Introduction

For a long time, I believed the story we were told.

That capitalism won. That the Soviet Union collapsed because it was inefficient. That the 1990s were simply the natural reward for choosing the “right” system. Freedom, markets, progress, end of story. It took years, and a lot of lived experience, to realize that this explanation was far too simple.

What actually happened was not a clean victory. It was an absorption. And what we are dealing with today is the moment when the benefits of that absorption are finally gone. This is not about ideology. It’s about how systems behave when they reach their limits.

Debt Isn’t a Problem — It’s a Boundary

Most people think of debt as something abstract. A number. A future issue. Something governments argue about on television. But when debt becomes permanent, when it has to be rolled over again and again just to keep things stable, it stops being financial and starts being structural. At that point, decisions still happen, but they are constrained. 

Quietly. Almost invisibly. Before anything else, the same question always comes first:

Will this affect access to capital?

That question doesn’t need to be said out loud. Everyone already understands it. And once that becomes the organizing principle, sovereignty doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape. You still have choice, just less of it than before.

Debt doesn’t collapse systems. It teaches them how to behave differently.

What Capitalism Used to Be

When people talk about capitalism, they usually imagine the version they grew up with. Work hard. Produce something. Get paid. Grow. Expand. Repeat.

That model worked because there was always room to expand. New markets. New resources. New consumers. Energy was cheap. Nature was treated as external. Time felt abundant. Debt worked in that world because growth absorbed it. You could plan a life around it. You could believe that saving and working would eventually lead somewhere stable.

That version of capitalism wasn’t a lie. It just depended on conditions that no longer exist.

When Growth Stopped Doing Its Job

By the late twentieth century, cracks were already visible. Energy shocks in the 1970s showed that physical limits mattered. Productivity gains stopped translating into wages. Asset prices rose while everyday life became more expensive. Growth continued on paper, but it stopped solving the same problems. Debt kept rising, but growth no longer neutralized it.

Capitalism didn’t stop at that point. It adapted, the way it always does.

The 1980s: Buying Time with Consumer Debt

The response in the 1980s wasn’t a fix. It was a detour. Reagan and Thatcher didn’t reinvent capitalism. They shifted where the pressure sat. Instead of states carrying debt, households did. Credit expanded. Consumption was pulled forward from the future. People became the shock absorbers.

This kept the system running, but it also created the overleveraged society we now live in. Debt replaced expansion.

It worked-temporarily.

The Soviet Union: Not Just a Collapse, but an Absorption

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The USSR wasn’t just a political system. It was an entire technological and economic zone built outside capitalist pricing. Heavy industry. Scientific institutions. Engineering capacity. Energy systems. Infrastructure. Education. Decades of accumulated value that had never been priced by markets. When that system dissolved, capitalism didn’t simply “win.” 

It inherited.

Factories, infrastructure, knowledge, and labor were suddenly exposed to global capital. Assets were priced, sold, dismantled, reorganized, or absorbed. Entire regions became new supply chains. This was not an accident, and it was not spontaneous.

Long before the flag came down, the transition was already being discussed, modeled, and quietly prepared. One of the places where this happened was the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria — a joint East–West project during the Cold War itself. It focused on systems modeling, optimization, and long-term economic thinking.

Within that environment, a generation of Soviet economists and planners was already being introduced to financial logic that did not exist inside the planning economy. Figures who later drove post-Soviet reforms did not appear suddenly in the 1990s. The reform logic came before the collapse.

Seen this way, the Soviet system did not simply fail and then get replaced. It transitioned, and the transition was prepared inside the old system.

The Role of the Bulldozer

This is where individuals matter — not as masterminds, but as instruments.

Mikhail Gorbachev was not the obvious successor in the Soviet hierarchy. He was not the most senior or the most orthodox. In many ways, that was precisely why he was chosen.

By the time he rose, the system already knew it could not continue as it was. Reform was unavoidable. What was needed was not a guardian of continuity, but someone capable of pushing through changes that others could not survive politically.

Perestroika was presented as renewal and restructuring. In practice, it functioned as controlled demolition. Gorbachev did not design the final outcome, but he made reversal impossible. He absorbed resistance. He cleared the path.

He was less an architect than a bulldozer.

History personalizes these moments, but systems often select figures who can perform a specific role at a specific time. The individual absorbs the cost of transition while deeper structures reorganize.

This pattern has also been noted by external analysts. A comparative essay published by the Russian International Affairs Council draws parallels between Mikhail Gorbachev and Donald Trump as transitional figures associated with efforts to reorganize systemic liabilities during periods of structural stress.

Transitional Figures and Managed Unwinding

There is a tendency to treat figures like Mikhail Gorbachev and Donald Trump as historical accidents,  as if systems simply “ended up” with them. That view misses something important.

In periods of structural stress, systems do not always select their most stable or consensus-oriented leaders. Quite often, they elevate figures capable of doing something far more specific: reorganizing liabilities.

This is not a moral judgment. It is a functional role.

A comparative analysis published by the Russian International Affairs Council explicitly frames both Gorbachev and Trump as leaders who sought, in very different contexts, to shed obligations that had become structurally unsustainable, whether geopolitical, economic, or institutional. In both cases, the aim was not collapse, but relief: reducing commitments that no longer matched underlying capacity.

