New Statesman - 19th February 2007

Were trade unionists looking in the wrong place when they fought for better pay and shorter hours? The latest thinking, from left and right, is that having a stake in our work is the real key to human happiness.

Karl Marx famously predicted that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers. If so, they have been an awfully long time on the job. (Perhaps they knock off early.) In fact, there is no grave. Capitalism is alive and well, having triumphed on all fronts: economic, social and political. Like democracy, it has proved to be the worst way to run an economy - with the exception of all the others. Yet it seems unlikely that in a hundred years there will be any general need for the word capitalism at all. The only sixth-formers writing essays on "capitalism" or "socialism" in 2107 will be those studying history.

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