Ramblings: The Boom
Backstory
One time a bit back I had wanted to go rock climbing and a good buddy of mine said we should go, we set it up that afternoon. We decided to walk to the Boiler Room from 40 Elm and we always talk good so good did we talk. I had mentioned my aspirations to write and potentially do more academia to get some more cred in that lane. As someone who had done some of the arts, he told me a speech he once heard from a prof.
I believe it was a prof welcoming grads or PhD students. She said that many people go into academia with the idea of tenure or job security. Stable job and retire with great benefits. She shut that idea down. Not only are jobs becoming more scarce and competitive, but with the restructuring of academia, everyone is getting paid less and less, with shorter contracts that offer no security. The ratio of professors to adjunct professors is getting lower, and given the political climate, it is unlikely to stop.
The professor said that it seemed the boom was over. We don't know if this interest in language and the arts was something important for a short period of time historically during the golden age of capitalism, which has come to an end. People have lost interest and value it less. Given its lack of necessity for industry, it is not seen as important in the real world.
This got me thinking.
Some Initial Thoughts
As a Mark Fisher head one of the immediate things that stuck out to me, maybe I invented it while listening, is that the interest in language and the arts seems to be waning. I find this particularly interesting because it speaks to the idea of the illiteracy of capitalism. Workers do not need to read to produce or consume. This means the capitalists don't focus on it, which means it gets no coverage, which makes it less desirable. Adding onto this, the working class is getting poorer, receiving none of the gains from the productivity booms of the last 50-odd years. To keep up, you need the most in-demand jobs, which are based in the tech sector, which means the arts are not a big focus.
It also got me thinking about if arts is being killed. It makes sense for the arts to be killed in this political climate. Not only in the sense that it doesn't generate enough profit for capitalists but also in that the arts stand as a fundamental challenge to the existence of capitalists. Almost all real academic writing and thinking at this point is clearly against the current capitalist system and its operation. Making sure people can't really read and don't really understand that system is the most effective way to make sure they don't start sabotaging it.
The other thing that stuck out to me was just this simple idea of it all being a boom. We talk about the golden age of capitalism all the time, its strong unions, worker protections, welfare net, and massive growth. I so far have generally stopped there, what the structures were and how they impacted people's conditions. What I never really thought of was the wider implications of the boom in itself. How do values change in that type of long-term boom, when could it have stopped and how it could be prolonged, as well as how values change based on the general condition of shit being so good at the button factory.
For a second I thought this was a very rare time where thinkers could just go ham. We have a lot of history and not so much history of great minds. Maybe we are at the tail end of this whole enlightenment phase where we have thought up most ideas, or maybe I am so used to absorbing ideas that I struggle to think of new ones. I frequently think I think of new ideas, but they have almost always already been discovered. Is the well of what we can think about starting to run dry? We can analyze things we know using new methods we already know to come to some slightly new conclusions, but it is all within this self-contained body of ideas that we know.
Maybe it is valued less because there is less new value in it. How many truly great philosophers are there right now? How many truly new methods of analysis are yet to come out that offer a truly new perspective that changes the way we look at things? Is the future of the arts just academics spending 10 years learning what other academics have done to repeat it to other concepts looked at by yet more academics to create an intersect of a new academic to become part of that process again?
Sorry comrade Montgomaire, like all of your favourites, I am not answering or solving anything, but I will get to my actual question.
Just Which Boom Is Fixing To Bust
With the idea that academia was a boom that was coming to an end, started thinking about that more widely. Academia wouldn't die alone. There needs to be a much wider change, a shift in thinking, that explains this with much broader visible implications. What if the boom and bust isn't academia, but the whole structure?
We constantly see the term late capitalism thrown around. Not only does it kind of feel right because of the uh... you know... what it's like out there, but there is also a lot of evidence to back up that we are at one of the last stages of capitalism as it may exist. First, capitalism has consumed the entire world. There is no longer a larger space to expand out to, which means for capital to accumulate, the goal of it all, it must turn its eye to the inside of its borders. Where there used to be a massive new market to capitalize on, there is now an internal concentration of rising inequality. As inequality rises, so does unrest. This cannot last forever.
