Are we in "late stage" capitalism? What's next?
I often engage in thoughtful discussions with my friends regarding our current socio-economic situation, and I find it challenging to discover a more fitting description than the term coined for it.
Wherever I direct my attention, I observe life increasingly being shaped by the well-oiled machinery of capitalism, a system devoid of inherent morals and existing solely to maximize profits for its shareholders.
To me, the notion of "late stage" capitalism implies a bleak future fueled by the insatiable demand for constant and unsustainable growth. This, in turn, hampers our ability to effectively plan for the future, as investors prioritize immediate gains. Consequently, our planet suffers the repercussions through climate change and the exacerbation of wealth inequality.
Moreover, the ruling of FEC vs Citizens United, wherein corporations were granted the ability to lobby as individuals, seems to have unleashed a relentless flywheel that perpetuates and nourishes the insatiable beast of capitalism and greed.
I am genuinely intrigued by the perspectives of others on this topic. If we collectively recognize that we are heading in an unfavorable direction, what steps can we take to regain a more positive trajectory? How can we incentivize prioritizing moral values and environmental impact over monetary gains?
I believe many people use the catch-phase "late-stage capitalism" online as a general expression of dissatisfaction with whatever they're frustrated with, especially if it somehow relates to money and the effort of making a living. Yes, it really is frustrating, but saying "ugh, capitalism" doesn't point to any specific problem.
It's not something I can constructively respond to other than with generic sympathy. Yes, life sucks sometimes. Terrible things happen to people. Since I don't know you, I probably don't know the half of it.
I don't see the future as bleak, though, I see it as complex and unknowable. Sometimes things seem pretty stable and unchanging for a while, but life has always been an uncontrolled experiment. There are many charts people point to that show things getting better on average, but sudden disasters can change that, and also, everyone dies in the end. (So far.) Also, understanding macroeconomic trends isn't directly useful for solving personal problems.
We live in a time of cultural pessimism. Sure, there are plenty of uncritical fans of new trends, but for any significant change that might help someone, some people will immediately figure out who it might hurt and discount any positive effects. It's easy to find things to doom scroll about that are real tragedies. However, many people also worry about imaginary problems that don't directly affect them and also haven't happened yet.
Some of those imaginary problems might turn into real problems. There's no reason to believe that more big earthquakes or wildfires or pandemics or wars won't happen. I don't think this should affect your basic outlook on life, though, if you have it pretty good. People with big problems to deal with now don't have time to worry about climate change or future pandemics or wars.
I think it helps to avoid abstract philosophical or ideological debate. I agree with David Chapman that the cosmic perspective can be used as a con job to make you unhappy, and thinking about global problems often isn't much better. Better to work on concrete problems that are closer to your own size.
I'd say the description of late stage capitalism is accurate purely for the reason it has created a mass extinction event. The greed, exploitation and unrelenting drive for profits is why the ecosystem has been absolutely devastated, and it is only going to get worse.
Capitalism relies on externalised costs, coal power plants have killed untold millions. Worse than that they have damaged the health and cardiovascular systems for hundreds of millions if not billions.
We have know this for a very, very long time. But under capitalism those costs are externalised to society and so they can profit while people suffer and die.
I've heard libertarians respond "How do you know other economic systems would be any better, capitalism is incredibly efficient, socialism would probably have been even worse!"
If you have a properly socialist society where industry is publicly owned, energy generation is owned. Then those costs are no longer externalised. The billions the NHS has had to spend treating the impact of coal power pollution would now be balanced against the actually value of coal versus a more expensive but less polluting alternative.
The massive impact of cars in cities is weighed against the massive healthcare cost, but also all our research showing how damaging car commuting is to peoples wellbeing. All public transport being publicly owned means that you can provide it for free because it massively offsets the societal costs of driving. In addition public transport has huge benefits for wider society. Commuting, travelling for research, visiting friends and relatives have near impossible to calculate value.
It is late stage capitalism because this is it. A mass extinction event that the planet won't recover from for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. There is no later stage, it has been done. Capitalism could drive an even greater extinction event left unchecked but it doesn't matter, it is still a mass extinction regardless.
You're taking a world history perspective and pointing to a bunch of different problems and making it sound like a huge, complicated, unsolvable mess, and then blaming it on capitalism.
Even from a world history perspective, I see problems with that habit of thinking. As you say, these problems are very old. Prehistoric people in the Americas and Australia hunted many animals to extinction. People were too successful at hunting when there was nothing to stop them, and that might even be before money, so it's nothing like modern economies. Humans are the most devastating invasive species, and we bring other invasive species with us. Other species do it too, to a lesser extent.
To return to the present and zoom in slightly, there's habitat destruction in many parts of the world, but some countries do much better than others. Rich, peaceful, stable countries tend to do better, even if they have capitalist economies. Regions with poor and unstable governments do worse. There's a similar range in socialist countries. Some former communist countries devastated their environment with polluting heavy industry. They used coal too.
It seems like this might have something to do with how effective governments are at controlling our destructive tendencies and how willing people are to go along with it. That is, when governments aren't actively blowing things up, causing devastation of their own during a war.
I just made an extremely broad statement, but environmental problems are often local and specific. We'd get a better perspective on any one of them if we zoomed in on it.
Another example of how a zoomed-out perspective obscures important detail is how you talk about cars. They're not all the same. There's been a fair bit of progress; the cars on the road today are far safer, more fuel efficient, and less polluting than they used to be. Some countries and some cities do better than others, and if we wanted, we could do some research to learn more about each city's problems and how it's doing at solving them.
I don't know what you mean by "there is no later stage, it has been done." It sounds like you're predicting the end of the world?
Mass extinctions aren't the end of history. To zoom way out, mass extinctions happened several times when there were no humans at all. This one is ours. Much has been lost, but there's still plenty of life.
Megafauna extinction predates written history let alone economic systems and so are not comparable to later civilization driven problems.
Rich countries "do better" today because they have already exploited the world around them and now exploit impoverished countries. For example the British almost entirely deforested Ireland, but today Ireland is one of the most wealthy countries in the world and can exploit its near uniquely perfect wind climate. That doesn't mean rich Ireland isn't exploiting its forests, there are none. Instead wealthy countries exploit rain forests abroad.
Yet it is still all a lie, "Rich, peaceful, stable countries tend to do better". They do not do better. Just look at the GHG per capita emissions of the US. It is unbelievable. China despite being the worlds manufacturer is still half the US. We (the west) do absolutely awful.
Unstable impoverished African countries have horrific local pollution. But if you look at GHG emissions per capita they are still tiny. Even worse, their huge ecological disasters are primarily caused by western companies setting up unregulated oil pipelines, bought through corruption and devastating the local environment. You can't blame that country for Shell/BP et al.
Describing post Soviet countries as socialist is akin to using Somalia as the pinnacle of capitalism. If you compare those countries the US has 2x/3x/4x/5x GHG emissions per capita.
Comparing cars against cars is an easy way to make it seem like great environmental progress has been made. How about comparing emissions per KM versus buses and trains?
I'm honestly perplexed by that approach. I never mentioned the end of the world, or that mass extinction events have never taken place. Everything we are discussing is on human time scales. If you give the earth 100 million years speciation wouldn't care about our extinction event just like all the times before.
