Upon reading this collection of essays (the title of this post) from Wolfgang Streeck and then contemplating our current world, The Second Coming of William Butler Yeats comes to mind:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
Streeck has been a sensible critic of modern political economy for a long time, and his recent summing up is very useful today. Here he seeks to “inspire more concrete thinking on how the modern-capitalist global system might in the not-to-distant future come to an end, even without a successor regime in sight, as a consequence of its internal contradictions unfolding.” The eleven essays include “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” “Citizens as Consumers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption,” “Why the Euro Divides Europe,” and “The Public Mission of Sociology.” All of them repay reading.
In his description of capitalism lie the seeds of its instability and ultimate decline and dissolution:
Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society, and through unending expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets, on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market-opening policies both domestically and internationally…Capitalist society is distinguished by the fact that its collective productive capital is accumulated in the hands of a minority of its members who enjoy the legal privilege, in the form of rights of private property, to dispose of such capital in any way they see fit, including letting it sit idle or transferring it abroad…(thus)…the vast majority of the members of a capitalist society must work under the direction, however mediated, of the private owners of the tools they need to provide for themselves, and on the terms of those owners in line with their desire to maximize the rate of increase of their capital.
This, of course, has led to precarity for the masses (including the Professional Managerial Class/PMC, much to their coming surprise) who are becoming less and less comfortable with their position as contingent beings at the mercy of “The Economy.” But more fundamentally, infinite growth is not possible in a closed material system. It may seem strange that this simple accounting error, described by Alyssa Battistoni in Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025), may lead to the end of the world. But this is a possibility. And the commodification of all life – food, family, work, community, recreation, business, entertainment, education, health, science, art – has led to alienation and anomie that consumerism cannot relieve in either the short term or the long term:
The vast majority of…members [1] of a capitalist society must…convert their ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process, because of economic or technological restructuring, into acceptance of the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power generated by the capitalist economy. For this, highly complicated and inevitably fragile institutional and ideological provisions are necessary…(including)…the conversion of insecure workers – kept insecure to make them obedient workers – into confident consumers happily discharging their consumerist social obligations even in the face of the fundamental uncertainty of labor markets and employment.
“Consumer” is Neoliberal-speak for “citizen.” The systematic disorders of capitalism covered by Streeck include stagnation, oligarchic wealth redistribution, plundering of the public domain, corruption, and global anarchy. Secular stagnation is inevitable as the previously empty world fills up with our products and our waste. For example, more carbon has been emitted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that in all previous human history. And then there is plastic. The transnational fossil fuel corporations knew long ago what would happen to the ecosphere of planet Earth as a result of their output. As a friend who worked for one of the largest oil companies put it to me once, they did not hire stupid engineers and chemists. However, they did hide their research. Is it any wonder that the predicted effects of anthropogenic global warming are arriving now to some surprise? Or denial?
Wealth redistribution upward and corruption have gone hand in hand for much of the history of capitalism. Corruption leads to the plundering of the public domain. None of these failures can be attributed to only the notional left or the notional right. Both are implicated, especially in our current Neoliberal Dispensation [2], in which there is only one party, the Property Party, in the US and the UK and most of the rest of the world.
Unlike in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which is a favorite of the traditional right going back to Russell Kirk:
Under financialized capitalism the private vice of greed is no longer magically converted into a public virtue – depriving capitalism even of its last consequentialist moral justification. Stylizing owners and managers of capital as trustees of society has lost any remaining credibility, their much publicized exercises in philanthropy notwithstanding. A pervasive cynicism has become deeply engrained in the collective common sense, which has become as a matter of course to regard capitalism as nothing but an institutionalized opportunity for the well-connected super-rich to become even richer. Corruption…is considered a fact of life, and so is steadily growing inequality and the monopolization of political influence by a small self-serving oligarchy and its army of wealth defense specialists…Elite calls for trust and appeals to shared values can no longer be expected to resonate with a populace nursed on materialistic-utilitarian self-descriptions of a society in which everything is and out to be for sale.
