Five questions on the last days of capitalism

1. Isn't it absurd, in this day and age, to talk about the last days of capitalism?

The prospect certainly isn't imminent. For a century and a half the hard left has talked about the transition to post-capitalism. Yet despite world wars, economic convulsions in the 1930s and 2000s, and major social conflicts in the 1970-80s, capitalism today as an international system is richer and stronger than ever.

2. Why no communist revolutions in the West?

For a century, a dwindling band of revolutionary Marxists have anticipated a violent overthrow of capitalism by the massed proletariat led by a Leninist revolutionary party. That prospect was never realistic.The working class en masse never aligned around a credible anti-capitalist programme. That's because the alternative to capitalist production in an epoch of scarcity can only be a planned economy. And that doesn't work.

3. What will the end of capitalism really look like?

Marx wrote that "no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself".

Capitalism continues to grow, indeed it has to. Without profits, investment stalls and the economy implodes.

Michael Roberts has argued persuasively that the long stagnation of the last decade or so was caused precisely by the heroic efforts of governments back in 2008/9 to minimise the effects of the crisis. Consequently there was no clear-out of inefficient firms, no devaluation of capital and few opportunities for industrial reorganisation. Zombie firms and debt overhang have stifled profitability and as a result the recovery has been anaemic. Still feels like it.

The underlying trends of capitalism persist through peaks and troughs though. The tendency to revolutionise production through automation, the replacement of workers by machines. So far - at least during an expansionary phase - the economy produces more roles for people displaced than it eliminates.

Cognitive and robotic automation changes that.

The 'safe' jobs right now seem to be those where manual skills are at a premium (care homes) and those where intelligence and interpersonal skills are required (senior executives, politicians, designers). But eventually over the next century or two those will also succumb to cheap automation.

What happens then? People get displaced from the labour force and don't get rehired.

This imposes additional welfare costs on the economy. Meanwhile the active workforce tends to zero. Fewer workers in a highly-automated economy means surplus value (which translates to profit) decreases. And don't forget all those transfer payments to the unproductive unemployed.

With fewer workers and an increasing proportion of the population on welfare, demand for consumer goods (produced by Department 2) declines and as a consequence the market for increased automation products goes into reverse (which hits Department 1). This is not a linear process - nothing in a capitalist economy is linear - but it is tendential. It feels much like the current stagnant economy but with mass unemployment and few job prospects going forwards.

4 What will replace capitalism in the end?

The process I just described results in the economy - in fits and starts - breaking down. There are no good investments. There will always be demand - the unemployed gotta eat, and the capitalists who own the means of production still need their luxuries - but the economic dynamism has gone. Without profit there is no incentive to address that demand and the factories stay shut.

Capitalism has finally completed its work.

I doubt the mass of people will tolerate this state of affairs and the capitalists will not see a way forward as there is none. At this point we have to imagine a world where the environment has become heavily optimised to provide everything a person wants (the result of all those decades of relentless consumer-oriented automation - smarter and smarter AI systems and more efficient robotic systems) yet it can't be put to good use via capitalist processes.

The resulting political transition might be something like the collapse of the Soviet Union rather than a Leninist insurrection. But after that, who knows? We're into science-fiction.

5. What do we do in the meantime?

What has the left done during the last century? Capitalism wasn't abolished, not even close. The workers' movement fought to secure its own existence and social reproduction in material and cultural terms. It didn't do a great job on the latter front, seemingly bewitched by the smug fairy-tales of neoliberal social-liberalism.

But that won't last forever - it's gotten silly now.

I'm in favour of continuing all the processes of increased automation. They're a net good. Within capitalism they will be used of course to buttress and reinforce the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (AI and robots are great for repression).

But in the end it will be self-defeating because capitalism is incompatible with the elimination of the workforce. That truth preempts even the Draka solution .. even if that's the form automation eventually takes. Slaves are equipment, not proletarians.*

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* Part two of this post: "Capitalism incompatible with total automation/slavery".