The Trouble with Wealth

Living in a World with too much capital

Inequality is usually pictured as the obscene contrast between grinding poverty and unmerited opulence, between mile-long queues at food banks and corporate CEOs buying gold wrapped steaks with their £5 million annual salaries. Hunger in the midst of unbelievable plenty.

Or, in economic terms, through the irrationality of a system that blocks the flow of money to the mass of people, thus creating a demand problem as the poor – or not wealthy – are far more likely to spend their income than the rich.

There is nothing wrong with viewing inequality in these ways but in my opinion they leave something important out. What they overlook is that great wealth is a problem in itself, not just in relation to poverty. This is because wealth is invariably transmuted into capital – money invested in order to make money which is then reinvested again in a never-ending process. And capital which is not directed to a palpable collective need, inevitably distorts society and makes solving urgent problems such as climate change all but impossible.

A Tale of Two Factors

Economists often refer to capital and labour as “factors” in production, i.e. inputs that enable goods or services to be produced and turn a profit. As shown by heterodox economist Harry Shutt, western economies hit a benign equilibrium during the post-war boom (1950-73) in that there was strong demand for both factors – capital and labour. The result was extremely low unemployment (around 3% in Britain) and buoyant growth in fixed investment (capital investment in physical assets such as factories, buildings, equipment, vehicles etc.) that actually exceeded GDP growth.

However, after stagnation set in the mid-70s, the rate of fixed investment fell below GDP and unemployment began to rise. The decline in fixed investment has continued over the ensuing decades, dropping from 20% of GDP in France, Germany, Britain, Japan and the US in 1980 to 14% in 2015. Unemployment spiked in the 1980s and ‘90s. Its subsequent official decline has much to do with compelling individuals to take any available work – Germany introduced ‘mini-jobs’, for example, and on-demand labour and self-employment have mushroomed everywhere. In Britain, if you work for one hour a week, you’re counted as employed. And in order to “make work pay” it is subsidised by the state in the form of tax credits.

In essence, intensified by technological advancement, the demand for both factors of production – capital and labour – waned significantly. However, the way they were treated could not have been more different. Labour, if organised, was denigrated as a pariah and a self-interested impediment to the production of goods and wealth. Unions were ensnared by legal restrictions and the unemployed compelled to retrain and make themselves attractive to employers.

Capital, by contrast, – despite facing, in Shutt’s words, “a demand-supply imbalance comparable to that of labour” – was fêted as the essential ingredient of wealth creation. Entrepreneurs were lauded, profitability seen as a desideratum that benefited all, and the rate of return demanded on capital was intensified. In addition, the “wall of money” at the top of society was augmented by an influx of pension funds into financial markets which naturally demanded a healthy return in order to pay their beneficiaries.

The result has been an immense surplus of capital which cannot be sated by purely physical innovation but is nonetheless perpetually in search of profitable opportunities. This state of affairs distorts society in multiple ways. One way has been a turn to debt-based speculation entirely unrelated to material assets. This path caused the 2008 financial crisis. But there are many other examples.

Gimme Shelter

The environment is one. Oil companies have responded to looming climate catastrophe by transforming their rhetoric but little else. They proclaim a commitment to a ‘green transition’ but still try to “optimise” their oil and gas portfolios and prioritise new exploration. Investment in renewable energy is so low it doesn’t warrant a distinct category in their accounts. Many institutional investors, such as pension funds, charities, and universities, under pressure from climate activists, are committed to divesting from such companies and investing in renewables. However, hedge funds – pooled investment funds patronised by extremely rich individuals that aim to beat average market returns – have stepped into the breach. They are buying large stakes in oil companies, pushing up their share price. “People don’t understand how much money you can make in things that people hate,” commented one manager.

Thus the surplus of capital is ensuring that any progress made on climate change is, under this economic system, instantly reversed.

