Warm This! (Bedtime Stories about Capitalism)

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Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed — not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm.

Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post crisis. You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.

New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: I believe it offers an escape route — but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking — about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in , and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation.

The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart. The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working.


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In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece.

Ours Is No Bedtime Story by Ed Pavlić | Poetry Foundation

It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody.

That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists — the s in Europe, the s and s across the globe — it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism.

The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption.

Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology.

On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. But what is all this information worth? A study for the SAS Institute in found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth.

Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world. The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value.

In the s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In , Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.

Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable.

A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. There are 2 parts to this answer. Board members with this long term outlook are getting played by PE General Partners who have only a short term outlook. Because PE, formerly called vulture funds, is destroying good companies and jobs. Because PE is now moving into taking over publicly built and operated utilities and infrastructures with negative consequences for the public and the utility payer.

PE control of pension fund investments has produced anemic returns in exchange for high risk, illiguidity and fee gouging pensions by PE firms. Yes, Martin Finnucane , it may be a problem for us. PE finds the healthcare market very attractive. Beacon has gained a huge share of patients in this market they now serve 50 million people.

Okay, I looked at the video-of-the-day. It mostly consists of very smart Robert Reich pleading with a pig-headed Chris Hedges not to be insane and take any action that would allow Donald Trump to become President. And no reader of NC will think I am exaggerating. The Gray Lady has been looking pretty Slim of late. As in Carlos looting out the shell he got from the Sulzbergers…. Goebbels and Bernays would be proud. The bit with the spilled water above prompted me to write. The implication that PE makes its profits from increased efficiency is just over the top.

Yes it sure is, though the sentiment can be corrected with a change of one word: PE makes its profits from increased efficiency misery. NPR had me ready to rip the radio out of the dashboard at points during the Dem primary season. Perhaps the Times is looking for some infusion of private equity money, explaining the fawning coverage?. Both papers already have about the same editorial content and they could lay of some columnists at both papers..

It would make a good Saturday Night Live skit — if that show is still on the air. She could present these slides with a dark skirt and glasses. I admit I jumped into commenting without clicking through, but since watching the cough Democratic cough convention speeches I would not put any level of condescention past the production team that are currently trying to will their favored version of reality into existence.

All I know is I am thoroughly fed up with the pervasive dishonesty we are all swimming in. This presentation is a slick piece of dada art form, produced obviously by darkly comic writers in a pre-rebellion stage of psychic dissonance caused by making rent as castle serfs polishing silver doing their best to put some cat doo on the rug right before the banquet.

That smell is not fondue! I liked the zingers about sweet dreams and paying more money for everything and reaching into your bathroom. You can almost feel a hand coming up from the water in the bowl as you sit on the toilet. Just to grab you! You better look next time you sit down. Even behind the shower curtain. Some something dude in corporate casual attire with modest quantitative skills may surprise you from behind the shower curtain with a contract to sign and payment to make before you squeeze one more out.

Even a public restroom might be more private no pun intended. I just wrote that by accident. Best to dig a hole in the backyard, or in a local park but they probably own that too. Like someone above mentioned, newspapers in single industry-dominated cities favor that industry, or else. Noticeably excessive fawning is their only option for self-defense, honesty, and self-respect. Lucky denizens of a modern Versailles. We are the powerless, poorly dressed canaille ; we can afford some coarse public sneering.

I saw this in the new Simpsons episode 20th Century Fox that endorses Clinton. Even though Clinton is heavily favored by the narrative, Hillary and Bill are almost unrecognisable.

The end of capitalism has begun

It is like the person who drew the cartoon version of the Clintons went out of their way to make them basically unrecognizable and blur the connection. Trump, on the other hand, is of course unmistakable. Something is going on here imo, some kind of internal resistance to a loss of artistic freedom or something. He was forced to publically endorse Clinton to protect his own life and livelihood!

Any person or business or organization that is Pro Donald Trump will be threatened with, or suffer sanctions and boycotts. Private Equity is taking over the State. But that is not Fascism, children plebs. Time for bed now. Did you read the series? This piece is meant to convey that PE is some sort of threat, but does it in such a tame way with such cute visuals that it conveys the opposite message.

I have it from insiders that the Times committed huge resources to this series and is really proud of it. To win a prize these days a story has to be a whiz bang full on broadway production number. That also gives as many no-name reporters and technical types work and recognition.

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God almighty, what am I looking at? What a splendid example of the crapification of the art of illustration. High fructose con syrup. Are they hoping to lure in the emoji-loving youngsters? The whole concept of design has been thoroughly polluted by the PR class. Does it have that sanitized, MoMA-gift-shop aesthetic? Ok then, it must be for the Smart People!

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But design fetishism is an entirely reasonable approach for a culture that has to feel good about the hundreds of false choices we must make every day. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web.

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