Cover story: 'After capitalism' by Geoff Mulgan | Prospect Magazine April 2009 issue 157

Cover story: 'After capitalism' by Geoff Mulgan | Prospect Magazine April 2009 issue 157: "what might come after capitalism?

Only a few years ago that question had been parked, deemed about as sensible as asking what would come after electricity. Global markets had pulled China and India into their orbit, and capitalism’s triumph appeared complete, with medievalist Islam and the ragged armies that surround the G8 summits jostling to be its last enfeebled competitor. Multinational companies were said to command empires greater than most nation states, and in some accounts had won the affiliation of the masses through their brands.

Yet the lesson of capitalism itself is that nothing is permanent—“all that is solid melts into air” as Marx put it. Within capitalism there are as many forces that undermine it as there are forces that carry it forward."