Toward a Theory of Global Capitalist Exhaustion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 August 2025
Global capitalism is in deep crisis. 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 and multidimensional crisis that points to the impending exhaustion of global capitalism's capacity for renewal. The crisis is economic or structural, one of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation. It is a crisis of social reproduction. It is political, a crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony, and geopolitical conflict. It is ecological, with the threat of the collapse of the biosphere. The ruling groups launched a vast counteroffensive from the 1970s and on against the working and popular classes to reconstitute the hegemony of capital as a transnational capitalist class emerged. The dialectical approach and radical political economy are the tools for analyzing and theorizing the crisis of global capitalism. The study points us in the direction of a renewal of Marxist crisis theory and offers a bold theory of global capitalist exhaustion.
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