While capitalism might be coming to an end because of internal contradictions rather than external forces, the problem is that no logical or practical successor is approaching. The manifest successes of capitalism recognized by Karl Marx himself (e.g., high relative standards of living in the Global North) have nevertheless led inevitably to an increase in social entropy – a state of public, social, and governmental disorder that increases with every passing political season, including on this, the twenty-seventy day of a US government shutdown. When I first began reading this collection, Gramsci came to mind, and he appeared in due course:
The social order of capitalism would then issue, not in another order, but in disorder, or entropy – in a historical epoch of uncertain duration when in the words of Antonio Gramsci, ‘the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born,’ ushering in ‘an interregnum in which pathological phenomena of the most diverse sort come into existence’ – in a society devoid of reasonably coherent and minimally stable institutions capable of normalizing the lives of its members and protecting them from accidents and monstrosities of all sorts. [3]
Increasing entropy is indeed the order of the day, which translates into a life in the “shadow of uncertainty, always at the risk of being upset by surprise events…and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck.” Yes, people are responsible for themselves and their families. But this can be glorified as a life of freedom and liberty unconstrained by society, culture, or their institutions. But:
The problem with this (fundamental) neoliberal narrative is that it neglects the very unequal distribution of risks, opportunities that comes with de-socialized capitalism, including the ‘Matthew effect’ of cumulative advantage. [4]
The behavioral program of the post-social society during the post-capitalist interregnum is governed by a neoliberal ethos of competitive self-improvement, an untiring cultivation of one’s marketable human capital, enthusiastic dedication to work, and cheerfully optimistic, playful acceptance of the risks in a world that has outgrown government.
So, what is likely to “keep an entropic, disorderly, stalemated post-capitalist interregnum going in the absence of collective regulation containing economic crises, limiting inequality, securing confidence in security and credit, protecting labor, land and money from overuse, and procuring legitimacy for free markets and private property through democratic control of greed and prevention of oligarchy?”
Streeck lists the following responses to the coming interregnum, or “inconvenient apocalypse,” in another formulation.
- Coping: Individual responding with new improvisations and stopgaps to the successive emergencies in the entropic interregnum.
- Hoping: Individual mental effort to imagine and believe in a better life in coming possible future. Dreaming might be an adjunct of hoping and a way of coping better.
- Doping: This helps with coping and hoping and can involve substance abuse, both performance-enhancing and performance-replacing. [5]
- Shopping: Rich capitalist countries with saturated markets for consumer goods must “get individuals whose needs are covered to develop desires that give rise to new desires the moment they are fulfilled. This is old news, though, covered exceedingly well by William Leach in Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)
What we can expect during the interregnum is “individuals-as-consumers adhering to a culture of competitive hedonism, one that makes a virtue out of the necessity of having to struggle with adversity on one’s own.” This, of course, is the libertarian’s view of a big, beautiful world. By definition, this libertarian (and classical Liberal) has the Matthew Effect on his side but does not understand this simple fact.
So, what is to come after the interregnum if we survive climate catastrophe with a modicum of civil society left in our new world? In Streeck’s analysis, increasing social and political entropy will continue to lessen the power of institutions to mediate between conflicting goals and to ameliorate the disruptions that will follow. We have been on this course for nearly fifty years and a continuing slide seems likely.
But this is not a foregone conclusion. Our human world will get smaller as the room for expansion of the economy ends – we exceeded the carrying capacity of planet Earth some time ago. Capitalist democracy has always been a problematic concept, but for a short time through the Great Compression following World War II, it functioned as an engine of economic and social progress, even if this progress was uneven and certainly not universal. On the other hand, Neoliberal capitalist democracy is the perfect oxymoron. But as our world shrinks there will be opportunities to improve life at the local, regional, and national levels, while letting “global” take care of itself in the coming multipolar world. Yes, our presuppositions are huge here, but they underpin hope.
Although neither the notional Left nor Right do so, we must always remember that markets and business civilization are not the same thing as capitalism. Business makes life as we know it possible, and has since the Middle Ages. Business, small and large, lives in the real world of people and places, just as education, medicine, science, art, and virtually every other thing that makes a humane life possible. As our world becomes more local and regional, business and industry will of necessity become less extractive and more functional, fair, and legitimate (which they approached, with the normal caveats, during the Great Compression). This more humane, more social environment that is local and regional makes ecological, cultural, political, and economic sense. Democracy exists only from the ground up, and to the extent we have ever had democracy it has been local. [6] This so-called democracy could also be inward looking and less than fair. But that was not a requirement then and we know better now, despite our current, hopefully fleeting, distemper.
