In my last post I presented a mildly
dystopian description of how the future would look like from a societal
perspective if we do not substantially change how we organize property and
production relations (and keep in power the major parties that have been ruling
the main economies of the world for the past half century, which are overly
vested in maintaining the status quo).
It is essentially a society not much different from Today’s, just a bit more
unequal, a bit more stagnant (regarding economic capacity to produce material
goods, scientific knowledge and even technologies with the ability of improving
people’s lives… in those materially stagnant periods sometimes the zeitgeist compensates with flourishes of
creativity that may make the future appear again as distinctly modern –garish fashion, crazy visual
arts, innovative narrations, even new art forms enabled by electronic media,
likely an almost fully livable Virtual Reality…) and thus a bit more hopeless,
a bit more desperate, for the increasing numbers trying to clinch to a middle
class life style with incomes increasingly low classy. That means more pressure
at work, more competition to stay put in the ever more precarious labor market,
more lifetime devoted to the advancement of professional careers in an
increasingly zero sum game (my employment is your lack of new opportunities) to
the exclusion of everything else.
In that previous post I intimated
that I did not expect the situation to change due to pressure from the bottom
up, but I saw the only sliver of hope in the possibility of the elites
themselves, favored as they are by such state of things, pushing for change.
Yup, the plutocrats, the one percenters (my gosh, in my youth those were the
members of bike gangs, as they proudly christened themselves after the
conservative AMA dubbed them so for their perceived responsibility in the
Hollister riot), the filthy rich, are almost the only hope for bettering
everybody else’s condition. So, to keep that hope alive I am going to devote
this post to analyze how the likely evolution of the socioeconomic world-system
in the next two decades may look like from the perspective of that elite that
occupy the corner room of the title: the CEOs of the big corporations, the
investment bankers and hedge fund managers, the ones that decide which lobbies
to pay and what legislation to enact, which items are newsworthy as they may
further their interests and which are not… but first a word of caution. I have
never believed (and do not believe now) that the world is actually ruled by a
tiny clique of entrepreneurs and executives that convene behind the public
scene to dictate policy. Those CEOs and bankers I’ll speak of are isolated
individuals, typically surrounded by a heavy retinue of sycophants and false
friends that shelter them from reality and impede their fair evaluation of
their surroundings, and thus incapable of coordinating their actions for their
global benefit. They are individually very powerful, but collectively almost
powerless (to begin with, because imposing the will of a tiny number over the
desires of the many doesn’t sit well with our avowedly democratic principles),
which in part explains why they have to advance their interests in mostly
secretive and restrained ways. However limited their capacity for coordinated
action may be, they specifically set the tone of the cultural agenda, they
legitimize dominant ideas and they can ostracize new alternatives (they are
mainly responsible for defining the “Dominant Reason” I’m devoting my
dissertation to expose).
Now this responsibility is not
planned or explicit, and may be not even consciously intended. Is not like the
owner of a giant conglomerate calls the poor soul in charge of programming a
local network and threaten to fire him if he airs a documentary about the ill
effects on public health on some chemical compounds that other branches of his
firm manufacture, or a media mogul threatens to shut down the operations of an
independent publishing house if they bring to market the ideas of an up and
rising countercultural figure; although those things may conceivably have
actually happened, I think they belong more to an imaginary narrative of
corporate evildoing that the public finds comforting to indulge in… I fear the
reality is more prosaic and in some sense more terrible: great corporate
leaders do not give a humdrum shit about ideas or discourses, trusting the herd
instinct of the masses and their zest for emulating the worst excesses of the
public figures to discard those alternative voices to the proverbial dustbin of
history without need for their intervention. The mechanism through which
economically powerful captains of industry (in a post industrial economy that
expression has to be revised) shape the framework of what can be publicly
discussed, and even of what can be privately thought, deserves a post of it
own.
Now back to our original concern,
what do I think those captains are more likely to observe from their privileged
perches a couple decades from now? First, given their age, most of them are
thinking more about their legacy than the state of their bank accounts (the
latest whiz kids to make it to the C-Suite stormed the heavens in the noughties…
so in the thirties most of them are already 40-50 years old, or older). Not
having many heirs to think about (either childless or divorced) and with
fantastical amounts already stashed away (in the old times they would have no
doubt diverted part of their fortunes to fiscal havens, but with tax rates
ludicrously low already in most advanced nations there is just no need any
more) they can only fall prey to melancholy thinking how the future, once you
arrive to it, is just not all it was hyped up to be: no flying cars, no
colonies on Mars, no cheap and inexhaustible sources of energy, no great
medical breakthroughs that have expanded the average lifespan to above 120
years… just the same old same old (as it couldn’t be otherwise, when you gear
all of the economy and all of the creative energies of the population towards
the production of shorter lived gizmos that can have an impact in the bottom
line in months rather than years, let alone decades). Even the excitement of
growing the corporate behemoth under their command may have grown stale, as
that growth only comes from absorbing the competition (the only real
alternative to being absorbed oneself) in a market of either constant or
slightly diminishing size (neither private nor public demand can grow: the
first one depends either on demography or on productivity through technological
innovation, and as we have argued ad
nauseam both have dried up; the second one is hobbled by the historical
legacy of ever increasing deficits that have failed to spark the overall
economy back to grow). So politically they resort to what all the plutocracies
in all ages have done: they try to buy the government to ensure their
protection and turn their (uncertain but definitely low by historical
standards) incomes in monopoly rents, which they then lend (most likely to the
very same government, always hungry to finance the aforementioned irreducible
deficits) in an ever expanding financial turn. But of course, in an economy
devoid of real growth that lending can only finance speculative enterprises in
the form of bubbles, which by definition sooner or later end up bursting, so if
the leading tycoons turn too greedy (and take excessive risks) they may end up
loosing significant portions of their wealth.
So what is an honest to God
plutocrat to do in such dire circumstances? In my view, there is only one
alternative: a substantial increase of the aggregate demand that creates anew
niches of opportunity and can trigger the “creative destruction” that
Schumpeter famously (and incorrectly, as it has only worked in a couple very
specific historical circumstances) identified as the true spirit of capitalism.
Now in a couple decades we (they) will have realized that fiscal stimulus by
national states just can not create the necessary oomph for that substantial
increase. The multiplier is nowadays close to 1, and the already strained
public finances are unable to make a difference in today’s moderately
financialized economy (again, Europe and Japan are our , much less two decades
from now (when the degree of financialization will likely dwarf anything we
have known so far). How can then they prod the economy towards that required
substantial increase (once they convince themselves, having exhausted any other
alternative, that Keynes was right all along)? I can think of only two alternatives,
one of which has already been tried: another turn of the screw of
weaponization, and all out war between great powers (be it USA vs China, or USA
vs Europe, as the imperial project of a hegemonic USA has already failed
miserably, and demonstrated that just obliterating the socioeconomic gains of
the past 50 years of your run of the mill rogue state or banana republic doesn’t
do all that much for your GDP, and have a number of unintended consequences
that just makes it not worth the cost) with the subsequent massive destruction of
fixed capital (probably with a significant amount of human capital alongside,
but in an era of high inequality and no growth we are all expendable)… or a
redistribution of wealth so enormous numbers of poor villains can increase
their level of consumption (and again, I hope nobody has any doubts of how that
redistribution would look like: universal basic income).
So there you are: unlikely as it may
sound today, our best hope for a more just and less dehumanizing society is
that the plutocrats that set the tone of what and how to think come to realize
that redistributing a part of their gains is the only way forward. Which in 20
years should be abundantly clear, anyway. Talk about delusional optimism…
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