The financialisation of housing is another way capital is perverting a basic social need. In countless cities around the world, rents have shot up after investors – invariably an unholy combination of hedge funds, private equity funds, and Real Estate Investment Funds (REITS) – have bought up whole blocks of rental properties, viewing them as lucrative income streams. Alternatively, housing is demolished to make way for luxury apartments. Berlin presents an extreme case. €42 billion was spent on large-scale real estate investment between 2007 and 2020.  According to one analyst, after the 2008 financial crisis, investors were looking for a place to put their money and set their sights on Berlin. In a city where 85% of the residents are renters, rents have increased by 70% in nine years. Despite the existence of a strong cooperative sector and state-owned housing companies, over four in 10 rental properties in the German capital are owned by either financial market investors or big, private landlords.

Unsurprisingly, given the city’s culture, there is resistance. In September, a referendum in favour of expropriating Berlin’s largest corporate landlords, who collectively own 11% of apartments in the city, was passed. Whether the result will be carried through, however, remains doubtful.

One way of looking at the frenzy for privatisation which has taken hold throughout the world since the 1980s is not just in terms of corporate capture or ideological monomania, but as an outlet for an ever-growing mass of surplus capital. Privatisation is a longing that can never be quenched. In the first stage of privatisation state-owned industries were hived off to the market in one-off sales. But that was just the appetizer. Now private capital is guaranteed an income stream by running, on a contract basis, public services funded by taxation. In Britain, railways and buses, even spy planes, are operated in this fashion, while the state-funded National Health Service is gradually being hollowed out by private provision. In 2010, the NHS spent £4.1 billion on private sector contracts. Nine years later, this figure had more than doubled.

‘Exiled’ former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn posed a genuine threat to these vested interests – through for example a pledge to “renationalise” the NHS. He jeopardised an extremely fruitful, and necessary, income stream and thus had to be destroyed.

Globally, a kindred process has occurred. Where public services have not been gutted, the state serves as a convenient shield behind which public funds are directed into private hands. Under the guise of attaining universal health coverage, the Kenyan government has subsidised access to private care, given private providers higher reimbursement rates and formed public-private partnerships with international companies at great expense. All this has been done at the behest of international agencies such as the World Bank and billionaire charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“More and more people have been priced out of health care because of their socioeconomic situation and inability to access private care either because of the expenses involved or because the type of help they are looking for is not available, because it's not profitable”, says an author of a report on the subject.

There are numerous other instances of the pernicious effects of surplus capital scouring the globe to meet its unquenchable appetites. A partial list must include the warping of democracy and the media, the money laundering role of football, and the targeting of children by consumer giants. The problem of inequality – and thus contemporary capitalism – is apparent not just in too little money at the bottom of society, but too much at the top.

Check Your Privilege

But curiously one could argue this is contrary to the original purpose of capitalism. Defenders of the system are fond of pointing out its modernizing character in contrast to atavistic socialism. However, the myriad anti-social effects of surplus capital serve to illustrate how we in the 21^st century are living according to the dictates of a 19^th century system. Modern capitalism and its attendant institutions were born at the height of the Victorian age. Stock markets and joint-stock companies (later known as corporations) were created to facilitate outside investment – capital – in economic enterprises and limited liability laws introduced to protect investors by ensuring that if their chosen enterprise failed, they would lose nothing more than the original sum they ventured. Shutt calls “the privilege of limited liability”– which still exists – “the bedrock of capitalism”.

In the description of Canadian law professor Joel Bakan, “the modern corporation was invented in the mid-nineteenth century to help create pools in investment capital needed to finance new and growing industrial ventures, like railways, steamship lines, and factories.” Corporate law, he says, was “designed to incentivize and thereby produce the fuel, capital, that the system needs to operate.” Without it, “the whole system, not just the corporation but capitalism itself, would grind to a halt.”

Arguably, at the time, incentivizing the “fuel” did produce immense dynamism and social benefit in the form of railways, steamship lines etc. Even Karl Marx was impressed, paying tribute to the “colossal productive forces” unleashed by the bourgeoisie. But now this “fuel” is primarily engaged in a compulsive and blind search for profit, no matter whether this adds to social welfare, or more likely, degrades it. To stretch Bakan’s metaphor, the van is now full but the pump is still spewing out more petrol which is spilling all over the station forecourt and running down the street.

