That is because he did not think his vision of a society beyond capitalism – of high productivity, automation and leisure – was internally contradictory. So where Marx saw an intractable problem, between a system based on work and market rationing on one side and abundance on the other, Keynes saw an easy procession from one world to the next.
With each passing day, particularly since the 2008 crisis, it seems ever more obvious that Marx was right. The five crises of this century are either an existential threat to humanity, or the birth pangs of something better.
Despite what Keynes predicted, neither is inevitable.
Post-Capitalism and Information: Peter Drucker
Unlike Marx and Keynes, Peter Drucker was not a political economist but a theorist of management. Like them, however, he believed that capitalism was a contingent, finite system with a distinct endpoint. He called that endpoint ‘post-capitalism’ and, as in the thinking of Marx and Keynes, it represented the full development of modernity.
At virtually the same time that HTML was publicly released, Drucker identified how information had become the primary factor of production – more so than the historic trio of labour, land and capital. As he wrote in 1993, ‘that knowledge has become the resource rather than a resource, is what makes our society post-capitalist … it creates new social dynamics. It creates new economic dynamics. It creates new politics.’
Drucker believed that society went through such rearrangements regularly, with Western history showing a ‘sharp transformation’ every several hundred years. All of which meant that within a few short decades, ‘society re-arranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political infrastructure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world’. Drucker believed the shift to post-capitalism to be one such transformation.
What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?
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