Mikhails Gorbachev’s reforms were intended to modernize and preserve the Soviet system. Instead, they accelerated its disintegration, not because reform was misguided, but because the system had already passed the point where reform could restore balance. The liabilities were too large. The structure too rigid.

The analysis draws a careful distinction: the United States is not the Soviet Union, and its institutional resilience is different. But the comparison itself is revealing. It shows that transitional periods tend to elevate leaders who can absorb disruption, fracture old alignments, and make continuation of the previous model impossible. In that sense, Trump’s role looks less anomalous and more familiar.

His presidency was not defined by building a coherent replacement system. It was defined by disruption of alliances, norms, trade assumptions, and institutional expectations. That disruption did not stop the system from functioning.

It changed how it functioned.

What matters here is not personality or intent, but pattern.

Large systems rarely unwind through consensus. They unwind through figures who can move obstacles, provoke resistance, and exhaust old narratives, clearing space for deeper structural reorganization that occurs elsewhere: in finance, infrastructure, standards, and compliance regimes.

History tends to remember these figures as causes. More often, they are signals.

Signals that the old structure can no longer carry its own weight.

Why the 1990s Felt Like a Golden Age

From the Western perspective, what followed looked like triumph.

From a systems perspective, it looked like inheritance.

Capitalism suddenly had access to cheap assets, new labor pools, new technologies, new markets, and new extraction zones,  none of which it had to build from scratch.

This bought time.

The explosion of consumption, finance, and confidence in the 1990s, especially in the United States, wasn’t proof that contradictions were solved. It was proof that a huge amount of external value had entered the system all at once.

Capitalism didn’t resolve its limits. It postponed them.

Globalization Was the Last Expansion

Globalization followed the same logic. Move production. Arbitrage labor. Stretch supply chains. Expand markets one last time. By the 2010s, that option was exhausted too. Markets were integrated. Labor advantages narrowed. Environmental and political costs increased.

There was nowhere left to expand into.

When There Is Nowhere Else to Go

This is where we are now. Capitalism didn’t end. It turned inward.

When expansion stops working, systems shift from growth to management. From abundance to control. From persuasion to procedure.

This is where circular economy stops being a philosophy and becomes a requirement. A closed system cannot function on pure freedom. It needs tracking. Limits. Feedback loops.

Circular Economy and Programmable Control

A circular economy cannot run on anonymous money and unlimited choice.

It requires rules. Conditions. Constraints. That is why programmable currency, conditional spending, expiration mechanisms, and embedded compliance start to appear. Money stops being neutral. It becomes a steering mechanism.

This isn’t punishment. It’s logistics in a finite system.

Why Carbon Becomes Central

Carbon sits at the center because it connects everything. Energy. Production. Land. Time.

Carbon credits are not moral gestures. They are accounting tools. They allow value to move across time, stabilizing the present by promising future restraint or restoration.

Carbon becomes part of finance because finance needs something measurable to manage limits.

Measurement Replaces Growth

In old capitalism, growth solved problems. In this phase, measurement does. MRV, ESG, reporting systems, they aren’t trends. They are how the system governs itself without political conflict.

What can be measured can be allowed.

What can’t be measured becomes risky.

What is risky becomes expensive.

What is expensive disappears.

No ideology required.

A Familiar Pattern Reappears

When I look at the present, I can’t help noticing a similar pattern. Figures like Donald Trump function less as designers of a new system and more as disruptors of the old one. They polarize attention, break norms, absorb outrage, and make reversal difficult. At the same time, the United States continues to consolidate the infrastructure that the next system depends on: data centers, cloud architecture, financial rails, satellite networks, and digital standards.

Disruption at the political level can coexist with consolidation at the infrastructural level. In fact, it often enables it.

Again, the pattern matters more than the person.

The Quiet Irony

Here’s the part most people don’t want to hear.

To survive its own limits, capitalism has adopted mechanisms it once defined itself against: coordination, managed distribution, controlled consumption.

Not through revolution.

Through finance.

It’s not socialism in name. But it is a system where choice is conditional, behavior is shaped, and value is allocated through rules. Capitalism didn’t defeat its opposite.

It absorbed parts of it.

Conclusion

Expansionary capitalism ended a long time ago. Consumer debt bought time. The collapse of the Soviet system bought more. Globalization stretched the limits one last time.

Now that time is gone.

What remains is a system that must live within boundaries. Circular economy, programmable money, carbon markets, MRV, and ESG are not ideologies. They are survival mechanisms.

People still argue as if capitalism were fixed and eternal. It never was. It adapts. It absorbs. It changes shape.

And the real divide ahead isn’t between capitalism and socialism.

It’s between those who understand how the system now works, and those who are still arguing about the version that already ended.

A Final Note

None of this means outcomes are predetermined. It does mean timing matters.

We are still in a phase where choices exist, where positioning is possible, where direction can be selected rather than imposed. That window does not stay open indefinitely.

The system will continue to organize itself, with or without individual understanding.

The only real choice left is whether one moves early, while options remain, or later: 

When  compliance has already been decided.

The essays that follow explore how this systemic shift expresses itself in legitimacy, compliance, and asset markets.