In response to my suggestion that governments are falling down on their job, a reader remarks:
Water-carrier is a good term here. This is end-stage capitalism, wherein the capital has captured the regulatory (read: public interest) process. Though the neoliberal Democrats have their share of the blame — a large share, mind you — it’s also the result of many decades of domination of the political scene by reactionary conservatives, i.e. most Republicans.
Which I don’t dispute, along with a sophisticated psychological attack.
But I’m interested in the phrase end-stage capitalism, which I’ve run across before and not paid much attention. Let’s take it literally: what does it imply?
For me, it suggests there’s a limited lifetime, a deterministic fate to the entire capitalistic+democratic scene. It reminds me of a software engineering term for one variety of development: The waterfall model.
In this model, you never get to go back and correct your mistakes. As each step in the life cycle of developing a software product is completed, it is passed on to the next team, which does its bit, and it never goes back to a prior step for problem correction.
Sounds like madness, doesn’t it?
But the comparison does raise the question of why can we not correct our errors and then continue on? The suggestion that this is end-stage capitalism might imply, at least to the socialist, that at some time the entire capitalist way of doing things will go away.
And I have to wonder if that’s necessary. After all, the replacement of mercantilism with capitalism has certainly led to some amazing gains in terms of material success, although there’s no denying that a host of injustices, human and otherwise, have accompanied many of those gains. So that leads to this question:
Do we throw everything away because mistake-prone humans have made mistakes? Or do we try to correct the errors while retaining the spirit of hard work and smarts will bring you rewards?
I lack confidence in the term end-phase capitalism. This may be the instructive phase of the consequences of near laissez-faire capitalism, where we learn that it does not result in an endless sea of creative chaos, but instead leads to an inhuman chase after monstrous profits. That may be more accurate.
But we shall see over the next few years. Will Americans continue to follow the Republicans down the rabbit hole of money worship? Or will they draw back and rethink how they conduct their lives?