The capital imperative is now not merely anachronistic and anti-social but positively deadly. We now know that order to stand some chance of staying within the limit of no more than 1.5 degrees of global warming by 2050 – and thus potentially dodging catastrophic climate tipping points – the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground. However, such a philosophy of abstention is utterly alien to the nature of capital which is myopically impelled to exploit short-term profit. And in a world of boundless surplus capital – with each fragment on an eternal search for profitable opportunities – such an endeavour is doomed from the start.

In 2014, geographer David Harvey estimated that capital had to find profitable opportunities worth $2 trillion in order to satisfy the requisite ‘return on investment’. By 2030, he gauges, that need will have increased to around $3 trillion. “Thereafter the numbers become astronomical,” he writes. “Imagined physically, the enormous expansions in physical infrastructures, in urbanisation, in workforces, in consumption and in production capacities that have occurred since the 1970s until now will have to be dwarfed into insignificance over the coming generation if the compound rate of capital accumulation is to be maintained.”

And we also have to imagine what non-physical – i.e. speculative – investment will do to the world in the coming years.

Bending the Knee

But, perversely, rather than face up to this literally unsustainable situation, the world’s governments have chosen to artificially turbo-charge capital creation. Through the central bank policy of Quantitative Easing, the quantity of money in the financial system has been massively expanded – by an estimated $13.9 million a minute since 2020. As a result, developed economies have largely weathered the Covid outbreak but at the cost of hugely increased inequality. The combined wealth of US billionaires has risen by 70% since the start of the pandemic, a period of a little more than 18 months. In Britain, the number of billionaires has jumped by a quarter while globally billionaire fortunes have increased by 27% in the context of an expected rise in extreme poverty for the first time this century. For reference a billion is a thousand million.

But those are merely the personal effects. QE has also instituted fake stock market booms, facilitated the lucrative practice of companies taking over their rivals (to no-one’s benefit bar senior executives and bankers), produced skyrocketing property prices in the UK, and swelled the resolutely short-termist venture capital industry. In short, rather than – heaven forbid – standing up to the immensely powerful vested interests around capital enrichment, governments have chosen to bend the knee and grant their every wish. Contrast this with the way defenceless benefit claimants are treated and you have an insight into the mentality of most politicians.

There is a current in left-wing thought that is indifferent to wealth inequality, viewing it as far less pernicious than income inequality despite the fact that it is more extreme. Before the pandemic, wealth inequality was rising in 49 countries. Its enormous increase in the brief time since Covid struck has prompted calls for a tax on wealth. But if wealth inequality has spiralled in such a short period, what will happen in the years to come when many of its causes will likely remain untouched? A wealth tax will be a mere drop in the ocean.

Great wealth is profoundly undemocratic, concentrating economic decision-making in fewer and fewer hands. But it also ensures that capital enrichment, a process which profoundly hurts and perverts society, is set in stone and will intensify year by year. The time is coming when we will find what it does intolerable.

Will automation spell doom for capitalism?

Capitalism is doomed and, you’ll be pleased to hear, will go the way of the dinosaurs sooner than you think. That’s the conclusion of one of the essays in the book, Does Capitalism Have a Future? The author, Randall Collins, predicts the demise of capitalism in the next 30 to 50 years. So if you’re 20 now, by the time you hit late middle age you may well be living through a tumultuous, revolutionary period or possibly inhabiting a post-capitalist economic system.

The culprit is not one of the usual suspects – not financialisation leading to deeper and more frequent economic crises or a declining rate of profit – but something simpler and even more inexorable. The force in question is automation and Collins says it will seriously eat into ‘communicative labour’ in the near future – his essay is called, ‘The End of Middle Class Work: No More Escapes’.

Mechanisation – labour-saving innovations that enable businesses to produce more at lower cost and thus reduce the need to employ people – has decimated skilled working class jobs over the past forty years, says Collins. Manufacturing employment in advanced capitalist countries has declined from an average of 40% of the workforce, to just 15%.

