For the first time in 500 years, we could actually change the capitalist system. I mean replace it, not just revise it. I mean get rid of capitalism and create something new. And it is all happening because of the digital revolution.

The Postcapitalist Manifesto

by Anthony Signorelli

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A Unique Time in History

Capitalism is going to die. For the first time in 500 years, the core economic system of earth is going to change. Capitalism will not be able to continue because its own intrinsic logic is going to destroy it. Capitalism will die because of the digital revolution.

Entrepreneurs see opportunity to disrupt the system. Social activists see opportunity to end the system. Entrepreneurs seek to create disruption and profit handsomely. Social activists seek to fix the systemic injustices, solve climate change, end poverty, and create peace. Both groups realize that the time has come when they actually can build something new. Although the goals are different, the purposes are parallel and aligned—end capitalism and replace it with something better.

The driving force in this change is surprising. It is not socialism or communism. It is not religion and its moral concerns. It is not even our global political structures. Just as feudalism lost to capitalism due to its internal contradiction, this once-a-millennium opportunity is being driven by capitalism itself and its relentless pursuit of digitalization. Capitalist entrepreneurs are leading that pursuit, and as I will show, the pursuit of digitalization will cause markets to malfunction, labor to become valueless, and investment to become meaningless. The logic of capitalism will stop working. This has never occurred before, and because of it, we have the opportunity to shape the future as no generation since the Renaissance.

This manifesto summarizes the argument. It probably raises as many questions as it answers, and for that reason, I have included links to a free sample of essays selected to address these questions. The eight essays are selected from my collection Speculations on Postcapitalism and go into more depth than I could include here.

Nonetheless, let me introduce postcapitalism here—why it is inevitable, and what we could create in a postcapitalist world.

How Do We Know Capitalism Will Collapse?

Capitalism will not be able to continue on its centuries-long path of gradual, continuous growth because of three discontinuities emanating from its own intrinsic logic. Those discontinuities are:

  • The inability to price digital products
  • The inability to create demand among superfluous workers
  • The inability to account for externalities

A break in the capitalist system is inevitable because capitalism must create digital products, it must eliminate labor wherever possible, and it must never account for externalities. Both at the macroeconomic level and at the individual business level, these three imperatives drive behavior, occur simultaneously, and undermine the foundations of capitalism. Astonishingly, capitalism has no mechanism for dealing with any of these three discontinuities.

The Problem with Digital Products

We are in the midst of a digital revolution which is likely to create a digitalized economy. While this may seem innocuous, the first discontinuity is that markets cannot figure out how to handle digital products—and they never will. To understand this, let’s look briefly at how markets set prices under capitalism and show you how those same mechanisms do not, and indeed cannot, work for digital products.

How Prices Are Determined in Capitalism

Capitalist markets set prices using the law of supply and demand. This law states that prices are determined by the ratio of supply to demand. Hence, the higher supply is in relation to demand, the lower prices will go. The more demand increases over supply, the higher prices will go. It is a simple concept.

While the pricing mechanism of supply and demand suggests that prices fluctuate as supply and demand change, there is one limit: Prices below the cost of production cannot be sustained. Rational businesses will not produce at a loss, so the cost of production functions as a real-world limit on how far market prices can decline. When businesses opt out because prices go too low, production stops, supply goes down, and that makes prices rise again.

What Happens to Supply and Demand in a Market for Digital Products?

Digital products have a unique feature—they have no cost of production. Think of ebooks, for example. Once an ebook is on a server, it can be downloaded one time or a million times at no difference in cost to the producer. This fact creates a problem for markets in two ways. First, if the cost of production is zero, then there is no downward limit to prices until the product is essentially free. Second, supply is infinite. In other words, the limited supply (or scarcity) on which pricing depends has turned into abundance. There is infinite supply. Under these conditions, the law of supply and demand can no longer accurately price products in the marketplace, and prices fall until the products are free. In other words, the market function on which capitalism depends no longer works.

