Resumen de Is the west regressing into neofeudalism?

Michael Hudson

• The question this conference poses concerns more the future than the past. In which direction are the current capitalist system and today’s Western economies heading? Nevertheless, we can provide an answer only if we have enough historical perspective to see the dynamics we’re caught up in. What’s happening today is not what capitalism looked like in the 19th century. Western economies no longer have the policy aims of industrial capitalism. And, to the extent that Marx has described the problems that we’re having, he thought those were problems that capitalism was going to get rid of, not problems that it’s currently causing. The term “capitalism” is just too broad to grasp the distinctive characteristics of today’s post-industrial economy. We must be more specific and recognize there are different kinds of capitalism. In the past, one often spoke of “monopoly capitalism,” but the two other major possibilities are “finance capitalism” and “rentier capitalism.”