Charlie Stross’s “Different Cluetrain” is a set of theses describing the future we live in, where capitalism not only doesn’t need democracy — it actually works better where democracy is set aside in favor of a kind of authoritarian, investor-friendly state.
Stross is really on fire here, channeling the best of Rebecca Solnit, David Graeber and Thomas Piketty. I just finished a huge novel, Utopia, which was my attempt at thinking myself free of the despair that these conclusions bring me to.
1. We’re living in an era of increasing automation. And it’s trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).
2.
A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything—capital flows towards profit centres and if there aren’t enough of them profits accrue to whoever can invent some more (even if the products or the items they’re guaranteed against are essentially imaginary: futures, derivatives, CDOs, student loans).3.
Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.4.
The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective. (This emerges organically from the needs of the organization’s employees.)5.
Governments are organizations.6.
We observe the increasing militarization of police forces and the priviliging of intelligence agencies all around the world. And in the media, a permanent drumbeat of fear, doubt and paranoia directed at “terrorists” (a paper tiger threat that kills fewer than 0.1% of the number who die in road traffic accidents).
(Image: canary wharf, Clive Darra, CC-BY-SA)