But on a human time scale a mass extinction event means that for millions of years, humans on this planet will be missing out on a huge part of our ecology. With entire biospheres eradicated and living on a planet lacking so much of the incredible life we evolved within. Sure given millions of years evolution will have replaced those species with new wonders. But our species is only ~250k years old.
It isn't a great argument for capitalism when you compare your impact to an asteroid mass extinction by pointing out life still survived.
My goal isn't to defend capitalism or to pick one view and say it's the best. I'm pointing out that there are multiple ways to look at things. It's good to be aware of them, rather than getting too fixated on one way.
I think your criticisms show that pretty well. "Environmental damage" is very broad term. When I said "Rich, peaceful, stable countries tend to do better" I was being very vague. There are a lot of things we could look at and many comparisons we could do.
Greenhouse emissions per capita is one reasonable way to compare countries, and you're right that US is pretty bad if you look at per-capita emissions, but I see there are other countries that do worse, including Canada and Australia.
That's just one list, though. I was thinking of clean air and water. Here's a list of countries by air quality and you'll find the US and many European countries do very well. (Occasionally US cities have had the worst pollution due to smoke from wildfires, though.)
I don't want to make too big a deal of any of these comparisons, since there are many others we could do, particularly when there's all of world history to choose from. Some will be better than others and any comparison can be criticized, but many will be interesting.
The reason I brought up previous mass extinctions is that you seem to be vaguely hinting that mass extinction is the sort of catastrophe that we won't recover from. There are some people who will argue for doom, but I don't think other scenarios have been ruled out.
Maybe it's not "late-stage" capitalism? Maybe there will be more history, and someday our descendants will see it as early or middle stage capitalism? There's a built-in assumption of doom or revolution in that term.
On transit, I just want to note that while the Western world generally does well with publicly-owned mass transit, some countries like Japan have extremely successful privately owned transit.
There are many ways to organize an economy, and the US's specific flavor of capitalism isn't the only way to do capitalism. Governments choose what to encourage through subsidies and taxes; we could have done better and committed to more nuclear power plants etc. My point is that governments can price social externalities into companys' decision making to effectively guide private enterprise. Late-stage laissez-faire capitalism sucks, but there are many small changes we could make right now that would make countries more equitable without abolishing capitalism.
What about people whose "big problems to deal with now" are a result of runaway capitalism? In the US, the younger generations are realizing they will be the first to be worse off economically than their parents. They may never own homes despite being more educated than ever and working multiple jobs. They question whether they should or could have children they would struggle to afford. Inflated prices at the grocery store make basic necessities take a bigger cut of the paycheck. Rents are out of control.
Not everyone "has it pretty good" and often the causes of their problems seem to stem from capitalistic greed making resources scarce. You're right, those people aren't worrying about climate change and pandemics, they're worried about the future of themselves and their families, about how to feed, clothe, and house themselves on stagnant wages in an increasingly expensive world.
"May never own [a] home" is a pessimistic assumption that may or may not pan out in any individual case. Sometimes people end up better off than they imagined (it happens) or a government might actually take effective action to make housing shortages go away.
No, I wouldn't bet on it either. Housing issues are persistent and widespread. The widespread assumption that housing problems will always be with us is an example of the cultural pessimism I was talking about, and I share it to some extent.
But there's also no law of physics or economics that says housing can never be fixed. By studying history we can see that enormous society-wide changes do happen sometimes. Some of us are old enough to have lived through them.
Changes in government policies can have significant long-term effects. Also, there's been some movement recently. Some laws blocking new housing from being built have been changed in some places recently. (I'm most familiar with California.) There are a lot of new apartment buildings here and more under construction.
High rents have happened in many places, but the fixes still seem to be local. This is fundamentally unlike global warming. Housing is a big problem but not it's not global in the same way because it has local causes. We share air with the whole world, but not buildings.
Seeing that people are suffering is observing facts about the world. Taking a zoomed-out view of the world that makes problems seem overwhelming and unfixable is not fact-based, it's a mindset.
You've been told that high rents and housing shortages (which are real) are caused by a vague global problem of "runaway capitalism," but that's not a fact, it's a pessimistic cultural assumption that's "in the air" so to speak. It's bad for people because it makes them depressed.
I would argue cultural pessimism is a requirement to inspire change. Continuing with the US as an example, politics has become so obviously intertwined with financial interests that without an outcry from the general population they are disincentivized to change policy in favor of the everyman. People need to reach a certain level of discontent before they stop accepting the status quo in order to avoid rocking the boat.
These problems, as you note, are not unfixable, but there is a sense that the people with real power to fix them are not interested in or incentivized to do so. From a "zoomed in" perspective of privilege, things aren't that bad, so why make radical changes?
To be clear, I'm not saying things will necessarily continue to get worse and that change can never happen, just that that seems to be the direction we've been heading in for the past few decades and there seems to be little willingness at the top to change course. The timescale of change is also a factor: progress in government is slow and could take decades before effects from policy change set in. Will that be fast enough to allow millennials/gen z/gen alpha to see the same prosperity their parents enjoyed?
I get that we shouldn't zoom out so far that the issues become intangible and seemingly unsolvable, but where do we zoom in to? If I stick to my own perspective, my outlook becomes clouded by privilege and I start to fail to see the problems others face. Even if it's depressing, I think it's grounding in some sense to be aware of the world's issues as long as we don't allow ourselves to dwell on them too much to the point of despair.
Yes, people who are unhappy will often be more interested in political change. However, a vague desire for change won't necessarily go in a good direction. Authoritarian populists appeal to people's vague longings for some kind of change to get votes. Decent politicians will too; running on change is an obvious, all-purpose move that any political challenger will adopt.
Also, deep pessimism can just as easily inspire political apathy, which results in not voting at all. Why bother? Young people have the lowest turnout, though it's improved recently. Maybe that comes from thinking that the problems are too hopeless and only radical change will do? At least, that's how they often sound online. Since turnout matters, political pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I don't like vague appeals for change. I like to see specific goals. But it's not in a politician's interest to get real because it divides their supporters, so often they don't say anything interesting at all, particularly when they're ahead.
Another way that zooming out leads to apathy is that means people pay little attention to local politics where they can make more of a difference. Media attention is all on national politics, where your vote is a drop in the bucket, or politics in other countries where you have no real say at all.
There are also structural reasons why we see a lot of zoomed-out discussions. Newspapers and book authors and bloggers and YouTube influencers have incentives to avoid covering local communities. Why spend time on a local problem with a limited audience when you could write about something that appeals to a nationwide or even worldwide audience? Local news tends to be less interesting and has a harder chance of getting widely shared. Lots of local newspapers have shut down.
Tildes has similar structural issues. We're an international community, so we're not going to talk about local issues as much. Most people hide behind pseudonyms and avoid getting too specific about personal details for very understandable reasons relating to privacy. This means more abstraction and less storytelling.
I'm being vague and philosophical too. I'm not really a storyteller. I point towards being local and specific, but I'm not really doing it. I will at least zoom in a level, so instead of capitalism let's talk about housing or water issues or something else like that. These are still big, abstract problems, but at least we can start talking about physical constraints.
So, I don't have any solutions. Maybe we should support people who want to tell specific stories and, when they generalize, try to do it in a more zoomed-in way.
Decent points, there is risk to pessimism becoming self defeating and leading to apathy instead of action. I also heartily agree with politicians never really getting real because it's too risky for their position, one of my biggest pet peeves in politics.
