Thought Shrapnel

You may have noticed that nostalgia is, well, a vibe at the moment. Why is that? Because the present kinda sucks. Why does it suck? Because we live in completely unequal societies, increasingly ruled by demagogues.

Umair Haque, who used to be omni-present pre-pandemic on Medium seems to now have his own Ghost-powered publication and has written about post-capitalism. It’s long, with short paragraphs, and lots of italicising. But he knows what he’s talking about.

I’ve excerpted the key points, but I’d recommend clicking through and looking at the bullet point list of things he suggests reorientating one’s life and career towards. It was pretty reaffirming for me, with a January of not really enough work on, to know that getting a corporate job isn’t really a long-term solution.

The idea of late capitalism means all that. It means that people are immiserated, exploited, ruined, left desperate. That inequality soars. That there’s no future. That societies lose hope. But instead of coming together and having some kind of constructive revolution, and here we don’t have to agree with Marx, they have a fascist meltdown, which I think we can all agree is a Bad Thing.

People turn on one another. Societies shut down. Companies turn ultra-predatory. Cronyism runs rampant. Economies slide into depression. And instead of some form of positive collective action, the answer to all this tends to be conflict, and maybe even World War.

That’s late capitalism. It’s not just “this is dystopia” or “everything sucks” or even “I’m exploited to the bone.” It has that historical meaning, the very specific one: instead of doing anything positive, making wise decisions, people turn regressive, lose their thinking minds, turn on each other, and instead of the sort of class war Marx envisioned, turn to demagogues who end up starting very real ones instead.

[…]

If you’re middle aged, I’d bet that the above is already beginning to happen to you. You’re being forced out, at least if you’re in a corporate career. Every mistake isn’t just “I could lose the promotion,” it turned into “I could lose this job,” and now it’s, “that’s the end of my career, because I’ll never find another one.”

Understand that and face it. It is true. This trend of forcing middle aged people out—no matter what their accomplishments are—is here to stay now. It is never going away. This is what the “job market” is and will be for the rest of our lives, and probably beyond, because what did we learn earlier? Late capitalism recurs. It isn’t even a “stage,” as Marx’s descendants thought, but something more like a chronic condition. And we, unfortunately, have it.

[…]

The time has come now for many, many people to forge post-capitalist lives, careers, professions, and futures. They might not know it yet. Their despair and bewilderment is a reflection of how little this guiding principle is discussed, understood, or talked about. That doesn’t mean that they all have to go out and be activists or revolutionaries, lol, not at all, we just discussed how being a creator is something that’s post-capitalist.

[…]

What does it mean to “be a post-capitalist"? Many of us are starting to find out. It means running a network, community, organization, thingie, maybe a business, in certain dimensions but not along strictly profit-maximizing capitalist lines, but more humanistic ones, in a sense, and that’s not a bad thing, when you think about it.

Source: the issue.

Image: Kevin Jarrett