Capital after Capitalism The evolution of the concept of capital in the light of long-run sustainable reproduction of the species

Hardy Hanappi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The capitalist mode of production has fulfilled a most astonishing ‘historical mission’ for the human species. It enabled an explosion of labor productivity gains and the discovery of new utility dimensions. But this progress came at the price of accompanying explosion of contradictions, of unequal benefits and burdens across global and local classes of humans. This paper sets out to explore what will happen if capitalism is finally ending, if its mission collapses. To do so a workable definition of the essence of capitalism is needed, I propose this to be the ‘capitalist algorithm’ – for a detailed treatment see [Hanappi, 2013]. The most interesting question then concerns the social mechanisms that might overcome – revolutionize – what currently dominates the behavior of large production conglomerates as well as their military arms on a global level. Following the tradition of Hegel and Marx it can be assumed that a large part of the capitalist algorithm simply will have to vanish. But as history shows there also always is a remainder of a mode of production that in an inverted form (Hegel: negation, German Marxism: ‘Umstülpung’) becomes part of the next progressive mode of production. To identify what ‘Capital after Capitalism’ could be, what has to be abolished and what might survive in which form – remember the double meaning of Hegel’s concept ‘Aufhebung’ – is a central prerequisite for a proper understanding of the coming revolution of the current mode of production. Since each step on the ladder of global social evolution is also a step in social human consciousness, this step in understanding implies a direct impact in guiding the actions to accomplish this turnover.

Keywords: Capitalism; Utopia; Political Economy; Mode of Production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B00 B59 N10 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77161/1/MPRA_paper_77161.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:77161

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().