It seems like as the internet has grown, especially with the maturation of social media, we've all become more used to thinking in this "zoomed out" lens and thinking in broad generalities from ease of exposure to society at large.
Runaway capitalism can be associated with the ever rising chase of higher returns year after year. Several companies and firms consider themselves in the danger zone if their profits for a current year are not greater than the previous. That's why so many big tech firms laid off people. Their projected returns were not on track despite those companies obviously doing well. In order to give bolster to that growth, they cut people to save costs.
Rental and Realestate doesn't really have that option due to finding efficiencies elsewhere. In fact the algorithm used to raise rent estimates has been determined to help monoplize the market for landlording firms as detailed in NPRs coverage of this ProPublica Report.
It's not an assumption, but a reality that this tool is aiding in runaway capitalism of rents. If the owner of this pricing algorithm is collaborating with rental companies, it is done so in the name of higher returns and growth. I know my current lease is managed by one of these publicly traded firms and they have a stock price that is beholden to shareholders. When shareholder interests for higher returns impacts my rent going up, then yes it's a reality of runaway capitalism impacting my and other's options for where to live.
Landlords raise rents when they can. People with limited incomes struggle to make rent. It's an old story with some modern wrinkles.
The ProPublica article is interesting. Here's the story itself and the Tildes discussion.
Yes, it makes implicit collusion easier and that will make things worse in tight rental markets. There are countering trends, though. California has some fairly mild rent control now, a cap on rent increases at 5% to 10% a year depending on inflation. Some Silicon Valley cities have stricter laws.
If there are enough empty apartments then the market becomes competitive and landlords need to make concessions to attract new tenants. This software won't change that. Rents seem to be down significantly in many California cities this year? Though not all of them. And to take advantage of that, sometimes you have to move.
Maybe that's not the story where you live? Many news articles are about national trends and will miss what's happening locally.
The longer-term story in Silicon Valley has been about rich tech firm employees pushing up rents. There's limited supply and they outbid other people. Landlords have become very rich from taking advantage of that, and many working class people get pushed out.
Landlords' profits depend on laws that make it difficult for real estate developers to build new apartment buildings. That's changing, though, finally. The state is forcing cities to get rid of restrictive local laws preventing housing from being built. We'll see if that succeeds.
The California real estate story doesn't seem to be about an inevitably bleak future due to the unstoppable forces of capitalism? It's about market problems that can be fixed, and people being slow to see what needs to be done, but finally starting to do it, despite opposition. I don't know what's going to happen, but there does seem to be a chance.
Other places will have their own real estate stories, often similar, but with their own variations. In the western US, real estate markets are often affected by limits on the local water supply. But maybe they can find their own solutions too?
You should look at the newspaper headlines are articles leading up to the creation of the trade union movement. The wealthy interests espoused exactly the same sentiment as you. That it wasn't capitalism at fault and holding such views would hurt society and peoples well being.
Thankfully the workers rights movement ignored such sentiment, they came together, formed unions and went on strike. They forced the fundamental workers rights we take for granted today. Quality, safe affordable housing was part of that.
It isn't people being exploited and in poverty that makes them depressed, it is blaming wealthy landowners for increasing rents that really upsets them?
Housing costs are not some burden on society. The working populace living in high quality, insulated low energy housing creates a workforce that generates trillions. Poor housing promotes disease, injury, poor health and mental health problems. That is billions lost simply due to the workforce not being looked after.
If you enact a law that you are only allowed to own two homes and your second home is heavily taxed, suddenly buying property to rent or as an investment vehicle becomes infeasible.
I would suggest you read research on income vs rent over the past several decades. Instead of making cultural assumptions and declaring something as fact, you might have a more nuanced understanding.
Let's look at now vs. 30 years ago. Homeownership rate is higher now than in 1993 Source: FRED. Looking at the distribution (Census.gov pdf), homeownership rate increased for under 35 and 65 and over, but decreased for 35-64 year olds. So is this a big problem relative to the past? It's hard to say that it's worse based on the data. One could easily argue that if any group should have a higher homeownership rate, it's old people who are likely retired.
Looking at multiple jobs, it does seem like the trend is going up by some measures, but down by others. I believe the first link includes gig work and the second one doesn't, so it might be more representative. That said, ~8% of people working multiple jobs means that it's not representative of the general population.
As far as being able to afford to buy things in general, real median income is up over the past few decades.
Based on all this, I'm not sure if your examples of big problems are really problems for the majority of people. However, the majority isn't everyone. One thing I think the US is bad at is helping the minority who are poor in a consistent way. We do have various welfare programs, but they aren't very good. I'm not convinced that this is the result of capitalism though. Other countries using capitalist systems have more robust social safety nets. This seems like an issue with our priorities as a group rather than the system of government. Plenty of people are actively voting against better social safety nets, so switching systems wouldn't improve this.
To my eye, the graph shows homeownership for under 35s is similar to 1993 (within tenths of a percent), 35-40 is down, 65+ slightly up. I also wouldn't be surprised to see homeownership falling among very old folks as many of them move to retirement communities in their twilight years. Overall I am surprised to see how it hasn't changed all that much (ignoring the huge spike in the middle from the housing bubble and crash).
Capitalism isn't always so bad when paired with safety nets, but America's brand of capitalism seems particularly ruthless towards the poor. Any suggestion of implementing such social programs is met with cries of "socialism!" and shouted down. I don't know for certain if capitalism is truly the culprit, but America seems steeped in a hyper capitalistic mindset of every man for himself.
More than any of the other things I mentioned, wealth inequality seems to be at the root of many of America's ills. I keep coming back to this video from a decade ago and wondering what the updated graphs would look like. There's simply no reason for so many to have so little while so few have so much. Especially when considering the people at the rich end pay disturbingly little back to the country in the form of taxes.
I looked up the tables, and for under 35 homeownership, it's 37.9% in 1993 and 39.0% in 2022.
I watched some of the video, which made me curious about taxes. The first result on google says that by income in 2020, the top 1% paid 42.3% of taxes, and the top 25% paid 88.5% of taxes. I know that the video discussed wealth rather than income, but the skew seems to be pretty similar.
Turning from numbers to opinion, I'd say that tax law could be improved to proportionally tax the rich even more and the poor even less, but I also don't find the current amount disturbing. I think there's a lot of pessimism going around, but when I look at the numbers, I see "needs improvement" rather than "everything is going down the toilet."
I want to focus on this because it is not true that affordability is the primary driving factor behind fertility.
Between countries, families in wealthy countries have fewer children than families in poor countries. Norway's fertility rate is 1.48 (births per woman), lower than the US' 1.64 — despite Norway offering generous subsidies and childcare. Nordic countries arguably offer the most childcare support to parents than anywhere else on earth, yet they have the lowest birthrates.
Within countries, wealthier families have fewer children than poor families. In the US in 2017, the poorest had ~50% more children than the wealthiest.
There are several factors:
I would say that the inherent problem, in its most absolutely distilled form, is that the people who are producing the goods and services for purchase, ie the labor, are not able to reap the advertised benefits of the system. The people advertising the benefits are the only ones benefitting.
Until the people who actually provide labor and purchase things have had enough, it will continue. Give people enough to distract them, or convince them that one day they will have a shot at the ring, and they will vote against their self interests forever.
