Is Capitalism Near Its End?

John Michael Godier likes to play around with various Fermi’s Paradox scenarios. And then people in the comments sections play around some more.

I’m wondering if anybody does similar with the Capitalist Paradox. Why if there are so many life forms existing on earth, and exoplanet likely, are humans the only capitalists we know of so far? Shouldn’t another species have tried to sell us their alien trinkets and toys by now?

I’d also be happy with discussions about alternatives to capitalism. Maybe the Matrix Hotel concept, or that world where cities roll around on giant tracks and prey on smaller towns which only get to have wheels. I’d avoid stuff like “Thatcherian TINA” or George Carlin’s “Just Assume There’s Nothing I Can Do and It’s All Gonna Turn To Shit Anyways so I’m Gonna Poke Fun at the Ensuing Calamities.” I’d bet there’s some interesting ideas out there. Maybe even plausible.

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Thus spoke Zarathustra or someone.
Does it really matter?
We are so screwed no matter who said what to whom whenever.

Reading your commentary on Wallerstein, supplemented by your own ideas, on capitalism’s future when there is no one left to be looted (and I am glad for people to finally see that capitalism’s great “wealth creation” shtick is akin to the ACA giving people healthcare–yeah, some benefits can be realized, but only at the very inefficient cost of paying off a class of people who contribute NOTHING to actual wealth creation, who only skim off resources (money) that could have be used to provide an even better product or outcome)–what happens next?

I recall my younger days in the 1980s, when I first started my current job, and how Reagan looted the poor of what little they had. Sad to say, many of my fellow coworkers applauded this (having done a stint in amongst the poor myself, I was appalled to hear how “easy” they thought the lives of the poor were). A generation or so later, their middle-class and even upper-middle class successors are being looted: real pay lagging behind inflation, pensions slashed then eliminated altogether, medical benefits cut, etc. What I then would anticipated is that once people in the 70-90 percentiles have been looted, the looting will focus on the 90-95 %, and then the 96-99 %, and so forth. People who cheered when those beneath them were looted instead of defending them against the robber class will find themselves looted one day too.

Fools.

Early on, during my stint amongst the poor, I found out the effect of the minimal wage. Even now I’m relatively well-off now, I still firmly believe my best economic interest lies in boosting the minimal wage and otherwise improving the living standard of both our and the world’s poor. The poor and minorities are our canaries in the proverbial coal mine; what our upper robber class plans to do to YOU one day they first try out on *them*. Count on it! Even in terms of enlightened selfishness, with no larger altruistic ends, your smartest course of action is thus to defend them and to help them. I find it odd that many people are too-short sighted to see things this way.

People who cheered when those beneath them were looted instead of defending them against the robber class will find themselves looted one day too.

Are they cheering or mentally defensing? In denial? After my career was wrecked with root cause being mandates bought by the robber class, my two worst family critics by far were the only in-laws I had who not much later, would not only lose their own careers but become unemployable.

I think that coming after me was their way of unconsciously trying to persuade themselves that they were immune, that they still had all the same power over their own lives as they’d had back in Reagan’s time, when in reality, their gut was telling them that this was far from the case anymore.

There’s an old contractor’s maxim: “People buy on emotion and justify with logic.” I’ve been trying to get that one morphed into something a bit more accurate, since there’s nothing logical about buying a shiny turd. One who does so is just following emotion with more emotion.

There’s also “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Actually, roads called “good” get paved towards hell, intentionally. And most people are just too emotional to notice.

Stewart M is absolutely correct regarding looting of the lower orders by those above them, and how this loot-fest, which has been going on for decades, will inevitably bite and consume those well-off men and women who think they’re protected and immune. They aren’t.

But then, capitalism is a system that depends on looting and pillage and enslavement and environmental ruin and all sorts of unpleasantness, doesn’t it? When resources are cut off or run dry, climate goes haywire, markets implode, supply chains collapse, and no one quite understands what to do about it except exploit more, loot more, oppress more and shed more blood and call it Our Democracy, then yeah, we’re probably nearing the end of the capitalist experiment.

What comes after?

