The Future As Possibility

By Mischa Suter

For over forty years, Altvater has written books and faced the same problem again and again. "The last chapters of a book are always hard," Altvater says about the challenge of formulating a social perspective after identifying conditions. This problem is striking in many social-critical articles. Vague generalities, easy proposals and demands follow radical analyses. For most authors, there is a bifurcation between investigation and instruction for conduct, Altvater says. Altvater is the most important German-speaking Marxist economist today. The pensioned professor for political economy lives in an apartment building in Spandau near Berlin, an ordinary urban area with chicken snacks and corner pubs that have disappeared elsewhere in Berlin. The problems of the last chapters are not an accident but an essential characteristic of concrete utopia. "Our analysis of capitalism or society occurs in the time period between past and present. The future cannot be simply extrapolated. We must see the future as possibility."...

Read more here...