Why capitalism survives

In the United States, he suggests, most self-declared democratic socialists are really social democrats, which is all well and good: Boldizzoni himself believes social democracy is the best way forward.

If capitalism endures through coming centuries, as Boldizzoni suggests it will, it will be because it can shrug off the deaths of millions of people and the extinction of thousands of species.

But I think he has misunderstood his audience. Very few contemporary critics of capitalism evince certainty that it will collapse or that revolution is imminent; no one is sitting on their hands waiting for the end. It is clear enough that capitalism is currently beset by a number of structural weaknesses. Even before a global pandemic brought daily life to a halt, there were signs of trouble.

Even the phenomenal growth rates of China and India had begun to slow before the pandemic hit. Yet analysts have thought as much before, and capitalism has gotten out of plenty of tight spots thus far. Yet it is hard to see how we could do without them.

It strikes me as preferable for those who have studied our social and economic order in depth to make at least some conjectures, however fallible, about what may come rather than to renounce the practice entirely. Epidemiologists and public health experts, for example, had anticipated a pandemic for years, based on a mix of scientific facts and analyses of social conditions: what might have appeared as a false alarm in now looks like foresight.

The book, of course, was written before the pandemic that now hangs over its theme though the cover, eerily enough, features an image of a grim reaper.

But the pandemic like climate change can hardly be understood as exogenous to capitalism: the virus itself is the outgrowth of the periurbanization that has accompanied rapid development, the commodification of once-wild subsistence foods, new encounters between humans and nonhumans driven by industrial food production, and the global movement of both people and commodities.

It is true that even problems endogenous to capitalism may not destroy it—at least not immediately. The environmental problem, Boldizzoni notes, may represent a serious threat to human well being, but it is not a threat to capitalism.

We are headed, however, for a future in which parts of the world will be essentially uninhabitable within decades. Even that may be something that capitalism can survive: after all, capitalism does not need every part of the world, nor every person living in it.

But in fact, the more brutal it is, the longer it can last. It has already survived wars that killed millions and destroyed entire cities; it will survive the fires and floods and droughts to come, and possibly even find new opportunities for accumulation in the process of rebuilding—at least for a while.

At some point, of course, ecological breakdown will be too severe for capitalism to continue to function. But by then, there may not be much hope that anything else can continue functioning either. I am not convinced, however, that those who recognize that capitalism may not end soon must simply accept it. In the meantime, I think it is imperative for those who think capitalism should come to an end to explain as clearly as possible why, and to do what they can to bring that end about.

Intellectual adventures may be able to avoid the future, but political ones cannot. There are worse things, after all, than being wrong. Confronting the many challenges of COVID—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster.

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Beyond that, there's also a coincidence between the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession, and I believe that many of those coincidences are now breaking, because they were actually never tied together by any fundamental law.

A big part of this breakdown is technology, which you rightly describe as a child of capitalism. Is it possible the child of capitalism might also become its destroyer? Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been a helpful pursuer, chasing workers from the activities of lowest value into repetitive behaviors of far higher value. The problem with computer technology is that it would appear to target all repetitive behaviors.

If you break up all human activity into behaviors that happen only once and do not reset themselves, together with those that cycle on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, you see that technology is in danger of removing the cyclic behaviors rather than chasing us from cyclic behaviors of low importance to ones of high value.

That trend seems objectively bad for most people, whose work consists largely of routinized actions. I think this means we have an advantage over the computers, specifically in the region of the economy which is based on one-off opportunities. Typically, this is the province of hedge fund managers, creatives, engineers, anyone who's actually trying to do something that they've never done before. What we've never considered is how to move an entire society, dominated by routine, on to a one-off economy in which we compete, where we have a specific advantage over the machines, and our ability to do what has never been done.

This raises a thorny question: The kinds of skills this technological economy rewards are not skills that a majority of the population possesses. I think that's an interesting question, and it depends a lot on your view of education.

Buckminster Fuller a prominent American author and architect who died in said something to the effect of, "We're all born geniuses, but something in the process of living de-geniuses us. The problem is that we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine. This is because our educational system was designed to produce employable products suitable for jobs, but it is jobs that are precisely going to give way to an economy increasingly based on one-off opportunities.

Part of the question is, how do we disable an educational system that is uniformizing people across the socioeconomic spectrum in order to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour? I think what is less clear to many of our bureaucrats in Washington is just how much talent and creativity exists through all walks of life.

What we don't know yet is how to pay people for those behaviors, because many of those screenplays and books and inventions will not be able to command a sufficiently high market price, but this is where the issue of some kind of hybridization of hypercapitalism and hypersocialism must enter the discussion.

I don't think we know what it looks like. I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based. By the same token, we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms.

Now, that does not mean we can afford to indulge in national welfare of a kind that would rob our most vulnerable of a dignity that has previously been supplied by the workplace. People will have to be engaged in socially positive activities, but not all of those socially positive activities may be able to command a sufficient share of the market to consume at an appropriate level, and so I think we're going to have to augment the hypercapitalism which will provide the growth of the hypersocialism based on both dignity and need.

I believe that once our top creative class is unshackled from those impediments which are socially negative, they will be able to choose whether capitalism proceeds by evolution or revolution, and I am hopeful that the enlightened self-interest of the billionaire class will cause them to take the enlightened path toward finding a rethinking of work that honors the vast majority of fellow citizens and humans on which their country depends.

Are you confident that the billionaire class is so enlightened? Because I'm not. All of these changes were perceptible years ago, and yet the billionaire class failed to take any of this seriously enough. The impulse to innovate and profit subsumes all other concerns as far as I can tell.

That's curious. There was a quiet shift several years ago where the smoke-filled rooms stopped laughing about inequality concerns and started taking them on as their own even in private. I wish I could say that change was mediated out of the goodness of the hearts of the most successful, but I think it was actually a recognition that we had gone from a world in which people were complaining about inequality that should be present based on differential success to an economy which cannot possibly defend the level of inequality based on human souls and their needs.

I think it's a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class — several rungs above my own — is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution.

So I think that in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones.

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