The Robots are coming

But mechanisation has now been joined by robotization and computerization, which have the potential to automate away not just repetitive, manual tasks, but cognitive work as well. Thus managerial and professional jobs, the provinces of people who have largely benefitted from the changes of the last 40 years, will start to crumble.

Computerization is still in its youth, says Collins, but as it develops the process of technological displacement of jobs will ‘become more extreme with each passing decade’. In time we will see the arrival of ‘humanoid robots that would take over upper working class and middle class skilled work, and then displace managers and expert professionals as well.”

Such developments will cause structural unemployment of 50% or more. In these circumstances governments will undergo a fiscal crisis (a vanishing number of people will be paying income tax of any significance) and there will be mounting pressure for a ‘revolutionary overturn of the property system.’ A tiny elite of robot owners will receive all the profits ‘leaving the great bulk of the population to scrap among themselves for jobs servicing the elite and their machines.’  This won’t be, in John Major’s immortal phrase, a ‘society at ease with itself’.

Will Basic Income come to the rescue?

The lion’s share of Collins’ essay is concerned with rebutting various escape routes from technological displacement that have worked in the past but aren’t going to in the future. These include the replacement of the lost jobs with new ones in different sectors, globalisation or the endless expansion of education. Interestingly, one escape route that Collins doesn’t consider is Basic Income. But Basic Income is precisely the solution that will be tried in the face of technological onslaught. Indeed, it is being advocated now, and not just by itinerant thinkers but by Silicon Valley overlords.

However, there is one conspicuous obstacle that will dog Basic Income if the robot scenario sketched by Collins comes to pass. To actually ensure that this hi-tech future doesn’t turn into a dystopian nightmare, the basic income would have to get at a far higher level than many currently think feasible.  As Collins says, if middle class jobs going to be lost, then so is the income that goes with them. This implies, if it is going to substitute for the vanished spending power, a basic income ‘max’ set at £25/£30k a year or maybe even more.

But that will mean an increased financial burden on the government at a time when its revenue from income tax is being severely curtailed because all the middle class jobs are disappearing. To make that burden bearable, and to avoid the governmental fiscal crisis that Collins says historically has always presaged revolution, the robot-owning corporations would have to be willing to be subjected to extremely high tax rates. This is still the case even if the governments of the mid-21^st century develop the spines so obviously lacking now and close down the zero per cent tax havens that currently harbour $32 trillion.

This is possible; enlightened self-interest may hold sway. But it’s also conceivable that the small number of corporations that lay down the law in this future society (and given the capitalist tendency to monopoly, we can safely assume it will be a few behemoths) may decide that it’s in their financial interest to simply repress, through massive police forces and surveillance, the vast majority of people. 

They will be left, as Collins imagines, to ‘scrap among themselves’ for jobs servicing the elite. And kept in line, should they think of rebelling, by state and private security forces controlled by massive resource-rich corporations. There is no guarantee this option won’t be chosen. You don’t have to look into history for long to find examples of slave states that lasted thousands of years.

But the mere fact that the elite running this future society will have this kind of choice before them indicates, to me, a flaw in basic income scenarios. Basic income is usually conceived as a kind of painless balm that is applied to society in order to stop the disastrous scenarios – of mass destitution caused by the disappearance of well-paid work – that would come to pass if things were left develop freely. That is, basic income, of itself, does nothing about vast inequality of wealth and ownership that exist now and will, if trends continue, become ever more extreme. It merely, hopefully, nullifies their effects.

The mirage of capitalist competition

Collins regards the transition to a non-market based, centrally-planned economy in the mid-21^st century as almost dictated by circumstances. Reality will ultimately come to govern whatever wayward desires people have. “All the ethnic, religious, lifestyle and other conflicts will only be so much noise, stringing along the crisis until finally an alignment of mobilized political forces comes about that solves the crisis by post-capitalist transition,” he says.

