That's a good post Rimbaud, but I think it still misses one basic point: the increase of consumption power of workers from a hundred years ago to now. Imagine telling a worker between the wars that they could fly to Europe for a day's wage, or that they could afford to buy new clothes every month (and we know the true cost of that is paid by other workers but that's not the point here), or that they could eat a diet from all over the world.
Of course it's also true that there has been much undermining of that progress in consumption power recently, to the point that foodbanks are a regular part of everyday life for many people. Yet that is 3-5% of the population using foodbanks. You don't build mass movements on even 5% of people, no matter how outrageous their falling into poverty may be. And yes, the cost of living crisis has affected many more, but from a consumption level that was unimaginable a hundred years ago.
Orthodox socialists insist that workers only believe they have benefited from capitalism, and are in fact exploited by it, but this is rank sophistry to those who feel they've got a good quality of life out of capitalism. Even when wages stopped rising, the increase in cheap goods from china benefited working people here enormously and people really feel that. They really experience it. There's no point in being in denial about that experience. And of course we can talk about outsourcing our immiseration abroad - but it does mean less immiseration in this country.
Fair point, and I think that also relates to what I said about household consumer products creating a more individualised lifestyle and giving people better things to do with their time.
But - I do not believe that capitalism is stable.
Firstly, the huge improvements in quality of life in the west are largely a legacy of organised labour, and as the strength of labour declines a lot of those benefits are fading away.
Secondly, there is an almost global problem of inflated housing stock. IMO the stability of global capitalism today rests on lopsided demographics (baby boom followed by declining birth rate) where there is a sufficiently large demographic who have benefited from this relative to those younger people who have suffered because of it. This won't be permanent though, and the fight for affordable housing seems a good rallying point to unify working classes in different countries.
A third related point is the emergence of a rent seeking capitalism. Inheritance and property ownership is becoming more salient than skills and profession in determining your social class. Digital monopolies are also more like rent seeking landlords than traditional 19th Century capitalists. I think AI will accelerate this process by essentially deskilling a wide variety of professions. ChatGPT can already write basic code for a simple program, but one can imagine in 10 years time a more advanced AI which can write complex computer programs based on simple text prompts. Significantly this means the ability to raise your social class through education or work is reduced and inheritance of property becomes the defining thing.
Fourth, far from exporting emmiseration, outsourcing of industries to the third world has significantly improved living standards in other countries by bringing people out of the countryside and into some kind of urban consumer economy. But as we are seeing in China now, that also eventually runs against a limit and now rising labour costs contribute to manufacturing moving to places like India, Vietnam, or Bangladesh. However this also means that there is no longer so much of a massive divide between the rural impoverished masses of the developing world and the urbanised working class in the west. Our lives and struggles are no longer so alien from each other.
Fifth, environmental crisis. Reading Hobsbawm's account of what he refers to as "the age of catastrophe" - from the outbreak of WW1 through the Great Depression and to the end of WW2 - you are struck by how capitalism lurched from crisis to crisis from the senseless slaughter of WW1, it isn't surprising that Communism held widespread appeal as an alternative to what appeared to be a failing system.
But I think we are entering a new age of catastrophe now. Capitalism got out of the early 20th Century crisis first by destruction and rebuilding, and then by globalisation and the expansion to new markets. But I wonder if now it is both running out of new frontiers for growth (hence the near-global real estate boom as that is the best bet for growing capital over productive investments), and also running up against environmental limits. The refugee crisis and the pandemic are closely related to the environmental crisis, and additionally the rise of the populist right and the decay of democratic life is, I suspect, a product of the same process of individualisation and depoliticisation which has made the Labour movement almost disappear. For this reason I think that the re-emergence of socialism as a vital movement will have to appear as a re-assertion of democracy in the face of right wing populism and democratic decline. I think those who identify as the left should focus first primarily on attempts to revitalise democracy first, as a means to create the conditions for a new labour movement. For example, wiithin the UK context, getting more powers to local government opens up new possibilities for the left - there is a reason why Thatcher centralised power. A radical left city council could still easily be elected in somewhere like Glasgow, Liverpool, or Newcastle, but under current conditions there's not much point as there's nothing you could do, maybe focusing on political reform and democratic renewal can create temporary alliances which might not be workable on a purely socialist platform.
