CapitalismRelinked from The Guardian

“Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism…”. – Paul Mason Zoran Opalic: Could we call it a Modern Soft Slavery/Communism? We live in a fluid phase of modernity, in which social forms are constantly changing at great speed, radically transforming the experience of being human…

Companies will pay you by the “only if it works” theory, we have transportation companies that don’t own a vehicles (Uber), Facebook – most popular media owner that doesn’t create content, Airbnb – largest accommodation provider that doesn’t own real estate…I guess you can call this sharing. And it’s all so cool and different and…similar to communism – this postcapitalism was invented long time ago by Tito in Yugoslavia, quite good experiment for the era that is in front of us all… In this form of society I would rather be that sharing symbol in the sky (photo above) then one of the guys holding hands and looking forward to this new era…Eventually somebody has to pay. Now more than ever before. I just don’t want to be one of this cool poor bastard that has to take it from this newly promoted “postapitalism” “Inevitably, the undermining of familiar institutions, an aspect of modernity that has certainly been intensified in recent years, has had important consequences for people’s sense of identity. There is nothing new about the observation that national and class-based identities (both of which had seemed almost definitively modern) have been upset by the end of the Cold War and various other developments discussed under the heading of ‘globalisation’. Similarly, Bauman notes that while the workplace was traditionally a very important source of personal identity, changes in the economy have rendered it far less reliable. He suggests that the enduring identities once associated with work have given way to looser and more provisional identities, and conceptions of community, that are subject to constant change and renegotiation. Indeed, Bauman points to a more profound transformation of how we understand what it means to be human in the absence of transcendent ideologies (traditional or otherwise) such as have characterised modernity until recently…” – Zygmunt Bauman.

Read the full Paul Mason article here.

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