The Structure of World History

Are Services Post-Capitalist? A Marxian Interrogation

“…It consists in simultaneous analysis and prediction, or what Bell (1973) called 'social forecasting'. Winant (2021) offers the most concrete recent proposal for how interpersonal labor performed in non-capitalist sectors-public and nonprofit hospitals-might prefigure a new care-based mode, echoing Karatani's (2014) 'reciprocal exchange' as the key social relation of both pre-state and post-capitalist societies (p. 231). His work builds on a recent surge in post-capitalist theorizing (Bastani, 2019;Hermann, 2021;Mason, 2015;Rifkin, 2014;Srnicek and Williams, 2015;Wark, 2019) and it has been the central task of this study to combine and assess their claims empirically, while deploying relevant insights from Marxian political economy and service work sociology.…”

“…The problem with most of these contributions, however, as well as their postindustrial forbearers, is their authors' reluctance to grapple with the thorny question of transition. Historians, philosophers, and social scientists have hotly debated this, focusing on the transition to capitalism, which post-capitalist theorists broadly ignore (Anderson, 1974;Althusser, 2006Althusser, [1963; Brenner, 1976;Harman, 2004;Heller, 2011;Post, 2011;Wood, 2002;Karatani, 2014). The core insights of this contentious body of work, largely divided between 'political Marxists' and those (also mostly Marxists) who disagree with them, are the following.…”

End of Capitalism, End of Humanity?

“…How, then, does this square of four forms function? One possible path to understand it was outlined by Kojin Karatani whose basic premise is the use of modes of exchange (instead of modes of production, as in Marxism) as the tool to analyze the history of humanity (Karatani 2014). Karatani distinguishes four progressive modes of exchange: (A) Gift exchange that predominates in pre-state societies (clans or tribes exchanging gifts); (B) Domination and protection that predominates in slave and feudal societies (here, exploitation is based on direct domination, plus the dominating class has to offer something in exchange, say, protecting its subjects from dangers); (C) Commodity exchange of objects that predominates in capitalism (free individuals exchange not only their products but also their own labor power); (X) A further stage to come, a return to the gift exchange at a higher level-this X is a Kantian regulative idea, a vision that assumed different guises in the history of humanity, from egalitarian religious communities that rely on communal solidarity to anarchist cooperatives and communist projects.…”