I am aware that the West’s best time was essentially at the expense of the rest of the world - but where can one find opportunity and prosperity of those times today? Was this a great anomaly of history? Is it time to hedge your bets on living out the Chinese dream?
Is it time for the West to accept that what our parents experienced will never exist again?
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again? (It’s too unsustainable - for the planet, and because superprofits won’t flow as they once did)
What has actually happened that’s caused it to collapse?
The west can’t return to pre-2008 levels of growth and living standards, capitalism has run it’s course, it has peaked somewhere between late 1900s and early 2000s and is now firmly on the decline, modern forces of production have reached such a high level of automation that the rates of profits are all but razor thin across almost every single industry and that the return on investment on further innovation or infrastructure projects are close to 0 if not negative.
All recent attempt from capitalists to create new ways to generate value in our ultra automatized society, from bitcoin and NFTs to AIs have failed or are about to fail, because as Marx and Engels showed machines and financial assets cannot create new value, only human labor can. On top of that, the western fantasy that Europeans and Americans don’t need to work in fields and factories anymore and can just have their entire economy be desk and retail jobs is evaporating as the growing BRICS block start allowing global south country to get around the unequal exchange based imperial order that allow the west to pull their wealth, resources and low end and industrial goods from the global south.
As a result, in the imperial core infrastructure is rotting away never being properly maintained let alone replaced, and “innovation” is now a pointless spectacle of billionaires going on stage to wow crowds of techbros with promises of new shiny technologies that either never materialize or end up never living up to the promises, and standards of living for the common peoples are decreasing as capitalists try to get what they can’t get out of innovation, assets and imperialism anymore out of us instead.
Capitalism is utterly incapable of going back or solving the problems it created for itself. The only way for Europe or the US to improve their situation would be to have a revolution take control of the most important aspects of the economy and guide it to make sure it does what needs to be done like China is doing. Something the free market neo-liberals would never dare do.
AI is coming and it’s going to be transformative. It’s also going to be extraordinarily bad for workers. There has never been a better time to be a capitalist.
This is why things will never improve. As long as things improve for the bourgeoisie they’re more than happy to turn us into batteries for the AI god
Yes and no, certainly excluding the workers from the production process as much as possible is something the bourgeoisie want to do and that the AI technology, as much as they are merely stochastic parrots, make possible.
However, as I said, they won’t be able to make much profit from it if any at all, it’s just too high a level of automation for surplus value extraction to be feasible, in fact the AI business is already unprofitable right now, only the less than a hand-full of AI companies aren’t in the red and only because of massive subsidies and ridiculously overvalued stock prices due to the AI hype bandwagon.
AI is in a financial bubble, right now the bourgeoisie can’t shut up about it because line go up so must buy stocks and firing workers make line go up but sooner or later it will pop, the capitalists will realize they can’t extract profit out of it and panic as competition prevents them from going back to extracting surplus value out of actual workers, this will likely trigger a massive crisis of overproduction that will cost the bourgeoisie trillions, the biggest in history and possibly the last. The day AI is systematically implemented by capitalists across most industries will be the day the rates of profits finally tick down to 0. They can’t win, no matter their economic power they still can’t go against the way the capitalist system works fundamentally, it’s the basis of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
I do agree, tough, that it will be hell for the proletariat, our condition are gonna worsen like no previous crisis of overproduction had never made them worsen before. But that also mean that the fight for socialism is now or never, now is when we must push forward our alternative, because if we don’t start right now when the conditions are still relatively stable, we won’t be ready to take the punch when the approaching boiling point of capitalism’s primary contradiction arrives.
There will be no surplus value gained from it on net, maybe a little, but it represents a massive shift in the allocation of surplus value from the worker to the capitalist. Pretty much anything that is currently being done in an office is going to get annihilated.
The things that require no business context-- copy generation, image creation, entry level coding-- have already been wiped out. There are innumerable companies with really smart people currently working out the filtration piece. Someone is going to crack it.
To the point below AI is a bubble and going to burst, but some things will survive. The things that survive are going to be giants. Capital markets are already starting to price this in. The rotation into the mag 7 represent the partial capture of future labor spend of literally every single enterprise.
This is like looking at covid coming over the horizon in late 2019 or early 2020. The conditions in the US were set up in such a way that you knew, when this thing landed, that it was going to be a death blow. The atomization, the lack of solidarity, for profit healthcare, no paid sick leave, vaccine skepticism. Just the perfect breeding ground for disastrous outcomes.
