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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process. … Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character of the capitalist process is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes. … The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. … [T]he … process of industrial mutation … incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. …
It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.
(Schumpeter, 1942: 82–4)We can agree with Schumpeter that the future will be one of technological change and what is now called “globalization.” We need not accept all of Schumpeter's arguments about capitalism, but we can extend his metaphor of the dynamical system of the “weather” to make some general points about the process of change in the global political economy.
Weather is a dynamical system involving the oceans and the air on the surface of the earth.
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