Permanent Planetary Turbulence

Jun 30, 2026

1. The Long Winter

Wolfgang Streeck is a German political economist, former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. His major work Buying Time (2014), and especially How Will Capitalism End? (2016) make the argument that capitalism is in a terminal crisis — not collapsing in a revolutionary moment, but running down over a long period because the institutions that stabilised it (the postwar settlement, the welfare state, embedded liberalism) are exhausted and there is no successor system being built.

"Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way."

Streeck’s specific contribution to the interregnum debate is this: he rejects the assumption — built into most Marxist and liberal frameworks — that a dying order must produce a new order. The Gramscian formula (”the old is dying and the new cannot be born”) implies the new order will eventually be born. Streeck says: maybe not. "What comes after capitalism in its final crisis... is... a lasting interregnum... a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder."

Maybe what happens instead is a prolonged period of systemic disintegration without replacement. He calls this the long winter, the interregnum that doesn’t end, the entropy of capitalism rather than its transcendence — over the postwar period, capitalism exhausted its capacity to deliver three things simultaneously — economic growth, social stability, and democratic legitimacy. The neoliberal era was an attempt to preserve the first by sacrificing the second and third. That bargain called the rules-based order is itself now breaking down.

But no successor system has the social base, institutional architecture, or hegemonic vision to replace it. So what happens is not a new system — what happens is a slow, multi-decade decomposition, during which the formal institutions of capitalism continue to exist, but progressively lose their coordinating function. Markets become more rigged, states become more captured, infrastructure decays, expert authority collapses, governance fragments. The system doesn’t end; it slowly unravels.

One of Streeck’s key ideas is that the system is without opposition — meaning capitalism has defeated all its organised alternatives, but in doing so has lost the disciplining pressure that made it functional. However, Streeck wrote the long winter argument in 2016 from inside the assumption that capitalism was still a single system in crisis. The rules-based order was cracking but still whole. Now it has factionalised. The decomposition Streeck described is now being driven by four rival capitalist projects, each of which is trying to manage the disintegration on its own terms, and none of which can build a successor.

Streeck explains the season; the rheopolitical framework explains the reason. The “long winter” describes the historical condition of late capitalism — a prolonged era in which the system cannot renew itself. Rheopolitics explains one mechanism sustaining that condition: rival infrastructural factions possess sufficient power to block one another but insufficient power to establish a new hegemonic order. The result is not collapse or transformation, but prolonged strategic paralysis.

The standard frame for great-power competition assumes the actors can leave the system. A multipolar world contains the possibility of new alignments, defections, exit. The current situation of rival factions is what happens when no faction can exit — because each controls something the others cannot function without, and any attempt to head out the door invites the rest to slam the door shut.

2. Nobody Can Exit

Davos cannot exit because it has no state apparatus of its own. Mark Carney, who has become the unofficial point man of Davos, is advocating that “the international order be rebuilt out of Europe.” His middle-powers coalition means Davos is retreating into fixed European borders in the wake of the failure of the Great Reset and the resignation of Klaus Schwab. Carney is attempting to build a multi-state coalition to give Davos military-industrial hard power.

Carney admitted as much, to the Australian parliament on March 4, 2026, that “great powers can compel, but middle powers can convene … Canada is choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience. We’ve adopted a new framework for engaging the world — variable geometry —creating different coalitions for different issues.”

How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

Richard Revelstoke

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The National Imperialists cannot exit because their domestic political base depends on the spectacle of confronting the other factions. Without the narrative that Trump is draining the swamp and taking out the deep state, his militant attempts at expanding the US-Israel empire are exposed. Netanyahu’s narrative that Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists dissolved when Jared Kushner revealed that Gaza was a proposed condo haven, not a war zone. Starting a war with Iran, under the pretext that Iran is providing weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, is revealed to be an attempt to weaken the China-Russia-Iran axis and crush the State Capitalist coalition.

The Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns cannot exit because their supply chains, capital sources, and markets are all controlled by factions they ideologically oppose. Silicon Valley cannot fabricate chips without rare earth metals from China or the fabrication plants in Taiwan. And they cannot sell chips without the regulatory rubber stamp of Brussels and export controls from the Imperial Nationalist faction.

The State Capitalists cannot exit because they need access to Western consumer demand, Western technology, and Western financial infrastructure to keep producing. Roughly 25-30% of China’s export trade is directed toward the United States and Europe. China is technologically dependent on western-made advanced microchips in order to compete in the AI market. US chips from Nvidia and AMD still offer superior performance for training large-scale AI models, compared to China’s homegrown versions.

Each faction is structurally pinned by its dependencies on the others. The trap is not quicksand but mutual hostage taking. Every faction holds a lever on every other, and the one act that pulls all those levers at once is the attempt to leave. So no one leaves. But no one rests either: each keeps testing its own grip and probing the others' — tightening here, threatening there — and that ceaseless testing of leverage produces turbulence.

