WAR AND THE CRISIS OF HEGEMONY
I have titled this book 'The Century of Decision' because I contend that this century will witness one of the sharpest turning points in human history. The last critical age, which was so challenging and fundamentally changed accumulation systems and lifestyles, was the 14th century, a time of great disasters and transformations. In that century, the historical system we now call capitalism made its first decisive emergence, creating a pattern. However, this historical system, which has continued to the present day, was not without rivals. Non-capitalist formations also changed, transformed, and adapted alongside it.
And our world is changing “qualitatively” today. The system we call capitalism is actually slowly giving way to another accumulation system. The Russo-Ukrainian War, the rise of China, Trumpism... These are the most important topics of the tectonic shift in global accumulation. The author of this book claims to examine all these processes from 1340 to the near future, i.e., 2050, not at a popular level, but at a scientific level. I have examined this long period in the light of dialectics, contradictions, cycles, moments of rupture, and metamorphosing historical systems. My aim was to construct a “map of time”. The century we live in is truly a century of “decision”.
It is a decision about what kind of world we prefer to live in. There is no issue more important than this decision on humanity's agenda. This book does not aim to predict “which choice humanity will ultimately make”, but rather to explain the journey that leads us to this inevitable moment of decision and fork in the road.