Short of jettisoning capitalism, this looming confrontation cannot be averted. “There is no intrinsic end to this process of replacing humans with computers and other machines,” Collins writes. “The displacement of human work will go on not just for the next twenty years but the next hundred, even the next thousand years – unless something extrinsic happens to change the underlying mechanism driving technological displacement of work: capitalist competition.”

However, there is one problem with this scenario. Far from steaming ahead, as it theoretically should be, technological advancement is crawling along. Productivity measures output per worker and were automation to be busily rewiring the entire economy, productivity would be shooting ahead – machines (if they are ready to be utilised in the economy) being far more efficient than the average human. In fact the opposite is the case. Productivity growth in advanced economies is currently a risible 0.3% a year, compared to 1% before the 2008 crisis, which in turn pales next to the 5% attained in the 1960s and ‘70s. In the UK, productivity fell by 0.5% in the first three months of 2017. Capital investment, often the precursor to productivity growth, is likewise feeble. It collapsed after 2008 and has been falling steadily for the past three decades in any case.

Which leads to a subversive question – if technological advancement, the hallmark of capitalist competition, isn’t happening, are we actually living in a capitalist economy?

Part two to follow

A plague of depression or sadness rebranded - what's the truth about capitalism and mental illness?

An essay, published a couple of weeks ago by the novelist Will Self, caught my eye because it embodies an interesting conflict between two differing left-wing critiques of corporate capitalism. They appear to be making diametrically opposite points yet both stem from an anti-capitalist viewpoint, or at least display a healthy scepticism towards the “truths” of our corporate society.

Self, who has previously been a psychiatric patient, was concerned to take on the psychiatric profession and  (as the stand-first puts it) its “disease mongering”. Unable to cure severe mental pathologies, Self argues, psychiatry has instead turned to treating “less marked psychic distress”. Aided and abetted at every stage by pharmaceutical companies, doctors now create diseases to fit the drugs available. What used to be ordinary sadness has been rebranded as depression, an illness that can conveniently be combated by the prescribing of anti-depressants  - a dispensing of billions of pills to correct an alleged chemical imbalance in the brain that coincidentally makes fantastic profits for big pharma.

“The sad are becoming oddly co-morbid (afflicted with the same sorts of diseases) with the mad,” writes Self.

Selfish capitalism and it discontents

Contrast this with the claim by Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism, that neo-liberal capitalism is generating a “mental health plague”. Depression is now the condition most treated by the National Health Service in Britain, says Fisher. According to clinical psychologist Oliver James the “selfish capitalism” of Anglo-Saxon societies is causing an acute intensification of emotional distress ; an epidemic of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder. James cites World Health Organization surveys: 26% of Americans experience an episode of “mental distress” every year. In Britain, the number is one person in five.

Here is James speaking:

So one side identifies a contagion of mental illness, while the other says it’s all a plot to uphold the prestige of psychiatry and supply pharma corporations with a steady profit stream. Who’s right?

At the risk of being diagnosed with an incurable case of fence sitting, it seems to me that both of these positions, on the surface utterly incompatible, may be true.

Depression x 1000

There is undoubted evidence for the veracity of what Self is saying. The arrival of Prozac and other SSRIs in the late 1980s coincided with a thousand-fold increase in the diagnosis of depression. It would be extremely difficult to honestly argue this had nothing to do with efforts of drug companies to market anti-depressants. And this initial anti-depressant spurt has since become a biblical flood. In 2011, 46.7 million prescriptions were written for anti-depressants by the National Health Service in England, an increase of 9.1% on the previous year, and an avalanche of pills compared to the 9 million prescriptions signed off in 1991.  But though “psychic distress” - to use Self’s term - has clearly been turned into chemically treatable depression, that doesn’t mean the distress was a fiction, or that the distress hasn’t increased, or that it was simply sadness given a medical name. There is, it seems to me, a large space between sadness and full blown mental illness. And a lot has been happening, in the last twenty or thirty years, in that space.

