Marx was essentially correct, capitalism died some time ago, I think those of my age saw bits of it but for the rest we exist now in a state of corporatism plutocracy and oligarchy. Someone can form those ideas into a word for modern America. You need also to add a bit of libertarianism to the stew. Ours is an investment society, work is left to the laborers, often far away.
"Capitalism is the ownership and use of the concrete but dynamic elements in a society - what is commonly known as the means of production. A capitalist is someone who produces more capital through the production of the means he owns. This necessitates the periodic reinvestment of part of the capital earned into the repair, modernization and expansion of the means. Capitalism is therefore the ownership of an abstraction called capital, rendered concrete by its ownership of the means of production, which through actual production creates new capital.... However, capitalism as conceived today tends to revolve around something called the profit motive, even though profit is neither a cause of capitalism nor at the heart of the capitalist action. Profit is a useful result of the process, nothing more. As for the ownership of the means of production, this has been superseded by their management. And yet, to manage is to administer, which is a bureaucratic function. Alternately, there is a growing reliance upon the use of capital itself to produce new capital. But that is speculation, not production. Much of the development of the means of production is now rejected as unprofitable and, frankly, beneath the dignity of the modern manager, who would rather leave such labour and factory-intensive "dirty" work to Third World societies. Finally , the contemporary idea of capitalism grandly presents "service" as its new sophisticated manifestation. But the selling of one's own skills is not a capitalist art. And most of the jobs being created by the service industries are with the exception of the high-technology sector descendants of the pre-eighteenth-century commerce in trade and services." p360 'Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West' John Ralston Saul
"Kristol was trying to detach conservatism from its schizophrenic devotion to free markets on the one hand and tradition on the other. He knew that you can't revere tradition if you admire the "creative destruction" that capitalism brings to life. He knew that you can't insulate the nuclear family from the heartless logic of the market if you accept the dictates of free enterprise. He knew that conservatism had to become more liberal if it were to sound like something more than hidebound devotion to a phantom past. A "combination of the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal," he declared, "is most desperately wanted," and cited Herbert Croly, the original big government liberal from the Progressive Era, as his source of inspiration.
Kristol also knew that the competitive, entrepreneurial economy Friedman and Hayek posited as the source of freedom was a mere fantasy. Capitalism had long since become a system in which large corporations, not small producers, dominated the market - those anonymous and unknowable laws of supply and demand which once made all producers equally subject to the discipline of market forces had been supplanted by the visible hand of modern management: "There is little doubt that the idea of a (free market,' in the era of large corporations, is not quite the original capitalist idea." Some producers had more market power than, others: some persons (and this is how corporations are legally designated) were more equal than others. So everyone was not "free to choose," as Friedman would have it, simply because he or she inhabited a market society. Corporate capitalism remained a moral problem. For in "its concentration of assets and power-power to make economic decisions affecting the lives of tens of thousands of citizens - it seems to create a dangerous disharmony between the economic system and the political." P11 'The World Turned Inside Out' James Livingston
"Companies achieve great economies, but they do so in part by driving wages down, and over time they will drive wages below the subsistence level unless the government intervenes to prevent them." Adam Smith
"Adam Smith's position on the role of the state in a capitalist society was close to that of a modern twentieth century US liberal democrat." Spence J. Pack
