Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, confirms: “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from 90 percent for the cohort born in 1940).”
But even if true, is the implication that capitalism was better then than now?
In the same vein, pathologies arising from increased financialization have been “blamed on the disappearance of capitalism in its classical form, with the latter now painted in retrospect as a system in which market logics led to productive investment, more-or-less shared growth and functional politics.” But haven’t we always been told capitalism is bad, albeit winners and losers vary across space or time?
In contrast, it is easy to make an empirical case that recent developments in capitalism are not all that new:
In the field of study I’m in — platform labour studies — there is this story that platformisation is tied to the rise of a precariat, that we have these social and labour norms from the postwar era, and that they have been degraded by neoliberalism, of which one feature is platformisation. It’s one part of a broader narrative of the decline of the postwar social contract. For me, what’s missing from this story is that the postwar social contract was only ever a reality for a very small group of workers at a very historically specific moment.
Actually, that postwar social contract had very much been based on exclusions, exploitation and extraction from the majority of the world’s workforce. What we’re seeing now is simply the category of people that have access to that social contract is rapidly shrinking. That’s being read as a new kind of phenomenon when actually, it’s the generalisation of a phenomenon that has existed for a huge number of people.
In other words, many of our parents and grandparents were suffering under capitalism all along just as we are.
But any such conclusion leads to an obvious question: What if the seriatim crises of capitalism are treated as proof-positive not of its death rattle but of its vitality in morphing losers after losers?
Sources
https://ourtime.substack.com/p/seven-theses-on-brenner-and-rileys
https://www.common-wealth.org/centre-for-democratising-work/interview-dalia-gebrial 1/211/21
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 