What Comes Next? (2026)

Book Review from the November 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Comes Next? Why Our Society Needs a System Upgrade. Volume 1: The Illusion of Money. By Robert Everett Cox. 2026. 326 pp.

This book, the first in a 3-volume series, presents a detailed explanation and critique of the capitalist system. It delves into various different views on the origins and rise of capitalism and the impact that system has had, and continues to have, on people’s lives. Its four chapters, each divided into various parts, are entitled ‘Why Work?’, ‘The Wages System’, ‘Abundance Thwarted?’ and ‘For Richer or Poorer’.

It is difficult to do justice in a single review to the breadth and intricacy of the investigation the author conducts, characterised as it also is by multiple references to the contributions of other writers and researchers. It may be useful, however, to pick on certain aspects that this reviewer found especially striking for the way they illuminate certain widely discussed topics whose implications are often incompletely understood and rarely taken to their logical conclusion.

The first one of these, which spans the volume and is interrogated with admirable clarity, is the ‘two-class’ case advanced by socialists, ie that society is divided between the tiny minority who own most of the resources and wealth in society (capitalists) and the vast majority who don’t (workers). Among the objections often raised to this view is that, since not everyone falls neatly into either of these categories, it does not reflect the reality of things. The author’s response to this is a frank and simple admission that such a picture of society is indeed ‘a simplification, a generalisation’, but that ‘making generalisations is unavoidable if we want to see the wood for the trees as far as understanding society is concerned’. More precisely: ‘A capitalist may be loosely defined as someone who possesses sufficient capital to comfortably live off the proceeds of investing that capital. This should not be confused with a self-employed worker; however hard-working, entrepreneurial and frugal such a worker may be. The latter does not possess sufficient capital to qualify as a capitalist and therefore still depends on working to obtain a living, like other members of the working class’.

Secondly, the much debated subject of ‘financialisation’ of the capitalist economy (‘making money out of money’), the ‘fictitious capital’ associated with it and how that relates to capital invested in the traditional production and distribution of goods and services is examined in a way that sheds far more light on the phenomenon than this reviewer has previously found and is also linked in innovative fashion to Marx’s ideas on money, credit and surplus value. Ultimately, the author tells us, we should not be surprised by the manifold forms that capitalism’s drive for profit may take, since ‘like some hydra-headed monster of Greek mythology, it grows a new head as new circumstances dictate’.

Next, there is ample discussion of what the author refers to as ‘capitalism’s structural waste’. Most people are aware that a good many of capitalism’s technological advances, rather than being used productively to better the human lot and create the abundance modern technology is capable of, are directed instead into activities that make life more complex, more insecure or more perilous the world over. Here we are talking about, for example, increased bureaucracy, the sales and advertising industry, and preparation and waging of war, which absorb the time, effort and mental and physical energies of so many of the working population. This ‘progress perverted’ phenomenon is, of course, widely understood, but rather than just lament the waste associated with it, the writer is not afraid to refer to the whole world of ‘commerce, finance and retailing’ as ‘socially useless industries’, and then to take it further by analysing and putting an actual figure on the ‘wasted labour’ all this represents (50 percent). His incontrovertible explanation for this is that ‘Under capitalism, generally speaking, technological innovations tend not to be taken up and developed if there is no prospect of making a profit by doing so’.

A final example, among many, of the issues this volume addresses in a novel and thought-provoking way is the futility of proposals or attempts to reform capitalism in the interest of workers. It dwells, in particular, on the advocacy by many of Universal Basic Income (UBI). In a section entitled ‘The UBI Panacea’, it explains in entirely credible fashion how automation and AI are unlikely to drastically reduce the number of jobs any more than previous major technological developments have and so are unlikely to cause what John Maynard Keynes wrongly foresaw as ‘a new disease … namely technological unemployment’. It follows from this, the author goes on to argue, that UBI policies by governments will not be needed, since dire want among the mass of workers owing to unemployment will not come to pass. As for UBI as a solution that governments could adopt anyway to deal with the structural unemployment caused by capitalism or simply to try and equalise spending power among workers, he points to the impracticality and potentially disruptive nature of this on a plethora of different levels whatever the model proposed. A hypothetical example given is of a government conceiving and trying to bring in UBI as a measure that ‘provides everyone with the same lump sum, which they receive on top of their income, earned or unearned’.

Such samples of the issues addressed in this volume may give an idea of the breadth with which it covers a wide range of other areas, eg, the ‘human nature’ argument, the ‘fake’ socialism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the nature and causes of inflation, ‘the penetration of money into every aspect of our lives, the continued validity of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the concept of ‘relative poverty’, the vast disparity of wealth ownership between workers and capitalists. It also offers a small taste, if only a taste, of the ‘What Comes Next?’ of its title, ie the alternative system of society the author sees as necessary to replace the one investigated here. This alternative is summed up as ‘a post-capitalist society when employment (and hence “unemployment”) would cease to exist and when money would no longer be required to access the goods and services we need’. How this characterisation is followed up and fleshed out in the further 2 volumes of What Comes Next (‘Beyond the Price Tag’ and ‘A Sharing Society’) will be discussed in reviews of those in future editions of the Socialist Standard.

Howard Moss