It is one thing to think of ebooks and music, but the reality is that all products are increasingly digitalized and susceptible to the same dynamics. For example, let’s imagine a kitchen plate. You cannot eat your food from a digital plate—it needs to be real. However, in today’s model, plates are made in factories where labor costs are low, shipped to high priced markets, and people buy them. Digitalized plates will be different. In the not-too-distant future, you will choose a digital plan for a dinner plate from the internet, download it to your personal 3D printer, and create your own plate—no labor, no shipping, and most of the value lying in the digital plan, which was free. This dynamic will reflect our acquisition of more and more consumer goods, and as the value moves into the digital plan and away from labor, prices will decline dramatically. As products continue to take on more and more digital components, or as they become completely digitalized (thereby replacing traditional products), markets in those products will break down—just like it did with ebooks. On the open internet, there are millions of free ebooks, PDFs, videos, and other digital products, thereby demonstrating the reality of a digitally abundant market in which prices collapse to zero. When digitalization includes 3D printing, automation, or robotic production, almost everything is susceptible to it—including food, housing, furniture, and energy. The pricing dynamics driving these markets will be the same as well.

Here is the problem: When products are free, the entire rationale for capitalist investment no longer makes sense. Capitalists don’t invest to sell free products, and they don’t pay workers to produce free products. Capitalism requires the capability of a profit, but no profit is available when the market cannot create a price. The economy can handle a few product categories collapsing in price, but as digitalization spreads to construction, cars, clothing, and even food production—all of which are currently happening—capitalism ceases to function in any meaningful way.

Automation Eliminates Labor

The second discontinuity is automation and robotic production.

Here is an example of the impact: In 2016, Adidas announced that it is opening a new production facility in Germany to replace some factories in southeast Asia. They are not doing this by reducing labor costs—they are doing it by eliminating labor costs. They are replacing people with robots. The new factory will ultimately produce 500,000 pairs of shoes per year, and it will employ only 160 people, none of whom actually make the shoes.

For entrepeneurial capitalists, production without labor is a dream. Eliminate labor and you eliminate most cost, management headaches, inefficiencies, and production disruptions. Certain aspects of society will never be digitalized or automated away—people will still value human presence. However, those exceptions will not define how the economy is organized or defined. Today, for most people, the economy is organized around selling time (i.e., labor) in the labor market to add value to capital investment made by others. In the future, most of the labor market will evaporate because most of the work will be done by automated robots, driverless vehicles, and artificial intelligence.

The problem is that while production robots do not need to be paid (which capitalists love), they also do not buy things (which capitalists hate). Capitalism depends on consumption to drive its economic engine, so if no one has a job, they also have no income; and if they have no income, who is going to buy the products? This is why leading entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are calling for consideration of basic income programs. It is not that they are social visionaries; it is that their own wealth cannot last if consumers cannot buy, and basic income is a way to solve that problem. (See “Problems and Opportunities in the Universal Basic Income Dream” in the free sampler.)

 

Climate Change—The Inescapable Reality

The third discontinuity is the inability to account for externalities. Externalities are the byproducts, garbage, waste, and pollution that a company generates but doesn’t have to pay for. Externalities come in the form of pollution, systemic financial risk, social problems, disease and debilitation, and wasted energy. For all of capitalism’s history, these externalities were treated as unfortunate byproducts which were largely someone else’s problem—the people downstream, the government, the poor and poverty-stricken, or the indigenous inhabitants. And they remained ignored as someone else’s problem so long as capitalists didn’t need to pay for them.

