5 CIVILIZATION
Enlightenment brought us science - the explanations of the links between causes and effects.
Enlightenment also brought us democracy and the rule of law.
As feudalism vaned, capitalism took hold.
Accumulation entered center stage.
Industrial business became the name of the game.
Conquistadors and colonialism after the great exploarations brought us raw-materials and slavery to found the new Western Civilisation.
Energy and technology merged to boost development.
The four cheaps - cheap labour, cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw-materials - build modernity and the population explosion.
As Capitalism was build the Labour Movement’s rise became a threat. Capital bribed Labour with the class-compromise and secured the system - for a while.
More recently, neo-liberialism broke Labour and created the New Inequality - a society of the super-rich and the precariate.
Despite financial crises Capitalism has thrived for all my lifetime. Capitalism as an era of free nature and free atmosphere is now hitting the wall.
No longer so: Capitalism’s boom has spawned failures of systemic context. The so-called green revolution of food solutions has produced a lot of food and made profits for large corporations, but depleted soil nutrients, spread toxins, severed mycelial networks, and disrupted nutrient cycles, creating eutrophic lakes and dead zones in our oceans.
Capitalism is up for a reckoning - cheap nature is striking back on modernity.
We are headed for Civilizational Breakdown.
MEMO CIVILIZATION
This should be about capitalism proper - imminent contradictions choking it
Schwartz on finanzialisation
Emergence of non-capitalist spheres within dying capitalism
Willfull/revolutionary killing of the beast vs suicide vs strangulation by nature breakdon.
With the onset of globalization, the system is running out of new ecosystems.
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5.1 Strangulated Accumulation
Traditional fordist manufacturing has in recent decades been surpassed by monopolies based on intellectual property rights (IPR).
The fordist regime was based on control over physical capital embedded in vertically integrated company structures with many employees and strong labour unions. Success in this era required wage/profit sharing and continous investment to maintain market power.
The IPR regime comprises vertically disintegrated company structures with few employees (‘Franchise era’). IPRs generate monopoly rents with no need to share profits or invest to maintain market power.
Today, in the franchise era, firms with large profits don’t need to invest while firms that might invest are starved of profits.6
5.2 Financialization
Profits from the non-reinvesting firms are funneled into bloated financial intermediaries.
5.4 Decline of Profit Rate
Growing financial flows with limited real-economy investmest opportunities brings down the economy-wide profit rate and strangulates economic growth in the advanced countries.
(Roberts:)
5.5 New Imperialism
The new empires (US/EU, China/Russia, India) will compete for access to investment opportunities worldwide.
The Ukraine war may be seen as the first of many new imperial wars to come.
