How Capitalism Ends: History, Ideology and Progress

by Steve Paxton

Overview

While the past 300 years have witnessed immense growth in productive capacity, the ‘logic’ of capitalist production is now pushing progress in all the wrong directions. We’ve passed the point where our biggest enemy is material scarcity. Our problems no longer revolve around insufficient production, but iniquitous distribution - and the fact that we’re fast running out of planet - and these are problems that capitalism cannot solve. Taking in a diverse range of contemporary and historical evidence - from the Putney Debates of 1647 to Modern Monetary Theory, from John Locke to Thomas Piketty, from the Rights of Man to the rise of identity politics How Capitalism Ends navigates a path through current affairs, history, economics and philosophy and sets the scene for the conversation we, as a civilization, urgently need to begin…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803410012
Publisher:	Collective Ink
Publication date:	11/25/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	428 KB

About the Author

Steve Paxton, in addition to an academic career culminating in doctoral research with GA Cohen at Oxford, has worked on building sites and in betting shops, been a PHP programmer and a T-shirt designer, been employed, self-employed and unemployed, blue-collar, white-collar and no-collar. He combines the experience of this varied career with his academic background to bring unique insights to the printed page. He lives near Oxford, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Part I History 1

1 Capitalism and Progress 3

1.1 Where We Are Now

1.2 How We Arrived Here 6

1.3 Understanding Historical Change 10

1.4 What is Capitalism? 13

1.5 Capitalism and Progress 16

2 The Rise of Capitalism 20

2.1 The Development of Capitalism in England

2.2 The Spread of Capitalism - France and the US 29

2.3 The Russian Road to Capitalism 32

2.4 Revolution and Reform 37

2.5 Economic Determinism 43

3 Capitalism Undone 48

3.1 Does Capitalism Still Work?

3.2 Capitalism and Rationality 53

3.3 Automation and Artificial Intelligence 54

3.4 Rescuing the Proletariat 57

3.5 The Changing Shape of Inequality 65

Part II Ideology 69

4 Left and Right 71

4.1 Origins

4.2 The Duality of the Left 75

4.3 The Duality of the Right 78

4.4 Civil Rights and Natural Rights 81

5 Equality of What? 85

5.1 Wealth Inequality 88

5.2 The Cult of the Status Quo 89

5.3 Equality or Sufficiency? 90

5.4 Is Inequality Inevitable? 92

6 Property and Freedom 98

6.1 Which Property? 99

6.2 Property and Freedom 100

6.3 Property and Rights 102

6.4 The Distribution of Ownership 103

6.5 The Origins of Property Rights 111

6.6 Property and Productivity 117

6.7 The Possible and the Permissible 122

6.8 Distributive Justice 123

Part III Progress 131

7 Work 133

7.1 Work and Virtue

7.2 Beyond the Labour Market 135

7.3 The Distribution of Effort 137

7.4 The Distribution of Reward 140

8 Money 143

8.1 Modern Monetary Theory 144

8.2 Transforming Wealth 156

9 Beyond Capitalism 160

9.1 Levelling the Playing Field

9.2 From Employment to Empowerment 166

9.3 Health, Housing and Education 171

Conclusion 176

Afterword: The Politics of Change 179

Endnotes 187

Works Cited 219