Ordinary and extraordinary sadness

Self himself makes the distinction. “But what has made it possible for someone recently bereaved or unemployed,” he asserts, “to have a prescription written by their doctor to alleviate their ‘depression’ is, I would argue, very much to do with psychiatry’s search for new worlds to conquer, an expedition that has been financed at every step by big pharma.”

Bereavement and unemployment are, I would argue, two completely different states. Bereavement is ordinary, though it doesn’t feel ordinary, sadness. It’s impossible to go through life and not be bereaved and feel its emotional effects. Unemployment is, by contrast, very much a socially constructed state. In the first place, unemployment has only been around for 200 years or so. Secondly, it’s much more acute now than it was forty years ago (from 1950 to 1973, UK unemployment averaged 1.6%). Lastly, its effects on an individual depend very much on how society treats it. Post-capitalist economists such as Richard Wolff and David Schweickart have argued that, in a more humane society, people that have to be laid off by enterprises would automatically be offered jobs or training elsewhere. This is everyday practice now in the Mondragon federation of worker co-operatives, comprising 256 companies employing 83,000 people, located in Northern Spain.

By contrast, what British society does is to make unemployment the personal responsibility of the person who is unemployed. Unemployment – a social problem if ever there was one - becomes an individual problem. The result is self-blame and, in a society that is intensely comparative, all the ingredients for mental distress, not just sadness, are laid. It is interesting that the root causes of the emotional distress identified by Oliver James in 2008’s The Selfish Capitalist (a book written before the financial crisis) – stagnating real wages, the growth of short-term, service industry jobs (see the rise of zero-hours contracts) and an exaltation of the consumer habits of the rich – have only become more prevalent. So why shouldn’t mental anguish have got worse?

Diseases, disorders and effects

The key to understanding what has happened, I think, is to separate social effects from their pathologisation, the turning of states of mind and behaviour into a “disease” which can then be treated by drugs. This pathologisation may be entirely unjustified, just suiting the need of pharma companies to make lots of money from selling pills, and indeed the pills may not actually work (Self says that the chemical imbalance theory of depression, on which SSRIs are based, is “essentially bunk” – he may be right, I don’t know) But all that doesn’t mean the social effects are not real. “The vast number of ‘hyperactive’ children in the US prescribed Ritalin is so well attested that it’s become a trope in popular culture,” writes Self. True, but I’m not convinced that labeling trends as a medical disorder, means that the trends themselves – difficulty in concentrating and impulsive behaviour in this case – are not genuine. Likewise, I don’t believe that the rise in mental distress is a myth.

Valium nation

To take a historical example, millions of prescriptions were written for the tranquilizer, Valium, a predecessor of anti-depressants, in the 1960s and 1970s. The drug quickly gained a reputation for being “the housewives’ choice”. It provided a release from the psychic consequences of an extremely restricted life. The problems for these women were pathologised and the symptoms they suffered from chemically anesthetized. But that didn’t imply that the underlying issues – a life limited to motherhood and caring and confined to the home – didn’t exist, or that doctors somehow created them, as most people, now the vast majority of women go out to work, would recognise. Why can’t the same be said for anti-depressants?

The book, The Spirit Level, provides persuasive evidence that Anglo-American societies have become more anxious, if not more depressed. The authors cite the work of American psychologist, Jean Twenge, who looked at 269 studies measuring anxiety in the US from 1952 to 1993. She found a continuous upward trend. By the late 1980s, the average American child was more anxious than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s. Anxiety, as far as I understand, is related to depression, though not as extreme. You can’t explain away these findings by saying it’s all down to doctors, egged on by pharma companies, discovering anxiety where previously it didn’t exist. Prozac was first released in 1988, just five years before the period of study ended.

I’ve little doubt that Self is right and psychiatry and big pharma, have, for different reasons, created diseases and pathologised distress. But that is only half the story.

