Four Structural Dilemmas of Contemporary Capitalism and Their Coupling Mechanism

The crisis of contemporary capitalism is not a simple accumulation of isolated problems. This paper employs system dynamics as an analytical method to propose four structural dilemmas: accumulation–distribution, capital–democracy time, marketization–social trust, and accumulation–ecological boundaries. By "structural dilemmas," it is meant not that capitalism has no room for correction, but that certain tensions are repeatedly reproduced by the system's routine incentives, with corrections relying on countervailing institutional forces such as redistribution, labor institutions, antitrust, long-term public investment, and ecological regulation. This paper uses the concept of "institutionalized primacy of private interests" to summarize the selection and amplification of self-interested behavior by property rights, competition, and incentive structures, revealing the positive-feedback coupling among the four dilemmas and the conditional nature of negative feedback. The Nordic experience demonstrates that institutional differences can significantly alter the intensity of these dilemmas, but the remedial mechanisms are politically conditional and reversible.