You're writing in very abstract terms. Zoom in.
Are there really no examples of working people who have benefited from working? Like, say, a plumber or a welder or an electrician who makes a good buck and has a house and a boat? No good union jobs, anywhere in the world? Maybe that's a broader, more extreme statement than you wanted to make?
Which advertised benefits do you mean, anyway? Who advertises them, and who believes them?
Maybe it would be better to start all the way zoomed in by thinking about specific people you know and how they struggle with specific problems, and zoom out from there?
Capitalism is incredibly adaptive and resilient and I don't expect it to go away any time soon.
I don't know what's next. But I believe that the creation of hierarchies and elites is intrinsic to how humanity works. Some must be at the bottom, some at the top. If wealth ceases to be a mechanism of oppression, we will either bring back something from our past or find another form of domination. What it will be is up for debate, but your question made me immediately think of 1997's Gattaca, and the possibility of replacing economic division for a genetic hierarchy.
I'm not entirely pessimistic, though. I do believe we will eventually overcome the need for hierarchies of oppression. But we will go through a lot of shit before that.
My understanding is that societies on average were far more elegatarian before the dominance of agriculture.
The Conquest of Bread is a good read.
I haven't finished it but I recommend The Dawn of Everything as a book on topic as well, though I believe they dispute your point. It is really contemporary, and a new theory of humanity, which I liked.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
Great book! I've been reading it recently. It can be hard to follow at times, but the argument they put forward is fascinating.
I'm not sure if hierarchies or ladders are necessarily oppressive. If people indeed naturally think in a hierarchical way, we just need to ensure that there a wide variety of games valued by society (ex. physics, literature, art, social science, basketball, etc) and that everyone is treated with a baseline level of respect and dignity to not have a system where some people are seen as being just objectively superior or inferior to other people.
Oh, I agree with you completely. There are many hierarchies that are not oppressive.
I meant to say that, historically, since long before capitalism, humanity seems to continuously recreate macro hierarchies of oppression to such a degree that I believe they have become an essential feature of our societies which will inevitably be reproduced whether or not wealth is a factor. Which does not mean that every single human hierarchy is necessarily oppressive.
You are correct that this is a belief. It is not based in reality.
We tend to see the world by the lens of the ideology we are currently immersed. That's why we have so many post apocalyptic movies and not post capitalists (it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism).
Elites are not intrinsic and using the "natural" argument is bad because there is no such thing as "human nature". This is dangerous because it is mostly used to justify things like slavery, racism and exploitation.
Elites are something that can only exist if there is private property (in the means of production) and this is something that is recent as far as human history goes. And to ensure private property, we need some kind of government.
Humans existed in more egalitarian ways for far more time than the state we current live.
The way we see the world and social relationships is highly influenced by the relations of productions.
At the most basic level, ownership of stuff, land in particular, is only enabled insofar you are willing to inflict violence upon those whom would take it.
I think there's almost a direct correlation between population density and need for heirarchy. You don't need much of a heirarchy if its a small nomadic tribe.
The animal kingdom is a brutal, nasty place.
We are animals, but we are a far far away from animal kingdom because we can pass knowledge and the next generation starts on top of what the previous did.
Yes, governments are the owners of violence. Private ownership and, consequently, hierarchies can only be enforced by violence.
As the need for hierarchy I probably agree with you, but I need to learn more. I just recently started reading more about this stuff and there are a lot of things that are falling apart as I step away from our current ideology.
I'd also look into the history of people abandoning cities. It used to be a very, very large problem that people would leave cities to return to the commons. That problem went away with the divying up the commons to lords.
Not just humanity. Hierarchies and elites is a hugely present structure in many species.
Nah, I think we're chugging along. Too often the past is looked at with rose tinted glasses. There's a lot of factors that can go into that, and I think a recent NYTimes piece Your Brain Has Tricked Into Thinking Everything Is Worse is poignant here.
At this point "capitalism" has become so underdefined, and so euphemistic, that it's honestly best to describe instead the component pieces that any particular person thinks comprises it. So I think market economies are here to stay; they're really quite reliably present in human history. On the other hand, the historical record of planned economies is that they can work in short periods, maybe best exemplified by the command economies of states in total war, but over the long term, they always fail. This does not surprise me; I am highly doubtful of fallible human's ability to plan an economy of millions of people. Wherever markets are limited, blackmarkets arise.
As to private ownership, I think that this is more malleable, but in general being allowed to have private ownership tends to allow for more flexibility. Communist Yugoslavia was one of the few countries that played with market socialism, and while they fared better and for longer than their peers (markets work!), inevitably inefficiencies from the ownership model caused them to fall behind peers and suffer economic collapse in the end as well.
That is to say, I think we'll have the combo of democracy, the ability for private individuals to own things, including capital, and mostly free markets with controls. As time moves on, the democracy part can shift more to oligarchical systems.
Maybe It's because I've been reading "The Dawn of Everything", but I don't agree with the historical part of your statement.
First of all, a market economy is not necessarily a part of human history. They only seem to be reliably present in history, because history has so far only been written by people completely surrounded and raised within market economies. Never forget that historical and archeological analysis is always a product of the time the analysis happens. (As we see now, with countless new discoveries and retrospectives showing the biases of 19th and 20th century archeologists, who placed their own ideas on what a nation and state is to construct a false narrative (not necessarily on purpose) based on the piecemeal evidence they had.
For command economies, it's equally hard to claim that they 'always fail'. First of all, what is a command economy? Do we only consider the former Soviet states, or do we look back further and take into account, for example, the Inca economy? And what do we mean with 'failing'? If the only way to 'win' is to keep existing, then I'm afraid all human social and economic models are doomed to fail. Did the command economy of the USSR fail because it ended up in corruption, or did it win because it succeeded in lifting up countless people out of pre-industrial poverty? The whole debate is fascinatingly hard to talk about with endless philosophical arguments that often tell us more about how we ourselves perceive the world, then it does about the system we are talking about.
Anyway, excuse my rambling. One more point on command economies: Would you consider Amazon to be one? Think about it: A giant, global, centralised system which connects thousands of autonomous and external vendors to a huge hierarchical system of production and delivery, controlled top-down through a data-driven approach of supply and demand. Sometimes, I think a command economy is strangely feasible and growing right before our eyes within the current free market.
Terrible example. It used slaves.
They fail because power corrupts, so long as a capitalist society has the ability to fight corruption based on free ability to rise, then it's less likely to become something such as the USSR or CCP. Command Economies fail because people are human.
It failed terribly at this. Russia still has people utilizing outhouses and no plumbing.
No, because I have a choice to get my good elsewhere. I'm also not told I can only buy certain amounts.
And what makes that a terrible example? So did the Romans, and we still use them as a template for law. In fact, our entire concept of private property is grounded in the concept of Roman slavery.
Power corrupts, but I see no mechanism in capitalism to prevent the accumulation of power. Money equals power in our system, plain and simple. Wealth inequality is rising without check. If you think that capitalism does not cause human suffering due to corruption, I urge you to take a closer look.
So do many parts of the world with capitalist systems. Remember: Both Russia and China were a joke before turning towards a command economy. Then, they became super powers. (And one of them imploded, of course.) Purely from a material point of view, it's hard to argue against the success here. I usually consider the USSR a failure not because of its industry, but because of its internal social oppression, rigidity, and ultimate downfall due to corruption. All of those aspects can also happen (and we see them happening) in market economies.
