Neo-Feudalism, Anti-Capitalism

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism — which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object. – Keynes

Boeing Commercial Airplanes, the main civilian manufacturer of airplanes in the USA, can no longer manufacture reliable airplanes. In the past decade there have been two disastrous crashes of Boeing craft, one incident in which a a blocked door blew out while in flight and one incident when a Boeing plane just dropped fifty feet for no reason the pilot understood. Boeing, which used to have an impeccable safety record. The reasons for this seem to be relentless cost-cutting and a contempt for engineering on the part of the current owners of Boeing. Union-busting seems to have been part of the story.

In other areas, the profitable retailers Toys R Us and Bed Bath and Beyond were bought out, loaded with debt, and shut down. Highly-profitable silicon valley firms are laying off employees for no apparent reason. Google and Facebook have oligopolized the daily advertising business, destroying the business models of newspapers, and hedge funds have bought up and gutted most of what remains. Most journalists in the United States have been laid off and are scrambling independents, if they have not found some other line of work. Whole huge areas of the US economy are being bought up, broken up, and sold in parts, apparently so billionaires can buy more yachts.

The US system of production depends on business owners using their wealth as productive capital and major business owners have abandoned this. If this continues, the end result will be a gutted economy dominated by a handful of wealthy people, like that of Russia or Mexico.

Many of our radicals are calling this “end-stage capitalism.” Yet it is not capitalism at all – it destroys capital. It does not (in my limited knowledge) have a name at all. I call it neo-feudalism or anti-capitalism. Whatever it is, it is destructive of actual economic production. The system of customs, laws, and ownership of industrial production in the USA, what Marxists call the mode of production, has broken down, and is now destroying the means of production. Unlike in Marxist theory, this is not leading to a revolution from the working class and the creation of a communist social order, but instead an economic nihilism, with the very wealthy continuing the process and many younger people complaisant, or actively participating by opposing action as hopeless.

The Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act are initial attempts to repair this failure. I do not think they go far enough; sooner or later, if the US economy is not to be entirely gutted by the very wealthy, the system of corporate ownership of business must be addressed.