We can start with food and then go further with other necessary goods, durable and otherwise. Genuinely free and transparent markets and small business civilization are essential to a fair and just world. Will this necessary project work? Or was Mark Fisher correct when he wrote “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (with credit to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek)? Unless one wants to join the misanthropic darlings of Big Tech and AI, this project must work. One person, one subject, one problem at a time worked on by one billion people at a time.
Oh, and also with a little of Bakunin thrown into the mix: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.” With a bit of anarchism from Proudhon, through the late, great James C. Scott, and, contra Yeats, anarchism is “mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule,” instead of a stupid vandalism on offer from nihilistic thugs with no political sensibilities whatsoever.
Returning to the great Irish poet, unless the best of us, from wherever we come and whatever we do and whatever we believe, regain real conviction and real intensity informed by good will and seriousness of mind, Mark Fisher’s lament will come to pass and there will be no one to pick up that which has fallen apart. Alas.
Notes
[1] Membership of all in society is essential for human flourishing, no matter what TINA says. Robert Putnam was correct in Bowling Alone. Long before the book was published, in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors was proud that his company was the largest employer in the United States and provided a “middle class” life to hundreds of thousands of union workers and their families. True membership in society and politics was unevenly distributed, but its reach was increasing up through the early days of the neoliberal transformation during the second half of Jimmy Carter’s one term as president. Contrast with the current largest employer, which surpassed GM long ago without a thought for its workers, many of whom need SNAP and Medicaid, or the people. Not that any CEO has a great love for unions, but the ethos of post-war capitalism did not admit of a return to the rapacity of the previous iteration of capitalism characterized by Jay Gould, who said that he could always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. Whether Gould actually said this is uncertain, but the malignant extent of his and his fellow robber barons’ antipathy to the working class writ large is certain, even if working people made them wealthy beyond imagining, from the 1870s into the twenty-first century of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Musk.
[2] Neoliberalism is a protean concept. Wendy Brown and Quinn Slobodian (here, here, and here) offer outstanding, accessible expositions. A short description of neoliberalism might be: The market is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured, in a political economy in which people are for the economy rather than having an economy for the people in which human flourishing is the objective. Being able to buy a 6-pack of tube socks made by mistreated people somewhere on the far side of the world for $18.99 at retail is not living better by saving money.
[3] I defer to Streeck and the original Italian that I am not competent to translate, but my preferred version of this quote from the Prison Notebooks is “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
[4] The Matthew Effect was coined by Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman when they showed that eminent scientists get more credit than they deserve. I first read their work during my long laboratory apprentice in a lab that was connected to the Science Library. They were correct about the distribution of rewards in science. The simple statement of the Matthew Effect is, “The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.” This is an apt description of our neoliberal world. Cumulative advantage in the real world comes to those who had the good sense to pick their parents wisely. The signal blindness of conventional liberals and libertarians in the PMC of both the notional Right and Left is they fail to see their head start in life as unearned but very real secular grace.
[5] Streeck describes our society very well here: “Doping is closely connected to corruption. Most of the substances used to enhance performance one way or other are highly profitable legal products of (Big Pharma). Performance-replacing drugs, on the other hand, as consumed mostly by losers are mostly illegal…(and they are)…sent to prison or die in comparatively large numbers from overdose.” Richer users of performance-replacing drugs are sent to rehab, with the sympathy of the court.
[6] For a view of how regionalism makes for a more humane society and democratic economy within the larger world, the essays and fiction of Wendell Berry point the way while showing what membership in a community means, without eliding the difficulties of community.
I noticed that you made the unspoken assumption of many ‘Futurists’ about Terran humankinds’ way forward in the sentence towards the end of the essay: “One person, one subject, one problem at a time worked on by one billion people at a time.”
The present world population is above eight billions. To return to a workable ecology, that number has to be sharply reduced.