This is a fluid, dynamic conflict rather than a rigid war. Factions frequently form temporary, fragile alliances to defeat a mutual rival, only to turn on each other the moment the immediate threat is neutralized, and this is the deeper analytical reason why the quadripolar order is structurally unable to resolve. It’s not just that the four factions are evenly matched. It’s that the underlying system they are fighting over no longer has the institutional reserves to produce a new equilibrium. Even if one faction “won,” it would inherit a capitalism that has lost the capacity to reproduce its own conditions.

Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” is metaphorically true — the symptoms are morbid not because they predict rebirth, but because the rebirth isn’t coming. The interregnum is the new normal. Capitalism cannot re-invent itself.

Fukuyama’s end of history thesis assumes the plateau is desirable but capitalism’s defeat of all its rivals means it has lost the discipline its rivals once imposed on it. It now fights only itself, and the fight has no end state. The world has virtually zero replacement strategy for capitalism.

Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism is often summarized by his most famous line: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” His argument is not that capitalism is healthy or universally accepted. Rather, it has become the horizon of political imagination. Even those who criticize it tend to assume there is no viable alternative. Politics therefore becomes managerial rather than transformational.

Fisher explains the crisis of imagination (culture). Streeck explains the crisis of accumulation and governance (political economy). Rheopolitics explains the crisis of elite coordination (power).

Streeck’s long winter says capitalism has lost the systemic capacity to reproduce itself. Streeck and Fisher explain the deadlock: a system that cannot reproduce itself, occupied by a population that cannot imagine its replacement. Gramsci’s hegemon of common sense says this is how the world views the ruling class and capitalism. The four factions are fighting inside that cultural and systemic exhaustion. None of them can win because none of them can construct a politically legitimate alternative — they can only manage the decomposition.

3. Historical Parallels

Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Europe contained multiple competing centers of power: The Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, a host of independent kingdoms (England, France, Castile, etc.) and merchant republics like Venice and Genoa all were vying for supremacy.

None could destroy the others, and more importantly, none could leave Latin Christendom itself. Everyone depended upon church legitimacy, trade routes, banking families, Latin literacy, canon law and the diplomatic norms of the times. Kings fought wars while continuing to rely on the Church for legitimacy and administration. When the Pope excommunicated a king, he was not destroying the system; he was weaponizing shared infrastructure. This resembles the modern Western sanctions that function as a modern form of excommunication.

The Holy Roman Empire was famously described by Voltaire, as neither holy, nor Roman, nor truly an empire. It consisted of hundreds of overlapping jurisdictions — princes, bishops, free cities, electors, and the elected emperor — none of whom exercised complete sovereignty. Authority was fragmented, negotiated, and constantly contested. Rival powers fought, formed alliances, and obstructed one another while remaining embedded in the same legal, economic, and religious framework.

The modern global order exhibits a similar structural logic. Sovereignty is fragmented across states, multinational corporations, financial institutions, technology platforms, and international organizations. No single actor possesses sufficient power to dominate the whole, yet none can exit the shared infrastructure on which they all rely. The result is not a stable hierarchy but a condition of permanent strategic rivalry inside a common system. There is also no elected emperor to coordinate the system.

The Italian Renaissance City-State System of Florence, the Concert of Europe (1814-1815) and the Cold War all displayed similar banking networks, merchant routes, diplomatic institutions and the same balance-of-power system. Victory by one threatened everyone. Complete destruction of the system meant economic collapse. Competition therefore became permanent rather than decisive.

After the Congress of Vienna, the great powers (Britain, Russia, Austria Prussia, and France) all competed intensely. Yet all feared another continent-wide revolution like the French Revolution or another Napoleon Bonaparte. They therefore maintained a common diplomatic order while simultaneously trying to improve their own positions.

The United States and the Soviet Union competed across every domain during the Cold War, yet both depended on nuclear deterrence, international finance, maritime trade, telecommunications and diplomatic rules. Neither side could actually “win” without risking mutual assured destruction.

The Cold War became a managed rivalry. Today’s system differs because there are not two blocs but multiple elite coalitions embedded in many of the same corporate, financial, and technological networks. The system is based on mutual asymmetric denial.

4. Trapped Inside a Planetary Infrastructure

In every historical example above, someone could eventually conquer the system. Today, the infrastructure itself has become global. The four factions may fight over dollar finance, semiconductor supply chains, AI models, satellites, cloud infrastructure, undersea cables, payment systems and logistics — but none can simply build an entirely separate world.

The Imperial Nationalists need global manufacturing. The Beijing bloc still depends on access to global markets and technology. Silicon Valley needs states to enforce property rights, build energy infrastructure, and provide security. The Davos-oriented institutions depend on the prosperity generated by states and corporations.

History has seen competing elites before, but today’s transnational ruling class is the first to be trapped inside a single, planetary infrastructure from which no faction can fully withdraw. It is less like a traditional empire than a global version of the Holy Roman Empire — except that its common territory is not Europe, but the world’s interconnected financial, technological, and logistical networks.