“(You and I, dear reader, are not in the game and never were, unless some billionaire or CEO is reading this.)”
This is misleading. If you own anything that yields income – rental property, a farm, a business (like this blog), even a savings account – you’re technically “in the game.” Indeed, the same is true if you’re an employe. That covers probably most of us. As our economy is set up, capitalism is not optional.

I THINK this means that, unless you’re a major player, you’re largely powerless. That is pretty obviously true, and becomes truer as ownership becomes more and more concentrated. In principle, we can gain power by banding together, whether we’re small businesspeople or employes – that’s what unions are all about, and also local Chambers of Commerce, etc. (The national C of C seems to be strictly about the big players.) However, banding together effectively has been made more and more difficult, essentially as the market portion of capitalism shrinks away.

My favorite model for an alternative approach is market socialism, the Mondragon model: worker ownership and control, especially of dispersed, monopoly-free businesses. Another, congruent model is customer-owned businesses, especially utilities or stores. These two models are a form of socialism – but mediated by market mechanisms, more than central planning, which is at best fantastically clumsy.

To clarify: Capitalism and markets are not the same thing; they aren’t even the same KIND of thing. Capitalism describes the ownership and organization of businesses; it’s top-down, based on ownership outside of the enterprise itself. Markets are the mediating mechanism BETWEEN enterprises, based on feedback (negative feedback; positive feedback is usually a bad thing.) Among other things, they depend on the entities being relatively small and a free flow of information. Capitalism tends to centralize power (that’s its original purpose – to create large pools of capital for projects), eventually cancelling markets (even though we call some of its elements “markets”). So does “free trade”, incidentally.

Willy

Are they cheering or mentally defensing? In denial? After my career was wrecked with root cause being mandates bought by the robber class, my two worst family critics by far were the only in-laws I had who not much later, would not only lose their own careers but become unemployable.

This was during the Reagan administration. I could write a post on my coworkers of that time, as it illustrates so much about how we got here, and what’s right and what’s wrong about the analyses of people like Thomas Frank. A short summary:

a) They believed that (my company isn’t unionized) that the very worst thing that could happen to them would be for my company to be unionized. Capitalism just by its very nature produced their ever-increasing pay and benefits. (But then again, isn’t that what not only Rs, but Cold War Democrats had been telling them all their lives?). They did not realize that, quite the contrary, it was an economy that had a greater degree of unionization back then that had accomplished this.

b) They were racist to the core. No African-American (there were a few) nor brown person of any type “deserved” their job. My first supervisor took offense when I made a disparaging (read: accurate) remark about the KKK, saying “The KKK did a lot of good things too!” When the debate on making MKL day a national holiday was ongoing, I heard a lot of “Martin Luther Coon” remarks and how the Civil Rights movement was all a bunch of “paid communist agitators”.

Finally, being the young and foolish person I was, I brought in a MLK birthday cake to celebrate. My first supervisor (the one who defended the KKK) suddenly went on a diet. Another coworker openly refused to work with me. But several of the younger people, and two of the African-American scientists who worked there, sought me out as a friend. When I was asked about it, I just said “I was tired of hearing the racist BS”.

I could go on (did you know that being in prison was a cushy life of “no work and three squares a day?” Or how AIDS was a ‘good thing’? or that we could end it if we “just lined all of the people with HIV up and just shot them?”) but I mention this as people like Thomas Frank (who I actually like a lot) have written this narrative how the Democrats went corporate and betrayed the white working class which is why turned to Reaganism. But that’s just not the true timeline. The white working class started leaving the Democrats well before the Democrats went conservative/corporate, during the late 1960s (Wallace anyone? All in the Family ?). And they did it largely because of racism, of intolerance for anyone non-conforming, and for the Warfare State (keep building those bombs with union labor, baby!! Paul Wolfowitze, architect of Iraq, started out for the Cold War Hawk Scoop Jackson, who was labor’s favorite candidate). My former coworkers had not been “dumped” by the Democrats, they had known nothing else but good pay raises and better benefits and I recall them talking how in the future “we’ll all get five weeks vacation or more”) and the like. Instead, Democrats went corporate because their white working class base dumped them for the Rs because of Civil Rights.

