THE DEATH OF THE WORLD ECONOMY (AND OF MARXISM)

by Duns Scotus

Rule number one: never predict what you want to happen. Because it is simply not going to happen. You are not God and the world can be brutally callous about your special-snowflakeism. This was the mistake that Paul Mason made when he wrote PostCapitalism (published in 2015), which he then pimped with an overlong article in the Guardian, Britain's leading trade rag for sociologists and social workers.

Everything about Mason is “Guardianista” – a Trotskyist media type and "academic," proud of his Jewish and mining roots (two separate strands obviously), who proclaims an affinity for Northern Soul, a Northern British working-class dance movement centred on worshipping the absent Black man... Pass the sick bucket!

Your average Guardian reader, now in his late 50s or 60s, has lived a life in which leftist economics has been taken down a dark alley and had its head severely kicked in on at least several occasions, by a big nasty, thug called Reality.

He has lived through the Thatcher years, the vacuousness of New Labour and the death of the Labour Party, which is now in the process of jumping into the dustbin of history by electing Jeremy Corbyn (same demographic as Mason) to its top job; and most recently he has seen the last great hope of Socialiasm, SYRIZA pushed down on its threadbare knees and forced to grovel before the parsimonious and quietly arrogant Germans.

Mason: a believer in
postmortem socialist utopia.

When it comes to “dildos up the ass,” the Leftist economist has suffered almost as badly as the White nationalist, who has seen his country turned into a Pakistani rape camp. We feel your pain, bro, but not at all for the same reasons.

This leftist pain is the animus behind Mason’s book, which is essentially a re-parcelling of the utopian balderdash of Marxism in order to send it off to a location in the far distant future, at which none of us, least of all the Guardianista generation, will ever arrive. More than anything, Mason’s book can best be interpreted as a Guardianista secular form of heaven beyond the grave.

On to the pathetic substance of Postcapitalism (available from Amazon for $20.25 LOL). Here is the thin slice of vegan tofu beef-substitute in this unnutritious Ryvita sandwich:

"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.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. 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.

Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue."

Essentially, he is talking about an economy run on blogging with magic factories, run by kindly robots, supplying everything else. This would be like Karl Marx pointing to philately and philanthropy as refutations of capitalism. A hobby that people do because they enjoy it is not a repudiation of a monetary economy.

Post-Marxism in action: new welfare recipient
arrives in the West and takes a selfie. 

Narratives like Mason’s will continue to have traction, not because they are perspicacious, but because they stem from a widespread sense of malaise that is generated by global capitalism and its original Faustian bargain. But this is not anything the Left has a handle on, nor indeed the fake Right. Those two are simply aspects of the problem (see illustration above). It is only here, in the alternative right, that any true sense of the problem can be grasped.

In the last two-hundred-and-fifty years the world has seen enormous growth in the economy, in living standards, and in wealth. We have broken free from the Malthusian Trap that imprisoned all former economies. But this economic miracle has also seen massive growth in poverty, degradation, and dissatisfaction. It is a phenomenon that has both good and bad sides. But to understand why capitalism is doomed in its present form, you have to understand how it actually worked during its past golden age.

There are three points to consider, which can be organized under the following rubrics: MOTIVES, MODES, and MEANS

The MOTIVES can be defined as the animal spirits that have driven capitalism, in other words, hunger, greed, sexual desire, and family feeling. The desire in these basic human drives are what has driven the spirit of enterprise and the power of labour.

The MODES can be defined as the manner in which this economic miracle has unfolded. Central to the essence of this post-Malthusian expansion has been growth and credit. Because the economy was always able to grow – through massive new technical breakthroughs and plugging in new vast markets and demographics to the system – it could run on an increasingly credit-driven system, which externalized the risk of investment in future growth and profits.

The MEANS can be defined as those elements of the global population that were able to be transformed into the kind of high productivity people necessary to keep the system growing, essentially this means high-IQ, high-trust, industrious, conscientious populations of the type formally found in Northern Europe, and to a lesser extent Southern Europe and East Asia.

Endless growth.

Combined together, these three aspects produced the miracle whose fleeting form we now inhabit. But, just to identify these fundamental aspects of capitalism is to realize how broken the system now is.

Firstly and most importantly, the MEANS are in decline. While there are much more Whites and East Asians than there were 250 years ago, as a proportion of the global population, these groups are plummeting, while less, non-, and anti- productive populations, like Africans, are soaring.

The MODE is also under attack. Technology continues to advance, but a rule of diminishing returns has set in. While our grandparents or great grandparents saw their lives completely revolutionized by technology – with enormous economic impacts – we have merely seen ours tweaked a bit. Think: electricity and jet travel vs. wind turbines and Facebook.

We have entered upon a phase of technological and economic stagnation. Growth is no longer as possible as it once was, and what growth there is, is over-leveraged, and has deleterious effects both on both MOTIVE and MEANS.

Our dynamic modern economy.

Finally, the MOTIVES are under attack. Hunger, greed, sexual desire, and family feeling have all been brutally undermined by capitalism, especially among the naturally most productive members of the world population. The proof if it is needed is in the demographics of these groups.

We live in an age of bloated obesity, mass pornography (a form of anti-sexualism), and gender deconstruction, in which the traditional family structure is collapsing; an age of sneering atomized cynicism and increasing selfishness (and self-loathing), where the responsibilities and once potent loyalties of the family have been co-opted by the debt-addled welfare state.

We have little to work for now except crass egoism or the declining habits of a past culture that linger on, and we exist in constant conflict with our remaining emotions. The healthy, strong, life-affirming emotions of the past, and the discipline they inculcated, are objects of ridicule and snark.

When they talk about the structural and long-term problems of the global economy, these are the factors they should be talking about. Rather than the Pollyannas of intellectually dead Marxists like Mason, we are heading for much darker and dystopian times. The alt-right is a short seller.