Kind of a trick title, that. There isn't going to be one. At least, not for a while. Here is a marvellous quote from Max Weber, who understood a thing or two about capitalism:
"The Puritans wanted to be men of the calling - we, on the other hand, must be. For when asceticism moved out of the monastic cells and into working life, and began to dominate innerworldly morality, it helped to build that mighty cosmos of the modern economic order (which is bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production). Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed".
Weber wrote those words in the original version of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published over a century ago now in 1905. All that has happened since then is the intensification and extension of the mechanism. There is much talk, following the economic crisis of 2008, of the end of capitalism; in fact, I strongly suspect it is simply another of its periodic crises, one of those episodes of creative destruction of which Marx wrote.
What is very striking is that the whole world is now committed to the capitalist enterprise; the global effort by the major economies to co-ordinate fiscal rescue efforts was truly unprecedented. Whereas the crisis of the 1930s with which the present one has (in some ways justly) been compared occurred in an era where there still seemed to be genuine alternatives (communism, socialism, national socialism, fascism), the distinctive feature of the contemporary situation is that nothing else is on offer. The market is now regarded as the only viable form of economic exchange, for good or ill, just as Weber foresaw.