Thus, we are led to the conclusion that, to survive the coming polycrisis, we must suffer through a Jackpot phase. That is where localism will have its greatest success. The scale of everything will have to shrink.
Perversely enough, Saint Luigi the Adjuster is leading the way. His action was small, though not for his victim, and intimate enough to qualify as a personal apotheosis. Perhaps heretically, Saint Luigi, by playing G-d, most nearly approached divinity. The modern saint claimed omniscience individually, while the Neoliberal Dispensation claims it as a collective. Which is right, or are both deluded?
Stay safe.
I think the overprivileged are constantly aware of the Luigi factor which is why they are experimenting with the intruments of repression.It’s worth remembering that McKinley–the president that the Trumpies and Karl Rovies revere–was assasinated even as anarchists in Europe were tossing bombs.
The human drive toward hierarchy is a definite menace in a modern world and planet threatened by all those other human drives. And so people like Trump and his Wall Street buddies are dinosaurs who once again walk the earth. Welcome to Jurassic Park 2025. In those movies it always ends with disaster and survival by the skin of our teeth.
Reading the original novel ‘Jurassic Park,’ I see that the ending is ambiguous but suggests that “The End” is quite possible, perhaps inevitable.
My experiences with the “overprivileged” suggest that those people are truly blind to the possibility that “that which is to be feared” can happen to them. The belief is that it is not directly applicable to themselves. It is a sort of tunnel vision.
Be safe.
I very much doubt that anyone who would be considered over privileged is aware of any real threat to their existence. I think the whole reason they appreciate their privilege is that they can be blithely ignorant of things like inflation, babies dying in Gaza, the threat of nuclear war, possible Banderite terrorism, SNAP running out of money, health insurance premiums skyrocketing, food deserts, bus schedules, lack of broadband… these people don’t have to care about any of that. They are insulated from all of those challenges. Which is why the Gaza treatment coming with AI is convenient for these people. They’ll shred the social contract, demote even the currently well to do into the Precariat, and enforce the revised social order with drones and control measures developed in Gaza.
The going thought is likely, “We” the unwashed masses, will suffer a Jackpot. But the good and right people, insulated in their elysium, they will be above it all. And come through it to provide leadership and culture when we are ready to emerge from our dark age.
another assumption is one i see here of an inability to have a workable ecology with 8 billion people. perhaps given the current capitalistic oriented societal structure, but other ways could hold a multitude more as current barriers are reduced.
the idea of families residing in kins domains, while fanciful from a current perspective, offers the possibility for continual improvement in our ecology.
our current structure doesn’t seem sustainable. something surely will rise from the ashes when the fires get lit.
True enough when applied to “Western” societies. Here I solicit comments from pertinent people, the social structures in the Second and Third World regions are much closer to the old days, with extended families sharing domiciles and small group cooperatives acting in the economic sphere. Whether lower standards of living when compared to the so called First World societies is a defensible position, I leave to others to debate. I here suggest that such a diminishment of the West’s material culture is inevitable.
The stars are aligning and Lovecraft’s world of inhuman and heartless rules based orders is arising from sunken R’leyh to rule the world.
This really is a battle between Good and Evil. So do I resort to petitions to Saint Luigi and pray for Divine Interventions.
Stay safe.
Thanks for this work, KLG. You say “But as our world shrinks there will be opportunities to improve life at the local, regional, and national levels, while letting “global” take care of itself in the coming multipolar world.” It seems that, in America, the direction the ruling class is taking is to enhance control, to ramp up surveillance and expand repression. Witness ICE, the free-speech crackdown. &c. That said, some reason for hope lies in the very entropy to which they are responding. The executive branch is peopled by a parochial clique of morons, and they give to direction to incompetents who run agencies which are dysfunctional to the point of being ineffective. Nearly any result of their actions which corresponds to their intentions is the purest accident, one reason they rely on boldly asserting success in the media. This certainly could provide opportunities at our more local levels; I’m less convinced in the humane intentions of capitalists in other parts of the multipolar world.
This article articulates my deepest fear and deepest unspoken conviction: which is that for humanity to thrive in an undetermined and uncertain future, the west must burn.