My point is that these failures and successes are not only linked to economy. They are related to power structures: The USSR failed because it concentrated power in the hands of the very few, who were faced with the dictators paradox: The veracity of their information became warped by the very power they wielded, this rendering them impotent.
Okay, but that's not the point? Amazon internally is a command economy, in how it orchestrates and distributes it's many, many different production chains, vendors and logistical systems. In a command economy, you are also not told what to buy. You buy what is available, just like you do now. You are simply living in an economic model where the matter of supply and demand is taken care of centrally instead of distributed and organically. If it works perfectly, there should be little apparent difference between the two for the consumer: Products are simply available where they are needed. Amazon demonstrates that the production-logistical part of an economic system need not be a chaotic, competitive environment to adequately manage the global shifting supply and demand: A centralised approach can work, given enough data and the modern tools to analyse, communicate and control.
There is still a very significant difference between Amazon and the command economy of an entire nation. While Amazon's internal logistical structure is similar to the bureaucracy of a command economy, it is still tied to the price of goods in an external market. In other words, there is a very simple criterion that Amazon needs to fulfill across their range of products: profits need to exceed costs. With this clear goal, it is a lot easier to try to optimize their 'internal economy'.
Not all command economies fail in their attempt to optimize in light of their goals. The real stake through the heart of a command economy is setting their goals. The idea that profit needs to exceed costs is meaningless when you determine the prices for everything ahead of time. So what is the 'correct' price for specific goods and services? In a market economy, the price is determined by people's willingness and ability to pay for these things, which takes into account all kinds of nearly invisible factors. People's intimate knowledge of their own needs and of the economic climate of their community (what other goods and services they have access to) are factored almost automatically into the functioning of a market economy. In a command economy, the amount of work that must be done to replicate and use this information is basically insuperable.
Another distinction between Amazon and a command economy is that Amazon can (and probably will) fail. Amazon was founded in 1994 and did not start to become a major player in e-commerce until around 2000 - the longevity of its business model has yet to be proven. So many businesses, even huge ones that seemed ready to permanently dominate their section of the market, failed miserably, either disappearing or becoming a shell of their former selves. Yahoo, Kodak, Toys R Us, Blockbuster, and Sears come to mind. And when these companies fail, life pretty much goes on like usual. Amazon is so big that its failure would be perhaps unprecedented. Certainly there would be a degree of inconvenience (on the e-commerce side) and disruption (on the web-hosting side), but it is almost certain that other companies would step in and more or less fill those roles. For most people, life would pretty much go on as usual.
Compare this to the failure of a command economy. When an entire nation follows a single economic system, and that system fails, there are no easy alternatives that step in to fill its role. History has shown us that when this happens, people suffer. Many starve to death or die from easily preventable illnesses. The state of technological and scientific progress is frozen for years and years. The political conflict to fill the power vacuum often leads to human rights violations, sometimes outright civil war. So even if you can sort of make a command economy 'work' inside a company, it is a poor comparison to justify an entire nation adopting this economic model.
Ah, very good point on the externality of price in Amazon's "economy". I think the point still stands that a command economy with 21st century technology would be a very different beast then it's early 20th century counterparts, but that indeed does not solve the issue of goal-setting through price.
Of course, that's an inherent 'problem' when approached from the communist angle: Their value and price theory is simply completely different from the one we are used to, rooted as it is in Marx' analysis.
What do you think of a hybrid approach? It seems to me that a command economy falters where price and dynamic markets are concerned, but it could be a dramatic improvement on private free market capitalism in some areas, such as healthcare, public transit, education... (I'm assuming here that we do not consider 'price' the driving factor in those areas, but rather have a goal setting mechanism based on the quality and efficiency of the service)
I mean, if you have to dig so deep as to bring up the Incan economy, it doesn't bode well for non-market economies. We really don't know that much about it, since the Incan did not write documents, and in practice I think the Incan economy was functionally a feudal serfdom given that we know it was ruled by oligarchy, and all the civil wars and wars of expansion that immediately preceded the Spanish invasion.
On feudal societies, I think feudalism can be sustainable over longer periods of time than other models, but in a specific hostile environment. Feudalism really optimizes for maximal martial might with minimum administrative overhead. But the more safe and wealthy the world becomes, the less either of those become relevant.
Failure of resource distribution is the main one. Shortages, resources wasted, growth limited by poor allocation, eventually to a point where the populace can take it no more. There is a infinite time horizon argument, but at the least the fact that the command economies have existential levels of shortages within a single human's lifetime is a poor performance.
I wouldn't consider Amazon a command economy. Mainly because it's not an economy - Amazon has many pieces, but outside of AWS, and the other parts using AWS, Amazon is relient on the rest of the economy for inputs and for people to sell services to. Furthermore, unlike a nation state, people don't belong to Amazon. Amazon may well grow too big for its britches, and collapse when it improperly allocates its own resources, but that's fine in this case. Unlike when a nation state fails, the people who work at amazon, will work for a competitor, and the people who used its services, will use a competitor.
I mainly considered the Incan example because it was somewhat fresh in my mind. But it stands to reason that we would have to dig deep to find other models: West-european expansion in the last 500 years was based on market economies and has effectively erased other modes of operation in its colonial wake. I'm just pointing out that we should not just accept it as the ultimate, best and only system simply because it has been exported so aggressively.
Systematically, market dynamics in a capitalist mode of production certainly do enhance a colonial drive, and seem to contain within themselves a sort of growth mechanism which forces it to spread and subsume other systems. But it also appears to have a self-destructive force, which is now becoming apparent after its global spread and with the upcoming climate crises.
It's funny you mention feudalism though. What are your thoughts on the idea that, due to the increasing concentration of wealth and power in corporate hands, we are approaching a techno-feudalistic or corpo-feudalistic society? It is one of the suggested outcomes 'after' capitalism. (Silly to even attempt to predict of course, but it is interesting to see how feudal structures can arise out of a world with more safety and more administrative efficiency.)
Your definition of failure certainly does neatly include what happened with the communist 20th century command economies. The main question then, of course, becomes whether these are due to a systemic flaw in the concept of a command economy, or due to other factors.
Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for a command economy. But we just cannot afford to just brush all these things aside, especially since the current system is most definitely experiencing existential crises. Command economies did certainly have shortages, but so do market economies. What do these have in common, why do these happen? We cannot hope to face the future if we don't dare to question the system and incorporate the lessons of earlier ones.
For Amazon: An economy is, as far as I'm aware, not an entity that is completely on its own. Yes, it is reliant on the rest of the economy. Much like any state's economy is. Perhaps I'm wrong here in defining it like this, I'm no economist. I'm getting this little definition from Wikipedia: "In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the production, use, and management of scarce resources."
Now, wildly interesting point there on how you define a state and therefore an economy: People do not belong to Amazon. Therefore, it is not a state, and so it is not an economy. I think this is circular logic.
For most of human history, people did not 'belong' to a 'state'. That is a quite recent social and cultural idea. Yet we do consider their modes of production and distribution to be 'economies'. And when nations fail, the people do in fact 'work for a competitor'. The collapse of a nation does not, after all, result in the annihilation of its people, merely their restructuring.