5. Threshold of Factionhood

The four factions are not fixed forever. Beneath them lie subordinate and emerging factions that increasingly possess strategic autonomy. India, Brazil, and the Gulf states are no longer merely regional powers. They are accumulating ownership over critical infrastructure — manufacturing, energy, logistics, finance, rare earth processing, sovereign wealth, digital payments, AI, or strategic geography. Should they acquire sufficient control over infrastructure that the existing four cannot easily circumvent, they cease being swing states and become factions in their own right. A faction is defined not by ideology or GDP, but by its ability to deny others access to something indispensable.

This also gives a clean definition of what separates a state from a faction.

A state exercises sovereignty over territory.

A faction exercises sovereignty over infrastructure.

We thus have a threshold of factionhood. A polity crosses that threshold when it satisfies three conditions:

Infrastructure ownership — it controls an indispensable network, technology, resource, financial architecture, or logistical corridor.
Denial capability — it can withhold or restrict that infrastructure from rivals.
Strategic autonomy — it cannot itself be easily coerced or excluded by any one existing faction.

By those criteria: India is approaching factionhood through semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, digital public infrastructure, manufacturing, and its ability to balance among competing powers. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council are approaching it through sovereign wealth, energy, logistics, AI investment, and control of key maritime chokepoints. Brazil possesses significant agricultural, mineral, energy, and environmental leverage, though it has less denial power over global infrastructure than India or the Gulf states.

The globe is currently in a quadripolar world order, but that could change. New factions may emerge as they acquire pieces of the global operating system. The question is no longer, Who has the largest army? but rather, Who can deny everyone else access to something they cannot function without?

The number of factions is not fixed. Four is not a law of history — it is a snapshot of the present balance of rheopolitical power. Future decades could see five, six, or more factions if new actors accumulate enough ownership and denial capability to become indispensable participants in the global system.

6. Permanent Planetary Turbulence

The transnational capitalist class is not a coherent elite. It has fractured into rival factions, each attempting to reorganize global capitalism according to its own vision. Yet none possesses enough infrastructural power to impose that vision, and none can withdraw from the global infrastructure they all share.

That creates what might be called a hegemonic stalemate, but more accurately it is akin to a four-way bad marriage, where the four partners divorced due to irreconcilable differences, yet still live in the same house because they all own the house and the mortgage needs to be paid.

Each faction can block the others:

the Imperial Nationalists can weaponize the dollar and military alliances;
the Beijing bloc can leverage manufacturing capacity and critical supply chains;
Silicon Valley can control essential digital platforms, AI, and cloud infrastructure;
Davos-oriented institutions retain influence through finance, multilateral governance, and regulatory coordination.

But none can construct a complete alternative system without relying, at least in part, on the infrastructure controlled by its rivals.

Streeck’s metaphor of a “long winter” conveys duration, but it doesn’t fully convey acceleration. The crises are not simply persisting; they are interacting with one another, amplifying one another, closer to a complex adaptive system continually approaching critical mass but never resolving.

Each of these pressures would be destabilizing on its own:

AI and technological competition accelerating economic and military rivalry.
Nuclear deterrence raising the stakes of geopolitical confrontation.
Climate change, the energy transition, and fossil fuel dependence creating competing imperatives rather than a single policy solution.
Expanding surveillance capabilities increasing both state capacity and public distrust.
Housing unaffordability, wealth concentration, stagnant wages, and cost-of-living pressures fueling populist backlash and declining political legitimacy.

The crucial point is that these are not independent variables. They reinforce one another. AI changes military competition. Military competition accelerates semiconductor rivalry. Semiconductor rivalry reshapes supply chains. Climate policy affects energy security. Energy security affects geopolitics. Economic insecurity fuels populism, which in turn constrains governments’ ability to cooperate internationally.

In a fragmented elite system, no faction can address these problems comprehensively because every proposed solution benefits one coalition while disadvantaging another. Consequently, crises are displaced rather than resolved.

If Streeck’s “long winter” describes the historical season of late capitalism, it is a winter in which atmospheric pressure is continually falling. Storm fronts accumulate faster than they dissipate. Rather than moving toward equilibrium, the system moves toward a condition of permanent turbulence, where each crisis interacts with the others, producing compound instability and permanent planetary turbulence.

The civil war between the factions does not freeze history; it supercharges it. Because no faction can impose a durable settlement, every technological breakthrough, geopolitical conflict, ecological constraint, and social crisis becomes another force acting upon the same shared infrastructure. AI, nuclear deterrence, climate change, surveillance, demographic pressures, and popular discontent do not merely coexist. They interact within a globally integrated system whose governing factions lack the capacity to produce a common political settlement. The result is not collapse, nor equilibrium, but a condition of continual turbulence.

Late stage capitalism produces not stagnation, but perpetual, compounding crisis without resolution.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit