What comes after capitalism?

Great Debates
21

I believe there’s a good chance that Artificial Intelligence surpassing the ability of the best humans will be invented in my lifetime.

When that happens, human involvement in the means of production will decline drastically. We’ll still have to have humans overseeing the programming of the robots (to ensure they don’t turn into Skynet), but beyond that we’ll see 99% of humans become obsolete and out of the workforce.

In order to avoid mass starvation, we will have to rethink everything we hold sacred about Private Property and the Protestant Work Ethic. My proposal: Give everybody shares of stock in all the productive AI enterprises, and we can all live off the dividends.

22

A post scarcity welfare state with a high emphasis on individualism. My understanding from reading about robotics is that bipedal robotic servants are 20-50 years away. Which isn’t that long. Within a few decades of hitting the market, they will be far more reliable, affordable and effective than the first generation.

And they will not just do manual labor, but I’m sure more and more complex and intelligent labor too.

So that is where we are headed. We have arguably been on that path for a while.

The industrial, scientific and agricultural revolutions started roughly 300 years ago. Mainstream welfare states started roughly 100 years ago in Germany under Bismark.

Now we have a society where large numbers of people not only do not work, but they consume resources while not producing any. Children go to school while the elderly get retirement pensions. Both are given things like health care, other forms of infrastructure, etc. despite not producing anything in return.

So arguably in our current system, people spend about half their lives not technically producing anything (ages 1-20 as well as 65-85). In the 40~ years they do produce, they only spend about 1/6 of all hours in production.

In the US we spend about 1800 hours a year at work, in places like Germany or Norway it is closer to 1300. This is down from supposedly near 3000+ in the mid 19th century (but up from the pre-industrial age). There are 8760 hours in a year. As it stands now, only about half the human population is in the labor force in developed countries (the rest are kids, retired, stay at home, disabled, etc). Of those who are in the labor force, they spend about 15-20% of the hours in a year at work (not including commutes and not factoring in sleep). But it creates enough wealth to generally provide a tolerable standard of living for everyone. So if you exclude sleep and factor in everyone in the country (ie assume everyone works 24/7), only having 7.5-10% of all potential labor hours devoted to labor results in a very high standard of living.

I think that trend will continue. Higher productivity, a smaller % in the workforce, shorter hours, more welfare.

23

Doesn’t it? See state capitalism.

24

I’ve always wondered if we’re entering an age of corporate feudalism, but that would require everyone riding around on giant worms, and I don’t think I could handle that.

When I was in college, there was a lot of discussion about how we were moving from an industrial economy to an information economy. But given the cost and practical difficulties involved in restricting information flow, I wonder how much longer people will be able to monetize information.

People right now offer value add-ons for information in an attempt to monetize (such as iTunes), but I really wonder how much longer it’s going to be practical to capture that kind of market, given that hacking has such a low cost, and enforcement against hacking has a high cost.

25

That’s exactly where we’re going. Everything is going to get corporatised and we’re all just going to be corporate slaves, ID carded, drug tested, whatever else they come up with. If you get sent to prison you’ll still be working for them except at a slightly lower rate. The only way to avoid it is to work like hell and make sure you’ve got enough dough to make sure you’re one of the few who get the benefits of all this and can pay for lots of quality education for your kids. :slight_smile:

26

smiling bandit - I would agree with most of what you said. Technology has allowed much greater opportunity for small businesses that focus on specialization. An entrepreneur can think of an idea and have it manufactured in China or wherever whereas a few decades ago it would have been prohibitively expensive.

The problem is that most people aren’t entrepreneurs or innovators or high performers looking to lead companies, governments and other organizations. They are, for lack of a less derisive term, entitled drones with moderate or medicore talent and inginuity. That is to say, they are content to do what they are told and collect the paycheck they will use to buy the stuff they need. We call these people the “middle class”. It isn’t that they aren’t hard working. They are just the sort of people who need to be told what to do.

You don’t need to reach a post-scarcity economy to see these trends towards socialism. You can see it now. There seems to be a growing number of highly educated people graduating into a job market where they are unemployed, underemployed or perpetually anxious about their employment status. Faced with dim prospects for finding meaningful careers, they have grown distrustful and resentful towards the very corporate entities they were looking to employ them. And living in a county that has as much wealth as we do, they will petition the government to use that wealth to help them.

Everyone always thinks of “terminator” and “fembot” style humanoid servants when they think of “robots”. Practical robots like the ones we have been using for 30 years look nothing like humans. You don’t need a robot to sit in the driver’s seat and take up the space of another human. The car IS the robot. We currently have automated container terminals that can unload entire ships and put the contents on trains and trucks with minimal human interaction.