Now, the point here is not to actually discuss the semantics: The point is that what applies to Amazon can actually apply to a nation: It exemplifies that a command economy can work, if there is a clear hierarchy and it has modern IT infrastructure to monitor everything and avoid corruption. I find it an interesting thought experiment, if nothing else.
I get that it's a terribly weird and awkward thing to say: Corporations obviously are not nations. And yet, the global multinationals of our day and age share so many similarities. They are more powerful then many great nations of the past, have more absolute control over their 'subjects' then many did. There are still (thankfully) a great amount of differences and a (somewhat) clear line between corporation and state... But the similarities are there, and can provide us with fascinating insights into how people engage in a social fabric.
Markets are much more prevalent than just in Europe, and over the last few years, though. Rome had an extensive proto-market economy. In non-warring periods, China had extensive market economies.
In terms of growth, I really don't think any of that is unique to market economies. Growth is a fairly normal thing to reach out for, and to be honest I think it's something that should be sought after. Increasing the pool of riches instead of shuffle around what resources you have is good.
Negative externalities are a market failure, I don't think it's the kind of necessarily causes some kind of death spiral. Part of that is likely that I more optimistic about the climate than other people on the internet. There is no global warming cliff beyond which is inescapable doom. Yeah, it's bad that the climate will change, and it'll definitely cause damage, but we've also make very good progress on it. Two decades ago the projection was over 5 degrees of climate warming, but now it's less than 3. Is that still over 2? Sure. Could it be better? Sure. But the ship has turned, and humanity will chug along.
I also don't particularly think we're in a particularly existential crisis, or at least over market economics and private ownership. If anything, in the US I think populism and nationalism is the bigger threat to our democracy and system of government. It's been worse, and it's been better in the past.
In terms of feudalism, I honestly think it's a pretty weird comparison. I think people are mistaking feudalism for something else. Feudalism is centered around martial relationships - the subject renders to their lord martial power. It's something that came about because it creates high military power with low administrative overhead. You can see in the later European feudal days that as the nations got wealthier, there was a push towards absolute monarchies as Kings could finally render enough power and have sufficient technology to administer a country absolutely.
I don't think there's any reason why there would need to be feudal relationships; if anything, governing and organizing a bunch of people has become easier. Companies don't need subordinate companies that do the same thing, they'll absorb or kill competitors.
On Amazon, one thing is that Amazon has been around for two decades. It's a bit early to call it a successful model of a perpetuating command economy. The history of conglomerates is not one of success; no, really. Pre-tech there was a big disinvestment in conglomerates, for purely market reasons
On the parts about a state, what makes it different is that the human cost of Amazon failing or splitting is low. Nation states failing brings substantial human suffering, and nations also have weapons, and armies, and their failure often leads to violence.
This, this, a million times this!
The #1 problem with society, IMO, is that the "free market" is in tension with the political economy - or to put it another way, it can sometimes be profitable for a corporation to spend $1 million in lobbying for a bill that nets them e.g. $10 million in subsidies. What's more, the people who benefit from this broken political system are specifically incentivized to keep it broken. People will say "that's not capitalism, that's <____>! Capitalism is actually <____>." To which I have to ask if this hypothetical capitalism has ever existed outside of lab conditions.
It's rarely worth using capitalism unless someone pre-defines their definition, at which point you might as well refer to that definition as "quorpism" and debate the merits of quorpism.
I don't have time to write a full post with sources, but I'd posit that we're in late-captialism because we're approaching the end of perpetual growth sometime relatively soonish (less than 200 years, almost certainly sooner). Perpetual economic growth is one of the biggest traits of the industrial age shaped primarily by captialism.
Perpetual growth is impossible in a finite world. Eventually growth must stop, if only because resources run out.
Many of our efficiency gains in the last 30 years WRT material sciences and things like heat pumps and fuel economy are starting to approach effective theoretical limits. We're close to peak oil, if not past it.
We're hititng a point where increasing profits need to come from cutting corners rather than improving products. I frankly think we hit that point in the 80s for many things. I think all the evidence we need of that is the decline and elimintion of lifetime warantees.
But the main driver is going to be climate change. As the weather becomes more unpredictable, there will be more disasters. Eventually we'll need to switch from the competitive nature of markets to the cooperative nature of community.
I don't think anything about limited resources is particularly incompatible with either markets or private ownership. It is the case that the current market favors growth, but of course it does! If given the choice between redistributing the same amount of resources, and simply getting more resources, it's better to get more resources! The former is zero sum, after all.
Oil is a good example; oil companies are not growth companies anymore. Their stock prices practically mirror a sine curve. Everyone knows that there is finite and decreasing supply of fossil fuels, and that renewables will increasingly eat into the market. That's okay, people who invest in oil and gas do so for the dividends, and they know that those dividends aren't going to increase beyond inflation on a long term basis.
If anything, when resources are limited, markets become even more important. Humans tend to allocate resources poorly, and when the pool of resources isn't growing, that's even more important. Many of the command economies of the past were really buoyed by the "rising tide raises all boats" principle, and would be much worse if exponential growth wasn't occuring.
Conversely, the main thing keeping old planned economies back was a lack of information. Nowadays with ERP systems we could (relatively) easily count exactly how much of any 'thing' that needs to manufactured, for the entire economy.
I don't believe capitalism needs endless growth. In a shrinking population, we would still be doing most things the same, investments would mostly pay out in yield or dividends rather than future growth. Arguably what requires growth is aging populations. Increasing amounts of old people require more and more resources which are currently provided by growth.
I really want to express my opinion on this but I am not sure how to do it constructively. So I will just express my feelings about this and admit that I am no expert and what I say is subjective.
Yes, capitalist countries have flaws.
I grew up in a "communist" country; a totalitarian regime with a state-controlled centrally planned economy. After 1989, that country transformed into capitalism. So, I have personally experienced both capitalist and non-capitalist regime and in my experience, the capitalist regime is so incomparably better that it feels like comparing the latest Lamborghini to that dangerous cart I made out of scraps when I was 8. I feel like I need to warn people who talk about "late stage capitalism" and want something better: please be careful. Previous attempts turned out horribly wrong.
Countries with the highest quality of life are capitalist (as in "an economic system in which private individuals or businesses, rather than the state, own property and businesses"). The things often mentioned as flaws of capitalism are not always related to capitalism per se but to specific countries, most often the US. Some of those things are just bad things that happen because we live in an imperfect world and not in a paradise - for example, there is no socio-economic system that is somehow inherently moral... and it does not need to be. For that, we have legal systems and customs and social norms and many other things that I am forgetting. Seeking for a socio-economic system that somehow fixes all that is seeking for a silver bullet.
So, if someone wants to change my mind:
EDIT: Thinking about that Lamborghini metaphor - I was trying to emphasize the contrast in my personal experience, but maybe I should have used something like Toyota. It is a decent car that just works OK for most people. And that is what capitalism is for me. I can have a decent life. A life I could not even imagine before 1989.
You seem to be concluding that OP is saying that capitalism (full stop) is the problem. You're not alone, I see similar responses elsewhere in the thread. I don't think that was the intended meaning though. The 'late stage' bit is important.
Late stage meaning the point where constant growth, along with wealth consolidation and financial influence on legislation, policy and public opinion reach a level where human (and ecological) wellbeing increasingly suffer.
Speaking for myself, I think capitalism remains the best way to structure an economy. But there are a lot of different ways to do capitalism. Capitalism needs to be tempered or it eats everything.
