Important discussion about the polycrisis

Systems are failing

Gramsci channelled by Streeck

 seeks to “inspire more concrete thinking on how the modern-capitalist global system might in the not-to-distant future come to an end, even without a successor regime in sight, as a consequence of its internal contradictions unfolding.”  The eleven essays include “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” “Citizens as Consumers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption,” “Why the Euro Divides Europe,” and “The Public Mission of Sociology.”  All of them repay reading.

In his description of capitalism lie the seeds of its instability and ultimate decline and dissolution:

Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society, and through unending expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets, on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market-opening policies both domestically and internationally…Capitalist society is distinguished by the fact that its collective productive capital is accumulated in the hands of a minority of its members who enjoy the legal privilege, in the form of rights of private property, to dispose of such capital in any way they see fit, including letting it sit idle or transferring it abroad…(thus)…the vast majority of the members of a capitalist society must work under the direction, however mediated, of the private owners of the tools they need to provide for themselves, and on the terms of those owners in line with their desire to maximize the rate of increase of their capital.

This, of course, has led to precarity for the masses (including the Professional Managerial Class/PMC, much to their coming surprise) who are becoming less and less comfortable with their position as contingent beings at the mercy of “The Economy.”  But more fundamentally, infinite growth is not possible in a closed material system.  It may seem strange that this simple accounting error, described by Alyssa Battistoni in Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025), may lead to the end of the world.  But this is a possibility.  And the commodification of all life – food, family, work, community, recreation, business, entertainment, education, health, science, art – has led to alienation and anomie that consumerism cannot relieve in either the short term or the long term:

The vast majority of…members [1] of a capitalist society must…convert their ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process, because of economic or technological restructuring, into acceptance of the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power generated by the capitalist economy.  For this, highly complicated and inevitably fragile institutional and ideological provisions are necessary…(including)…the conversion of insecure workers – kept insecure to make them obedient workers – into confident consumers happily discharging their consumerist social obligations even in the face of the fundamental uncertainty of labor markets and employment.

“Consumer” is Neoliberal-speak for “citizen.”  The systematic disorders of capitalism covered by Streeck include stagnation, oligarchic wealth redistribution, plundering of the public domain, corruption, and global anarchy.  Secular stagnation is inevitable as the previously empty world fills up with our products and our waste.  For example, more carbon has been emitted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that in all previous human history.  And then there is plastic.  The transnational fossil fuel corporations knew long ago what would happen to the ecosphere of planet Earth as a result of their output.  As a friend who worked for one of the largest oil companies put it to me once, they did not hire stupid engineers and chemists.  However, they did hide their research.  Is it any wonder that the predicted effects of anthropogenic global warming are arriving now to some surprise?  Or denial?