It is easy to be tempted to anticipate a new world. Often what we think will happen coincides with what we want to happen. But that doesn't mean the world isn't changing. Many of those changes will be permanent. They also occur in an important stage of transition and change in capitalism. Pointing this out sounds cliché. Antonio Gramsci's famous phrase «The old world is dying. The new one takes time to appear. And in that chiaroscuro monsters arise» is often a sign of laziness, an excuse not to think further or simply an example of voluntarism.
Capitalism today is at its climax, not in its terminal phase. As Milanović says, "we are not in a crisis but, on the contrary, in the moment of greatest power of capitalism, both in geographical breadth and in its expansion into areas (such as leisure time or social networks) where it has created markets completely new and marketed things that had Whatsapp Mobile Number List been the subject of a transaction”8. For the Serbian economist, if we look at the basic conditions that make a system capitalist (ownership of the means of production is private, capital hires labor and coordination is decentralized), we are living in the most capitalist moment in global history. .
Western capitalism is not in crisis, but it is facing a major stress test. The covid-19 crisis has caused a clash between two antagonistic conceptions: on the one hand, a financialized, deregulated, monopolistic, unequal, highly indebted and globalized “late” capitalism; on the other hand, an idea of direct, self-sufficient capitalism, with a war economy and with a function of the State as a benefactor and a large insurance company. Marxists have been talking for more than 100 years of "late capitalism" or of an eventual end of capitalism as a consequence of its contradictions, but the system survives and adapts.