I definitely don't think communism is the answer, it has a terrible track record.
Re 4, I personally am a Fabian Socialist, not a Marxist which means I believe in evolutionary, not revolutionary socialism. The ultimate goal would be for a socialist society run for the benefit of the people but arrived at through strict regulation of the abuses of capitalism.
I think the disconnect is that since the '80s, the Anglosphere, especially the US has seen the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of the postwar Keynesian consensus resulting in plummetting standards of living. As someone from a former socialist bloc country your standard of living is presumably far higher than your parents was. For the average American, certainly the average working class American, that is more than likely not the case.
Marx was spot on at diagnosing the flaws of capitalism but not that good at proposing a solution.
I would also contend that totalitarian regimes don't have a good track record, socialist or no.
I'd love to hear from Cubans, because from an outsider prospective, they seem to be doing mostly fine, and would likely be doing much better if they didn't spend the majority of the last century under economic sanctions from the US. My understanding is that the social 'floor' for Cuba is much higher than the USA.
I'd contend socialism hasn't really been given a fair try until its been done in a democratic way. But the USA has been quite fervent in insuring that doesn't happen.
I mean I think the problem with Cuba is that 'mostly fine' is a bit of a low bar. Social services have a solid baseline but the authoritarian nature of the regime is problematic.
I'm from Singapore myself which is an interesting hybrid regime when it comes to capitalism. We were doing state capitalism before China.
I would say that capitalism is a very fuzzy concept and much of the failings unique, or uniquely extreme, in the US are often ascribed to capitalism.
It might be better to start with the more concrete idea of centrally planned economies vs non-centrally planned economies. Are individuals naturally inclined to act out of selfishness and greed without government involvement? To what extent should the economy be structured and organized by the government to avoid the excesses of human nature?
I'd say no. We get nudged there by living our lives perpetually in a system that materially rewards greed and selfishness.
Seeing how people act in a large scale crisis, like hurricane aftermath tells me all I need to know. The vast, vast majority seek to help those around them rather than watch another suffer.
The most pernicious lie about economic systems that gets parrotted and over again is that capitalism is inherent to human nature, that socialism is against human nature. The justification usually reduces to the prisoners dilemma, and the fact that the selfish choice is the winning strategy. Obviously analagous to capitalism.
But the thing the capitalists conveniently leave out is the winning strategy for the stateful prisoners dilemma, the one where you play over and over. Obviously more in line with the real world of living in a society. The winning strategy there is to cooperate, but if the other person is selfish and fucks you over, you return the favor. Cooperation is what actually won us the world as a species.
In my mind we've had to deal, as a society, with a small minority of people that insists on breaking this inherent social contract. They sow the wind, and they have reaped, are reaping, and will continue to reap the whirlwind. I personally don't care if the top 1% get to mess around with their fast cars and private jets and island getaways if it means the lives of the bottom 1% are acceptable. But now that is no longer the case, how much longer will people - who we can see every time there is a disaster are fundamentally good and kind and care about one another - how much longer will they tolerate these excesses?
I mean...in the ideal, the two aren't opposed. There's money to be made in the environmental space and companies have made money having morals. The biggest player in that is the government since they have the ability to incentivize with laws/tax breaks/subsidies which things are important. They just aren't.
The main issue is just corruption and monopoly, which is an issue for any "ism". People climb to the top, they want to stay there, but they don't want to adapt, so they try to disincentivize competition rather than improving. Capitalism, generally, recognizes this, as does just about any other ism, and that's why we have (or arguably had) laws to try and prevent such things.
Unfortunately power consolidates. "Oh we need to make it easier to do this to fight that" or similar such shortsightedness makes it easier and easier to get enough people agreed to start pulling things apart.
I don't think it's necessarily a "late stage" thing so much as part of a cycle. There's still a variety of ways it can go, but the problem is that we're bad at accepting that it's not going to be quick. These things are often generation spanning shifts and it's going to take time for them to resolve.
Monetary gains are most certainly opposed to caring for the environment because monetary gains must, by necessity, prioritize the short term. That's the whole business of accumulating wealth, which will then be used to accumulate even more wealth through financial applications.
If there's a gain to be had, corporations have a fiduciary duty to pursue it. Any value must be extracted at the faster rate possible -- regulations and societal expectations are setbacks and nuisances to overcome by any means necessary,
If, at some point, capitalism was beneficial for the environment, that was not a principled stance, but rather an accidental alignment that would be quickly forgotten when it proved less lucrative than the alternative.
Which is why you make it to their advantage in the short term. Most government authority still stems from control of the military and the economy. You start taxing, fining, and if necessary, arresting those who can't follow the laws, while incentivizing those who get the outcomes you want, and you'll see movement. The simple issue is that the same companies they need to put pressure on are the ones donating to their war chests for elections.
Which is why monetary gains are fundamentally opposed to any ethical consideration. Capitalism is like a snake, you can take the venom out of it, but it would be foolish to mistake that temporary state for its true nature.
Monetary gain is only harmless when the gain is not enough to overcome ethics. After a certain threshold, it is seldom harmless and often nocive.
We are definitely into late stage capitalism and well beyond repair considering what all crony capitalists are able to get away with today, vis-a-vis they got away with in the 90s and earlier.
Have you heard of any antitrust lawsuit lately like the Microsoft one in 90s? But even more depressing than that is that the people seem to have given up hope and accepted this as a way of life. They've started valuing brands and businesses more than other people - that's where the rot really starts.
And since politicians are plebs too, they've also started succumbing to this "greater power" of corporate and allowing them to rule by proxy.
The rot is just too deep and entrenched by now and I think it's too late to reverse it. A few millennials like us who have seen a much freeer world will only have it in our memories but for newer generations, this is all probably just a way of life, not capitalism!
This is a conversation I don't think we can have often enough. At least until everyone is so familiar with it that it becomes boring. That's my first answer to your question about how we change course: awareness. You have to acknowledge the problem before you can solve it.
It seems like some don't like the term late stage capitalism. Maybe that's a sign it's been overused.
That's too bad, like OP, I think it's a perfect pithy decription of where (some) western countries have arrived.
But whatever term you use, in some economies, the level of financial influence over both government and other systems is dystopian. As a result a large percentage of new wealth goes to an ever shrinking, tiny fraction of the population.
New wealth in this context meaning surplus that is created by efficiency. Think the wheel, horses, the industrial revolution and now the digital revolution. The amount of work required to provide goods and services keeps shrinking. At some point (provided we don't destroy the biosphere too much) providing for the basic needs of an individual will be so cheap it will be almost free.
If all of that surplus continues to be captured by the very top, which seems inevitable on our current course, we'll have big problems. Certainly we're seeing a dramatic example of this with the combination of inflation and record breaking corporate profits quarter after quarter. Prices aren't, in many cases, going up because a healthy market says they have to, they're going up because they can. In the process sucking wealth to the top.
One problem with this is that killing the middle class breaks the whole system. You need middle class consumers for modern capitalism to work.
The environment is another of the obvious problems. All that regulatory capture, enabled by wealth consolidation, is a big part of how we arrived at mass extinctions and climate change. And it's an even bigger part of why it's proven so hard to change our systems in order to avoid the worst of the potential outcomes.
For profit corporations are not well suited to thinking about, and solving, those kinds of problems. It's just not their purpose.
