William I. Robinson, "Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Apr 30, 2026

William I. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara and author on global capitalism, outlines the multifaceted crisis exhausting capitalism today. He surveys 1970s structural shifts, transnational hegemony breakdown, ecological limits, state legitimacy dilemmas, overaccumulation and social reproduction strain. The conversation closes with discussion of global resistance and democratic socialist possibilities.

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INSIGHT

1970s Structural Crisis Spawned Globalization

Structural crises recur roughly every 40–50 years and the 1970s crisis led capital to launch globalization as a counteroffensive.
Globalization created a transnational capitalist class and a globally integrated system of production, finance, and services that prolonged accumulation until new limits emerged.

INSIGHT

Automation Raises Structural Profit Crisis

Capitalism's core drive is perpetual expanded accumulation, producing crises when profitable investment opportunities vanish.
Rising organic composition of capital (more machines, less living labor) and AI-driven automation lower profit rates and shrink effective markets.

INSIGHT

Overaccumulation Creates Surplus Humanity

Overaccumulation means obscene wealth with nowhere profitable to invest, producing two billion people as 'surplus humanity.'
Capital shifts social reproduction costs to states and privatizes health, education, and utilities, intensifying mass deprivation.

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Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (Cambridge UP, 2025) is the most recent book from Professor William Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This title is the latest in excellent and ground-breaking titles from Professor Robinson in a distinguished career, where he began writing books on United States intervention into Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s, expanding this focus on United States hegemony more broadly in the ground-breaking book Promoting Polyarchy in 1996, up to then grappling with the totality of the capitalist world system more recently in titles such as The Global Police State in 2020, Can Global Capitalism Endure in 2022, and War, Global Capitalism and Resistance in 2024, alongside many other books.

Professor Robinson’s latest instalment we discuss in this episode, Epochal Crisis, tracks the multifactorial crises that are impacting the global capitalist system today, across economic, social, ecological, political and other dimensions, and how these intersecting and overlapping crises are degrading or exhausting the ability for capitalism to renew itself. This contemporaneous epochal crisis, as Professor Robinson carefully details, is catalysing morbid symptoms that express themselves as wars, unprecedented violence, ecological emergencies, rock-bottom political legitimacy and a host of other dangerous and cataclysmic effects. Epochal Crisis is both a wide-ranging and extensive investigation into the current, overlapping and intersecting crises that are plaguing the world capitalist system, as it appears in its final, violent death throes, and also a highly engaging work that is easy to digest and will help you understand the very naked reality of capital crisis that is so obvious to us all today. Thankfully, Professor Robinson also addresses what we can do in this latest, perhaps final, epochal breakdown of the capitalist system, to find some revolutionary hope in these dark times.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.

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