The fundamental problems underlying the present crisis require for their solution the amendment of cultural structures that became dominant in early modernity when the modern world-system was constituted first in Europe and then worldwide.   World leaders and  the economists who advise them are now debating whether more stimulus or more austerity, or some combination of the two,  is the path toward restoring the normal functioning of capitalist accumulation, and therefore toward higher levels of employment and economic growth.  There is no solution within the terms of their debates, only an historical necessity to muddle through somehow.  Nor are there well-known solutions waiting in the wings, for both central planning and social democracy are discredited by good logical reasons and by historical experience.

I join those who are proposing a less-known solution, a plural one, in which markets are restrained and supplemented by other ways to mobilize resources to meet needs, many of them non-mercantile.   When sufficient supplementing is achieved, the private for-profit economy will still exist but it will be governable; it will be able to partner with other sectors without imposing on them the overriding necessity to gain the confidence of investors come what may even at the expense of sacrificing social and ecological objectives.   The result will not be a transition from the present neoliberal regime of accumulation to another regime of accumulation, but a liberation of humanity from the necessity of living under some regime of accumulation or other. 

Thie attached document is an expanded version of a talk given at the University of South Africa in December of 2011.