Now for AI, zero worker protections, no solidarity, fifty years of precedent for dying for the line, threadbare social protections, endemic fascist tendencies, heightened political tensions. AI is going to break this place
I agree
I agree with all this, but still, ultimately these survivor cartels are going to be the “sick man of capitalism”, they will survive and be able to maintain themselves for a time but they won’t be able to thrive (by today’s corporation’s standard I mean) and they won’t be able to go anywhere.
Their economic path is a dead end, with so many jobs gone and labor so devalued by the high level of automation, these companies’ ability to mass produce on a scale never seen before will matter little because most peoples would only be able to buy the produces if they lower the prices so much that they would be systematically selling at a loss, and the few large bourgeois that will remain won’t account for even a 1 000 000th of the demand they would need so selling to them as luxury product won’t cut it either. So it’s all going to rot away with the only way out being revolution.
Quite the opposite I think companies are going to rip. The beneficiaries of these technologies are the owners of the means of production. A huge part of the population will just be locked out of the economy. We know what that looks like already, just look at what’s happened in the black community, or how this place treats indigenous peoples. If you don’t make money you don’t exist. Only this time everyone is getting redlined. Favelas are coming to the US.
A small elite will sit on an increasingly large hoard of wealth and the dispossessed will shoot each other over the scraps. Revolution basically.
What’s interesting about the US now is there is no good outcome. The scenario I paint is if AI succeeds. The alternative is economic collapse 2008 style. Either way this place is cooked
The scenario I paint is if AI succeeds. The alternative is economic collapse 2008 style.
It’s going to be the second one. The chatbots can’t do the things they are selling them to do and eventually the check will come due, there’s absolutely no way they turn this into a never-ending bonanza of riches and productivity. Value still comes from labor.
Value comes from the pairing of labor with technology. A farmer is nothing without the plow, a plow pales in comparison to a tractor.
LLMs are tractors for knowledge workers. But it’s a poison pill in that most of the value shift that comes is in the automation of rote tasks. The point I’m making is that businesses won’t get dramatically more productive, maybe a bit on the margin, but they’ll be able to strip out a massive amount of labor from their operations. This will be a huge boon for return on capital which is the only productivity the capitalists actually care about.
AI is coming and it’s going to be transformative.
Is it tho? The first few iterations of LLMs were pretty impressive and showed promise but it seems to me like progress is slowing down, also pretty much all AI companies are operating at a loss with seemingly no end in sight, these things suck up all the hardware and electricity you can get and even the best models are not even all that useful right now, they still make mistakes and can’t really do anything original. The only real winner in the AI race is Nvidia lmao.
It’s definitely a bubble that’s gonna pop, some of it is going to survive but I don’t at all expect society to fundamentally transform due to these things.
Yeah it really is. I was the world’s #1 hater and without getting into this much detail I ended up being in a position where like it or not I do this for a living. The technology is real. You can draft contracts without a paralegal, you can process invoices without accountants. As the technology progresses more and more will be subsumed.
Yeah writing boilerplate documents/emails/code/whatever is what it’s good at, not much more.
I’m a software developer by trade and in my experience those things aren’t all that good at coding unless you’re really really specific about what you want and it’s not super complicated. I like using it for some utility scripts and some boring boilerplate stuff but beyond that it’s just not all that useful.
So a good example is we had to refactor some models to use pyspark, and our data scientists were able to speed up the process probably 3x by using Claude. Like it won’t take you start to finish, this process that is being sold is a definitive lie, but it will dramatically increase productivity when properly applied. And as people figure out how to improve the results through proper context application, the use cases will grow. That shit destroys jobs. Because now a data scientist can do 3x as much.
The things can’t think, but they are basically intellectual mech suits, and the societal implications are profound. A lot of folks on hexbear I think dismiss the tech prematurely without really understanding what it is or how it works
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It’s not going to happen unless we guillotine all the bourgeoisie who are responsible for taking more and more and more from us every year
Yeah I HIGHLY doubt we’re going back. If the bourgeoise can’t even bear a socdem like Bernie they ain’t letting the poor catch any more breaks.
Well yes, but at the same time, in the case of a lot of western Europe, the socdem policies were on the back of imperialist profits. Is that preferable?
Synthesis: Socdem will permanently thrive in Western Europe, but it’s because burgerland volunteers to be the exploited sweatshop.
No but I’m just saying
Oh fun
What would actually happen if we did that? What do you envisage?
While it might mean boosted public services, I don’t think it brings us back to that time. That time was a time of cheap consumerism, which for many was luxurious.
I could afford expensive consumerism if I didn’t have half my paycheck going to rent (now a mortgage). Your idea of “cheap” is skewed when every single economic interaction in our society has some rent seeking fuck skimming value from you in the process. Literally just imagine society without all of that. Every single thing should be cheaper than it is simply by virtue of eliminating the bourgeois and their ability to expropriate value from us.
