The New Anti-Capitalism — Harold James

Interesting form the point of view of the changing nature of the mode of production from industrial to digital. 

This suggests that an economic system more appropriate to emerging conditions is in the making — and in the interregnum it will be somewhat messy, especially given the accumulated challenges arising from negative externalities such as climate change 

This further suggests a new phase on the historical dialectic where opposing forces hammer out the response to systemic shifts in social, political and economic terms. 

The result is a period of uncertainty and conflict before the dominant trends emerge from the fog of change in a complex adaptive system comprising nearly ten billion people.

I think that terms like "capitalism" and "socialism" may be becoming less appropriate as the world is more and more enmeshed in a "'paradigm shift," as Ray Dalio has observed. Just as agriculture was not foreseeable in the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity's development, or industry in the pre-technological age of feudalism' so too, it may not yet be possible to discern the outlines of what is emerging and what kinds of conditions will accompany this. 

I am old enough to remember when Dick Tracy's wrist radio was far-out, and saw the distribution of technology over the 20th century — the electric light, automobiles, radios, aircraft travel, television, and the computer. What will people coming along now see — robotics, AI, bio-medicine, space travel....

Thinking chiefly in terms of existing categories like "capitalism" and "socialism" as presently conceived is looking backward to see the future.

Project Syndicate
The New Anti-Capitalism

Harold James | Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation