MACHAAN

Source: The end of capitalism has begun | Books | The Guardian

A spectacular read – bristling with commentary over the last 600 years, connecting the dots to the next civilisational shift that will occur in our lifetimes.

Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer.

In the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled.

Neoliberalism has presided over the demise of capitalism, even as Capitalism is backed into a corner by Information technology, and automation.

Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.

That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.

The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet.

A takeaway full of hidden implications, that stayed with me: That in the current age, ‘Information is physical, and software is a machine’