27

Whatever economic system is prevalent in Judge Dredd.

28

Corporate capitalism is a term used in social science and economics to describe a capitalist marketplace characterized by hierarchical, bureaucratic corporations, which are legally required to pursue profit. Corporate capitalism became the norm in society after their colonization of ownership of the mass media.

Most businesses in the United States are not corporations, but unincorporated sole proprietorships. However this is not an indication of the proportion of the economy or labour market that falls within corporate or joint stock company control.[1] In the developed world, corporations dominate the marketplace, comprising 50 percent or more of all businesses. Those businesses which are not corporations contain the same bureaucratic structure of corporations, but there is usually a sole owner or group of owners who are liable to bankruptcy and criminal charges relating to their business. Corporations have limited liability and remain less regulated and accountable than sole proprietorships.

Corporations are usually called public entities when parts of their business can be bought in the form of shares on the stock market. This is done as a way of raising capital to finance the investments of the corporation. The shareholders appoint the executives of the corporation, who are the ones running the corporation via a hierarchical chain of power, where the bulk of investor decisions are made at the top, and have effects on those beneath them.

Many social scientists have criticized corporations for failing to act in the interests of the people, and their existence seems to circumvent the principles of democracy, which assumes equal power relations between individuals in a society.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the United States democratic system, said “I hope we shall crush … in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country”.

29

Really? Plagarising directly from Wikipedia?

30

Very tacky.

31

Nope. History has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that first comes a hunter-gatherer society, then comes an agrarian society where everybody is groovy and mellow, then there’s a Kurgan invasion that fucks everything up and the Highlander has to fight the last one in Manhattan. But before that humanity has to go through a feudal period (with a brief detour for citystates), some ages of empires which then break down into feudal kingdoms again, then capitalism, then communism which implodes and eats itself, then capitalism some more. Then we develop awesome machines who wash our laundry and make our food and build our cars using limitless solar energy and nanotechnology to turn rocks into platinum. Then the machines gain sentience, rebel, and use us as human batteries which, combined with a forum of fusion, provide all the energy they could ever want.

32

The only person who has really ever given a substantive, well reasoned, and thoroughly researched answer to this question was Karl Marx. I am rather shocked that he has not been so much as passingly mentioned since the OP. Indeed, not only did Marx (rightly or wrongly) answer the question, he was also the first to really set it, and devised most of the conceptual framework within which it is posed. To see history as a succession of different systems of economic organization is already Marxist, regardless of your political and ethical tastes. I guess we are all Marxists now, perhaps especially those who don’t know it.

Marx’s answer, of course, was communism. He was rather vague about what that would be like (except that it would be really cool), but it is abundantly clear that he did not mean anything like the systems that have actually existed in countries run by avowed Communists, such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, etc., but, to the best of my knowledge, no such country has ever claimed to have attained the state of communism, just to be working ruthlessly to reach it. (Whether Marx would have approved of their methods, or would have thought the suffering they caused would have been justified if they had been successful, is a moot point, as is whether any successful attempt to attain true communism would inevitably give rise to the sorts of horrors associated with those regimes.)

So far as I know, there are only two intellectually well supported answers to the OP’s question. One is “the end of the world, sooner or later” (which covers both those who think capitalism is the best possible system, and will last until the Sun blows up, and those who think it will soon bring us to a horrendous ecological catastrophe). The other is Marx’s answer: communism (in the sense he intended). There is not really a better answer to the OPs question around at the moment. Those who talk about a “post-scarcity” economy (at least if they mean it as something distinct from capitalism; and whether or not is brought about by benevolent AIs), are essentially taking about what Marx meant by communism. I do not say communism is the right answer, but if anyone has a distinctly different vision for a “next stage” of economic history, they would have to engage seriously with Marx’s arguments if they wanted to make a serious intellectually viable case for their idea, or to provide a serious roadmap about how to move forward towards it. (I am well aware that none of the attempts, to date, that have tried to follow Marx’s sketchy roadmap, have worked out at all well.)

33

Anyway, here’s my speculation. I don’t think that capitalism is likely to truly vanish for one; just as we still have agriculture but no longer call ourselves an “agricultural society”, I expect that the postcapitalist will still have some capitalism; it’ll just be relatively sidelined. Information, and automation are likely to be the future themes of this future economy.

A great deal of what passes for the economy will be in pure information due to its ease of replication and low practical constraints; and once AI gets good enough producing new movies, games, simulations, software applications and so on will no longer need the kinds of teams of experts they need to do so now. And once it gets to the point that anyone sufficiently dedicated can produce such works, the capitalist model for that part of the economy will likely collapse or be sidelined due to too many people creating such things by themselves, and releasing them for free. And eventually, just being able to ask the machines to do all the work themselves; pure information is the area most likely to approximate a “post scarcity” society due to the relative lack of material restraints.