A very optimistic view of the future…
WSJ has an article today “How U.S. Billionaires Stack Up With the Rest of the World
There are 3,508 billionaires on the planet. Americans dominate their collective wealth.” The US has an 8% increase in billionaires in one year (2023-2024), Russia – 8.5% in spite of the war, Germany – 8.5% in spite of the ‘de-industrialization, France – 13.9! in spite of gov dysfunction… China – 5.6% who needs their underperforming political economy…
Another view is that the near and mid term future will be shaped by the increasing efforts of the minority to ensure the resources needed for their exponentially expanding families in the 3rd, 4th and 5th generation. As a rule, these individuals do not work in the conventional sense of the word and enjoy relatively good lives. The key contradiction will be the numerically expanding “minority”, because of the relatively very high birth rates in this population, vs the numerically stagnant and shrinking resource provisioning ‘majority’, because of the sub-replacement birth rates there. The ‘majority’ also has ill health and is progressively underdeveloped in the childhood years.
Much has been said about the inefficient US healthcare, but an alternative view is that the life in the US is so hard on the majority that even the best healthcare in the world can barely keep them alive…
A good start would be to re-imagine what we accept as a legit business organization. If companies cannot “rent” humans, but can only be owned and run by the people that actually work there, we take the first step of Decommodifying us, humans. Once we are not commodified, we may start being able to live and create a non-commodified, non-exploitative economy. I think it has to start with ourselves. For me this makes it easy and fun to imagine the end of capitalism, once you cannot buy or rent humans, its hard to imagine capitalism :)
While The Second Coming is usually quoted in articles such as this, perhaps a segment from another Yeats poem, 1919, is more appropriate:
“… The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced out thought into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.”
I’m just a bit confused by the claim that no viable alternatives to capitalism have yet appeared on the scene. I thought China, flaws notwithstanding, was that alternative. What am I missing here?
In David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, ch. 5 is entitled: “Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’ “.
There is this idea of volksgeist — people’s spirit. It has been pointed out that CCP = imperial administration, communism = economic confucianism. The Qing dynasty lost its legitimacy unable to resist the barbarians. A new group came to rule, the CCP.
it is not going to work for us.
The universal political order is probably an invention of the Chatham House, when they advised to switch from advocating for the spreading of Britishness all over the world to promoting the universal rights and fundamental freedoms — there is nothing universal, only particular. This has already been well-known to the ancient Greeks. We will live and die by capitalism and liberalism…
Branko Milanovic in his Capitalism Alone describes the Chinese system as “Political Capitalism” as distinguished from the US as the exemplar of what he styles “Liberal Meritocratic Capitalism.”
His thesis is that both forms of capitalism face the identical challenge — to prevent the emergence of a hereditary plutocracy.
All systems change over time and Capitalism is no exception. From my perch, I can see a push to have a rentier type of Capitalism. That phrase ‘You will own nothing’ was a promise as much as a thought experiment but you won’t be happy. So where will it all lead to? People will rent their homes and only the wealthy will be able to actually own them. Cars too will eventually be all on a rental basis as well because the elites will ask if people really need to own their own cars? Your furniture and white goods will also be rented as well. Company town, here we come. And at the end of the day, workers will be rented by one company to service another. I can very, very easily see this as the system that Capitalism will evolve into as it will be one where the elites will basically own everything and generate huge incomes by renting it out to the plebs who will only own what they can hold in their hands. And if this sounds unlikely, many years ago John Deere told the copyright office that only corporations can own property, humans can only license it. The warning signs were there already.
Great essay KLG. I had the misfortune of wandering into the comments at another site yesterday (thank you to all at NC who keep things readable here!) where the majority were knuckle draggers decrying a communism or socialism which they clearly knew nothing about. I think they formed their views on the subject from this 80s Wendy’s ad. So I wanted the emphasize this bit from you –
“…we must always remember that markets and business civilization are not the same thing as capitalism.”
– and also the Bakunin quote –
“Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”
If people could understand those two simple concepts, we might actually get to a world where a government of all of us provides education, healthcare, security and a basic level of nutrition and shelter for everybody for free. Then we can have the freedom to spend the rest of our time making widgets to sell or maybe just smelling the roses.