Climate change is caused by centuries of pollution diffusing through the atmosphere and trapping heat, much like a greenhouse does. This pollution has always been treated by capitalism as an externality. But now that climate change is affecting everyone everywhere on earth, and scientists tell us that we are nearing the point where the balance is tipped and continued climate change will take on its own life, the pollution causing climate change has ceased to be an externality. Instead, it is a fact demonstrating that the externalities must be accounted for. There is no escape—not for the wealthy, not for the poor, not for business, labor, or consumers, and not for anyone in any given country. It cannot be made into someone else’s problem anymore. It cannot be privatized. Eventually, we swelter together or perish in catastrophic climate events. In essence, climate change means capitalism has run its course. (There is, however, a postcapitalist solution. See “A Postcapitalist Solution to Climate Change” in the free sampler.).

The Inevitable Collapse of Capitalism

One would think that, given these three realities (digitalization, automation, and climate change), the capitalists would change course. Maybe, but here is the problem—they cannot help themselves. The capitalist system intrinsically requires all actors to consistently drive costs of production down in order to increase profit margins and stay competitive. As digitalization happens, they all have to digitalize to keep up. The same is true of robotic production—anyone producing without robots will not be able to compete. Likewise, many capitalist elites cannot even acknowledge climate change because then they would have to acknowledge that the global capitalist project has brought humankind to the brink of collapse. For business, incurring the expense of unilateral action on climate change makes it impossible to compete. Capitalism cannot stop its own relentless juggernaut because to do so is to repudiate capitalism at its very essence. This is what makes the collapse inevitable. Digitalization, robotic production, and ongoing pollution in the form of greenhouse gases will continue to feed the three discontinuities, and there is no way for capitalism to stop it. (See “Four Dimensions Driving the Fall of Capitalism” in the free sampler for a more detailed discussion of societal readiness.)

In essence, capitalism has established a race toward its own end. On one hand, climate change could lead us to a catastrophic collapse, probably through a series of dramatic events, such that capitalism cannot continue because society, or the planet itself, is radically changed. On the other hand, capitalism careens toward a technological future that undermines its own principles, and a new type of society arises from that challenge. One way or another, capitalism comes to an end.

Four Transformations: The Postcapitalist Opportunity

The collapse of the capitalist system will not just change our relationship to capitalist principles, it will actually replace these principles altogether.

  • Where capitalism is built on hierarchy, the postcapitalist world is built on egalitarian networks.
  • Where capitalism is built on violence and coercion, the postcapitalist world is built on voluntary collaboration.
  • Where capitalism is built on extraction, the postcapitalist world will be built on conversion.
  • Where capitalism is built on scarcity, the postcapitalist world is truly abundant because it provides infinite supply at no cost.

These new principles—egalitarian networks, voluntary collaboration, conversion, and digital abundance—are the organizing principles for the new postcapitalist world. By replacing the old principles, these new ones provide the possibility of a completely new way of organizing society.

Just exactly how will this transformation occur? It will start with these principles, with what I call the four “pillars” of capitalism. These pillars define the social, political, and economic relationships of society; all of capitalism’s power and all of its problems derive from these four pillars. That’s why a change in those pillars changes everything.

Pillar 1: Hierarchy

The first pillar is hierarchy. Capitalism requires a hierarchy so that power can flow through the system. Organizations are set up as a hierarchy of offices, with each office exercising power over a certain realm of activity, which often includes other offices beneath it. The office on top exercises power over the office on the bottom, and often the bottom office is an individual employee. All corporations are structured this way. All militaries are structured this way. All governments are structured this way. It doesn’t matter who the people are that fill those offices; it only matters that the office be competently filled by someone who is responsible for carrying out that office’s tasks. In this way, hierarchy has defined our economic relationships for centuries.

But hierarchy goes much deeper, too. As a structural component of the capitalist society, it defines how the power flows, not just in business, but also in social and political relationships. In fact, it is so endemic to our culture that, in the mainstream, we tend to view hierarchical relationships as “normal,” and hierarchy becomes the basis of social power differentials in our society.

Transforming Hierarchy into a New Networked World

Networks are the opposite of hierarchy. Rather than hierarchical offices, which outlast the individuals who occupy them, networks are made up of relationships and connections between real people. In a network, when the person disconnects, all their relationships do as well.