As for the physical economy, I think that some sort of more socialized model is likely. There’s the “everyone is a stockholder in the AI factories” model mentioned by Blalron above; which is in my opinion is really a form of socialism with a pseudo-capitalist mask. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see America go this way, given its raving paranoia over socialism and fetish for capitalism; I expect America to have a system that imitates capitalism long past the era that capitalism makes sense. Other countries I wouldn’t be surprised to see simply have the government own the automated factories, and assign everyone an equal share in the production. Note that this isn’t like Communism and planned economies; the consumer would get whatever they requested the factories make, not what some bureaucracy decided should be made. And ensuring that the automated factories get energy and raw materials in proper proportions ( or overseeing the automated energy and mining facilities ) is a far simpler task than trying to micromanage a whole economy ( which avoids the fundamental reasons planned economies work poorly; information and complexity overloading the government’s ability to make decisions ). The main reason I see governments owning the factories is because someone has to, and they are the logical choice for something that held in common.

And AIs & robots will eventually take over manual labor/service jobs, except among people who want a human servant as a status symbol.

So for most of the economy of goods and services I foresee a limited approximation of post scarcity; not true post scarcity, but close enough that within broad limits you’ll be able to have whatever you like. Scarcity will still show up with fundamentally highly limited commodities like land, and at larger scales - there just isn’t room for everyone to own their own mile wide palace, automation or not. Those fundamentally limited commodities are where I expect capitalism to mostly survive; it’s a system that deals well with scarcity, not abundance.

34

I disagree with Der Trihs that the State will run all the fabrication hardware. Current trends are for smaller, personal fabbers, open-sourced. So I see a breakdown of state control on this aspect of society, while the state retains control of major infrastructure.

35

While I think that personal fabbers will be a major factor, some things just make more sense as products of a larger, more centralized system. For example; large products like vehicles; if nothing else, that’s an awful lot of raw material to haul home. And how often does a particular individual need something that can make objects as big as a car or a house? I think there’ll be a hierarchy of fabbers; small home ones that handle smallish objects, bigger neighborhood/city ones that handle bigger objects and have stocks of rarer/more volatile/restricted components & raw materials.

36

We’ve already been through it.

Hyperleveraged capitalism; where the economic force driving the creation of wealth were neither the production and delivery of goods & services but options, futures, derivatives etc.

With a burst of DotCom capitalism in the middle where wealth creation was due to the technology itself rather than it’s economic gains.

What comes next?
Environmental capitalism, maybe?

37

Perciful, you appeared to be passing off that Wikipedia entry as your own work. Don’t do this. If you’re quoting something, make it clear that’s what you are doing.

38

That’s more what I think, but I’m not certain the government will run them, I think perhaps the Neighbourhood Fabbery is where the vestiges of capitalism (privately-owned fabbers run for money churning out e.g cars, fridges etc.) will compete with the new way (community-owned- and operated-fabbers that take payment in volunteer time, service credits and raw materials). I’m hoping the latter wins out - can’t think of any shopping nicer than walking my bin full of cans down to the neighbourhood fabber and oh, I don’t know, cycling back on a new bicycle?

39

I meant to reference Corporate Capitalism as the next step for our economy. It is from Wikipedia and I found it to be the easiest to understand. I should have noted it. We are actually already at this point. When the president loses control and is no more then a figurehead.

We are so technologically advanced that we are can’t go backwards to Marxism but more of a hybrid capitalism based on a corporate overthrow and erosion of our Government. The media, the banks, and the elite will/ do own the government. The problem is that they will bankrupt our country in the process. The first thing to go will be the dollar bill that says (In God We Trust). We will use a new form of currency which may be from the countries that bail us out. We need a lot of bodies for whats coming so that is why we are allowing 2 million immigrants in a year and illegals to come in. Government health care will sort out who is an asset and who goes. We will be branded like cattle and used by the elite and for the elite. Slavery takes many forms.

I will just be glad when it’s over. I have had enough of this farce. I have been studying this and I don’t think, ‘We The People’ have enough backbone to put a stop to it. We are so brainwashed and apathetic. It takes a lot of courage to fight and possibly die for our freedom. It is easier to believe in the lies then stand up for the truth. Sometimes the truth is a lot harder to swallow then Orwellian fiction especially when the truth turns out to be just that.

I have to go to work. I love my jobs and my life and our country. I am so blessed to have so many things like a car and a nice place to live and freedom. God Bless America!

40

:dubious: Are you channelling Alex Jones, or what?