Road to a New Historical Society

Abstract

Now that the “disintegration of capitalism” has become definitive and its end imminent, we must next and last think of a “transition away from capitalism” towards what Uno called a “new historical society”, the economic substructure of which may be labelled “socialism” in the good old tradition of both Marxism and Uno. Yet, “socialism” in this context is still only a name that we tentatively apply to the as yet largely unknown substructure of Uno’s “new historical society” (today more commonly referred to as “post-modern society”), that has yet to evolve. It would, therefore, be both utopian and idealist to talk about it in detail at this point. In the meantime, however, it is now clear that the time-honoured “bourgeois state”, the traditional form of the nation-state that served as a (political and legal-administrative) “carapace” within which to develop our real economic life under capitalism will cease to serve our purpose. It has become necessary for us to deliberately seek a “welfare state”, as a new form of the nation-state, into which the bourgeois state must transform itself. It is in the process of creatively adapting this “welfare state” most effectively to the needs and aspirations of the new style of our economic life that we may be in a position to definitively terminate capitalism, and to introduce in its place a proper management of the substructure fit for a “new historical society”. In the meantime, the prevailing trend towards so-called globalization does not in any sense reflect the socialist’s old idea (or dream) of the “withering away” of the (bourgeois) nation-state, which will become real only when national borders become irrelevant to the real economic life of all humans.