Kapital...

"It's a Kodak world!" declared Gene Simmons in January 2008. The self-made millionaire KISS bass guitarist and businessman was one of a team on Celebrity Apprentice USA. The task was to devise a promotional campaign for a new brand of Kodak colour printer.

The company, trying to diversify from cameras, film and developing paper into the brave new digital world of Microsoft and Apple, was not impressed. They gave his slogan the kiss off, and Donald Trump reluctantly fired the man with the interesting hair from the show.

Long afterwards Mr Simmons maintained he had been right, as Kodak would come to see. Now that Kodak has filed for protective bankruptcy, with debts reportedly of $6.8 billion, perhaps the ingenious Gene feels vindicated. Who knows what might have happened had the Kodachrome kids thought to ask him how they could develop the Kodak world idea.

One commentator in the British papers said Kodak was the victim of its own spectacular success. The board had become monolithic, top heavy, too slow to adapt and change to the world being made over in the image of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Technology does not go backwards. Monolithic corporations, like monolithic corporate states, are bound to fall if they do not adapt and change. Just as the old USSR was undermined by the fax machine, embedded dictators in the Middle East were unable to resist the iPhones and iPads in the hands of the people they oppressed.

The ruthless versatility of capitalism was not mentioned by the protagonists taking part in a recent Newsnight squabble, following David Cameron's speech calling for a more sharing, caring kind of capitalism. They were still picking over the remnants of old either/or arguments - capitalism versus socialism, profit-making versus money-making, individualism versus state regulation - as though capitalists are a class united by a single drive, to make money, and a single philosophy, Fuck you Jack, I'm all right.

'Twas ever thus, you may say. But was it? Recollecting two essays about capitalism by the BBC's Robert Peston and the billionaire financier and speculator George Soros, I revisited them and found that these two men, from different points of view, touched upon simililar concerns, including the changing culture of money-making.

Peston's The New Capitalism was written in 2008, as credit was crunching and the pillars of capitalism appeared to be crumbling.

In 2006 and 2007, I had long conversations with ministers, officials and regulators about how the hedge-fund and private-equity booms - the mind-bogglingly huge rewards available to the stars of those industries - were symptomatic of a mulfunctioning in the markets. I saw the frenetic activity of these young financial firms as a manifestation that too much debt was available on ludicrously cheap terms that didn't remotely reflect the risks - and this seemed to me to be worrying. The standard response from those who now know better was that it would all come out in the wask in a painless way, that these firms were a great asset to the UK, and I was fussing about nothing."

Ten years before the Credit Crunch, in 1997, George Soros's essay The Capitalist Threat warned that individualism taken to an extreme was a great danger to the stability of the West's open societies. He likened the application of economic theory in modern times to social Darwinism, based on an outmoded idea of the survival of the fittest.

Traditionally, capitalism was a way of making things and selling them, making money has taken over from the need to make a profit. In some minds, making a profit and making money are two sides of the same coin. Soros is saying they are distinctly different.

There has been an ongoing conflict between market values and other, more traditional value systems, which has aroused strong passions and antagonisms. As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of nonmarket values has become progressively more difficult to maintain. Advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them.

Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationships postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into business. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor...Anthing goes, as long as you can get away with it.

Robert Peston's new capitalism, then, is what?

For many the New Capitalism may well seem fairer and less alienating than the model of the past 30 years, in that the system's salvation may require it to be kinder, gentler, less divisive, less of a casino in which the winner takes all.

There is a conflict between two aspects of capitalism: the deregulated money markets, in which making money is the sole value, and the over-regulated market for manufactures. Collectives and co-operatives motivated by Christian Socialism or its modern equivalent may be an alternative to the creed of greed espoused by capitalism's Gordon Geckos. However, that world view assumes a marketplace without the constraints and restrictive practices spun out of the Brussels web of the European Union. Technocratic corporatism was scarcely touched on by the Prime Minister.

This is no longer a Kodak world imagined by Gene Simmons. It is a bear market, more of a Kodiak world, in which people still try to make a difference.

Self-made millionaire and musician Sir Ernest Hall, born poor in Bolton, believes in practical utopias, not an idealised Utopia for all. In his book How to be a Failure and Succeed he says:-

You are never too old to learn something new, never too late to try something new. People try to tell us from the outset that we're powerless, that we have failed in some way. But the only failure is to stop trying.

"Fail better", said Samuel Beckett, or, in the words of the late Steve Jobs, "Be hungry, stay foolish."