Book, Capitalism without rivals: the future of the system that dominates the world[LS]

What design can be drawn from the globalization we have today? How did it form? What are its characteristics? What distinguishes it from previous periods of economic expansion aimed at internationalization? And the scenarios for the future? What can be done to at least mitigate the visible inequalities spread across all continents? By demonstrating, based on extensive documentation and data analysis, that capitalism ended up becoming the only economic system in force on the planet after centuries of coexistence or rivalry with other modes of production — with emphasis on feudalism and socialism —, Branko Milanović not only answers these and many other questions, but also offers an absolutely original vision of the evolution of communist societies in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, with emphasis on China — a global giant that today constitutes, in the author's analysis, the greatest example of what he calls political capitalism, in contrast to the liberal meritocratic capitalism represented, in particular, by the United States. For Milanović, if the ascending bourgeois class operated the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the most advanced countries of Europe since the end of the Middle Ages (and its subsequent expansion to other continents), it was communism that, in several parts of the so-called Third World , ended up playing this transitional historical role, only to later become extinct as a mode of production. With erudition and didacticism, Milanović shows the differences between the two predominant capitalisms, the ways in which they relate to each other, how their internal inequalities are constituted and how they manifest themselves, with their own characteristics, in all regions of the globe. By scrutinizing the formation and intergenerational reproduction of the economic and political ills of capitalism — in its two main aspects —, as well as the risks inherent to it, the economist points out measures capable of reducing them, thus exploring and enhancing the undeniable and consistent positive traits of what has unfailingly become the only economic system existing on our planet.