When networks become the dominant mode of organizing society, thereby replacing hierarchy, our whole way of thinking about the world will change with it. In a hierarchy, the predominant social currency is power as expressed in the exercise of the power of the office. In a network, the predominant social currency is influence, as expressed in one’s ability to influence opinion, ideas, and people. Whereas hierarchy spurs competition for the limited number of positions of power, networks open the possibility of unlimited connections and an abundance of influences from many different sources.

Thus, networks create a completely different mental model of the world—one in which power dynamics are almost incomprehensible because there is no hierarchical mental model to support it. Without any sense of the privilege of office, what is the value of creating an imagined office of racial or ethnic supremacy? In networks, the projection of influence occurs through connection, not through domination. New mental models actually do change the system of oppression in the minds of everyone. (See “Postcapitalism, Networks, and the New Post-State World” in the free sampler for more details on how this prominent idea is reshaping our political structures, especially the nation-state.)

Pillar 2: Violent Coercion

The second pillar is violent coercion. Capitalism is fundamentally coercive. It uses violence to coerce people into compliance, especially in the various forms of labor. Violence breaks strikes and peaceful protests; it drives conquest and the control of resources; it is the root of destruction in the natural environment; and violence was the core of slavery. Finally, violence is the threat behind the rule of law that enables police, as representatives of the state, to keep order, and which too easily devolves into the brutality against people lower in the hierarchy, thus displaying the negative, abusive side of the Rule of Law.

Violence has nearly always involved the dehumanized image of one’s enemy, and the practice of violence usually habitualizes dehumanization. For those involved, it is easier to hate and to kill when indigenous populations are viewed as “savages,” or when they believe that “the only good German is a dead German,” as many soldiers did during WWII, or when young black men are perceived as threatening criminals by law enforcement and the media. This dehumanization is a central part of most social ills.

Transforming Coercion into Voluntary Collaborative Production

Voluntary production collaboratives like Wikipedia, Linux, and Sugar CRM are on the forefront of the rejection of violence and capitalistic coercion. Collaborative production communities create products because people want to participate in them. They are totally voluntary, they produce products of great value, and the products are usually free.

Because they are free, however, no one can exert control. Rather, these communities create and adopt standards for participation collaboratively and largely self-police for compliance. Postcapitalism offers the chance to model society based on voluntary participation rather than coercion, and in so doing, to subvert the ideology of violence.

Voluntary collaborative production means that people are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do by a method of organizing society that they never asked for or wanted to be a part of. Although it may be difficult to imagine, poverty begins to lose meaning in such a world. Labor equity issues vanish. People are doing what they want to do.

Pillar 3: Extraction

The third pillar of capitalism is extraction. Capitalist success depends on access to the resources needed to be extracted through activities like mining, oil drilling, agriculture, and logging and clear-cutting. This principle makes capitalism intensely geographic, and led to the development of previously nascent ideas of private property and state control of territory—over time, states came to control territory so that private land ownership could be defended, and lumber, mining, and mineral extraction rights could be exercised. Perhaps like no other principle, this one shows the interconnections between the capitalist system and our current forms of government. (See two essays in the free sampler: “Postcapitalism, Networks, and the New Post-State World” and “Does Postcapitalism Mean Post-Democracy?” for more on these interconnections.)

Extraction and exploitation are required in an economy that uses things up—either by burning them or using them to produce something else, which also gets used up. Extraction is further magnified by capitalism’s imperative to grow—endlessly, into new markets, and for the purpose of maintaining profits. Extraction, then, is tied to the consumption economy—capitalism needs people to burn, waste, and dispose more and more resources every day so that the economic activity of extraction can march forward.