Side note: If I’m not mistaken Streeck is a German writing in English so there is no translator involved with this book. I didn’t know much about him when I read the book referred to here a few years ago, and from his writing I got the impression he was a younger man, but he is actually pushing 80. And although reading about economics can be fairly dull (you need to spice it up Piketty if you expect me to get through 872 pages), Streeck does sprinkle some humor and sarcastic jabs throughout the book. It’s not often you read about the dismal “science” and have a few belly laughs while you’re at it. Highly recommend this book and I have his new one on my to read list – Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism
You can find interviews of Streeck in English. I find him to be very knowledgeable, but not without wit.
It has to be actively defeated.
To add:
It’s not something of the natural world. It’s a man made system. The policies come from people and places with names. What’s to be done?
The problem is that money and banking function as the blood and circulation system of the state, as government is the nervous system.
As the Western banking cartel has overridden all the various governments under its purvue and does not function as an actual empire, with some central entity to give it focus, such as Rome, London, Washington, well as the fact that as a supra national social organization, Diaspora Judaism is an integral part of the networking mechanisms of Western civilization, bankers, traders, diplomats, lawyers, media, etc. That Israel became a sort of vanity project to pour some of this wealth and power into.
The problem this created is that Judaism is a tribal culture that has been seething over the fact the civilization gods proved to be more powerful than the tribal gods for the last two thousand years.
So basically taking the more dispossessed members of a culture with a bit of a narcissistic and persecution complex, piling them all into one little strip of land in the general location of the last place they had territorial control and pouring lots of guns and money in, has created a political vortex. Feedback loops with no circuit breakers. When this happens to stellar bodies, the eventual result is going nova and the fact that concert was called Nova is a bit cosmic.
So basically the eye of the storm of global capitalism has become recreating some Iron Age tribal temple.
When that reality check arrives in the mail, will be the denouement of global capitalism.
The Golden Rule is a better long term strategy than Kill all the Amuluks, because what goes round, comes round.
We have yet to come to terms with the implications of the earth being round, not flat.
The technology might be intricate, but push comes to shove and the sociology is still bands of monkeys shrieking and throwing sticks at each other.
Capitalism may be nearer its end than most people realise. If, as some suggest, developments with AI will lead to superintelligence where the machines are cleverer than humans at everything, then AI will take over and run and potentially do everything. If it is benign it will allow us to survive but I suggest the justification for the market system – that prices are the best way to convey information about economic demand and supply to allocate resources – will cease to have validity, as AI will know better.
When might this be? Eric Schmidt, ex-Google, says that the consensus in San Francisco is six years. Perhaps it will never happen, perhaps it will take longer. However, Marx would, I think, be pleased. Did he not claim that the means of production determines the political system or has my memory gone?
I have the sneaking suspicion that this AI Prophecy is of a kind with the Cold Fusion Prophecy. It is always just “around the corner.”
I live in San Francisco. I work in AI. I can emphatically state with total conviction that AI as it is currently developed, constructed, built out, and growing, will not achieve “superintelligence” or “take over and run and potentially do everything” in 6 years.
If you know anything about software transitions, what it will do in the short term is closer to what happened when Java was supplanted by Node and distributed web apps a decade ago (a lot of money and time will be spent to refactor existing use cases and applications to use a different development structure and potentially runtime engine). The mid- and long- term is harder to predict. People who work in the field and claim otherwise are selling something. Eric Schmidt, for example, probably has a huge amount of Alphabet stock that is valued on Google Cloud Platform’s profitability, and they have a lot of infra dedicated to – what else? – hosting and serving AI infrastructure.
AGI is na ga happen within the foreseeable future. All the incrementalist arguments for AGI employ the Beagle fallacy. On this topic, see Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT A.I. Lab.
Agree with @rj, above, that people in SV talking this up are thinking more about their stocks than computer science. The track record for research in A.I. is actually not very good. Most of what we are seeing now is more about engineering than any genuine scientific advances.
However, given current climate change projections, I would agree that the conditions which enable the present form of capitalism may disappear sooner than we think.
Thank you for these interesting comments.
