups but in the long run only exacerbates the underlying problem of overaccumulation. In 2018, for example, the gross world product or the total value of goods and services produced in the world, stood at some $75 trillion whereas the global derivatives market – a marker of speculative activity – was estimated at a mind-boggling $1.2 quadrillion (Maverick, 2018).
In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the U.S. and other Western governments turned to policies known as “quantitative easing,” which essentially means that government treasuries print money and inject it into the banking system as cheap credit – even involving negative interest rates. Quantitative easing ends up creating mountains of what is known as fiat money, or government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity, aggravating the gap between fictitious capital and the productive economy. Apart from the prospects of collapse itself, the out-of-control printing of money may in the long run trigger uncontrolled inflation that would further destabilize the global economy. This accumulation of fictitious capital gave the appearance of recovery