It’s true, my rent is exorbitant. Almost half my paycheck goes to it, and I just have a smal room in a flat share. The kitchen is tiny. Life would certainly be better without the existence of landlords.
Not even just landlords, every “employer” sustains itself in the same way
You go to work. You make a product. You’re paid a small portion of that product’s value as a wage. They HAVE TO pay you less than the actual value of your labor or else there’s no profit to make up their own income.
And THEN you have to pay rent from that tiny portion that you’re actually paid. And give someone profit buying groceries, seeking healthcare, etc. We are literally being nickel and dimed to death, and that’s AFTER a majority of our labor is straight up stolen
True, although I’ve heard groceries are run on pretty thin profit margins - in the UK at least.
yeah it’s not just us paying rent on our living space. the pizza place pays rent, the grocery store pays rent, the store at the mall pays rent (and the mall itself might pay another layer of rent) etc. the farm that grows your food might be paying rent to bill gates.
ugh yeah that too, there are so many levels of everybody just being fucked to death
No. 2008 was the final nail in the coffin for neoliberalism, or at least it should’ve been but the US found a charismatic new face who could carry it further for a while. If capitalism was a functional system, it would’ve at least adjusted itself at that point, but there was no correction or anything and now we’re all trapped onboard this rapidly sinking ship while the boomers who managed to swim ashore are shouting advice that’s at least two decades out of date.
Nah bro just go to trade school. There’s a plumber shortage dontchaknow
Ever is a long time.
I’m hopeful that 2108 or even 3008 will be a more prosperous time for people everywhere than 2008 was.
No, need for ever-increasing profits means it won’t happen under capitalism, and dealing with the fallout from a civil war and the climate crisis will leave a future socialist US too damaged to have that level of prosperity.
Is it time for the West to accept that what our parents experienced will never exist again?
I think this became clear around I want to say 2022, when they started clawing back all the mildly redistributive emergency measures taken once they had convinced people that COVID was no longer an issue.
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again?
Yes. This is extremely problematic for any potential revolution, as imo the main factor that determines if a people support their government is if their standard of living is continually improving.
What has actually happened that’s caused it to collapse?
The bourgeois needing an ever-greater slice of the pie means that workers get less. As most of the populace is workers, this leads to a decline in standard of living.
Will the world overall need to accept that the western living standard of that time will never be reached again?
there is much to be gained through wealth redistribution and rethinking what it means to have a high living standard in a post-capitalism world
Sure, but in reference to the downwardly-mobile white “middle class” of America I don’t know if this bears true. Things like cheap meat or international travel can’t be allowed to reach those levels again.
I think it’s possible but unlikely. The structural forces that capitalism generates tend towards an ever shrinking share for the worker, and that sure suggests that this continues until something breaks, like finally prompting a revolution, or collapsing into neo-feudalism. But that’s just the main, most likely future. It’s tempting to reduce predictions down to the most likely handful of options, but history is full of chaotic bullshit. Maybe the next time capitalism reinvents itself leads to a lull in how much workers are exploited, maybe some new ideological movement causes a change completely sideways to “socialism or barbarism”, maybe tech actually does save us after all.
But most likely, yeah, continually worsening conditions until something breaks.
The global south is the place to be now imo. Many places have been barred from prosperity due to overexploitation enabled by Western hegemony. Now that is declining, being Speedrun in fact by the relentless dedication of comrade JDPON Don. We have seen a broad rotation towards China in LatAm for example, belt and road in Africa, the story in the Sahel is very positive.
As the empires ability to project economic power wanes, the global south will finally have the ability to exercise self determination. Billions will be pulled out of poverty.
AI will decimate US work forces, infrastructure will continue to decay, and those left over will be clawing each other like animals. Full blown fascism is here and will only continue to worsen.
Grab your shit and move to Mexico, great things are coming.
100% agree that anywhere in the global south is better than the rapidly decaying imperial core, but let’s not forget that all of latin america (outside of cuba and vz partially) still has not gone through stage 1 of socialism: nationalizing all key industries and land under a communist party. This process has always required a civil war also, everywhere we find it.
So all the negatives of high rents and low wages are inevitable without that first step. These countries are still 50+ years behind the PRC or Vietnam, and have no hope of escaping capitalism or neoliberalism until they take the first step:
Obstacles to the China path in Latin America
I do believe that if there is a list of countries to go socialist next, many of them would be in latin america, or at least hundreds of times more likely than any imperial core country.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The problem is so many of our elites get taught at US schools and then come back preaching neoliberalism. More countries in the global south are going to face the same problems as the US than people think.