It won’t, it’s just hype. Having built a stochastical parrot that can do very little reliably, except to trick people that it’s more than a stochastical parrot, the IT industry is faced with a problem: how to make the line keep going up when the product is just a stochastical parrot. The solution: pretend that Data from Star Trek is just around the corner.
Thank you.
Raspberry jam and Acacia clearly know vastly more than I do. I find their comments extremely helpful.
One thing I believe I do understand, however, is that the phrase stochastic parrot refers to LLMs. From what trivial research I have done, I understand experts recognise that LLMs represent no more than at best a relatively small element in any future development of AI.
Time will tell and I am certainly no prophet, just an old man who tries to keep informed of interesting new developments and apply a hopefully critical mind when listening in to ‘the Great Conversation’.
I thing outside LLMs, you would need quite very qualified people to use such systems.
You reading too much Iain M. Banks mate, eh?!
” How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System.”
The first time I became aware of the Yeats poem was in the introductory chapter of the 1966 book “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” written by the sociologist Philip Rieff. That poem was the lead into a chapter entitled “Toward a Theory of Culture.”
Rieff stated way back then that a culture survives by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood…culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward toward those communal purposes in which the self can be realized and satisfied…The question is no longer as Dostoevsky put it: “Can civilized man believe? Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?”
All of this is to argue that what we seem to be facing today is not simply a crisis of capitalism but a crisis of our culture as well:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
Rieff suggests, near the end of this book, that the reformer asks only for more of everything–more goods, more housing, more leisure. He then adds: “who will be stupid enough to lead a counter-revolution?”
Quite a bit to chew on so early on a West Coast morning!
Re-reading The Second Coming I can’t help but note (as have others) that the beast “slouching toward Bethlehem” is a reference to the Balfour Declaration. WB Yeats was after all a contemporary Irish nationalist opponent of Lord Balfour. An interesting choice to open to a discussion of Streeck’s essays on the end of capitalism.
Meanwhile I must continue Coping, Hoping, Doping, and Shopping — at least until the Jackpot strikes and things fall apart…
“Coping, Hoping, Doping, and Shopping” — I’m going to steal that! Thanks for the pithy phrase.
The poem was written in 1919, and expresses Yeats’s despair at the turmoil of post-war Europe, and the influenza epidemic which had almost claimed the life of his wife Georgie. All of Yeats’s poetry has to be understood in terms of his theory of thousand-year cycles of history: for him, the time of Christianity was coming to an end, and what was to follow (the “rough beast”) would be much worse.No need to invoke Balfour
Yes, this is absurd. However, more insightful analysis shows, not that we suffer a crisis of absurdity, but a crisis of depravity.
“Capital” is credit for a extractive schemes. Withholding profit, however, does not free capitalists from constraint. Their venality is not unleashed by plenty, it is cultivated in their flight from overwhelming contra-actions.
Beyond strange, it is incredible! No, this ridiculous ironic viewpoint satirizes the destructive nature of capitalism: Behold! The end of the world proves the ultimate destructiveness of capitalism.
The crux – intelligent engineers and chemists were (compelled to be?) accomplices. A great indictment of capitalism: the talented are corralled to prevent damage to capitalist “credit”.
Not really knowing where we’re going, we tend to take a lot of clues from the movies, and yeah Kurt Russell is a little long in the tooth for Escape from New York Capitalism, maybe Ryan Gosling is available?
Capitalism is not a failing system because this implies that capitalism fails at the tasks set before it (which its apologists deny and its critics attempt to prove).
But just as the solar system doesn’t ‘fail’ when the sun eventually burns out, capitalism doesn’t ‘fail’ when it ruins this planet.
Naturally occurring systems cannot fail because they follow an inherent logic that is indifferent to human standards.
The difference between the solar system and the capitalist system is that the naturalness of the latter is man-made and therefore subject to change.
This is why Marx’s critique neither asserts rational actors (as was recently claimed here) nor is it primarily one of the unjust distribution of wealth or unproductive capital (e.g. financial capitalism), but rather a critique of the way in which a society structures its exchange with the forces of nature.
And by the way:
‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’
This is typical reactionary criticism that made figures like Yeats, Jünger, and Pound susceptible to fascism.
