Imagining the End of Capitalism

Ever since the 1990s, when to the longstanding cooptation of the Western working class by social democracy was added the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the saying has been popular among the chattering classes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” As McKenzie Wark has noted, there was this weird consensus among both its partisans and its critics that “Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence.”

Lately, however, there have been attempts to meet the challenge of imagining the end of capitalism.

How Will Capitalism End?

One of the early efforts was the 2014 essay titled “How Will Capitalism End?” by Wolfgang Streeck, the eminent former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Taking the bull by the horns, Streeck asserted, “I suggest we think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place. It is a Marxist—or better: modernist—prejudice that capitalism as a historical epoch will end only when a new, better society is in sight, and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind.”

Streeck’s angle of approach to the question was quite original, one derived from his familiarity with the work of the great Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi. This was that capitalism had been so successful in commodifying everything—or converting not only land and labor but also formerly fenced off areas like knowledge, public infrastructure, and the environment into commodities for market exchange—that it was eliminating the very social, cultural, and political conditions needed for its reproduction. A central assertion was that the demands of profit-making had become so intense that capital was destroying the very basis of sustainable capital accumulation—labor—by pushing down living standards in the center economies while allowing only extremely low wages in the economies of the Global South to which it had fled.

Streeck was one of the first to advance the idea of a “polycrisis,” that is, that owing to capitalism’s ability to erode the traditional brakes put on its ability to transform everything into commodities, crises were breaking out along different dimensions of societal existence, and these crises had a negative synergy, enhancing the impact of one another and thus magnifying their collective impact. These interacting crises were producing what Streeck called the “five disorders”—economic stagnation, oligarchic distribution, the annexation of the public domain to private property, corruption, and global anarchy.

Delinking Accumulation from Social Reproduction

Richard Westra advances a similar argument in his book The Political Economy of Post-Capitalism. Capital accumulation can only take place if the profits extracted in the production process are devoted not only to capitalist consumption and investment but part of it is channeled into wages that enable those that produce surplus value to physically reproduce themselves. He agrees with Streeck that the social conditions for the reproduction of the labor force are disappearing at a global level, as capital flees to the poorer countries to avoid the high wages of workers in the advanced economies while paying the bare minimum to workers in the Global South.

But equally important, Westra asserts, is the fact that the industrial/manufacturing sector where the extraction of surplus value traditionally takes place has become, for all intents and purposes, a secondary part of the economy, one that is increasingly subordinate to the part of the economy that produces not commodities but “intangibles” like patents, databases, and design, where the cost of production is conventionally estimated at or near zero. More and more, profits are derived from the “intangible economy” compared to the tangible economy, and these are channeled not into the productive sector but into speculation, so that those who monopolize information technology that reproduce the intangible assets via patents and copyrights, such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, become exponentially richer, contributing to the creation of that steep inequality of income and wealth characteristic of our times.

The much-reduced role in capital accumulation of the traditional industrial/manufacturing sector and the dominant role of the monopolized intangibles sector that makes its profits mainly by controlling knowledge create what Westra has called “capitalists without capitalism,” though he himself expresses some doubt regarding the continuing utility of the term.

Burying Capitalism

For both Westra and Streeck, capitalism is undergoing a terminal crisis, but it is still alive. There are, however, theorists who argue that capitalism is dead, and it’s time for theory to catch up with reality.  For McKenzie Wark, in Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, capitalism has been replaced by a new mode of production marked by control of the “vector.” Information technology is that “vector,” one that cuts through all dimensions of economic and social life, and it is those who control this vector that have supplanted the capitalist class and constituted themselves as the new ruling class. The capital versus labor conflict that was the engine of change in capitalism has been replaced by the struggle between the “hackers” that produce knowledge and the “vectoralist class” that is able to exploit that knowledge through control of patents and command of the logistics of information acquisition and delivery.   According to Wark,

If the capitalist class owns the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vectors of information. They own the extensive vectors of computation, which traverse space.  They own the extensive vectors of communication, which accelerate time. They own the copyrights, the patents, and the trademarks that capture attention or assign ownership to novel techniques. They own the logistic systems that manage and monitor the disposition and movement of any resource. They own the financial instruments that stand in for the value of every resource and that can be put on the market to crowdsource the possible value of every possible combination of those resources. They own the algorithms that rank and sort and assign particular information in particular circumstances.