Transforming Extraction into Conversion

Where capitalism must extract and exploit, postcapitalism will convert. The difference is that while extraction uses things up, conversion does not. Conversion is what happens in the digital world. We convert sunlight to power, we convert digits to words, we convert air into life when we breathe it. The source for conversion is in infinite supply—sunlight, digits, and air. If I get some, it doesn’t mean there is less for you. We don’t sell the source; we simply experience it.

The ethic of conversion completely transforms our use of resources, what we need, and how we get it, and brings to a close the ongoing juggernaut of resource exploitation around the world. Instead of fighting or competing over a scarce resource, the economy is driven by these conversions. When the paradigm shifts, we will find more and more opportunities for conversion of abundant resources rather than exploitation of limited ones. Capitalist activities like pollution and conquest come to an end because they are valueless, and hence, conversion is the key factor putting an end to climate change and the war on indigenous cultures in the new postcapitalist world.

Pillar 4: Scarcity

The fourth and final pillar is scarcity. The capitalist market depends on the scarcity of goods and services because limited supply creates competition among buyers. When capitalism manufactures a product, it creates one unit of the product, and if more than one person wants that product, then competition arises. This competition among buyers creates demand and pushes up prices and profits, both of which are good for the capitalists. Without scarcity, the market cannot function, and capitalists cannot sell their goods.

Transforming Scarcity into Abundance

When capitalist scarcity disappears and is replaced by abundance, this change brings an end to the deadly competition of capitalism. In fact, the whole idea of competition will fail to make sense anymore. There will always be enough, and we will always have it accessible. Instead of markets pricing scarce goods and services, they will simply be available on an as-needed basis, whether it is food, transportation, or housing. It will be freely given because the new postcapitalist wealth will not be based on “transfers” but rather on the engagement and conversion of the abundance that is given to us. This can be the basis for the elimination of poverty and oppression of all kinds.

 

The Foundation

Activists, environmentalists, and social theorists have long known that the roots of our current challenges trace back to these four principles. In their writings, these people describe how hierarchy, violence, and dehumanization, for example, provide the roots of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. They show that extraction, violence, and scarcity support mining, drilling, and deforestation. In other words, the systemic oppression described by activists and critics derives directly from the capitalist system and its core principles.

This is where entrepreneurs and social activists come together. The entrepreneurial digit-makers are disrupting the capitalist model, to be sure, but they are also creating the metaphor that will shape the future—digital open networks, free products, open collaboration, energy conversion, shared ownership and a new commons-based ownership, and digital abundance. These metaphors and ideas are already in place. Entrepreneurial capitalists are using them and reinforcing them every day. Social activists can leverage these metaphors into a new society, but only if they can see the opportunity. These metaphors, after all, underlie what I am calling the new postcapitalist principles. These new principles align with many interests of social activists, but their power derives from their alignment with the entrepreneur’s digital metaphors.

Just as the strength of capitalism has been an obstacle to social change in the past, the disintegration of the system now presents a tremendous opportunity for social and environmental change. As capitalism crumbles, a new system can be created that does not systemically support racism, misogyny, climate change, war, environmental degradation, and homophobia. The hierarchical, coercive, and exploitive principles that underlie those problems no longer align with the dominant economy and resulting consciousness. The old principles aligned with the old system will be replaced by new principles aligned with the new order of the world. The last time this happened, feudalism crumbled and capitalism emerged to reorganize society. This time capitalism will crumble, and it is up to us to shape postcapitalism, which will reorganize society once more.

These Principles Change Everything

Just as the pillars of capitalism—hierarchy, violence, extraction, and scarcity—form the foundation of the world we have today, replacing them with networks, collaborative production, conversion, and abundance will lead to a very different, postcapitalist world. The exact outcome of that world is not known, but if these pillars and principles do in fact change, there are many new possibilities. We will explore a few now.

The End of Systemic Fear

Consider the four principles that underlie capitalism: hierarchy, violence, extraction, and scarcity. How can one view the world through anything other than a lens of fear? That some people do is a testament to their strength, their good fortune in life, and a strong ethical character. But the individual exception doesn’t change the reality that the main tone of life in such a world is fear—fear that I won’t get my share, fear that someone will take mine from me, fear that my opportunity will disappear.

