Capitalism's Obituary

In The Tyee, Crawford Killian reviews the writings of Wolfgang Streek, director emeritus of the Max Plank Institute, who sees a decidedly dystopian future in the wake of an impending collapse of capitalism.

“The end of capitalism,” he writes in the introduction, “can then be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts... No effective opposition being left, and no practicable successor model waiting in the wings of history, capitalism’s accumulation of defects, alongside its accumulation of capital, may be seen... as an entirely endogenous dynamic of self-destruction.”

According to Streeck, salvation doesn’t lie in going back to Marx, or social democracy, or any other system, because there is no salvation at all. “What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum — no new world system equilibrium... but a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder.”

If we need a historical parallel, the interregnum between the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism might serve. The slave economy of Rome ended in a chaos of warlords, walled towns and fortress-estates, and enclaves ruled by migrant barbarians. That went on for centuries, with warlords calling themselves “Caesar” and pretending the Empire hadn’t fallen.

Streeck sees the interregnum emerging from five developments, each aggravating the others: “stagnation, oligarchic redistribution, the plundering of the public domain, corruption, and global anarchy.”

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In one essay, Streeck shows how the economic crisis of the 1970s led to the political crisis of today. Postwar Europe and America rebuilt the world by “Fordism” — mass production of durable goods at an affordable price, with few or no options. But Fordism eventually glutted the market with all-too-durable goods. In the 1960s, I wore the hand-me-down nylon socks my father had bought in the 1940s. In 1972 my wife and I bought a washer and dryer that still run reliably in 2016, without repairs.

That couldn’t last, especially as the baby boom tapered off. Capitalism’s solution was to offer customized, short-lived products that didn’t just meet your needs, but met your wants as well. That meant avocado-coloured refrigerators in the 1970s and granite kitchen countertops today, but nothing that really made life easier. It just let consumers express their changing personal tastes and status.

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Marx thought communism would see the withering-away of the state. Instead, capitalism has reduced the state until its chief functions are protecting the rich and policing the poor. But in the process, capitalism has killed off its rescuers. Who’s going to save the banks in the next collapse? Who’s going to bail out the masters of the financial universe when artificial intelligence takes their jobs? And who’s going to police the poor when taxpayers can’t pay for the cops and the rich are hiring cops for their own gated communities?

Wolfgang Streeck sees neither a single cause of capitalism’s collapse nor any obvious successor regime. The European Union may break up. Climate change may drown south Florida, including Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. Refugees will keep coming north; they will eventually overwhelm the fences and guards and create new enclaves in Europe and the U.S.A. and Canada. New pandemics will sweep unchallenged around the world.

No coherent political communities will be there to respond to such disasters. Such communities may arise centuries from now, but if Streeck is right, capitalism has ensured that we and our children will never live in them.

My take? I don't think capitalism is as one-dimensional as Streeck suggests. A recent article by Sandra Waddock that I posted as "A Primer for a Prime Minister" discusses not the destruction of capitalism but the abandonment of the sort of capitalism we have endured under neoliberalism.

Waddock argues for a change in economic regimes, a "system change." She and her colleagues envision capitalism not dominating democracy but harnessed in service to democracy and the public interest. I'm convinced her proposal to rehabilitate the democratic narrative, subordinating capitalism's worst excesses, is as possible as Streeck's dismal outlook.

There are other people of other visions, such as professor Richard Wolff, who also imagine a post-neoliberal society.



And, so, there you have it. Merry Christmas.