It's the System, Stupid. Review of After Capitalism, part 2.2

Welcome to Part 2.2 of your quick guide to capitalism and its ruinous consequences. I can see the next immutable feature of capitalism itching to reveal itself so let’s draw back the curtain and begin …

Unemployment

Yes, welcome unemployment. Or perhaps not. Full employment, as Schweickart says, is, outside of wartime, a textbook fantasy. The guilty secret is that unemployment is desired by the rulers of our society. Full employment leads to large wage rises (a seller’s market), which eat into profit as well as causing inflation, as the much lower unemployment rates in the 1960s and ‘70s, showed. Capitalists know this and they want the discipline of potential unemployment so employees are never completely secure in their jobs. “Economics is the method,” said Margaret Thatcher. “The object is to change the soul.”

But there is another reason for unemployment which Schweickart doesn’t talk about. Regardless of its usefulness in disciplining workers, there is a structural reason for unemployment. The Conservatives in Britain have made immense political capital from proclaiming the existence of a ‘structural deficit’ – government over-spending that is over and above the extra spending resulting from the economic downturn. But they – and all mainstream political parties – are silent about the structural character of much unemployment – the joblessness that would be there even without a recessionary economic climate. This is a feature they can never admit.

In the UK, from 1950-73, unemployment averaged 1.6%. Post-1980 it has averaged 7.8%, and frequently been higher. Even at pre-crisis levels, unemployment was high enough to have fatally wounded governments in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now it is seen as fact of life, when in reality, it is a fact of capitalism. John Maynard Keynes spoke about technological unemployment as early as the 1930s, and technological development, spurred on by the desire to reduce costs and increase profit, has rendered, under this system, a significant proportion of the population economically superfluous.

The economist Harry Shutt has written about this systemic problem. The scarcity of the means of subsistence, he says, has greatly diminished since the Industrial Revolution, but the scarcity of work opportunities has correspondingly grown. “Yet it remains true,” he writes, “that for the vast majority of the world’s people the sale of their labour is their only potential source of income”.

The Obama economic adviser, Laurence Summer, has said that high levels of unemployment are now a structural feature of the US economy, regardless of the presence or absence of economic crisis (which seems to be the new normal anyway). “No matter how hard we try, the current economic system needs fewer and fewer of us,” says the writer Dan Hind.

The structural nature of unemployment results in a situation where a majority of people work very hard, but a significant minority don’t work at all, or are under-employed, and live in poverty. The employed are employed because they contribute to profit, the remainder do not. Under capitalism, employment largely depends, not on meeting social needs, but being needed to generate profit. A great many jobs are, under any rational judgement, socially useless.

Overwork

Here we confront a paradox of the system. Capitalism is technologically prolific. It produces a wondrous variety of commodities and this explains a large part of its appeal, an attraction we will consider in the next part. But the technological advances the system makes, while theoretically reducing the need for toil and promising to ‘save labour’, actually makes work more intense.

“A visitor from another planet would be perplexed to discover that in a purportedly free and rational society there are millions of people who want to work more, living in close proximity to millions who want to work less,” writes Schweickart. “The visitor would be even more perplexed to learn that new technologies allow us to produce ever more goods with ever less labour, and yet the intensity of work – for those who have work – has increased.”

Working hours have increased in the US and Britain in the last twenty years, despite technological advance. Between 1998 and 2005, the number of people in Britain working more than 48 hours a week more than doubled. And one in six now works more than 60 hours.

In 1999, research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that nearly two-thirds of British workers had experienced an increase in the speed or intensity of work over the previous five years.

Some great minds of the recent past thought that technological advance would have precisely the opposite effect. John Maynard Keynes believed that people in the first half of the 21^st century would work 3 hour days and fifteen hour weeks. Keynes, one of the most famous economists in history, was grossly mistaken.

According to the theory of conventional economics if people desire more leisure, they will automatically get what they want, trading income for more free time (Conventional economics is all about desire – if you want a coffee-maker the market will provide one). But, in practice, it doesn’t work like that. Work hours are set, or implicitly set because they are required to get work done and employees can rarely negotiate more leisure, despite the rhetoric of ‘work-life balance’.

