{"id":21352,"date":"2016-07-03T17:28:47","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T22:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21352"},"modified":"2016-07-03T17:28:47","modified_gmt":"2016-07-03T22:28:47","slug":"brexit-and-the-crisis-of-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21352","title":{"rendered":"Brexit and the Crisis of Capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brexit and the Crisis of Capitalism<\/a><\/h3>\n

If you collapse these extractive, debt-dependent crony-capitalist cartels, you collapse the entire status quo.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Thousands of commentaries have been issued about Brexit in the past week.<\/b>I’ve written four myself. Most discuss Brexit as the result of immigration issues, class war, political theater, a reaction against the European Union’s bureaucratic power, sovereignty, etc. Other essays focus on the potential upsides or downsides of Brexit.<\/p>\n

What few if any commentators present is the idea that Brexit is a symptom of the Crisis of Capitalism<\/b>.<\/p>\n

The current global version of Capitalism is characterized by these overlapping dynamics:<\/p>\n

1. Replacing stagnant real growth and income (and thus taxes) with debt.<\/p>\n

2. Replacing investment in real-world productivity with speculation (i.e. financialization)<\/p>\n

3. Replacing \u201ceveryone must have skin in the game\u201d free-market capitalism withprotected, privileged Elites crony capitalism<\/i>\u00a0in which the few benefit at the expense of the many.<\/p>\n

4. Replacing local, decentralized democracy and ownership with central planning.<\/p>\n

5. Using \u201cextend and pretend\u201d financial trickery to mask insolvency, impaired assets\/ collateral and non-performing loans rather than address the debt overhang directly via write-downs and liquidations of impaired assets.<\/p>\n

If real (adjusted for inflation) growth and wages were increasing organically<\/b>(i.e. as the result of free-market dynamics rather than central-planning manipulation)there would be no need for financialization, \u201cextend and pretend\u201d or central planning.<\/b><\/p>\n

These ills are the status quo’s “fixes” to the Crisis of Capitalism, which arises from these causes:<\/p>\n

1. It is no longer profitable to hire people to do an expanding range of work<\/b>, from minding the jumble store on high street to writing software code that has been automated.<\/p>\n

There is no fix for this.<\/b>\u00a0As I explain in my book\u00a0A Radically Beneficial World<\/a>, the idea that we can “tax the robots” to generate the $2.4 trillion we’d need to make a Universal Guaranteed Income a reality in the U.S. is pure fantasy, as profits collapse as the cost of those commoditized tools decline.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brexit and the Crisis of Capitalism If you collapse these extractive, debt-dependent crony-capitalist cartels, you collapse the entire status quo.\u00a0 Thousands of commentaries have been issued about Brexit in the past week.I’ve written four myself. Most discuss Brexit as the result of immigration issues, class war, political theater, a reaction against the European Union’s bureaucratic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5582,111,127,150,182,195,279,284,14150,1302],"class_list":["post-21352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-brexit","tag-capitalism","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-collapse","tag-crony-capitalism","tag-debt","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-oftwonminds","tag-status-quo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21353,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21352\/revisions\/21353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}