To a market economy, money is the medium. To a capitalist economy, money is the message. One is a tool, the other is a god.
The financial tail is wagging the economic dog.
Contracts proceed all John Merryman, before exchange is even negotiated, even if the seller dictates medium of exchange thingy. The contract informal or formal is a process of the political, laws establishing rights under law, judiciary too administer it and its outcomes. In this its been long argued in the U.S., post Powell memo, it has taken a hard turn to corporatist favoritism over the decades due economic memes like absentee share holder value. Self dealing and looting with Gov funds is rank. Once upon a time Gov spent one $ and it produced 3x in GDP, now its inverted.
This is made even more stoopid[tm] when U.S. Corps ran to China. Total libertarian economic haven – no rules or laws to govern commerce – contracts were signed without any Judiciary to enforce it. Seems there is a long lag time in establishing the fact post being a Marxist state capitalism nation.
At the end of the day some people that they had won – end of history thingy. So now its back to contracts and who will sign with others and how that effects trade flows.
The problem is that money is a contract, between the holder and the rest of society. It’s just that as these linear goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see it as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 refers to it as both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
As a contract, storing the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side, so much of society is programmed to generate debt as a way to store the illusion of wealth. That the one thing the flunkies in DC are good at is running up public debt and the financial markets need this debt to grow metastatically is not coincidence. “The real money is in bonds.”
One problem is, what exactly is capitalism?
The way Adam Smith described capitalism is not exactly an economic system controlled by or works in favor of the capitalists. Quite the opposite, it’s a system in which they are caught up in a prisoners’ dilemma where they are forced to operate against their own interests against their will. In this sense, Marx can be read as the prediction/description of how this system would fail under increasing returns to scale and indeed, his prediction has come true, as the capitalists have broken free of the competition trap and have increasingly found the means to manipulate the market.
If “capitalism” is to mean the post-Marxian state of the economy, where the capitalists have shaken free of the the market restraints, I still don’t think we need to stray far from Marxian thinking, although with some twists (although I think these were already all in the original Marx.). The capitalists’ conquest of the competition reduces the economy to a zero sum game between them on one hand and the worker-consumer class on the other, where the capitalists increasingly hold more cards–control over capital and all that. But the more they accumulate, the more choke off their own future income stream–because they make money off of the consumers, after all. This is how I read the modernized variant of the crisis of the capital.
The aftermath of the capitalism will leave many defenseless would-be-serfs looking for protection, deprived of whatever assets they had. The “former” capitalists might try offering them protection in return for service, in turn, to save their own status–in other words, a return to feudalism (again, not original–technofeudalism is a familiar term to everyone here.). I still wonder what “protection” they could realistically offer, though. A lot of assets they accumulate will have no value in the post capitalist world.
A wiki page on capitalism should sort that for you mate.
Wiki page on capitalism is basically junk, along with the pages on democracy, liberalism, and such things, mate.
If you say so … I find it simple and not controversial …
If you would like to discuss the finer points I am at your leisure.
Only Wikipedia pages on hard science and egineering could be considered simple and not controversial, by the majority of people. Everything else is filled with ideology and political agenda. It’s not even a secret. Anyone that had any experience with editing (like I did) would have personal experience with it (starting from lists of kosher and non-kosher sources).
With a current resource consumption overshoot of 1.7 external pressures are inevitably going to have increasing and hopefully terminal impact regardless of all those internal contradictions in the capitalist Ponzi scheme.
Jenga rules apply.
Cue the resource wars of extermination.
Some good observations and spirit here. But without broad public understanding and control of tribalism and tyranny, oligarchy is far more stable than any just order. For centuries “managers of capital as trustees of society has lost any remaining credibility,” and “pervasive cynicism has become deeply engrained.” The opportunist sheep in fact aspire to nothing more than joining the oligarchy, will take no risks to oppose them, have adopted the religion of lying, cheating, and stealing as the measure of professionalism and virtue, and both despise and target humanitarians as atheists and traitors. Without properly-regulated institutions of democracy (vs. western oligarchic demoncracy), progress falters indefinitely. We must find paths to such institutions regardless of the cost. See CongressOfDebate dotcom.