Capitalism as a utopian belief
According to John Gray, any ideology can be seen as some for of striving for a utopia. In his latest book he’s already argued the fact that he doesn’t think that that is a very good thing. It drives people to impose their belief system on others where they might not suffice. In relation to the current financial crisis, it seems that we’ve come to the end of such a belief in a utopian market. Nevertheless we shouldn’t think that this is the end of capitalism, according to Gray. Yes, it will end the way in which we’ve organized our finances, but capitalism as the market principle has not, and will not come to an end. The belief is too much wide spread for that to happen. Even in former communist systems, such as the former Soviet Union and China, principles of capitalism are now adopted wide spread. And the relative harm that this crisis has meant for China, implies that the capitalist system has not lost it relevance and usability just yet.

Failing capitalist system created by humans
Both Leadbeater and Cohen agreed with Gray on the basic principles of the argument. The capitalist financial system might have come to the end. It is most likely that we’ll enter an age in which ’state control’ will increase over a vast period. That doesn’t mean that it will stay like that forever though. And even though the financial system seems bust, the market sure isn’t. In any walk of life the dynamics of a free market based on capitalist principles will stay afloat. Rather, it might be the only solution out of this crisis, when it will spill over to the ‘real economy’. Interestingly, all thinkers, foresaw a wave of economic distress hitting the real economy in the months to come. All of them agreed that the crisis in the US is ahead of what will hit Europe soon. One other interesting point, was that they all saw the failure of the system as a human failure. The crisis is created by human beings and their failure in finance. As such it is humans who will solve it again. A point that was previously made by Grady Booch as well.

So what does this mean?
I don’t know if any of you still doubted whether the current financial system would uphold. I for one wasn’t. So nothing new there. But the claims that we’ve heard in the press lately about ‘the end of capitalism’ seem to be a bit far fetched. Some parts of the capitalist system might be failing, but that doesn’t mean we will now all resort to systems that have proven to fail completely, such as the socialist system. However, it does promise to be a fundamental transformation of the system as we know it today. And that is, I guess what strikes me most, that even although I asked about systems thinking versus network thinking, we all observe our world still as a system. A system with a few broken parts, that can be humanly solved. I might agree with parts of the arguments given during the interviews, but I still wonder, if what we’re experiencing today is much less of a systems correction than it is the effect of a network were experiencing…