Predictable and Otherwise Part I

For many years I have held a rather heretical (in the usual lefty point of view) opinion. I personally believe that we are living in a post capitalist society that is better described as “managerial” rather than “capitalist”. This is, of course, a moot point, and I recognize that no society is purely dependent on only one mode of production and exchange. The inclusion of exchange is important to differentiate my point of view from merely another ‘historical materialist’ point of view, one that is solely focused on prouction and neglects to one degree or another the world of consumption.

I’ll leave the justification of this opinion for another time.What is important here is just like an idealized “capitalist” society has its periodic crises somehow connected to “overproduction” so does managerial society has its own cycles.of crisis. The business cycle, of course, never followed the rule book laid out by Marx in Capital  . When Marx wrote his magnum opus in the most free trade society  in the world at the time of its maximum free trade existence ie its closest approach to an ideal “capitalism” it was at least seeminly possible that history would follow the schemata that Marx laid out.