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[...] What may be surfacing here is the fundamental tension described by Marx between, on the one hand, the increasingly social nature of production in an advanced economy and society, and private ownership of the means of production on the other. As productivity growth requires more public provisi…

[...] there is no indication that the long-term trend towards greater economic inequality will be broken any time soon, or indeed ever. Inequality depresses growth, for Keynesian and other reasons. But the easy money currently provided by central banks to restore growth – easy for capital but not, …

[...] consumption in mature capitalist societies has long become dissociated from material need. The lion’s share of consumption expenditure today – and a rapidly growing one – is spent not on the use value of goods, but on their symbolic value, their aura or halo. This is why industry practitioner…

[...] Geoffrey Hodgson has argued that capitalism can survive only as long as it is not completely capitalist – as it has not yet rid itself, or the society in which it resides, of ‘necessary impurities’. Seen this way, capitalism’s defeat of its opposition may actually have been a Pyrrhic victory,…

The image I have of the end of capitalism – an end that I believe is already under way – is one of a social system in chronic disrepair, for reasons of its own and regardless of the absence of a viable alternative. While we cannot know when and how exactly capitalism will disappear and what will su…