Like every order before it, capitalism too will pass

Empires, monarchies and feudal orders once seemed permanent, yet all gave way. Capitalism’s remarkable adaptability is no guarantee of its permanence, and the real question is what societies choose to build in its place.

Empires collapse, economic systems disappear and political certainties dissolve. History suggests that capitalism, too, is a passing arrangement rather than the final destination of human civilisation.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made one of the most memorable observations in political history: “All that is solid melts into air.” Almost 180 years later, it is worth asking a deceptively simple question.

How long do the great economic, political and social structures of human civilisation actually last? Some survive for decades, others for centuries, and a few for millennia. Almost all eventually disappear or change beyond recognition.

Slavery existed for thousands of years before its legal abolition across much of the world. European feudalism dominated social and economic life for centuries. Empires rose, expanded and collapsed. Monarchies survived revolutions by surrendering much of their power. Even the nation-state, which today seems the natural unit of political organisation, is predominantly a relatively recent creation. Most modern nations acquired their present institutional forms during the past two or three centuries.

And democracy? Its origins reach back some 2,500 years to ancient Athens, but modern mass representative democracy is largely a development of the past century or two. Many democratic regimes have existed for less than a single human lifetime. A 2025 historical study estimated the average lifespan of empires in its sample at approximately 300 years.

The Ottoman Empire survived for more than six centuries. The Soviet Union lasted just 69 years. Longevity is not permanence. Nor is stability evidence that an institution represents the natural order of things.

Yet although empires disappear, imperial relationships may survive. Although slavery was legally abolished, coercion and exploitation persist. Although feudalism disappeared, concentrated landownership and inherited privilege endured.

Political structures can change more readily than the underlying relationships of wealth, power and social domination. This distinction becomes especially important when considering capitalism.

Capitalism has existed for perhaps five centuries, depending on how its origins are defined. Its commercial and financial foundations can be traced through the Italian city-states, particularly Genoa, long before industrial capitalism emerged in Britain.

The historian Fernand Braudel distinguished capitalism from the everyday market economy, associating it particularly with the commanding heights of economic power, where powerful actors could control markets rather than merely compete within them.

Giovanni Arrighi identified successive systemic cycles of capitalist accumulation, beginning with Genoese finance, passing through Dutch and British leadership, and culminating in the American-centred world economy.

Each leading centre eventually declined. But capitalism survived. Genoa lost its pre-eminence. Amsterdam displaced it. London displaced Amsterdam. New York eventually displaced London.

The location of capitalist power changed, along with the technologies and institutions through which accumulation proceeded. Capitalism’s extraordinary historical achievement has been its ability to transform almost everything around it while preserving its central organising principles: commodification and the accumulation of capital.

That brings us back to Marx. His observation was not simply that nothing lasts forever. He recognised something distinctive about capitalism itself. Earlier ruling orders frequently sought legitimacy through tradition, inherited authority and supposedly permanent hierarchies.

Capitalism, by contrast, depended upon continuous transformation. New technologies displaced industries. New markets disrupted communities. New centres of production undermined older ones. Capitalism could not reproduce itself without repeatedly revolutionising production and social relationships.

What Marx identified in the 19th century has become an everyday experience in the 21st. Globalisation has reorganised manufacturing and employment. Financialization has transformed ownership and investment.

Digital platforms have reshaped communication, commerce and work. Artificial intelligence promises another profound disruption. Meanwhile, climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological exhaustion challenge an economic order whose central imperative remains continuous accumulation and expansion.

Extreme concentrations of wealth coexist with widespread insecurity. Technological capabilities advance faster than the political institutions responsible for governing them. Democratic governments confront economic powers operating across national borders.

Meanwhile, the American-centred system of accumulation faces the rise of China and other centres of economic capability. Manufacturing, technology, finance and strategic power are being reorganised across the world economy.

But a transition from American to Chinese predominance would not necessarily mean capitalism’s end. It could represent another transformation within capitalism, as earlier transitions did.

The more fundamental question is whether the present transformation will alter the underlying relationships between capital, labour, the state and nature. Political governments can change every few years. Economic orthodoxies can dominate for decades. World economic orders can last a century or more.

Systems of property ownership and class power can survive across several political regimes. And ecological consequences can persist for centuries after the governments and corporations responsible have disappeared. Not everything melts into air at the same speed.

Predictions of capitalism’s imminent collapse therefore deserve scepticism. Capitalism has survived wars, depressions, revolutions and repeated transformations of global leadership.

It has incorporated reforms once fiercely resisted by capitalists: universal suffrage, trade unions, social insurance, public education, healthcare and substantial public ownership. Yet recognising capitalism’s adaptability is not accepting its permanence.

The American sociologist Erik Olin Wright argued that alternatives need not await a single revolutionary rupture. Economic institutions can be transformed through reform, democratic experimentation, public ownership, cooperative organisation and constructing alternatives within existing societies.

Historical systems do not collapse simply because they become old. Their transformation depends upon material conditions, conflicts, ideas, institutions, organisation and political choices.

Antonio Gramsci’s famous observation that the old world is dying while the new cannot yet be born captures the uncertainty of such transitions. Our present world may be experiencing precisely this historical tension. American economic predominance is being challenged.

Liberal democracy faces pressures from concentrated wealth, authoritarian politics and weakening public trust. Ecological limits confront established assumptions about growth. Yet unprecedented technological capabilities offer possibilities for expanding human freedom, reducing necessary labour and organising production around social and ecological needs.

Looking across 5,000 years of history, one conclusion becomes difficult to avoid. The slaveholder, feudal lord, emperor and colonial governor could each imagine that the social order sustaining their privilege was permanent.

History proved otherwise. Capitalism deserves no exemption. The question is not whether capitalism will last forever, but how it will change, what might replace it, and whether societies can consciously shape that transformation rather than merely endure its consequences.

Marx was right that all that is solid melts into air. But history offers something more than an account of dissolution. Institutions are human creations, capable of being contested, reconstructed and replaced. The future is not simply what happens after the present. It is also what people develop the imagination, capability and collective power to create.

This column first appeared on Pearls and Irritations and is republished by Global Catholic with permission.