
After Capitalism? - kawera
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-24/the-intellectual-situation/after-capitalism/
======
vixen99
Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years -
Economist Magazine.

Harnessing the energy of people across the planet by letting them trade with
each other has so clearly been a disaster for everyone, has it? Essentially,
isn't this capitalism with all its fault lines? One way or another it can be
got to work for everyone's advantage.

~~~
creshal
The article isn't lamenting capitalism, it's lamenting that we're leaving it
behind and have no idea what to do next.

> Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years

But it has been done _without_ generating the sort of full-time blue collar
employment that is implied behind all sorts of economic policies around the
globe. China has gone from feudalism to post-industrial robotization in one
generation, skipping most the wealth-building industrialization phase Western
Europe and North America went through in the last century.

The global creed is "you're not worth something without work", yet we are, for
all purposes, running out of work. The computer revolution is optimizing away
all its menial jobs _already_ – just how much have trends like virtualization,
clouds, infrastructure orchestration and so on reduced the demand for warm
bodies to throw at hardware issues in the last few years? – while education
systems still haven't finished ramping up the creation of more and more menial
labourers. The earlier industrial revolutions have, quite soon, created more
jobs than they destroyed, but this does not seem to happen any more.

We've reached the point where we have, globally, more people of working age
than we can possibly need to satisfy all global needs, and this trend is not
going to reverse.

And the problem is: We have no idea what to do about it. The left is blabbing
"muh robots" and "muh basic income", but _nobody_ has a consistent,
practicable theory of what a post-full-employment society (which is something
entirely different from a post-employment-at-all society) could look like.
We're still going to need menial labour, blue collar work, white collar… but
not enough. What _do_ we do with all the excess population?

~~~
nixusg
Lower birth rates? Short term economic pain of a graying population for a long
term gain.

~~~
vidarh
While birth rates are lowering enough that the population based on current
projections will start dropping in a few decades, UN projections also clearly
indicate it will start increasing again soon enough, albeit at a slower rate.

To avoid that would take substantial further reductions in birth rates beyond
that which is baked in based on current trends.

EDIT: Let me adjust this a bit. UNs World Population Prospects 2015 [1] says
"Continued population growth until 2050 is almost inevitable, even if the
decline of fertility accelerates." and their middle and top estimates shows
continued growth until 2100, though rapidly shrinking growth. The low end
estimate shows a reduction in the latter half of the century. Almost all of
this growth is expected to be in developing countries, however.

[1]
[http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_W...](http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/Key_Findings_WPP_2015.pdf)

~~~
marcus_holmes
So the people predicting a financial catastrophe in the next 20 years because
of the demographic nightmare of the boomers leaving the workforce and not
dying for 20 years, so we become a society with too few workers are wrong?

Awesome!

Seriously, which is it? Either capitalism is going to fail because there
aren't enough workers, or it's going to fail because robots are taking all the
jobs. Can't have both!

Because, of course, having both would be fine... no catastrophe, life
continues as normal as it has in the face of every prediction of imminent
disaster. We have less workers due to demographic changes, but that's cool
because we need less workers. We sort out the political problem of how to stop
all the money going to to <1% of the population, we're all good.

~~~
creshal
> no catastrophe, life continues as normal as it has in the face of every
> prediction of imminent disaster

I wouldn't call the circumstances in Europe 1815-1945, when the last massive
societal upheavals happened, "life as normal".

------
obrero
A point made by Engels in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the
State is that over the past 10000 years, the economic system has been
completely upended several times.

10000 years ago hunter gatherers lived in primitive communism. Then slave
empires arose in the fertile crescent. After Rome was sacked, decentralized
feudalism became dominant. We still see its vestiges, England and Japan are
ruled by royals, officially. Capitalism began taking hold only a few hundred
years ago. It may be permanent in our lifetime, but it will surely be replaced
in time. I doubt production will be for the purpose of enriching heirs 10000
years from now, or even 1000 years from now (perhaps even sooner).

Marx said capitalism will run its course, until its doing more harm than good.
Then it will be replaced by a different system of production.

~~~
vlehto
Hunter-gatherer primitive communism is alive and well. It's called "family".
At that scale it's easy to do business without money.

Capitalism as in money, trade, loans and private property date back at least
to ancient Babylon. If you wish to include "modern" banking in the mix with
currency exchange rates, then you go to 1157 Venice or Genoa.

What happened hundred years ago was income tax.

------
puredemo
Such drivel. There is no "after capitalism," unless the concept of economics
disappears completely.

Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which both
parties agree. As long as there is supply and demand (finite resources) there
is capitalism.

We have democratic socialism to make capitalism less brutal (read: less
efficient but more humanizing) but demand is too fickle for most economies to
be centralized much beyond that.

~~~
tomp
> Capitalism is simply the codification of a monetary transaction to which
> both parties agree

Not really. A lot of today's capitalism is based on concepts such as
copyright, patents and trade secrets, which are definitely not "natural" \- in
fact, they are directly opposite of "free market".

Personally, I believe that a capitalistic system where these three are
eliminated or at least severely restricted would be much preferable to what we
have today.

~~~
ersii
All three are basically the right of ownership, isn't that practically exactly
what capitalism is?

Could you please elaborate on how the world would look like without these
three concepts?

~~~
tomp
No, it's not the right of _ownership_ it's the right of _enforcing a
monopoly_. If I copy something you own, you still own it, I'm not taking
anything away from you... It would be amazing! Basically what we have now, but
(1) noone would go to jail for piracy, and (2) all research would be shared
much sooner, and you wouldn't need to worry which spurious patents your
original research is infringing.

