IS CAPITALISM DYING OUT?

     I received the new edition of Ephemera, (on the net) and found it a very interesting magazine. I found one article in particular "Is capitalism dying out?"  by Steen Nepper Larsen, extremely thought provoking and recommend it as well worth a read. The entire magazine is packed full of thought provoking articles and well worth a visit.

     The following is just a very short quote from near the end of the above mentioned article:

Exit

Where Gorz envisages a capitalism dying out and negating itself in a fertile virtual sphere of communication that contains real political potentialities for radical social transformation, I see what Marx called ‘the civilizing influence of capital’ giving breath to ever newer forms of contradiction. Gorz is right in claiming that knowledge is not reducible to a commodity. He is also right to emphasize that neither the Marxist theory of value nor the dominant ‘liberal’ theory of economic value can grasp the process of transforming knowledge into value. But unfortunately he is mistaken in claiming that capitalism will soon disappear. Maybe it is capitalism’s ability to produce powerful conflicting and contradicting patterns of social life that keeps it alive and kicking. Capitalism manages to integrate major parts of human creativity, our innovative skills, desires and communicative utterances to foster and maintain its own logic of accumulation, and until now we have not been able to conquer its destructive aspects or find a way to live without its seemingly magnetic power.

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ephemera 12(3): 486-491

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Is capitalism dying out?

Steen Nepper Larsen

You can read the full article HERE:

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