Capitalism is a corpse

What we have is an information-based managerialism camped out in the carcass of capitalism.

1.

We do not have capitalism anymore. Capitalism is a corpse. Instead, what we have is an information-based managerialism camped out in the carcass of capitalism. We still call it "capitalism" only because it is convenient to do so and requires no thought. Capitalism began to crumble on the eve of the Great European Civil Wars (World War 1 + 2). It has been progressively effaced since then.

2.

We have a new class system in place of the old. The old working/middle/upper class paradigm – the Labourer Vs. the Capitalist, mediated by a throng of middlemen – is gone. The new tripartite is similar to the old system on the surface but differs in important ways. It is composed of the service class at the lowest rung. They are basically a legion of servants, carrying out simple, monotonous, robotic, administrative tasks. In the big cities of the West many of these are now battalions of servants imported from abroad.

3.

All the core industries are now service industries: admin, security, hospitality, call centres, delivery driving, health and social care, retail, warehouses. The Western economy consists largely of these jobs. Resource extraction and manufacturing, the two pivotal components of capitalist economy, and the two domains where one could be said to be of "the working class", are on their last legs. They make up an ever-dwindling segment of the domestic economy at large, and so it makes very little sense to talk of "the working class" in the West anymore as a meaningful political unit.

4.

The middle class is now an informatsia. They deal with the production, acquisition, deployment and dissemination of information in its various guises. Their primary role is as vectors of information and intelligence, which will be used in the service of mass production, mass consumption, mass communication, mass administration, and so on. Their secondary role is to generate and propagate the cultural ideologies that benefit the system.

5.

The ruling class is now the managerial class, who control the flow of information, create context for it, and make decisions as to what use it is put. They are a nexus of specialists, directors, executives, and techno-bureaucrats, operating at the highest levels of mass organisations, whose role is to manage the assets of the new Leviathan. Service/Informatsia/Manager – this is the new class system in 'advanced' Western economies, and increasingly elsewhere also.

6.

To determine which class you belong to you can ask yourself 3 simple questions and whichever rings most true is your current class position.

– Does your work mainly consist in providing a straightforward service to other people? You are a servant of the service class.

– Does your work mainly consist of harnessing specific skills and techniques to deliver specialist information to an audience? You are informatsia.

– Does your work mainly consist in managing complex decisions for mass organisations and deciding how information delivered to you by subordinates is to be used? You are of the managerial ruling class.

7.

The managers grew out of the upper echelons of the old middle class under capitalism. The capitalists, the owners of industry, either all became managers or else retired to their dachas and country houses, leaving the managers to make key decisions for them while they collected a cut of proceeds. Every now and then, an old capitalist reemerges "to speak out" and call for a return to the spirit of capitalism, and each time they are roundly condemned by all three classes of the managerial system who now increasingly speak in one voice with one tongue.

8.

Many of the antagonisms that animated the capitalist era are no more. Managerialism has succeeded in eliminating these to a large extent, by imprinting a conformist climate and uniform ideology across the classes. Most servants adhere to the exact same philosophies as the informatsia and the managers. The dividing lines, when they do arise, are over cultural values and these sometimes cause strife within a class itself (for instance, the debate over transgenderism is primarily a civil war waged within the informatsia). Hence all class war has now become culture war.

9.

To control the flow of information mass bureaucracy was needed, and it has multiplied ever since the end of the war, to truly gigantic proportions. Mass bureaucracy is the exact and diametric opposite of capitalism, in its classical formulation.

10.

We are ruled by a Left-wing managerialism. It is "left-wing" precisely because it is heavily biassed towards the principle of "equality" and almost totally repudiates the idea of "nation." It dedicated itself to managing the massification of pretty much every realm of public life – to internationalising the idea of "equality." Mass parties, mass production, mass trade, mass service, mass advertising, mass consumption, mass corporations, mass movement of peoples, mass immigration – all of it is now suffused with superficial egalitarianism. This ethos did not come from the right.

11.

The 19th century capitalist drive to expansion has transformed into this bloated bureaucratic edifice that we live in today, having killed capitalism in the process. To most pundits this statement seems obtuse because they have been so conditioned to identify capitalism with the consumer society, with "the market" (as if markets didn't exist before capitalism), with "neoliberal" policies, with financialism, with "late-stage" inflections pummelled into their heads by Mandel or Jameson, that they completely lose sight of what are ultimately all just attempts at consolidating managerial dominance. A 19th century captain of industry would scoff at the suggestion that the system we live in today in any way resembles what they regarded as capitalism.

Coda.

Boccioni's Unique forms of continuity in space (below) was exhibited in 1913, a year before the war broke out. It has become the flagship sculpture of Futurism. It depicts a dynamic striding figure, mutant, armless, and half-formed, marching towards some sort of inscrutable destiny. I think it symbolises the shift from the Italian nationalism of the Risorgimento to the war ideology of Fascism, which was in utero at the time and only emerged screaming and full-blooded once all the soldiers had returned home. I think it also reflects our mishmash age of muddled uncertainty, where the old capitalist costumes are slowly being cast off and exchanged for the modish garbs of managerial collectivism.