Capitalism in terminal decline: the compelling empirical data trends (short summary)
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As the technological mode of production evolves from labour-assisted mechanisation to supervised automation, the labour time required for commodity production is disappearing — increasingly making private relations (ownership) of production and therefore capitalism historically obsolete; and world communism — a publicly/commonly-owned, decommodified economy — an economic necessity for the first time.
In other words, the faster and more abundantly we make things, the more their exchange or monetary value withers away. Profit = growth = devaluation = less profit per commodity; logically eventually making profit-based production unsustainable.
Whereas the mechanical mechanisms that have characterised capitalism are binary — like the division of labour, class, and competition that characterise capitalism — automated operations are (increasingly) non-binary — like the holistic, (post-competition) co-operative nature of a classless, fully communist society (i.e. globally).
With destributed, decentralised, additive and automated technologies emerging — smartphones, solar panels, 3D-printing, drones, humanoids, replicable lab-grown materials (including food), and so on — people are tending to become more independent from both employers and commodity-sellers, again making capitalism increasingly obsolete.
Communism cannot emerge ‘unilearnerly’ because of capitalism’s wild boom-and-bust cycles; or without a communist working class movement to resist and overcome attacks from an increasingly aggressive capitalist class desperate to reverse dwindling profitability. Nor is communism a guaranteed historical outcome, due to the existential threat of i) accelerating climate change, a result of capital’s ever-greater need to commodify nature; and ii) potential nuclear conflict, a rising possibility due to intensifying competition over dwindling profits.
Nevertheless, long-term empirical data trends provide compelling evidence indicating that capitalism is in terminal decline and must be replaced (of course not necessarily in one fell swoop) by a fully (globally) publicly-owned economy.
Presented together clearly and coherently, this information must be put at the forefront of communist agitation and used to transform common economic knowledge.
➤ The estimated aggregate ‘world rate of profit’ (above) has trended towards zero, from an estimated average of 43% in the 1870s to 11% in the 2010s.
➤ Rates of interest (a form of profit) over (at least) the past seven centuries have trended towards zero, where short-term central bank rates were stuck for most of the period after 2009 — record lows in both the US and UK, the traditional capitalist superpowers.
Ending recessions, however, requires an average 6% cut in the central bank rate (to cheapen capital, incentivising new borrowing and investment).
➤ Despite the falling prices of robots and automation — replacing costlier and slower-working, break-taking workers — Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and labour productivity growth rates are trending towards zero (or even continual ‘negative growth’).
➤ Prices have also closed in on zero — at exponential pace as, amid accelerating innovation, productive output tends to double absolutely every 25 years. X number of commodities made in half as much time as before, all else being equal, cost half as much.
One gigabyte of data storage, for example, fell from $193,000 in 1980 to just $0.03 in 2014.
➤ Despite the decades of privatisation of publicly-owned industry since circa 1980; along with decades of falling real wages and falling corporation tax — all enforced by the capitalist class to offset falling profit rates — the number of publicly-listed (not publicly owned) US companies fell (via bankruptcies and mergers) from 8,000 in 1996 to 4,500 in 2016 and 3,700 in 2022.
Similarly the number of companies listed on the UK stock exchange fell from 2,415 in 2008 to 1,646 in 2021. In Argentina the number fell from 321 in 1975 to 85 in 2021.
➤ Of seven major merger and acquisition waves in the US since the 1890s, four have taken place since 1989.
➤ Between 1964 and 2014, the average lifespan of S&P 500 companies shrank from around 60 to 18 years.
➤ According to Goldman Sachs, about 50% of listed US firms are unprofitable, trending up from about 10% in 1960.
➤ From 1977 to 2013, startups as a share of all US firms fell from 16.5% to 8%, a decline pervasive across states and sectors.
➤ Almost half, 43%, of around 9,000 commercial banks in the US disappeared between 2000 and the end of 2017 (already down from 14,000 in 1986 and 30,000 in 1921).