This fear is critical to understand because it is the emotional source feeding sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. It underlies war and competition. It makes us forsake our fellow human beings, forsake the natural world, and even forsake our own lives in an endless pursuit of an unachievable security. Fear is sustained by capitalism’s hierarchical worldview, the competition resulting from scarcity, and of course, the violence endemic to the system.

Where is the fear in egalitarian networks, voluntary collaborative networks, conversion, and abundance? How does oppression sustain itself without fear? Without scarcity? Without competition for survival? Postcapitalism will transform the core principles of society and it will be experienced as a relief from fear. When fear dissipates, it is possible for the whole apparatus of systemic oppression to fall away.

The End of Climate Change

The conversion economy is going to replace the extraction economy; the only question is if it will happen soon enough to stop climate change before it becomes irreversible, or worse, before it becomes self-reinforcing. According to climate scientists, runaway climate change takes hold at an average temperature increase of two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. They also tell us we are halfway there.

This problem cannot be fixed by doing less of what causes it; it will only be stopped by meeting society’s needs in a qualitatively different manner. The conversion economy converts highly abundant resources such as sunlight into the energy we need, so that in the conversion economy, there is always enough energy, there is no scarcity, and there is no pollution. That is how climate change can be solved. (See the essay “A Postcapitalist Solution to Climate Change” in the free sampler.)

But let’s be clear here: The change that is necessary isn’t just a new technology. Improvements in the power conversion technology of solar is important, but if deployed within a capitalist paradigm, it either will not work or will cause related problems that will perpetuate the climate problem. Building solar farms is not a solution, putting solar panels on your roof is. Solar farms disconnect production from consumption (a capitalist paradigm), whereas the rooftop production moves production to consumption in a new postcapitalist paradigm. In other words, we need to move past the capitalist paradigm and into a postcapitalist conversion economy.

When this happens, just think of the possibilities! With no extraction and no scarcity, the geography of mineral resources becomes irrelevant. There’s no need for big state control, or pipelines, or power plants. Mining comes to an end. Clear-cutting is no longer necessary, nor is it even profitable. To make it happen and to fulfill this promise, we will need to work at it.

Universal Basic Income—The End of Poverty and Coerced Labor

Digitalization and the free economy of the future will inevitably clash with the capitalist economy of the present; transition periods are like that. As an answer to job losses, poverty, and the need for consumer demand, many people are proposing a universal basic income. The idea is that every human being receives a stipend each month for simply being alive. No work, no minimum wage, no strings attached. You get a check from the government every month because you are alive.

Basic income is an obvious answer to poverty, unemployment, and maintaining consumer purchasing power. But equally, it creates a basis for the flowering of art, creativity, and entrepreneurship.

Think of it—what would you do if you didn’t have to worry about being out on the street without income, nowhere to live, and no food to eat? What business might you try? What art might you create? Would you just hang out with friends and enjoy life? Universal basic income has the power to unleash the passion of creativity and the joy of leisure without making it subservient to the commoditized world of the market. You will never have to work at a job you hate just to make ends meet.

Basic income is just one of the ideas coming from the postcapitalist world. (For more on basic income, see “Problems and Opportunities with the Universal Basic Income Dream” in the free sampler.) It is an idea to explore and to advocate. New ideas are also being developed by many theorists, activists, and intellectuals. Fostering these ideas through creation, networks, and advocacy is one goal of the postcapitalist project today.

Direct Democracy and the End of Power Mandates

The end of hierarchy as an organizing principle also means the end of hierarchical representative democracy. Hierarchy created government offices with their duties and powers, and whether intended or not, these offices have effectively ensured that government does the business of the powerful elites long before it thinks of doing the so-called “people’s business.” In other words, representative democracy is uniquely effective at supporting capitalism.