Now–to be sure–while racism more than specific economic policies does a better job explaining the political trends of the last 50 years, racism in the US does have its ultimate roots in economics, for sure. Slavery and the replacement of poor whites with black slaves to do the “shit work” lifted the economic and political status of poor whites, and everyone at the time and later knew it. It’s why poor whites fought in the Confederate armies (“if the blacks aren’t picking that cotton it’s going to be us”) and also why poor whites in the North fought in the same war for black freedom but with the purpose of “keeping the blacks down in the South and not here competing with us”.

It’s also why “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa was burned to the ground–the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells got started when a friend of hers was lynched, and for what crime–raping a white woman? Killing or injuring a white man?–oh, no, he was hung from a tree until dead for the horrible crime of RUNNING A SUCCESSFUL GROCERY store that competed with those of whites. People like Booker T. Washington had taken to heart the reasons why whites said that they were against equality for blacks–blacks were uneducated, unsuccessful in careers and business, etc–and had encouraged blacks to be successful. Tulsa showed those supposed reasons where all a lie–“your job in America is NOT to be successful, but to do the shit work so that we don’t have to, and to do it for pennies to boot’.

American democracy from its onset, Edmund Morgan wrote, “has always been corrupted by a contempt for the poor and the black”. It’s been the reason why we’ve never been able to move to something like, say, a Scandinavian-style social democracy, because conservatives have always been able to paint a black face on anyone who benefits from such an arrangement, even though most of the recipients of social welfare programs are white. Racism for more than a generation has gotten a good many whites to shit in their own beds just because blacks got some of the goodies too. I can’t think of a better support for ‘critical race’ theory than that.

“White and Black” doesn’t allow for much humanizing nuance.

In the places I visit, the vast majority of blacks walk right by the homeless blacks asking for money. They don’t help the poor whites, either. Nor the poor Chinese. Nor the poor Spanish. Nor the poor Latin. Nor the poor non-Han Chinese. Nor the non-Ainu Japanese. Nor the Ainu. Nor the Indian poor. Nor the indigenous poor. Nor the Muslim poor. Nor the Christian poor. Nor the Buddhist poor. Nor the atheist poor. Nor the…

Just spend an afternoon on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ.

You can replace “vast majority of blacks walk right by the homeless blacks…” with any other conceivable identity you can muster. The basic psychology/sociology is exactly the same. People act exactly the same towards “their kind” – where “their kind” is the much more outward-facing homo-economicus self. Their “cultural” self is left in the dust if it doesn’t keep up with the principles of homo-economicus – itself a theoretical abstraction!

But what of this “cultural self?”

An indigenous African never knew she was “black” until the “whites” came along. And vice versa.

This “coincidence of opposites” serves to redefine personal identity in the interest of something other than “self.”

The “interiority” of our selves is always in alignment with others at the most human level, while also quite different due to ages of cultural and societal inputs.

The recent modern world seems more and more to be a monolithic culture-and-society-destroying homogenization machine.

Instead of feeling alike at the most basic human level and recognizing and appreciating the vast cultural differences, the opposite is happening at an accelerating pace: People feel more and more different at even the most basic human level (a mis-feeling being intentionally created by TPTB) at the same time that cultures and whole societies (themselves previous destroyers of smaller, more tight-knit cultures) are being destroyed.

People with no culture, no redeeming society, and an utter sense of alienation at even the most basic human level are easily “re-cultured” in the interest of homo-economicus.

Which is, of course, no culture at all.

My favorite workplace lunchtime gang included an Andrew Dice Clay, a Denzel Washington, a Garth Brooks, an Andy Griffith, a Gabriel Iglesias, a Ted Nugent, and an older, saner version of Richard Pryor. At least the more dweebish engineering equivalent of such, such as they were.

That was 25 years ago. I can’t imagine such a crew being able to coexist today, let alone wanting to go to lunch together or toss around toys during breaks.

Back then I once saw my little niece introduce her black doll as “Shaniqua” and her half-Filipino father shrugged: “Diversity.” His son married a new age Anglo and his daughter a Chinese liberal.