~~~
aninhumer
>it's not the right of ownership it's the right of enforcing a monopoly.

Ownership is a form of monopoly as well.

Just because a resource is rivalrous doesn't mean more than one person
couldn't be _permitted_ to use it, particularly when you're talking about
capital goods.

------
aaronlevin
For those struggling with this, the last three paragraphs sum up the author's
thesis pretty well.

It's actually more of a critique of current leftist ideas (from a Left
perspective) than anything.

quote:

Getting less work seems unlikely to come about without the fight for
solidarity, the chief intellectual achievement of the workers’ movement, and
one that none of the accelerationists see fit to mention as an ideal worth
preserving or even renovating. This is despite the fact that automation—or,
more broadly, the increasing precariousness of labor through technologically
assisted means—has always been dialectically connected with it. What tech
enthusiasts call“disruption” is in fact almost always directed at forms of
organization that preserve a modicum of workers’ control over knowledge and
the products of labor. Because London taxicabs are controlled by people who
have built up impressive maps of one of the world’s most complex cities in
their brains, they ought to be replaced by self-driving cars operating on
Google Maps. Because high school teachers have professional systems of
accreditation and training and have unions to protect these, they must be
replaced by lower-paid short-term Ivy-League graduates and cyber charters.

Automation isn’t a neutral, inevitable part of capitalism. It comes about
through the desire to break formal and informal systems of workers’
control—including unions—and replace them with managerially controlled and
minutely surveilled systems of piecework. An entire political and legal
infrastructure has been built up to make these so-called tendencies seem like
the natural progression of capitalism, rather than the effects of
fights—sometimes simple, sometimes violent—to deprive people of whatever sense
of control they have over their work. The only reason such work has ever not
been totally shitty is that some attempt to preserve such control was made.
This — not some implausible notion of a fully automated postwork future—still
remains the surest of utopian impulses, the one most likely to deliver the
things we want.

Though the times are bad, the accelerationists presume that the state of the
left will get better simply because it can, in principle, get better. An
imaginative (if implausible) account of the future, accelerationism is a weak
account of how anyone might be persuaded to get there. We recall Lenin’s
comment about how communism would be “Soviet power plus the electrification of
the whole country.” The accelerationists seem to be telling us: forget about
the Soviets, the electricity will do that work for us! But politics can’t get
done by machines.

------
blackhaz
I say this stuff is pseudo-intellectual. Painful to read indeed.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
+1 is not worth your time

------
ilaksh
The way forward is not techno-communism. The problem is not over-competition
or over-coorperation but over-centralization.

We can get the imagined benefits of techno-communism by getting better at
systems integration through wider adoption of improved common technology
platforms. For example, what if web assembly had a registry and semantic
versioning like Node.js, and that became the standard for integrating B2B,
government, and IoT? This would be a programming-language agnostic system.
Systems for things like digital democracy, smart contracts, etc. could be
easily deployed, integrated, and evolved.

See
[http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization](http://www.reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization)
and [http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage](http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage)

------
ggrothendieck
The following link is another review of the same book by Paul Mason
[http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf](http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue73/Gillies73.pdf)
but it focuses more on the economic idea, apparently discussed in his book,
that the digital economy features a zero marginal cost of production. Now, if
the purpose of the economy is to allocate scarce goods what happens when
digital goods dominate the economy and have zero marginal cost (wikipedia,
arxiv, github, free software, etc.)? The idea that scarcity might disappear
would seem to undermine the very foundation driving economic transactions.

------
kawera
Short review of two recently published books around this subject:
[https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-
capi...](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4960/where-next-for-capitalism)

I've just started reading Matt Ridley's book and so far an enjoyable read.

------
acd
Here is a recommended read related to the subject

Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-
math/2012/04/economist-meets-...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-
math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/)

------
lifeisstillgood
I tried, honestly I tried. I tried to read it. I wanted to see the arguments
because this is an area of interest to me.

But I can't write a tl;dr - it would not sink in my brain. Part overview of
the area, part, something else, I really have no idea what the author was
trying to say

Please enlighten me

~~~
skrebbel
This. I mean,

> _Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are
> once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market
> capitalism’s erstwhile boosters._

I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it
means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.

IMO the author needs a healthy dose of
[http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequen...](http://web.princeton.edu/sites/opplab/papers/opp%20consequences%20of%20erudite%20vernacular.pdf)

~~~
21echoes
> > Several crashes later, the gloom has returned, and the signs of autumn are
> once again most recognizable in the pronouncements of free-market
> capitalism’s erstwhile boosters.

> I tried to read this sentence 3 times now, and I still do not know what it
> means. The same holds for entire paragraphs.

Is that sentence really that hard to read? I mean, it's definitely overly
flowery, but it means almost word-for-word "After many financial crises, there
is a lot of economic pessimism around again, even among free-market
capitalism's biggest proponents."

~~~
skrebbel
I didn't know an "erstwhile booster" is a person. Therefore, I thought
"pronouncements" referred to something legal, instead of just a complicated
word for "opinions". My best guess at the meaning of the sentence, therefore,
was something completely different and nonsensical.

The whole article is like this. Misunderstand one flowery phrase,
misunderstand the entire sentence, misunderstand the whole paragraph. It's
like the author _hates_ convincing people.

~~~
21echoes
[https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+erstwhile)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster](https://www.google.com/search?q=define+booster)

/shrug If those are familiar words to you, then I think it's a little harsh to
say that they "hate convincing people" because they use them. Totally agree
that a good author edits out rarer words to reach a broader audience, but I
think that's a very weak vector of critique for the article as a whole.