The digitalized, postcapitalist world of the future will likely replace representative democracy with direct democracy, wherein citizens vote on laws and bills directly using the internet. For example, Congress (or Parliament) might be expected to develop and negotiate the bills, but approval or denial comes from the people themselves. The digitalized, networked world enables the mechanism, and the postcapitalist collaborative production model normalizes that kind of communication and activity.

Personally, I think this new model is coming sooner than most people think. As government fails to do its job, ballot initiatives are moving away from issues of charter or constitution and becoming the defacto mechanism of the people to have a voice. Combine this frustration with the breakdown of the supporting structures of capitalism, and it would appear that direct democracy is not far away—despite its potentially enormous logistical and participatory challenges. (See the essay “Does Postcapitalism Mean Post-Democracy?” for a more detailed discussion. It is in the free sampler.)

The Power of Ideas—Turning Promise Into Reality

Whatever we may hope for in the transformation of the four principles of capitalism, the hopes are only possibilities. Activism and fighting the elites will not be effective by themselves. Resistance is not enough. We have to start with the engaged readers, the thinkers, and the theorists—people like you. We need to create a conversation and a thought environment in which the new ideas become the basic assumptions of reality, while the old principles wither away. (See “Why Thought Matters: Paving the Road to Transition” in the free sampler.) Historical shifts don’t happen in movements; they happen when dominant ideas change. This is not a battle over an issue. Rather, we are in a war for history.

Postcapitalism represents the most challenging notion in social theory today. It affects every aspect of society—religion, social structures, politics, economics, safety nets, military motivations, and business. Careers will be affected. Cities will change. New methods of living will make our present situation look as quaint to the future as the peasantry of old looks to us today. A new world is going to emerge no matter what; the question is whether it tips into dystopic possibilities or turns toward opportunities for a better world. To shape it into the better world, we need to understand the most exciting opportunities and most innovative possibilities that are emerging—and they are all over the place! We just need to know, explore, read, and think for ourselves about what could be. We need imagination. We need ideas.

So, the first order of business is simple:

Download your own FREE sampler of Speculations on Postcapitalism.

You will love reading these essays. I promise it will take your mind to new places so you can see new possibilities. The sampler is a selection of 8 of the 23 essays in the book. The titles include:

  • Four Dimensions Driving the Fall of Capitalism
  • Supercomputing: A Capitalist Response to the Postcapitalist Threat
  • Why Thought Matters: Paving the Road to Transition
  • Does Postcapitalism Mean Post-Democracy?
  • Postcapitalism, Networks, and the New Post-State World
  • A Postcapitalist Solution to Climate Change
  • Abundant Digital Food
  • Problems and Opportunities with the Universal Basic Income Dream

Download it and read them. The essays collected here are the foundation for the road ahead.

You can get these essays absolutely free here.

Let’s build the future that lies ahead.

 

 

The Postcapitalism Series

This topic is so important to me, I am currently writing a four book series on it. Most of them will be released in the next six months. To stay abreast and know when these books become available, sign up for our email list. That way, you will be the first to know.

Briefly, the focus of each books will be as follows:

  • Book 1: Speculative essays exploring many possibilities of the future ahead. “Imaginative, insightful, stimulating.” It is titled Speculations on Postcapitalism, and is available in print (for $18) or as an ebook (for $3.99).
  • Book 2: What Is Capitalism? Defines the logic of capitalism and how it will change to create postcapitalism. It also lays out the new postcapitalist logic, and how it will change economics, politics, social structures, and the environment. Due out in late October, 2017.
  • Book 3: What are all the opportunities in this postcapitalist world? How should we decide careers, investments, and related activities during the transition? Examines the future of AI, robots, automation, 3D printing, and their social impacts. Targeted for January 2017.
  • Book 4: Postcapitalism will change how we view the world—but how? What will that new view be? How will we perceive the new normal? Targeted for March 2017.