That's as friendly a way as I can imagine for introducing the difficult subject of the compatibility of capitalism and democracy which has become, in recent years, a focus of extensive discussion as the "balance" between capital and labour which characterised the postwar period gave way in the 1980s to a new brand of financial capitalism.
Although Margaret Thatcher kept assering that capitalism was the only way – or, in her own words, “there is No Alternative”, a mantra which soon attracted the acronym TINA – we have, since the end of the Cold War, become familiar with the “Varieties of capitalism” literature. Eased into it by Michel Albert, with later work by the likes of Crouch, Hall and Soskice being much more academic and, often, impenetrable.
By the turn of the millennium the message seemed to be that Capitalism takes various forms; is constantly changing; and will always be with us. But increasingly, people were wondering whether it was not out of control. Pages 57-66 of my Dispatches to the Next Generation plot the increasing dystoptic aspect of book titles. But a few years back, something changed. It wasn’t the global crisis in itself but rather the combination of two things –
first the doubling of company profits (as spelled out in this post) and
a sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs.
Now the titles talk of the new phenomenon of “post-capitalism”
"Democracy is Bullshit" is both a stinging critique of the representative system and an argument for the importance of extending democracy into the workplace as recommended powerfully in Richard Wolf's Democracy at Work – a cure for capitalism published in 2012. Somehow, though, we never seem to get the message
"first the suggestion that the entire engine of the system (profitability) was reaching vanishing point; and
ReplyDeletea sudden realisation that robotization was a serious threat to even middle-class jobs."
Neither of those were true. As I described, here, - https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/inflation-stays-high-rates-of-profit.html - profits are now at the highest proportion of the US economy in some time, and the rate of profit is high too. But, alongside all of that additional profit, and the use of robots, and so on, employment is also at high levels, and rising.
The greatest increase in technology seen yet, was that brought about by the microchip revolution of the 1970's, early 80's, that gave us all of the ICT, Internet, as well as industrial robots etc. But, from the 1980's, global employment doubled, and even since 2000, has grown by a third.