Today all three are big into making and displaying money. The nephew especially, after his high school sweetheart wife left him for a man making and spending more money. I’m no longer the amazing Bob Vila uncle, able to leap tall projects in a single bound. More like a strange hermit who enjoys doing strange menial things.

I’d agree with “homo-economicus”. It’s obvious that we’re being conditioned. Most of the ads I see depict 30-ish mixed race couples carelessly enjoying the fruits of their upper middle-class labors, when stress, depression, and economic and cultural anxiety is far more the norm, even from upper middles.

It’s like prevailing values from days of old, good or bad, got carefully pushed into brainwashing directions in an effort to get people to consume, divert attentions, or to scapegoat when the former doesn’t work. Thankfully, there are many progressive resources exploring, and explaining, the actual reality.

If voting still mattered, they’d make it illegal. I am not convinced they even count the vote in my county anymore. This is not about voters or voter blocs. Political parties don’t chase voters so much as they herd them. It is pretty clear on issues that matter to very, very rich people and the top management of giant business corporations, what masses of voters want does NOT matter.

Resentments are like cattle prods applied to people. Stir up people’s resentments in the right way and you can direct their political attitudes and prejudices pretty reliably.

As for the sequence of key political events and developments, I think there are two or three I would see as critical. One is that it stopped being possible to make a career out of leading and representing masses of ordinary people. I put that assertion in the passive voice to emphasize I do not see a singular reason that should be so. So I am a bit skeptical of a narrative that emphasizes the idea of the “working class” simply deserting the liberal-left or progressive values or some such. I think the liberal-left lost interest in leading the “working class” and demagogues from the right stepped right in, as they always do when the opportunity presents itself. Then, the New Democrats offered themselves to the rich and powerful as an alternative means to herd and corral the masses. My point is that bottom-up flow of political power to fuel a politics of opposition to oligarchic domination has been absent from the U.S. for a long time, a politics of true mass-membership organization non-existent for a generation or three.

I am not sure Americans are even capable of political organizing that isn’t funded and managed from above for above. I mean not psychologically or socio-culturally capable, not prepared by upbringing or social habit.

The crazy I see manifest among my decidedly not working class acquaintenances is no less pathological than that of any Trumpist. Watching a bunch of Russiagate propagandists trying to embarass or shame some fools over Jan 6 is cringeworthy television but is it any longer democratic politics? It looks a bit like 19th century Republicans waving the bloody shirt at Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, but is it the same.

After my grandmother died and it was time to shut up and sell off the house my mother had lived in and returned to every few weeks for over 60 years, my mom took me for a ride around that town of roughly 1400 with its Federal houses and dying or dead elms. We drove to the other side of town, to the literal wrong side of the tracks. I had lived in that town for the first five or six years of my life and been visiting regularly ever since. I do not know that I had ever seen “Dublin” — the tiny towns Irish-Catholic ghetto. My mother’s father was Catholic, but also the engineer who ran the all-important railroad junction in the town. He was the Chair of the School Board, who married the principal of the high school, my grandmother (a formidable lady who looked a bit like Eleanor Roosevelt). And, my mother showed me the humble church in “Dublin” where they came to mass and talked to me for maybe the only time in my life about her childhood and its “politics”.

When the modern woke say, ” Latinx” or talk the successor ideology of the 1619 Project I think Franks is contrasting that shiny, silly veneer with something more basic and genuinely lived, in a populist Kansas long ago. Something I glimpsed that day in “Dublin”.

@Bruce Wilder,

Given how hard the Sharia Law Christian Gilead Republican Party is working to make voting illegal for some people, they must think that some peoples’ votes still matter. Can you demonstrate that they are wrong to think so?

@Bruce Wilder,

You may be correct. It seems the Christian Sharia Law Republicans don’t want to take any chances. They fear that if too many “Democrats” are permitted to vote, they may be their denied policy outcome of the Gilead Republicanazi Fascistrumpanon Republic of their dreams.

They may be wrong to be concerned, but they do appear to be concerned. And they are acting on their concerns.