Informational Capitalism: The Final Stage
The old-school Marxist analysis on the periodizations of capitalism went as followed:
- 1st stage: Agricultural capitalism;
- 2nd stage: Merchant capitalism;
- 3rd stage: Industrial capitalism; and
- Last stage: State capitalism.
In hindsight, speaking as both a Marxist and Transhumanist, I’d say this analysis fell short in its understanding of just how resilient capitalism is as a socio-economic system. What it failed to predict was the eventual exponential growth rate of informational technologies, of which resulted in decentralized intelligence systems and open-sourced, peer-to-peer platforms.
In his own analysis of capitalism, Karl Marx was capable of going as far as predicting the eventual replacement of human labor for machine-based labor (or as he called it “living labor” for “dead labor”). Passed that, however, there is no clear understanding as to what occurs in the events leading up to capitalism being replaced by another socio-economic system.
Marx would refer to this system as Communism, whereby the state has withered away, poverty no longer exists, and class-based systems were abolished completely. It was always this vague, idealist vision of what the future should be, albeit one flawed by its own biased linear…