The reason, as Schweickart points out, is that consumption is the lifeblood of business but leisure is often its antithesis. “Any kind of cultural shift that emphasizes leisure over consumption bodes ill for business,” he writes. “To be sure individual businesses [like an airline] catering to the increase in leisure that people would have might profit, but if this leisure comes at the expense of income, overall aggregate demand will fall, profits will decline, the economy will stagnate or slip into recession.”

It can be argued that overwork is not an immutable feature of capitalism. Work hours declined, because of government and trade union action, in the latter part of the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century. In France, a 35 hour week was introduced in 2000. Theoretically, the EU has a 48 hour week. But these external restraints on capitalism have proved very hard to make stick. The French 35 hour week has been incrementally eaten away at since its introduction.

Instability

This last feature is not one included by Schweickart, although in the latest edition of After Capitalism, which I don’t have, there is a section on instability.

Anyway, capitalism is a peculiarly unstable economic system, and its instability is generated internally, not by uncontrollable outside factors. All the talk pre-2007 about an “end to boom and bust”, “the Great Moderation” and the “Goldilocks’ economy” (everything just right, not too hot or too cold), proved to be errant propaganda. In the UK, prior to the Great Recession, there were two severe economic downturns in the last thirty years (1980-82 and 1990-92). Millions of people were made unemployed, thousands of business collapsed, home repossessions and evictions soared. And now this.

Ha-Joon Chang in 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism has shown that the number of countries experiencing a banking crisis shot up after the beginning of the 1980s. 20% of countries experienced a banking crisis in the mid nineties, and 35% did following the 2007-8 global financial crisis.

If, for whatever reason, investors lose confidence, says Schweickart, they will stop investing, businesses will stop selling goods and the economy will slump. What we are experiencing now is a chronic loss of confidence in the ability of businesses to sell products as shown by enormous pile of money, estimated at £750bn in the UK, that corporations are sitting on and not using.

Keynesian economists, Chang included, would argue that, while instability is a feature of capitalism, it can be overcome. Restraints on finance and banking, exchange controls which don’t allow capital to leave countries, and encouraging labour to receive more of a share of profits, can achieve this. The economist Hyman Minsky said in 1982: “The most significant economic event of the era since World War 2 is something that has not happened: there has not been a deep and long-lasting depression.” But actually, the Keynesian era did end in a recession, in 1974. So Keynesianism was not able to eradicate capitalist instability.

Many economists now believe that another financial crisis is just waiting to happen

The consequences of this recurring instability can be seen in interrupted careers, destroyed relationships and life chances, evictions, home repossessions, and social unrest. The economic historian Karl Polanyi, writing during the Second World War, described capitalism’s strange ability to create “unheard of material welfare” but a simultaneous “catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people”.

The systemic instability of capitalism is the cause of the current and prolonged economic downturn and government budget deficits. “Capitalism went into the toilet” is how the American economist Richard Wolff expressed the situation in very technical language. It is not the result of poor people being profligate, immigrants, government over-spending, the EU (although the Euro may have exacerbated the problem) or selfish human nature in general. But while capitalism is the cause that cannot be seen as the cause, for the consequences of that cause and effect equation are unacceptable to the rulers of our society, other culprits have to be located. Hence this

This element of capitalist instability is quite apart from the everyday instability it involves: the speculation, for example, that pushes the price of essentials, such as cereals, beyond the reach of ordinary people in poor countries and causes hunger.

The best of all possible worlds

The above characteristics provide a corrective to the constant drip of capitalist celebration to the effect that the world we live in is the best imaginable. But others, not simple capitalist apologists, claim that capitalist amounts to the best achievable world and is far better than any humanity has experienced before.

John Lanchester in his book about the financial crisis, Whoops!, says he believes that western liberal democracies [all capitalist after all] are best societies that have ever existed, “which is not the same thing as saying they are perfect. Citizens of those societies are, on aggregate, the most fortunate people who have ever lived.”

The foundations of this belief will be examined in the next part. With capitalism, does the good ultimately outweigh the bad?