History has cycles. When dealing with ideas about how to organize societies there are ideological and sub-ideological cycles. Various nations have been capitalist since the 16th century, but what the means kept changing, usually every 50 to 80 years. Britain started very protectionist. It had periods where imperialism and capitalism were very intertwined. It had laisszez faire periods. All of these were forms of capitalism, but they were quite different from each other. The Roman Empire is an empire from Augustus to the end, but the Rome of Augustus is very different from future Romes, with their serfs (something Augustinian Rome didn’t have), their German legionaires, and so on.

In our times there are people alive who remember two and a half transitions:

  • The transition from laissez-faire (in America) to New Deal.
  • The transition of New Deal to Neoliberalism.
  • The transition of neoliberalism to whatever the new system will be called. (This is not the old system, Trump’s crazed tariffs, export controls to major buyers, the severe cutting of research, etc… all show that.)

In China they remember:

  • The change from warlordism and Republicanism to Maoism.
  • The change from Maoism to Dengism.
  • The recent change from Dengism to Xiism.

Globally we remember multiple transitions as well

  • The transition from the multi-great power world centered on America/Europe to the Cold War world dominated by the USSR and US. (Note this transition involved two world wars.)
  • The transition from the cold war world to the unipolar superpower world with the US the world hegemonic power.
  • The current transition from the American hegeomonic world to whatever will replace it.

In energy technology we have one and a half transitions:

  • The transition from the coal world to the petrochem world;
  • The current transition from the petrochem world to the electrical world based on other power sources.

Note that the technological cycle is a LOT slower. (And yes, I’ve left out the digital/telecom, but you could easily make the same sort of schema.

There is also the environmental question, and that’s part of various cycles. We aren’t different from other cultures in this regard: one thesis for the fall of Mesopotamia from the world’s leading region for six to eight thousand years is environmental. They aren’t the only ones.

We have multiple changes income all once:

  • Sub ideological changes in how capitalism and democracy run in Europe and the US.
  • A more or less complete change in China from Dengism to Xi-ism.
  • A change to the world political system, with the rise of China and the weakness of America.
  • Environmental collapse
  • Climate Change

All of these at the same times. Not only is “nothing ever happens” bullshit (as it always was) but we live in a period of radical change, and it’s only going to become more obvious over time.

But there are people alive, albeit not many, who remember the pre-WWII world.

Change is constant. It seems slow to humans, but those who live a long life have seen a great, great deal of change. And we didn’t even discuss the way daily life has changed due to the change from the analog world to the digital one. (A change I personally think was probably more bad than good, though I certainly love large parts of it.) And, of course, there’s the revolution in war making technology, strategy and tactics, as big as the change to trench warfare, then the change to blitzkrieg and air war.

Everything changes. And if you have a perspective longer than a couple decades, everything changes pretty fast, actually. Certainly the world I grew up in, that I remember from the 70s and early 80s no longer exists.

In human affairs nothing is constant save change.

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