| I think you're being overly defensive about his use of the word "capitalism", and in doing so have missed the entire point of the article. > Secondly, he's citing 'information technology' as being the death of 'capitalism'. An industry, arguably the most aggressively capitalistic. He's not talking about the info-tech industry being capitalistic, but rather some of the contradictions inherent within a capitalistic info-tech industry. Relying on scarcity of a product that has effectively zero marginal cost is a very strange place to be in. > Then he talks about corporate monopolies (anyone who's read economics 101 would tell you corporate monopolies are rarely result of unadulterated capitalism, but rather state corporatism). And anyone who's gotten beyond econ 101 knows that these black-and-white conceptions of the econ 101 capitalism have little to do with modern economic discourse or policy. > He mentions big companies using public data, most of that public data is generated, collected and shared openly by private companies to start with. I'm not even sure what his point was there... His point was that trying to make a business around owning, hoarding, and making scarce the public and private interactions of the populace at large (e.g. Facebook) is a shaky foundation. > Then he talks about alternative currencies, something which bloomed in response to flailing, devaluing state currencies. Which is just about the most free-market response to state currencies... This is where I started to become really convinced you had missed the forest for the trees. Yes, non-state currencies are a pet project of free-market purists. Yes, they are also a huge pet project of post-capitalists and marxists. If you would stop labeling the author as one of "them" in your political world-view that you are sworn to defeat, I think you may start to see a lot of parallels between what he's describing and what you seem to think of as "free-market capitalism". > The next paragraph he references briefly the 'sharing economy', something pioneered and spearheaded by companies such as Airbnb and Lyft. Truly great success stories of consumer capitalism. Again, you're so obsessed with your definitions of these labels that you're missing the whole point. "AirBnB and Lyft are private companies, therefore they cannot have anything to do with a large-scale transition in market dynamics!" sounds rather silly, don't you think? Especially when the author speaks incessantly about how new models are emerging naturally within old systems rather than the traditionally marxist conception of workers using the state to effect change? > "The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working." - What? Our public spending has increases by £50bn, how is this 'austerity'? The cuts have slowed down our public spending and even that has made us one of the strongest economies in Europe. So I'm not sure where he's getting the 'not working' from. I don't know what world you live in where you don't think we're in a period of "austerity" right now. That's literally all that finance ministers and politicians and bankers and economists are talking about. Whether or not this fits your pet definition of what "austerity" should mean, the rest of us are going to continue using that word in the way that we have been using it and all seem to understand just fine. > Most of the fluffy scenarios he describes, whereby private individuals make voluntary, mutually beneficial agreements with each other, is almost the very definition of capitalism! Again -- you're focusing on proving the author wrong ("Haha! Contracts made without threats of violence are capitalism, but you said capitalism was ending!") rather than even beginning to listen to what he was saying in a holistic manner. If you're fanatically obsessed with defending a econ 101 definition of capitalism: sure, you got him. There will still be voluntary mutually beneficial agreements; capitalism will survive. For the rest of us: this article was not about the word "capitalism", it was about what arrangement of "voluntary, mutually beneficial agreements" can be expected to exist, writ large, in a system where marginal cost of production quickly approaches zero. |