Is Capitalism Protean… ?

[Rowan Pryor]

Is capitalism protean or worse still is it infinitely protean? Cory Doctorow has recently typed up an interesting piece (as he always does): “”Open” “AI” isn’t”. The opening paragraphs are worth quoting in full.

“The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism’s flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top.

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it’s an incredibly effective one.” – Cory Doctorow.

I am not addressing the AI or Open issues in this post but rather addressing the alleged protean capacity of capitalism. Advocates and apologists for capitalism, as well as those who hate and fear it, often seem obsessed with its projected infinite capacity. It is conventionally thought, in capitalist economics, that endless growth and/or endless technological progress under the aegis of capitalism will solve all our problems in time and capitalism will prove more or less eternal. I have seen it expressed too that capitalism is “infinitely protean”.

I am no trained Logician but it seems to me there is a contradiction. If something is infinitely protean how can it retain its identity? If A may become B may become C may become D, does A remain A? I can lay some claim to being an empiricist though not a degree-carrying scientist. Capitalism is certainly protean but it is not infinitely protean. Over a times series, otherwise termed history, capitalism will reach the limits of its alleged protean nature. Capital/finance and their derivatives are or appear to be protean (being formal-mathematical) but the real economy in the real environment has all sorts of real limits. The formal superstructure always rests on the real base. When the real base cannot sustain the complexity and energy requirements of the formal, the formal will collapse or simplify as the real collapses or simplifies. It takes a vast deal of resources and energy to keep our formal systems up and running in our ideational-cultural-technological superstructure. Even hard thinking and research require a lot of resources.

Nobody who follows world news, other than the tripe of celebrity and sports news, can be unaware of the sequence of raging wildfires in the northern hemisphere in this the hottest year in recorded human history. The Maui fires, for example, and the local neoliberal capitalist plundering behind them (in addition to the wrecked global climate itself) are a case in point: “Hawaiian Electric, While Failing to Act on Fire Prevention, Had Cozy Ties to Regulators.”

https://www.leefang.com/p/hawaii-electric-while-failing-to

The Maui wildfires and the regulatory problems involved illustrate perfectly the problems of late stage neoliberal capitalism. The world is Maui writ large at this point. Neoliberal capitalism has structurally changed our society, through and through, by infiltrating and capturing all levels of government and governance. Corporations, oligarchs and predatory managers now effectively rule and run governments and their instrumentalities. Some over-optimistic bourgeois-left economists have proclaimed that neoliberalism, as excess laissez-fair capitalism and market fundamentalism, is over. They tend to mean this in the sense that it can be proven / is proven, in theory and practice, that neoliberalism does not work in terms of maintaining or improving human equality outcomes. Society has seen increasing inequality and the explosion of billionaire wealth under neoliberal capitalism. Neither does neoliberalism work in terms of saving environment and climate. By all physical and biological measures, environment and climate are deteriorating exponentially and are actually being actively undermined and destroyed by the neoliberal system.

Despite being refuted in the above ways, neoliberalism is still in complete charge. Neoliberal operators are at the controls. It’s like “Snowpiercer” in a sense). The navigators (scientists) have modelled speed and trajectory and said we have to slow the train down and divert it on to a different track to survive. This would involve moderating production and consumption and sharing the resources sustainably and evenly to all the people. The engineers or drivers (owners and managers) at the controls, in this little analogy, say “No way, our incomes, pay and perquisites are far higher in the system as it is. We are not diverting course and remember the security guards still answer to us.” Neoliberalism is not defeated until it is defeated on the ground. Any moral or theoretical victory is useless. It most be changed on the ground, in the governments and on the boards. So far, we have made zero progress in that direction. Where it counts, the power of neoliberalism is still, if anything, intensifying. This is why we are in worse and worse trouble every year with no effective steps whatsoever being taken, even at one minute to midnight, to arrest the approaching catastrophe. The proof that the earth is not infinite, its resources are not infinite, technology is not infinite and capitalism is not infinite nor infinitely protean is near at hand. Socialism or barbarism? More likely it will be socialism or extinction. The system which destroys the world (capitalism) cannot save it. That much is very clear now.

The question is “When does the mass of the people realise this?” I guess it will be when the mass of the people are burning or starving or homeless, to put it bluntly. The oligarchs manipulate them with bread and circuses. When the bread supply fails and the circuses are too expensive to stage, this will be the day capitalism falls. Closer to home, with an El Nino phase commencing just as global warming accelerates past 1.5 C above pre-industrial era levels, Australia will face, if not this southern summer year then almost certainly the next, the most catastrophic bushfires we, and perhaps the world, have ever seen. Meanwhile, the Australian government does nothing. They keep pushing coal and gas, still granting new licences for coal mines and gas wells, at the behest and mining and extraction corporates. They keep spending on circuses and letting the bread inflate. Capitalism is completely unsustainable, not infinitely protean at all. Nature is about to burn it down.

• This topic was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Rowan Pryor.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Rowan Pryor.

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