Wark says that capitalists were displaced by the vectoralists in what was akin to a bloodless coup. Information technology from the 1970s to the 1990s became an ally of the capitalists in their battle against the powerful labor movement, but upon winning that fight, they themselves were displaced by the vectoralists. The key reason is that the vectoralists were fighting with assets that were different, and this gave them the advantage:

Owning the means of production, labor materialized into capital in the sense of plant and equipment, is a rigid and long-term investment. Owning and controlling the vector, the hack of new information materialized into patents, copyrights, brands, proprietary logistics. It is more abstract, flexible, adaptive.  It is not more rational, but it is more abstract.

The Coming of Technofeudalism

Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, broadly follows Wark’s line of analysis, and he credits Wark with having greatly influenced him and his new book Technofeudalism.

Like Wark, Varoufakis says we have embarked on a new mode of production. He does not say that capitalists no longer matter. They do, and they still engage in extracting surplus value or profit from workers in the process of production. But they themselves are subordinate to a new elite, the  “cloud capitalists” or “cloudalists,” who have privatized the commons that was cyberspace and now control access to it. The cloudalists, among the most powerful of which are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the chipmaker Nvidia, control the globe-spanning information highways that are sustained materially by massive data centers located in different parts of the world. Accessing these intermeshed networks in cyberspace known as the “cloud” is now vital for the traditional or “terrestrial” capitalists to get access to you to sell their products, and these corporate gatekeepers make their money by charging these capitalists rent. Without access to the net, capitalists cannot make profits, and, very much like the feudal lords of yore who controlled land, the cloudalists’ monopolistic control of the cloud allows them to directly or indirectly collect, from the “vassal capitalists” and anyone who uses the net, “rent,” or income that is not subject to the market competition on which profit depends. It is this reliance of most of the cloudalists on income and wealth derived from charging rent to everyone, not from traditional accumulation of value in the production process, that prompts Varoufakis to give the current mode of production the name “technofeudalism.”

As in “terrestrial capitalism,” it is not the cloudalists that produce value. The real sources of value are what Varoufakis calls the “cloud proles” and the “cloud serfs.” The cloud proles are the service workers at Amazon and other Big Tech facilities who are ununionized, paid meager wages, and in constant threat of being displaced by robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI). But these proles’ labor provides only a fraction of the value extracted by the cloudalists. It is the cloud serfs that create most of that value. Following Wark and Shoshana Zuboff, author of the influential The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Varoufakis says the cloud serfs are most of us: we provide raw material for the cloud whenever we do a Google search, post a photo on Facebook, or order a book on Amazon, material that is then processed into information that the cloudalists and terrestrial capitalists can use to develop ever more sophisticated marketing strategies to get us to part with our dollars. The distinguishing characteristic of cloud serfs is they are doing unpaid work for the cloudalists even if they don’t realize it. As he remarks, “The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers—cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires.”

What is noticeably missing in Varoufakis’s exploited classes are the central producers of value in Wark’s paradigm, the hackers, a category that includes programmers, content providers, and data and logistics managers that produce the wealth of top dogs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. It may be that Varoufakis has not yet decided where to theoretically locate them—whether with the proles and serfs or against them—owing to their ambivalent, volatile politics.

