The Future of Capitalism and Democracy

Contrary to the thinking of many contemporaries, both capitalism and democracy will not last and are to be superceded one day by post-capitalism and post-democracy. The short-lived triumph of market capitalism and liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era does not imply the coming end of systematic ideology, of structural oppression, or of violent conflict at the rational endpoint of history. Unfortunately, violence does not disappear but only takes a different form of hegemony, as it has throughout history. The difference is, each age has its own form to adjust to, so we believe in ours, and those before us believed in theirs, just as those after us will in theirs. In The Future of Capitalism and Democracy, Peter Baofu evaluates how and why capitalism and democracy have failed at the institutional, organizational, structural, cultural, systemic, cosmological, and bio-psychological levels in order to synthesize the often conflicting ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity (broadly defined to include all dimensions of life), so much cherished by many minds since the modern era. And this is so, even if democracy and capitalism have different meanings in different cultures and societies. In the end, Baofu shows that capitalism and democracy, hegemonic as they are in the post-Cold War era, are just experiments in history and will not last, just as feudalism and aristocracy before them could not.