I've always also seen it as an inevitable consequence of the upward mobility of wealth within capitalism, which is a feature, not a bug.
If there was one thing that capitalism was supposed to deliver on, it was "the American Dream," or the idea that anyone with a strong enough work ethic or a good enough idea could become prosperous, particularly independently prosperous through private ventures. Now, it bears mentioning that even if the American Dream as a concept did exist at some point it was only after a class of western european white men butchered indigenous people and brutalized slaves to start accumulating wealth in North America, and, at least in hindsight and to oversimplify, the concept in general in terms of it being relevant for newcomers to America especially was surely more of a propaganda effort to purposefully increase the country's stock of motivated laborers who had it in their heads that the boss making a dollar on them making a dime was some mystical fast track to prosperity so long as they just stuck to their guns.
What I find most bewildering about capitalism and especially the role of the United States in it all, is that, for a moment, it actually looked like capitalism was going to actually deliver on that promise. It would never have been socialism, and I feel obligated to mention it likely wouldn't have meant much for the global south in the long run, but the sorts of things like Keynesian economics and the west in earnest trying to win a moral victory in the actually cold parts of the cold war, maybe even if the nascent environmentalist movements that were crushed by the rise of neoliberalism, in my opinion anyway, could have cemented capitalism as a dominant ideology for a very long time. In this day and age I think even a lot of people who aren't communists can look back at McCarthyism and see how absurd it is, but to some degree, I think it's worth admitting that that was going on during a time when the (predominantly white of course) working class were being given more than just an illusion of a promise of getting in on the benefits of the post war economic surge. Capitalist propaganda had a lot of self aware benefactors who didn't own factories. I mean, also still worth mentioning it was definitely not as monumental of an economic shift as was well underway in the USSR and about to really kick off in China, but I digress.
Wealth still certainly had an upward trajectory, again to mention most viciously in the global south towards their current and former colonizers one way or another, but at least for a brief window for the white working class in America, capitalism was learning how to tap the brakes and take scenic detours. Wealth having an upward trajectory has never meant that the rich weren't getting richer, they always were, but they were accumulating excess wealth at a slower rate, the cycle of wealth put much more economic power into a greater number of hands, and significantly more people overall (always have to specify it was still certain people and they were disproportionately white and men) were given a wage which kept them not just above poverty but stably and comfortably so.
Summary: Without needing to issue a correction in a future post of mine, regarding the mode of production capitalism. you do, under certain circumstances, "[gotta hand it to them](https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576?lang=en)," in the sense that capitalism as a mode of production is quite effective at the process of Making Shit. It's at an abominable, unforgivable human cost, and, well, the USSR and China represent at least a somewhat compelling argument for why socialism is still better, capitalism did result in a lot of shit getting made, and for a handful of decades it looked like it was actually going to redistribute that in a way that would have cemented it as a political and economic ideology for I think a very long time.
Once again it's obvious in hindsight, though, but I think capitalism has signed its own death warrant in advance in the tectonic shift in economic practice brought on by neoliberalism. And, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit here, but the most absurd contradiction within neoliberalism to me is that it's a bad scam run by total morons who simply had enough political power to ensure even their bad scam worked even though it was dogshit.
Like... not to be haughty or anything, but the Reagan administration's economic reforms not producing their intended purpose by the end of the Reagan administration should have set off alarm bells in anyone who knows a grift when they see one, right? A big part of that is that aforementioned McCarthyism of course, but jeeze. The exact wrong thing for capitalism to do is doggedly avoid address its most glaring contradiction, which is wealth inequality. Reaganomics represents not just a refusal to address income inequality, it represents the proposal that by temporarily deepening income inequality those that benefit from it will temporarily will return the favor by lessening it in the next fiscal year or whatever. Now, I don't want to be so crass as to say I think it's human nature to be selfish, but let's at least take note that making a show of telling workers that capitalists exploiting them will be good for them in the long run, and then giving those same capitalists not only much more power to exploit workers but also in a sense actually ramping up the competition among their own class to not have to be the one who trickles down their wealth first (would would make them less competitive among their own class), gives these capitalists both the moral justification and the profit incentive to just continue on that tack endlessly.
Economically speaking neoliberalism isn't just capitalism refusing to address its most glaring contradiction, it's self interested parties who benefit from that contradiction actually mutating that contradiction into a recursive form. In a broad sense the upward mobility of wealth isn't just a constant, it's accelerating, and its rate of acceleration is also accelerating. Income inequality keeps increasing not only because people benefit from it, but the people who benefit from its increase believe that it is part of some grand project that will work itself out in the end. Despite 50 years of contrary evidence, of course.