Whether they see the current mode of production as “terminal capitalism” or post-capitalism, all these authors see it as having brought humanity to a situation worse than that under conventional capitalism. For Westra, what makes the current arrangement distinctive in relation to other modes of production, including capitalism, is that for a mode of exploitation to be sustainable, it is necessary for it to provide the means by which the work force that creates the wealth of the ruling class can physically reproduce itself. That link has been broken in the post-capitalist era, with the ruling class preferring to channel its resources to speculative ventures rather than the provision of a living wage, condemning the workforce into deeper and deeper indebtedness in order to survive. “Even authoritarian regimes need to reproduce the material lives of human beings, as a byproduct of their social goal or project,” he notes. Invoking Rosa Luxemburg’s famous saying, he warns that “barbarism and social decomposition is a more real prospect if new socialist forms are not forthcoming.”

AI: From Promise to Threat

In the flush of the advent of information technology in the 1990s, there were those who saw the potential of that technology to bring about that transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, from prehistory to history, to use the famous words of Marx and Engels. According to Paul Mason, in a piece of writing known as “The Fragment on the Machine” that was part of the voluminous Grundrisse, Marx foresaw a time when, owing to the accelerated development of the forces of production, the main objective of humanity would be the attainment of “freedom from work.” At the dawn of communism, Mason theorized, “liberation would come through leisure time,” or as Marx put it, it would be possible for one “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”

What kept people away from such a society of abundance based on technologies that allegedly reduced the marginal cost of production to zero or near zero was the control of these technologies by the information monopolies, assisted by government and the big banks.

Two decades on, such a rosy view of the potential of information technology to serve as the bridge to communism if only we could end the iron constraints of the “social relations of production” on the “forces of production” has withered. With the coming of AI, such liberation seems further away than ever, since the way information technology develops is determined by the interests of those that control it. Technological development is not class-neutral.

In her powerful expose of Sam Altman and Open AI, Karen Hao provides in Empire of AI a stark warning about the destabilizing impacts of the development of “centralized AI.” There is, of course, the threat of the creation of a “superintelligence” that can go its own way, eluding human control and subverting humanity itself, a fear promoted by sci-fi literature that is shared by key figures in the AI industry. But AI poses more immediate threats. The so-called zero-cost of-production intangible economy is not independent of the tangible economy. It does not float on thin air. Indeed, it entails massive ecological and human costs. Like capitalism and earlier modes of production, it is extractivist in nature, necessitating the accelerated mining of lithium, rare earth, and other minerals, and voracious in its demand for land and water to maintain data centers whose energy consumption contributes to global warming.

There is also the massive human effort needed to check, censor, and annotate data gathered by AI, which is leading the AI giants like Open AI, Google, and Microsoft to hire and exploit hundreds of thousands of workers in developing countries such as Kenya, Venezuela, and the Philippines, workers who are grossly underpaid and are prevented from unionizing owing to the threat of the AI giants to leave and recruit their workers elsewhere in the world.

If one adds to the drive for monopoly profits and the absence of regulation the desire of states to use AI for intensive surveillance of citizens, you end up with a Brave New World, even before the arrival of the superintelligence that will displace us at the top of the food chain and have us for dessert.

Barbarism…or Barbarism?

It is true that Hao speaks, with  guarded optimism, about an alternative path of AI that is based on community control, much like Varoufakis and Wark envision the emergence of cross-class alliances of cloud serfs, cloud proles, hackers, and terrestrial capitalists resisting the information elites and posing the possibility of liberation. Still Westra’s fear of a ruling class that has delinked its interests from that of the survival of the whole society must not be discounted and might, in fact, be more likely. A portrait of such a descent into barbarism instead of leap into communism is provided by a remarkable article by Naomi Klein that appeared in the Guardian:

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

Indeed, some of our techno elites are preparing to literally leave the earth. As Klein notes, “Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space—now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession—beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence.”

Thanks to the writers we have surveyed, it is now easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world. But whether we regard the system that imprisons us as terminal capitalist, post-capitalist, or techno-feudal, we are more than ever faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s choice of socialism or barbarism. Unfortunately, barbarism, as Klein, Westra, and others warn us, appears to have had a headstart.

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