At some point in the Matrix movies, Neo learns he is not the first Neo. If you read Hegel, you learn that capitalism is not the first economic system. It was

At some point in the Matrix movies, Neo learns he is not the first Neo. If you read Hegel, you learn that capitalism is not the first economic system. It was preceded by feudalism, which was preceded by the slave latifundia of Rome and Babylon which was preceded by the hunter-gatherer bands that the world was solely covered with 10,000 years ago. Hegel saw enlightened, capitalist Prussia as the epitome of human civilization, but like those biologists who note that even humans are still evolving, Marx and Engels noted that the fourth economic system the world had thrown up might not be the last one, and that crises (like the one we had in 2008) were signs of the cancer it was dying from. The interview question on stages nowadays seems to be what does someone believe in that is not commonly believed, and I supposed the out idea now is the people who control production, the people who own capital are not interested in economy growing as fast as it sustainably can. They want a slower rate of growth in order to maintain more control of the system. This idea not only goes against current economic thinking, and investor's chasing of maximum returns, it's an anti-Marxist idea as well. It seems to be happening though. It's why people like Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold pour money into patent companies. It's why the joint chiefs of staff beg the Congress to cut funding for old Cold War tank factories every time the military budget comes up, but the billions for useless tanks, or the hundreds of billions for the designed by committee F-35 boondoggle etc. As Marx notes, something like a "war on poverty" is a joke, since people are not only purposefully kept poor but purposefully thrown into poverty, like during the enclosure of the commons in Europe. A surplus army of labor is a major tool to keep workers from keeping more of the wealth they create. Sooner or later, the good ship USS Wall Street will inevitably run aground, and the economy will grind to a halt in a way that will make modern Greece or 1930s USA look good. Then it will just be a question of what working class people and professionals do in their new situation. It's not really the working class people, who are familiar enough with reality, who one has to wonder about, it's more the US professional classes, who are more highly indoctrinated than probably any group of people in the world. I hold my mouth in awe as I hear US professionals pontificating about things going on half-way around the world in which they know absolutely nothing about. NPR is ultimately a heavier propaganda outlet than Der Stürmer, Правда or Fox News.