➤ The share of entrepreneurs among US households declined by half between 1985 and 2014, from roughly 8% to 4% — the capitalist class is dying out.
➤ UK investors are now holding onto their shares for 0.8 years on average — down from 9.7 years in 1980, a decline of 91.75%.
In the US the figure is down from five years in 1975 to 10 months in 2022.
➤ Whereas the capitalist class is a relatively dwindling minority of the world population, the working class (people who work for a wage) has been growing exponentially.
➤ Fossil fuels and energy are becoming too expensive to produce profitably — meaning we are not producing enough energy to reproduce the energy capital accumulation depends on.
➤ To offset falling profitability by economising production, capital accumulation is increasingly dependent on mergers between and central planning within private enterprise. (Private enterprise central planning includes: centralised databases; elimated internal markets (no interdepartment competition); digital stock tracking with real-time feedback (auto-planning); etc.)
A ‘final merger’ — necessitating a public-owned economy since no exchange of ownership is necessary in a total monopoly — with central planning of the economy as a whole and social accumulation replacing capital accumulation is consequently becoming an economic necessity for the first time.
➤ Like any other commodity, the value of the US dollar — the world’s dominant reserve currency since the end of WWII — has tended to decline as absolute productivity has risen, losing close to 100% of its purchasing power in the past century.
With money becoming obsolete, it must be replaced by a (digital, non-transferable) voucher system, pegged to labour time.
➤ As capital’s proftiability wanes, its dependence on state subsidies, contracts and facilities rises — making it increasingly dependent on war, surveillence, etc. — increasingly bleeding dry the tax base and taxpayer; as well as the worker through wage/welfare cuts and unemployment and the consumer through production cuts and inflation. The dwindling capitalist class therefore stimulates an intensifying class struggle and eventually bites off more than it can chew.
With society’s economic-technical basis evolving evermore away from ‘anarchic mechanised commodity production’ and closer to ‘planned automated utility production’, ‘state monopoly capitalism’ therefore evolves towards ‘state monopoly socialism’, necessitaing political and social revolution.
An all-socialist state — with the rule of the working class replacing the rule of the capitalist class — is required to enforce the conclusion of this historical transition (by enforcing the end of the enforcement of the dictatorship of capital).
To ensure the socialist state itself does not bite off more than it can chew, it should likely start out by nationalising only core, essential industries (land, steel, etc) and public utilities (rail, mail, internet, etc) with a view to taking the rest of the economy under state/public ownership in the long run.
The socialist state should probably use expropriation by compensation to disincentivise violent counter-revolution as much as possible. Options to pursue include: nationalising companies as and when they go bankrupt; having the state purchase 51% of shares in a company with a view to increasing the figure to 100% as quickly as possible; setting up new (social) enterprises that outcompete private rivals by providing higher quality and lower-priced goods and services. Further long-term compensation for the final capitalists and landlords, via long-term debt payments, can be utilised if necessary. They should also be allowed to keep their primary homes and holiday homes and offered important roles in social enterprises in order to motivate their defection and harness their expertise (something particularly important in the case of farmers, who can lease land from the state during the period of transition to full communism).
Once all private enterprise (globally) has been taken under public ownership — replacing for-profit commodity production with (therefore more productive) break-even utility-production (since the fetter of the profit necessity is removed) — the state (by definition the rule of one class over another) will have withered away since both class and the authority of one class over another will have been abolished.
With the increasing speed, inexpensiveness and decentralisation of production (as with smartphones and laptops, for example) increasingly enabling abundant material wealth for all (with everyone owning their own increasingly capable 3D printers, humanoid robots and precision fermentation labs, etc.) ‘lower communism’ will then evolve into ‘higher communism’; with the voucher system becoming obsolete any initially relatively hierarchical centrality of the socialist governing structure increasingly decentralising (especially as the counter-revolution fades) as previously poor peripheral regions and zones become increasingly prosperous.
See the full in-depth analysis
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Ted Reese is the author of:
Abundant Material Wealth For All: (Draft) Manifesto For The Coming World Socialist Revolution
Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown
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