This interview with Nancy Fraser about Covid-19 and the future of capitalism is an illuminating read, particularly this discussion of what could come after capitalism. The question she raises is whether Covid-19 represents a developmental crisis (leading to a new mode of capital accumulation) or an epochal crisis (leading to end of capitalism as a system):
If so, then there are several possible scenarios. These include some desirable ones, like global democratic ecosocialism. Of course, it’s hard to say exactly what that would look like, but let’s assume it would dismantle the “law of value,” abolish exploitation and expropriation, and reinvent the relations between human society and nonhuman nature, between goods production and caregiving, between “the political” and “the economic,” democratic planning and markets. That’s the “good” end of our spectrum of possibilities. At the other end lie some noncapitalist outcomes that are truly terrible: massive societal regression under warring strongmen or a global authoritarian regime. There is also, of course, a third possibility, which is that the crisis doesn’t get resolved at all, but simply continues to grind away in an orgy of societal self-cannibalization until there’s little left that’s recognizably human.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/nancy-fraser-cannibal-capitalism-interview
Mark Carrigan 