This is the ninth diary of a series on excuses for "why we can't have socialism." The argument that goes that socialism is impossible because capitalism will last indefinitely, and prevent any and all alternative societies from arising. Societies that have held on to the old socialism, well, mostly Cuba, are completely ineffective at socialism, and survive only by virtue of a black market capitalism. See, e.g. Patrick Symmes'Thirty Days as a Cuban.
The idea with this excuse is that there is no real force in the world today opposing the capitalist system -- maybe there are a few protesters here or there but nothing is really going on to "take out" the capitalist system, and since it's defended by the US military, the global corporate elite's all-powerful proxy force (responsible for 46% of global military spending), we can expect capitalism to last indefinitely.
Within this ideological spell, "progressivism" appears as a taken-for-granted notion that things are, or can be, getting better, while at the same time the predatory economics of neoliberal capitalism (and the "inverted totalitarianism" described by Sheldon Wolin) is regarded as the ultimate goal-state of Western civilization.
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It seems like I've heard this excuse from the time I was first exposed to radical ideas in the 1980s. Look at how strong the capitalists are! Who is going to defeat them? Usually this narrative is voiced by disillusioned radicals who see no option anymore beyond cowering in terror at the apparatus operated by the elites while "blending in with the crowd" and maintaining an image of outward conformity. Protests will be ignored, votes can be "arranged," and politicians can be bought, so don't even bother to challenge the system from the outside. If you voiced radical ideas in your twentysomething youth, as I did, you were told that it's best to "work within the system" if you wanted to promote social change.
The problem, of course, with such reasoning is that capitalism's ultimate defeat is not about what we do, though we can still have an effect upon the world. The most effective critique of the capitalist system today voices the objection that it is headed, on its own momentum, toward some sort of terminal crisis. This momentum used to be called "the contradiction of infinite growth on a finite planet" -- now, h/t to Jason W. Moore, it's called "peak appropriation":
Capital's problem today is not depletion in the abstract but the contracting opportunities to appropriate nature cheaply (i.e. with less and less labor). (p. 33)Now, the capitalists (and their client governments) do indeed present a facade of invincibility. Capitalist, corporate rule (rule by governments beholden to corporate capitalists) is advertised as the pleasurable alternative to being shot by the cops -- or at least this is what the protesters at the 1999 WTO conference saw. And indeed the corporations may rule indefinitely, if they can get the mass public to believe in the corporate ideology of life into the indefinite future. The problem, of course, is that capitalist business depends, for the indefinite sustainability which its propagandists loudly proclaim, upon "profit," which itself is "capital accumulation" -- corporations getting richer and richer. This is not entirely a polite business, nor always a win-win situation for all involved, but is rather increasingly (in this era) a matter of their being able to manipulate the system so that they get a profit. Corporate profit today often means leaning upon government for appropriation opportunities (what David Harvey called "accumulation through dispossession" and what Paul Krugman recently called "profits without production") and the exploitation of cheap labor, as Moore points out in the abovecited article:
In contrast to the golden ages of American and British world power in the mid-20th and mid-19th centuries, the era 1983-2008 was not built atop an industrial revolution in labor productivity. Quite the opposite! The robot factories of the future, widely anticipated in the 1970s, never materialized. The future became a world of sweatshops, surplus humanity, and shock doctrines, not automated factories. (p. 35)As the rediscovery of cheap labor in areas of the First World which in more prosperous times saw significant gains in worker rights requires a renewal of government repression of labor, we can expect austerity planning to be the trend in ideological justification of government policy today, even though (as one recent Alternet piece suggests) it hurts now and will hurt even worse later. And this is in fact what is happening.
In fact, one can imagine that such planning has been achieving its intended goals. The US suffering its biggest pay drop on record of recent is evidence of this. As Joe Firestone pointed out in a recent piece in Naked Capitalism, practically all of the budgets coming out of Washington DC are austerity budgets, and this is likely so for an important reason:
One explanation is that everyone in the political mainstream is on board with the gradual destruction of the American middle class and the creation of a plutocracy where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; and that everyone also knows very well that tight budgets lead to gradual private sector financial losses falling much more heavily on the middle class and the poor, and that these, in turn, will increase the wealth gap between the rich and everyone else. In this view, the effects of these budgets are not some overlooked side effects of implementing austerity; but are a great feature of medium and long-term austerity.This reasoning, unlike the others Firestone offers, cuts to the heart of elite motivation -- greater profit -- which (by the way) we also see in Volume 1 of Karl Marx's book Capital. There, in Chapter 25, Marx argued that the persistence of a large "surplus labor army," a mass of desperately poor, unemployed people (as promoted by austerity planning), will decrease wages, thus making labor-power cheaper. Cheaper labor-power means that businesses have to budget less for wages. Profit!I don’t know how many people fit the bill provided by this explanation, but I think that far too many of our elected officials, and, many more than we like to think, embody this explanation. The truth is that the elites are after the American people, and that in the areas that really matter we’ve become a kleptocracy, a lawless oligarchy that continuously extracts more and more financial assets from most Americans by illegal means largely with impunity because authorities will not prosecute them.
This is, as the Marx examples shows, neither a new trend nor a new elite motivation. The elite desire to force down wages may have been occluded, for a few years in the 20th century, by what in the academic business is called "Fordism" -- pay them more (as Henry Ford did) but control their behaviors through what Frederick Winslow Taylor called "scientific management" -- but this was later supplemented beginning with the neoliberal age (1973-present) with an emphasis on "flexible (i.e. disposable) labor." What's new, then, is that the drive to force down wages occurs in an era of declining overall growth, with a capitalist world-system that will have maxed out its potential on Earth through resource depletion and environmental despoliation, and is soon to experience "peak appropriation." And it is this combination of trends which has the potential to weaken capitalism to the point where it will either 1) morph into some other, oppressive system, or 2) be replaced by something else.
(Certainly we can say that the environmental catastrophe of global warming has reached the attention of our nation's "security" agencies, which are preparing now for the uprisings that such phenomena are expected to bring. Of course, the silliness of all this is that the US government, as the guardian and protector of global capitalism, expects the main challenge to capitalism to be not global warming itself but rather the uprisings it will provoke.)
Now, admittedly this is a form of speculation. I am merely saying here that "if this goes on" the ultimate end, the destruction of capitalism and its replacement by a regime of something more brutal (or possibly something better, if the resistance wins) is quite possible. I could, then, be wrong. I must point out in my defense, however, that the defenders of the capitalist system, the elites, are indefinitely committed to the continuation of most of the trends I cite.