When the social order exhausts itself...

"No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation."

-Karl Marx in a preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

read the entire piece here 

contemporary commentary here by Chris Hedges