Continually what is most frustrating to me about this is that the solutions really are that simple. Again if there is one thing that is admirable about capitalism it's that it has thoroughly abstracted wealth and production in a way that makes it something that is possible to manipulate on a grand scale with minimal oversight. So much of our society has now become financialized, and how I understand that in a broad sense is that it has been calculated and then represented as an abstract but relatively easy to understand value. At least, in an ideal application of the theory, it's a standardization of the social value of pretty much anything. I like to think of interviews and stuff I've read from Kim Stanley Robinson, not unlike [this one](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-22/kim-stanley-robinson-let-the-fed-print-money-for-the-planet). Now, I think how right or wrong Stanley-Robinson is is kind of beside the point, 'cause I just don't know how much I trust a guy who's getting published in Bloomberg and the Jacobin, but I do think he is one of those real good Understander types, he really knows what's going on in the world, which is a different skill from knowing what is a practical strategy to affect change within it. But I do think, couching this in his own perspective of pure, even wishful speculation, that the sorts of reforms he proposes in interviews like this, would _probably actually work._ It would be yet another way capitalism could do like, not a 180 degree turn, but maybe like, a 45 degree turn or a 90 degree turn at best. In another interview he puts it quite bluntly:
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However... and to be fair to Stanley-Robinson I do think he would agree with this, capitalism as a systemic process likely isn't going to budge on the trajectory it's on without some unmitigated, unavoidable, inundating catastrophe, and, well, even then, I don't know those in power will make the right decisions even then. Those self interested parties are basically in a great big circle, and they all constantly keep knives pointed at each other's backs. Even the ones that want to stop this, know that to do so is class sabotage/betrayal, and that meaningful attempts to mitigate the oncoming catastrophe are more likely to find them with a knife in their back and the good they tried to do snatched up by people with one fewer knife. And, to circle back around to police, they have put in an enormous amount of resources to arm their very own centuries-early shock troops to protect their own class positions. A often use "corporate fiefdoms" in a provocative way, but honestly, it's kind of appropriate, if you abstract some things. It's petty self interested warlords just shifting borders between them incrementally, sometimes taking advantage of weakness and carving up one of their own, sometimes entering alliances of convenience, but for the most part, it's a system that persists by claiming its own brutal efficiency is for the good of the lord as well as the serf, and isn't shy about putting serfs' heads on pikes to prove it.
The financialization of the economy and the opening up via neoliberalism to base absurd amounts of economic activity on speculation is another significant marker of just how fucked up and also profoundly shallow it all is. Capitalists say it themselves, well, I don't have liquid assets, I have a bunch of really big numbers in a lot of really big computers, or I have land title, or I just have other guys with big numbers in computers who think giving me their computer number means I can increase everyone's computer number. What we've got is the worst possible result of this financialization of economics wherein the economy has locked itself into a death spiral literally because a few hundred morons enabled some buggy settings and moved some sliders. If an enormous amount of the abstract wealth in the world exists purely as a representation of the potential for the expansion of wealth, now what the economy is best at is lying about its own purpose. Suitable for an economy that responded to enormous increases to productivity through automation by inventing pointless, recursive, and often just fake jobs to do (a la [Graeber](https://youtu.be/kikzjTfos0s), RIP).
And the really big kicker there is that it's an all consuming idea, and has permeated down for about a generation as equivalent to natural law. There are way, way too many working class people who are utterly convinced of the fact that Number Go Up is a sign that The Conomy is doing what it's supposed to do. Even after what has been decades of the same promise being repeated ad nauseum with no fundamental changes. We are downright in the midst of a financialization of epistemology at this point, where the idea that meaning can be derived from something's relation to an abstract expression of an accumulation of wealth has embedded itself into how people view the world. The first question anyone asks about any social change is how expensive it is, how much profit will it generate, who will pay for it, etc. How well an elected government is perceived to be performing is not about policies or the impacts of those policies, but about those policies generating more (naturally most often speculative) wealth, or at least using accumulated wealth efficiently or justly, but more than anything it's what that government did to address its debt, its surplus or deficit spending, how corrupt they may be, and so on. I mean, this isn't even how economists understand and apply finance, it's not necessarily how governments actually formulate budgets so much as it is how they manipulate their voting bases, yet economic despair is so omnipresent in so many peoples' lives that a preoccupation with relating everything to wealth is I suppose unavoidable. If some motherfucker can nudge a slider in one direction and then a meaningful number of people making roughly your income with roughly your amount of debt is at severe risk of homelessness if not death within the next 5 years, it's not a preoccupation I don't understand.
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuh I don't know where I was going with all of this. Just analyzing freely out loud I guess.