So that leaves government. But of course if government is, to a large degree, controlled by the people at the top of the capital pyramid, government can't do anything.
So I think that's where you have to go, after awareness. The influence of capital on government has to be reduced. There are lots of proposals for reasonable ways to accomplish that, so I won't digress.
Once that's done, if it can be done, salvaging representative government will look a little more realistic. And with representative government we can hopefully start to solve some of the systemic problems.
Which imo needs to include capturing some of the aforementioned surplus and investing it in the middle class. We have famous examples of this working in some European countries.
Thereafter, a better educated, more secure middle class would help create a value system that prioritizes human, and planetary, wellbeing.
Hopefully it's self evident why that is. If not I think that's a topic for a different post. Put simply: If people feel secure and connected, they interact with the world in a much different way.
Every time people try to reign in capitalism, the its most powerful players (large corporations, the IMF, huge equity firms) push back. In more concrete terms, this means, when people petition to have their humanity honored with things like childcare, elderly assistance, food security, a living wage, reasonable access to housing, etc -- corporations pressure lawmakers to take away those things.
Currently in the US, we have two opposing parties who both bow to the forces and dogma of capitalism. Republicans bow a little lower, because their electorate will happily believe anything they're told -- certain forms of Christianity have already molded their brains to be good little soldiers for the endless culture war. Democrats do the bare minimum they can get away with, although there are a few in the party (precious few) who give me some tiny glimmer of hope.
Everybody is fed up with capitalism, but because of the ideas about it that permeate society, most people don't have a word for their anger; after all, what could possibly replace capitalism? It's as natural as the light from the sun, right? The right wing has been using this to great effect. If right wingers and orthodox democrats dared to open their minds, maybe we could begin to see the kind of sea change we need.
This is a very US centric view. There are many countries with capitalist economies and strong social safety nets. We tend to be pretty pessimistic, but it's important to remember the average human's quality of life has only improved by most metrics.
That's fair, although I would just want to add that the capitalist pushback has happened in other countries with stronger safety nets. To your point though, they are still better off than the US.
Capitalist Realism is a good read which explores this idea more, how Capitalism is so ingrained into our everyday reality, that it's taken as the norm.
I think calling it the beginning of techno-feudalism is more accurate. Yanis Varoufakis talks and writes about this a lot. Platforms like Meta, EBay and Amazon create their own marketplaces that operate based on algorithms and rules where they are paid dues by the people buying and selling products. The more you pay the lord as a vendor, the more favor you receive in ad placement and getting to the top of the algo. As a buyer, you pay in data, subscriptions and fees.
A lot of other „lords“ both big and small are copying the formula… Apple, Microsoft Wayfair, Douglas, Lieferando… everyone pays a fee to get into their little fiefdom marketplace where they control the rules totally and there is no free trade. It’s not capitalism anymore! It’s feudalism!
To add to this, as a seller you are competing with the algorithm, not other sellers - there are thousands of options for buyers and you want to get to their first or second page of the results no matter the quality. As a buyer you pay the lord for protection and may even prefer to pay for their „services“.
I really think we are going to see wider adoption of this and it will replace all capitalism for the consumer. Big companies that have their own fiefdoms get to enjoy „socialism for the wealthy“ because if they fail, they get bailed out. There’s no risk at that level and without risk, there is no capitalism.
To be honest, we probably need more capitalism with a healthy dose of good old-fashioned regulation by breaking up the fiefdoms into smaller companies and creating a single public marketplace for the leftover platforms… and this last thought can apply to social media as well. Instead of Reddit, Twitter and Co. having closed platforms, we could have a public standard with they all have to use with plenty of third party apps and websites that can access their services. There’s more competition that way. What we have now is feudalism.
Today marks the anniversary of the ratification of the twenty-ninth amendment, granting corporations the sovereignty we needed, and deserved. An act which freed us from the incompetence, regulations, and tyranny of the federal government. We make our own laws, we supply the security, and we do the things which government is no longer able to do.
I'm far from an economist but here's my take. There are only three-ish things that could come next the way I see it:
Status quo keeps maintaining more or less. This one makes the most sense to me. Since the 1%ers always need labor to squeeze capital from. They don't really want to rock the boat.
Something replaces capitalism. Workers revolt and unite and we see lots of socialist movements across the world. Personally I doubt we see this for a number of reasons.
Societal collapse. Think large scale environmental disasters and/or economic collapse.
Eventually (3) will happen in the form of some kind of global warming environmental disasters. But until then (1) is all that will happen. I, personally, don't buy into any large scale economic collapses happening that we won't recover from or society suddenly revolting and uniting as the workers of the world.
We're in late stage bad education and parenting
Would you like to expand on that idea?
I can try but I am not a wordsmith and idk if I can articulate it well. It's kinda like suspended belief of object permanence, and the contradiction that it creates. One reason capitalism is of detriment to us is that humans favor convenience over morals, particularly when what is immoral is hidden from view. Where if it were happening in front of them, it would be much harder on the conscience to choose the convenience, particularly when the choice is being observed by the people around them. To give an example, think of outsourcing of clothes to another country. Now this is a loophole in capitalism, because if the entire line of production were contained within the domain of capitalism, the chain of production would never reach the cheap labor since no one within that domain would produce for that cheap. And here's where the mental contradiction comes in: a company is using a loophole to hack capitalism by attaining value outside of the domain, but the people inside of the domain pretend it isn't happening because clothes are cheap. So how does this tie in with what I said? Well parenting and education is how we pass on knowledge and skill, of which includes dicipline and morality. If everyone inside of the domain agreed to not use loopholes to cheat the system (or enough people that we could vote in reps who would ensure the law reflects that desire) then we wouldn't be in "late stage capitalism". This system is failing because it only works when everything is contained within the system. But people won't vote for that, there is not enough dicipline. Why? Because parents and education continue to fail to teach the skills required to carry such resolve into adulthood.
A great ice breaker, to be sure!
I would add that this clip featuring Slavoj Zizek is a great introduction into some of the subtle changes of capitalism over the last 20 years.
If we want to go back to the 60s-80s I think a series of really important shifts happened in both the US and the UK that changed capitalism (perhaps evolved) into the the late stage capitalism we exist in today. Reagan and Thatcher shaped the course of our planet beyond what they thought was possible and quite possibly in the worst ways they could have.
This is extremely interesting, thank you for sharing it. It relates to something I've thought a few times, and was wondering your take on:
Would you say that in some ways, capitalism and the economic sector of our society can be considered almost analogous to an autonomous living being in their own right? That we could be considered the cells of a larger organism that is global society and/or capitalism?
It's always struck me that in many ways, capitalism (or at least the systems that embody it) seems to be self-perpetuating, self-regulating, and evolves over time, very similarly to how we would define a living being, just in a different scale and context. I have no idea how scientifically valid that idea is, but I always like to ask people who know more than me about it.
Both living beings and whatever socio-economic system, are an emergent expression of lower level systems. It's an interesting comparison, that I think speaks more to our inherent pareidolia, for lack of a better world.
It's cool to think about, but I wouldn't necessarily equate them based on these similarities. As an analogy: a living being is the intersection of many complex biological systems, which ultimately culminates in some form of consciousness. A socio-economic system is the culmination of many systems, that results in some pattern of behavior - in the same way that climate works.