New Books in Economic and Business History

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 longtime analyst of global capitalism. He traces how capitalism’s drive to expand created deep structural crises since the 1970s. Discussions cover automation and profit decline, social reproduction and precarity, militarization and green commodification, and prospects for revolt and left renewal.

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INSIGHT

1970s Structural Crisis Launched Globalization

Structural crises recur roughly every 40–50 years and reshape capitalism's organization and politics.
Robinson links the 1970s crisis to mass global struggles and the ruling class counteroffensive of capitalist globalization and a transnational capitalist class.

INSIGHT

Automation Raises Organic Composition And Lowers Profit

Capitalism's survival depends on perpetual expanded accumulation via extensive and intensive expansion.
Robinson explains declining profit rates from rising organic composition of capital as automation reduces living labor and squeezes investment returns.

ANECDOTE

Xiaomi And Amazon Illustrate Labor Replacement

Robinson cites Xiaomi's lights-out smartphone factory and Amazon's plan to replace 500,000 warehouse workers with robots as concrete signs.
He links these examples to accelerating organic composition and shrinking markets for consumers.

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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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