Guatemala is a head scratcher to be sure. The largest economy to still recognize Taiwan
Mi gente what are you doing
But also that’s the type of thing that will reverse in the coming years with the waning of US influence… I hope… Maybe
It’s because our right-wing is so heavily captured by the US thanks to the civil war and the Evangelical missionaries. We even opened up an embassy in Jerusalem.
I think stuff like that will reverse but the brainwashing done by the “educated” elites who believe neoliberalism, car culture, and AI will make our economy the size of Germany is going to lead to bigger issues.
Its crazy because I dont want an suv or smartphonr or a house in the suburbs or a personal kitchen or any of the things you get with the western standard of living
I want nature and community within walking distance, which is something you don’t need modern levels of development for
Like, hospitals and running water are cool and I’d kind of give up the rest of modernity gladly
Its worthwhile too to look at what happened with imperial Rome’s decline. A few hundred years of civil wars, imperial overextension, political instability, famine/food shortages, disease and plagues, until everyone either left or died. By the time rome was finally conquered, it had something like 1% of its max population.
I firmly believe this process will happen much quicker than a few hundred years for the US and other imperial core countries. We are watching these countries eat themselves in real time, and the pillars that held up their imperialist system (US military and dollar hegemony), are quickly falling out from under it.
Not until we have socialism or a new meta, they have nothing left to pillage
They could climate migration and slave labour to rejuvenate their workforce, otherwise no. The only hope the west has is the them conveniently being the only place in the world to be least affected by climate change, all the bad shit will happen to its enemies
as goofy as it might sound look to the documentary about Fuyao to see the best case scenario for clapistan. Once it’s totally hollowed out the real big hitter countries’ bougies will snap up land and resources and pay powerless proles over here rock bottom wages
How does it pertain to it? Chinese bourgeoisie are going to buy up factories in the hollowed out imperial core and essentially give us a taste of our own medicine?
I don’t know a lot about the actual mechanisms that makes it worth it for these international companies, but the one example I provided was eventually a success. That particular car-glass company went from 1 factory in Ohio that lost money for two years to 3 factories in the midwest.
I’m not sure it’s ‘a taste of our own medicine’ but maybe that Chinese companies are flush with enough capital to eat 1 or 2 years of losses until their production & sales are high enough to sustain the factory. I don’t think it’s gonna be true for every manufacturing sector but in Fuyao’s case the owner is a billionaire and was also ideologically committed to opening an ‘american company’ (eventually all managers were replaced with Chinese managers and the did all they could to suppress a union in Ohio). https://www.netflix.com/title/81090071
No
So what does the end stage entail then? It’s not like 1865 was a great time to be alive.
What about when the graph flat lines? When the rate of profit drops to near 0?
It was earlier in the process of capitalism remaking our world, so the level of profit was higher and investment was high and competition was higher. Of course they had recessions, but the booms were self sustaining and brought improvements to people’s lives. Now we have large government deficits and the federal reserve shoveling money into the economy, because the profit machine won’t run without that juice, yet investment is low and mainly seems to go into locking up an asset and charging rent. With low rate of profit, you can expect asset bubbles and crashes, very low interest rates (no one wants to borrow unless they can make higher profit than the rate of interest, so rates will go down below the rate of profit), bouts of inflation, extreme wealth inequality, because the race will be to buy up and consolidate all the existing stable future cash flows rather than to invent new ones. And that’s the world we live in now. And there’s no reason it ever has to end or change.
Thanks for the insight. How would/should socialism endeavour to solve this problem?
What do you think are the new stable cash flows? If no ones got money to spend, then I suppose its just inelastic demands like food, shelter, and energy?
I know Malthusian solutions aren’t be-all solution, but do child caps prove effective in managing this sort of thing at all?
That is a complex question with many answers. Broadly, profit under capitalism is an accounting thing concerning accumulation of capital. But under socialist economics, if the total societal labor produces more enough to reproduce the labor force and maintain the means of production, then is it a surplus, even when it might be a loss for capitalists, which is actually probably the current state of our civilization because like I said, the government already runs permanent deficits and the federal reserve is also constantly injecting money with quantitative easing, which both raise profits.
Industry can be run to meet social needs and growth can slow without causing economic crises. Under capitalism, technology which allows us to easily produce all that is needed means less labor is needed and that means less profit, then low investment, low employment, low wages, and stagnation. Under socialism, this grows the surplus because more labor can be directed to other activities.
No 08’ will forever be a delineation point.