I must also add the fact that being global means there is no longer a competitor. The USSR acted as an alternative to capitalism. Why would workers settle for no ownership when they could have ownership, especially during a time when revolutionary politics was common and violence in politics was accepted? The capitalist system had a massive head start on the communists, and they were able to give workers enough to act as a bribe to stop the workers from starting a revolution. Changing systems is always a messy time, and if it works enough right now and I feel well represented, why burn it down for an unknown I hear bad things about on the news? Once the USSR fell to the side, capitalists no longer had to compete to keep things good for the workers, they were free to start making things worse as there was no reasonable alternative to escape to.
Something else that I thought about recently is that the developing nations we relied on for cheap manufacturing are trying to turn that cheap capital into their own better development. They are starting to demand higher wages and better pay. This will raise prices down the line, and in the vvest, where wages are not increasing, poorer people will start being challenged by higher prices. They will be priced out of their own existence, which is never a good sign for stability.
Additionally, capitalism has no solution for climate change. It is clear that we cannot innovate our way out of this or we would have already. 2 degrees of warming will cause a chain reaction that will very likely bring 5 degrees of warming, which will mean likely the mass extinction of everything. We have already invested in fossil capital to push us beyond 2 degrees of warming. As these targets get closer, violence to stop it will only become more and more socially acceptable. When things are ok people are fine with doing nothing, but as the reaper comes closer and closer, people will grow more and more content with the idea of burning it down.
To add one more to the pile, neoliberalism has failed. Markets are toted as the solution, but if we leave the markets, all you get are scams and schemes. 2008 showed that if we were to leave the markets alone, they would consume and ruin every single basic necessity and destroy the system in the process. It is bailed out and kept alive as a walking corpse for now until the next thing comes along as a competitive alternative to replace it.
So, maybe the boom was capitalism the whole time. There are no more external markets and it is tearing itself apart internally.
So What Next Then
The way I see it, there are a few ways that this will work out. I'm getting tired so I'll just jot something short off for each of the major options.
Devolve into fascism, which collapses and the next thing takes over. This is what I see as the most likely option. Capitalists will do everything they can to defend themselves, the culture war will get stoked to an inferno, and fascists will fight to maintain everything they can. Unfortunately, capitalism would be what they are defending, and it will be dead at that point. Even if they win at first, it will only lead to more collapse of capitalism until it crushes itself. Fascism is also unsustainable in the best of times, in the worst of times it won't stand a chance to replicate long term.
Strasserism is another play. The identity politics and culture wars go on strong, but this time with a much stronger worker angle to it. Because it is born of working-class unity to a degree, this could do much better at self-replication, but it has two major pitfalls I see. First is that the culture war people hate communism and this is communism. I don't see them being particularly logically consistent, but at least a large portion of them will hate this and it will lead to yet more clashes making it much weaker. The second is that most socialists are for real justice and worker action. This is inherently anti culture war because that attacks other workers. I believe that both of these flanks would be able to really shut down the bulk of the strassterist movement.
Socialism seems pretty popular these days among young people. Whether people are liberals with some socialist tendencies or actual socialists, I see a lot of young people falling in line with some form of socialism as it is fairly easy to digest and solves a lot of the contradictions of capitalism. It also has some real ways to compensate workers for increasing costs of the global economy becoming more level (thinking of other nations wanting more from the West in terms of compensation). Most people are also on board with at least a decent amount of real climate action, which given better material conditions, they may be able to back up better.
China may get their break. I can't claim to be an expert here, but a lot of people have been claiming for a long time that China is challenging the US for global hegemony, and capitalism shaking in its boots may give them a real opportunity to win. Maybe world socialism is a more realistic goal than we think.
Lastly, I think there is a solid chance of something we can't even imagine right now. Every system comes with its challenges, and maybe we get some cranked-ass system that I can't even reasonably think of right now as a person who doesn't have that many truly unique ideas. Through the chaos and struggle, whatever rises will rise, and given all of the challenges of the future, maybe we get something else entirely that could be purpose-built for say tackling climate change as an external threat.
他们要鼓吹分离 他们会鼓吹恐惧 现在让我们继续前进
Oncle Spencer