Modern capitalist society

rdf:langString Modern capitalist society

rdf:langString Modern capitalist society is a term used to describe a type of capitalist society in which a capitalist class of "new elites" and "old elites" concerned with maximizing their wealth secures a political system that serves and protects their interests, leading to the development of a wage-earning class. The term is commonly used by historians to refer to a transition from a premodern feudal society to a modern capitalist society, with consensus being that England emerged as the first modern capitalist society through the English Civil War (1642-51) and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). Historians identify that the transition into modern capitalist society is often defined by a bourgeois revolution in which rising elites secure a system of representative democracy, rather than direct democracy, that serves their interests over the interests of the previously ruling royal aristocracy, such as in the American Revolution. Modern capitalist societies rely on calculated and systematic production, different from the merchant capitalism of the Italian city-states, and are defined by the existence of a wage-earning class that functions as the counterpart to a capitalist class. They are described as highly competitive and individualistic, focusing on private interests over public welfare, through prioritizing commodity production and profit maximization. Defending private property, preserving law and order, maintaining the economic exploitation and political impotence of the wage-earning class, training the wage-earning class in the tasks that modern capitalist society requires to function, educating the wage-earning class to internalize the principles of capitalist-democracy, often through forms of propaganda in the mass media, and conditioning the wage-earning class to believe that they are autonomous and live in a society ruled by the citizenry, have all been identified by scholars as forces which maintain modern capitalist societies. Modern capitalist societies are positioned in Western culture as a phase of human progression that is superior or "more advanced" than "premodern" forms of society. This perspective was most evidently portrayed through colonial logics which asserted that Indigenous peoples belonged to more "primitive" cultures and therefore should assimilate into more "civilized" societies or face genocide (e.g., "Kill the Indian, Save the Man"). For Marxists, anarchists, and others, modern capitalist society is a phase which will eventually lead to the emergence of a qualitatively different form of society. In opposition, liberals and others are opposed to the structural transformation of modern capitalist society.