Activity

Nobody in 1917 considered the revolution in Russia unexpected. The Russian nobility had long been haunted by the specter of serf peasants revolting to avenge their near-slave condition. A modern proletarian revolution had been awaited ever since the European upheavals of 1848. This fear/hope was fe…

There is a further obstacle to revolutionary change. The communist and fascist revolutionary alternatives to capitalism were disasters, and they are the only ones to have emerged so far. There are no other alternatives around and almost no one wants to repeat either of those. Socialism, whether rev…

Moreover, new markets need not be restricted by geography. They can also be created by cultivating new needs. Capitalism has grown adept at persuading families that they need two cars, bigger and bigger houses, more and more electronic devices. Whoever dreamt of this fifty years ago? What will our …

Another estimate of the timing of future capitalist crisis is provided by world-system (W-S) theory. In earlier writing on the capitalist world-system, Wallerstein and colleagues presented a theoretical model of systemic long cycles. The core regions of the W-S in their expansive phase generate the…

Although educational credential inflation expands on false premises—the ideology that more education will produce more equality of opportunity, more high-tech economic performance, and more good jobs—it does provide some degree of solution to technological displacement of the middle class. Educatio…