The Death of Capitalism Announced

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England's Meltdown, an activist group that pronounced the end of capitalism, have managed to capture some media attention with their lovely costumes and staged funeral for capitalism. And they have managed to do this in a country and in a mass media that insists there "is no alternative."  This grim space of hopelessness, this end of history where no alternative to capitalism can be imagined, is exactly the sort of loss of utopian vision that has immobilized the Left for decades. In his recent book, Spaces of Hope, David Harvey insists that we must resist this hopelessness.  Rather than "no alternative," we must offer our own utopian visions of a world that is not primarily about profit, but people.  But what exactly should we call this world?  Communism has been sullied by the Soviets and Chinese.  Socialism seems like a compromise space staked out by countries as embedded in capitalism as France and Spain.  Better than capitalism, perhaps, but not exactly outside the market. Perhaps we should name this brave, new world "post-capitalism."  Under post capitalism, the primary motivation cannot be profit, but must be people.  The true costs of a product are considered- so gas is $20 a gallon and nuclear weapons don't exist.  Under post-capitalism, we are too smart to believe that markets can solve everything, but also not so naive that we believe the state can produce good toilet paper. Hopefully groups like Meltdown can actually imagine a post-capitalist future and resist the rhetoric of "no other alternative" that has dominated the post-utopian politics that were ushered in by the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions. via G-20 Protests Lose Some Momentum - NYTimes.com