Frederick Engels, speaking at Marx’s funeral, cited the proposition of historical materialism as the greatest of Marx’s achievements, along with the discovery of surplus value, and the capitalist system’s “laws of motion.” It is staggering to think that this excerpt, from the preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, was written in 1859. […]
Capitalism and Post-Capitalism Explained
Popular discussions of capitalism’s end and the emergence of a post-capitalist society are often full of confusion and muddled-thinking. Unnecessary debates and pointless digressions arise wasting everyone’s time. There are probably many reasons for this but one looms larger than all others — A failure to precisely define exactly what capitalism is. Some use the term so […]
Library
My office is never this organized. Books are usually lying around in piles which undergo a natural sifting process according to their relevance to the task at hand. I staged this photo in an attempt to represent the breadth and depth of thinking on the subject of capitalism’s social affects and the transformative role played […]
A Letter to Young Radicals
You’ve done your homework and you’ve achieved a rarified level of insight and understanding. Your bookshelf is full of works by Chomsky, Zinn, Marx, Gramsci, Zizek and the like. You’ve protested, occupied, and possibly even contributed some cash. You see clearly that the root of the problem is the system of capitalism itself — it […]
Understanding The RoR – 4 Simple Questions
The acronym RoR , short for Rise of the Robots, refers to the totality of the sweeping changes that newly emerging disruptive technologies will bring to our economy, our society, and our culture. These technologies involve far more than just robots, they include artificial intelligence, machine learning, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and whatever else is coming which we […]
Peter Drucker: The Post-Capitalist Society
Peter Drucker’s book, “Post-Capitalist Society”, published in 1993, is included in this section on the history of ideas for one reason — its title. If you search the term “post-capitalist,” Drucker’s book is bound to come up. This may lead to some confusion. Is this website associated with the book? It is not. Drucker’s book has the […]
Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
Content Coming Soon!
Jeremy Rifkin: The Zero Marginal Cost Society
Content Coming Soon! http://www.thezeromarginalcostsociety.com/
What is a Society?
Before discussing the advent of post-capitalist society we must first examine what a society is, and say something of how a society forms and functions. A simple dictionary definition of the word society might say something like, “a group of interdependent individuals” and will usually include some mention of sharing a common culture and common institutions. […]