Capitalism's Nine Lives: Predicting the end of the free market system is a mug's game, but a bigger welfare state is a pretty sure bet.

• Author: Cooper, Ryan

Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx

by Francesco Boldizzoni

Harvard University Press, 329 pp.

Is capitalism doomed? For well over 150 years, theoreticians have argued that it is, yet so far their prophecies have not panned out. Karl Marx famously predicted that the Industrial Revolution would set up a great political clash between business owners and the working class, ending "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." Many socialists thought the Great Depression represented the final death throes of the capitalist system. Even some conservatives and liberals at the time thought the system would implode or disappear within a century. Yet it has seemingly survived intact up to the present day. That failure of prediction is the subject of Foretelling the End of Capitalism, by Francesco Boldizzoni, a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Though Boldizzoni is perfectly clear about the gruesome side effects of unfettered capitalism, it simply isn't possible to predict sweeping revolutionary events with any accuracy. Those who do so inevitably fall prey to intellectual blind spots or biased thinking. However, he doesn't fully consider how parts of capitalism--at least as he defines it--have already disappeared in Western nations.

Boldizzoni has a deep familiarity with the thinking of both the anti-capitalist left and the pro-capitalist right, and his discussion of the intellectual evolution of various factions within both camps is superb. He runs through different strands of socialist predictions, starting with Marx's argument that the rate of profit would eventually decline, sparking a revolutionary crisis. When that didn't work out, Marx made the much more prescient prediction that increasing productive capacity would not keep pace with wages, leading to a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption.

It wasn't just socialists who got in on the action. The conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter disdained Marx's analysis but darkly suggested that intellectuals might help labor activists undermine the capitalist order. Marx was wrong about the manner in which capitalist societies would break down, Schumpeter said in a speech, but "he was not wrong in the prediction that it would break down eventually."

The liberal John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that within a century there would be so...