Late Capitalism
The term ‘Late Capitalism’ is a hopelessly optimistic lie told by deluded socialists to ease their paranoia. The truth is that the horrors Capital has to unleash on the world haven’t even begun yet. Corporate, Technocratic Colonialism is going to employ arcane financial instruments to place you into the digital panopticon. Everything you do will be digitised, datafied, gamified. Human capital, behavioural surplus futures: your life will be traded on equity markets.
This was always coming, it is The Machine’s Telos, but these fake lockdowns have been used to intentionally fast forward us into the Fourth Industrial Revolution/Great Reset.
Marxist dialectics assume revolution springs from relations of production made obsolete by developments in the forces of production. Revolution arises when these contradictions become critical: the people rise up and institute new productive relations. But this is quite the opposite. They seek to rip up Marxist historiography and impose new productive relations from the top and from a position of power afforded them by their mastery of the productive forces.
“But counter to what Marx assumed, communist revolution cannot resolve the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production. The contradiction admits no dialectical Aufhebung. Capitalism can always escape into the future precisely because it harbours permanent and inherent contradiction. Accordingly, industrial capitalism has now mutated into neoliberalism and financial capitalism, which are implementing a post-industrial, immaterial mode of production – instead of turning into communism…As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the allo-exploited working class – instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself…In fact, no proletariat exists under the neoliberal regime at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself. The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism. This is what accounts for the system’s stability.”
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is not just an industrial revolution, it will be a real revolution. Just as Marx claimed to have turned Hegel on his head, the technocrats seek to turn Marx on his.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is well named because if these people get their way, we are certainly going to be living in a new mode of production, but unlike any revolution in the past that has come from the ground up, this will be top down.
