Dialogue on Post-Capitalism

The influential marketing analyst Peter Drucker's idea of post-capitalism has attracted considerable attention in recent years in the People's Republic of China. One of its proponents is Professor Li Huibin of the Contemporary Marxism Institute of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau of the Communist Party of China, who has written extensively on questions of economics and philosophy. The dialogue was initiated at the invitation of Professor Li when Professor Arif Dirlik of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was a visiting scholar with the Contemporary Marxism Institute during the summer of 2006. The dialogue takes up questions of the relationship between Drucker's theory and Marxist theories of capitalism, the intellectual usefulness of “post-capitalism” in understanding contemporary developments in capitalism, and its possible relevance to the developmental strategy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”