The Big Bubble Is Bursting: Is There Life After Capitalism?

Democracies throughout history, operating under conditions of hierarchy, are under pressure to push away the pressure to grant equal rights to the people, so as to maintain elite rule.

Precapitalist societies used a number of different schemes to maintain hierarchy.  The Athenians used “citizenship” as an exclusion; medieval societies used “lordship” and various titles.  Our society uses “property” and “money” and so on.

Given that “property” and “money” are at this point markers of elite status (if, of course, you have enough of them), Jay’s suggestion that the Obama group wants “a more rational capitalism” needs to be looked at in light of said group’s craven attempts to re-create the conditions of 2006 (without, of course, any serious attempt outside of the petty “stimulus” to re-create the consumer economy extant at that time).  

What Geithner, especially, wants is to maintain the elite status of those currently implicated in “property” and “money” without there necessarily have to be any sort of “capitalist business” in which they have to risk anything.  Thus Geithner and co. bail out the banks, who bail out the stock market, while pursuing petty “restrictions” upon the financial sector.  

I think it all will lead to a sort of zombie capitalism, in which the most subsidized actors will pretend to play the roles assigned to them without there really being any systemic coherence to the whole, and while shutting out, to the greatest extent possible, the realities of the unprofitability of an increasing number of sectors of the economy as well as the growing angry mob which will be assembling outside of the gated communities.

One recalls that some of the most stereotyped and lifeless works of Roman literature were written at the disastrous end of the history of the Roman Empire in the west.  So, for instance, Macrobius‘ Saturnalia, an entirely derivative work, hoped to preserve the glories of the polytheistic past of Roman literature in the era of St. Augustine, and probably in Augustine’s geographic locale as well.  The US economy is, in Macrobius’ spirit, to be preserved as some kind of glorious Wall Street “Saturnalia,” in celebration of the glories of the capitalist system of eras past, while reality moves on.  We, for our part, are to become static objects in some sort of diorama of human action which will make the elite nostalgists of capitalism happy, though as mere diorama object we will not have to eat and that should make at least a few people unhappy.  Oh but the stock market has rebounded!

The “Marx-is-always-right” crowd (you know who I’m talking about) like to cite vague passages in vol. 3 of Capital to show that Marx could see even then the financialization of capital at work.  Give Marx credit where credit is due; but remember that there is no way Marx could have foreseen the overwhelming nature of the triumph of finance capital after the economic crises of the 1970s.  Thus the ultimate convulsion which ends the system is not likely to be the tendential decline in the rate of profit, but rather the elite’s attempts to use “bailout” to free its elite status from the risks of business.  One imagines a sort of global version of the Japanese “economy on ice,” multiplied thousand-fold.