The road to hell — and back

Epochal Crisis: the Exhaustion of Global Capitalism 
By William I Robinson 
Cambridge University Press, 2026.

Tune your radio to something like the BBC World Service for a week and you will get a full picture of the global crisis: climate disaster, genocide in Gaza, militarisation and ongoing wars, economic collapse, poverty, political-military repression, and conspicuous consumption by emergent ruling elites within billionaire capitalism. 

For socialists and the left, a key theoretical task is pulling this together to grasp where we are going and, as ever, what is to be done. In his latest book, Epochal Crisis, William I Robinson attempts just that. It is, to put it bluntly, a mind-blowing assessment, in which Robinson claims world capitalism has entered a final, epochal, multidimensional crisis. 

His book is filled with immense insights and written in a very accessible style. If you want to understand what is going on in the world, then read this.

Economic crisis

Underlying the economic crisis lies the workings of fundamental Marxist categories: the overaccumulation of capital, especially by digital capitalist corporations, matched by corresponding underconsumption by vast sectors of the world’s population, especially workers, the marginalised and the “surplus population” — “illegal” workers living on the margins of rich countries, socially or geographically, and integrated into or expelled from the labour force as needed.

It is a its heart a crisis of profitability — a long-term economic crisis that is accelerating. Robinson claims artificial intelligence may be able to hold this off, but just like the dot-com bubble two decades ago, it will not be able to do this for long.

This long-term economic crisis has generated a crisis of social reproduction. All the forms of social stability associated with the “Golden Age” — the period between 1950–75 — are breaking down. In advanced capitalist countries such as Britain, there is a housing crisis, an education crisis, a healthcare crisis, a prison crisis, and the appearance of what Gilbert Achcar, following Antonio Gramsci, calls “morbid symptoms.”1 You could also place in the same category the crisis in the ghettos, the crisis in refugee camps, and the overarching crisis in the Global South.

How can we measure this “crisis of social reproduction”? One way is healthy life expectancy — not the number of years people live, but the number of years they live healthy lives, free from major long-term illness or disability. A recent British report demonstrated an overall decline in healthy life expectancy by an average of two years. It also showed a 20-year gap between the most deprived areas, such as former coalfields, and wealthy areas, such as Richmond, on the southwest fringe of London.

Military accumulation

In a series of overlapping analyses, Robinson show how all these elements generate inevitable systems of control, summed up in the idea of global civil war. Some have objected to this terminology, but the reality of a cascading story of mass repression against the poor and exploited when they resist cannot be denied. This overlaps with another key Robinson category: militarised accumulation.

The past five years have demonstrated militarised accumulation on an epic scale. Donald Trump’s administration has just announced its 2026 “defence” budget: an astounding US$1.4 trillion, which represents a rise of 40%. 

Militarised accumulation includes the rise of military-monster corporations, such as RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman, which are closely integrated with hi-tech corporations such as Apple and Meta. Four key AI executives have been awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US army: Andrew Bosworth (Meta), Shyam Sankar (Palantir), Kevin Weil (OpenAI) and Bob McGrew (Thinking Machines). 

These awards are far from purely symbolic. They represent a deep-seated integration of the military and computing companies through cloud data storage, surveillance, target acquisition, weapons design and logistics. You can see all this in action in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and a host of countries targeted by US-made drones and missiles.

So, the epochal crisis finds expression in wars and domestic repression all over the planet. The boosting of domestic repression agencies aimed at immigrant populations and refugees is also a fundamental aspect of the war on unruly populations. ICE agents raiding US cities and terrorising immigrant communities are the most vivid example of this process.

Fascism

Epochal economic and social crises come bundled with political crises. State repression both gives rise to and is a product of the era of neofascism. Modern fascism strongly opposes climate science. As the example of the Trump regime shows, neofascism is a major obstacle to fighting climate change.

We are now in the epoch of climate catastrophe. In the next five years, we are likely to have at least one year where the global average exceeds 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. A devastating 2 degrees above pre-industrial averages would unleash major social catastrophes on a dystopian scale. 

If this happens, waves of climate refugees would leave the Middle East, Western Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa for Europe.

Tipping points

We should keep in mind that, on the economic front, key tipping points may be caused by developments “outside” the economy. Such was the case with the 1974–75 recession, the result of an oil shock caused by the Arab-Israeli war, which ultimately crashed the Keynesian welfare state and mixed-economy Fordist regime and eventually ushering in neoliberalism.

We are living through a period where another 2007–08-style stock market crash is highly likely, but this time much worse. That is because the 2007–08 crash was overcome by swamping the banks with quantitative easing, with Britain and the United States in particular accumulating gigantic debts so that banks could survive. The huge debt overhang was never paid off: US public debt is now more than $38 trillion and British debt is £2.88 trillion.

A new major banking or financial crash could see one or more major capitalist powers unable to raise sufficient funds to allow banks to meet their obligations, including the personal savings of millions of customers. 

A “global Argentina” could ensue: customers unable to withdraw cash, credit and debit cards unusable, standing orders failing, people defaulting on mortgage and rent payments, and a purely cash economy emerging. Millions would lose their jobs and social catastrophe would ensue, just as it did in Argentina after the 2001 government bankruptcy.

Resistance

In a global Argentina, all bets would be off as far as political outcomes are concerned. If the world enters such a phase without a strong anti-capitalist and workers’ movement, fascism would run rampant. Most people would be primarily concerned with survival, with little time for politics. 

But as Argentina showed, millions could turn to social and collectivist solutions when capitalism neither wants, nor can, provide the means for them to live.

To be clear, Robinson does not explicitly predict this outcome. But you do not need a weather forecaster to see the dangers and urgent need for ecosocialist alternatives. 

Doubts and elaboration

There is one nagging doubt, however, and one area that needs further elaboration.

The nagging doubt is the use of the word “imperialism.” Robinson thinks that globalised capitalism makes assigning capital to particular national states misleading. Perhaps, but I think he goes too far down this road. 

There are still nationally-based state apparatuses that try to bully weaker states and act as if they are defending national capital. Britain, the United States and China fall into this category. Imperialism has changed, but at the level of inter-state competition, it is alive and well.

The area that needs more elaboration — and the author knows this — is how to build an anti-capitalist, ecosocialist movement on a mass scale. 

Nevertheless, what this book does is vividly outline the terrain of struggle and where we have to fight. The definitive account of how catastrophe capitalism gets turned around will be written in the streets, the factories and in communities.

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  Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms, Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016). See also his The New Cold War: the US, Russia and China (2025), where Achcar provides a very different take on imperialism to that of Robinson.