It's time to find another definition for the current dominant "economic" system because it's not capitalism for sure. Call it, say, 21st century corporate feudalism, or whatever you like. We can now be certain that capitalism is dead.
Yanis Varoufakis describes this new, bizarre situation perfectly:
In Britain, the news came out that the economy had suffered its greatest slump ever – more than 22% down during the first 7 months of 2020. Remarkably, on the same day, the London Stock Exchange, the FTSE100 index, rose by more than 2%. On the same day, during a time America has ground to a halt and is beginning to look like not just as an economy in deep trouble but also, ominously, as a failed state, Wall Street’s SP500 index hit an all-time record.
Financial capitalism has decoupled from the capitalist economy, skyrocketing out of Earth's orbit, leaving behind it broken lives & dreams. As the UK sinks into the worst recession ever, & US edges toward failed state status, FTSE100 goes up 2% & S&P500 breaks all time record!— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) August 12, 2020
As Lee Camp aptly points out:
We are at the level of full-scale unencumbered, unleashed robbery by the richest human beings around the world. There's no government left to stop them that hasn't been bought. The most our government of oligarchs would do, is put a tiny little tax on their theft, but even that is unlikely. There's no regulators that give a damn that haven't been bought off. There's no media to turn public tied against them that haven't been bought off. And there's no criminal justice system that would truly go after the billionaires running the show. There is no one to stop this grand robbery. And the irony is, they are hastening the end of market capitalism, the thing they claim to love most. It only keeps working long-term, as long as the average people have enough bread crumbs to survive. But that will soon not be the case.
We saw that this broken system made the billionaires richer in the middle of a global pandemic, while millions lost their jobs and the working class is literally struggling to survive.
Yet, this is evidence beyond doubt that this system doesn't even make any sense, anymore. Whenever a mainstream economist from the neoliberal school of insanity try to convince you that you are wrong and that the markets will fix everything and automatically back to "normal", you can rub the above figures on their face.
The origins of this bizarre situation can be traced back in the mid 90s, inside a superficial prosperity created by neoliberalism and financial capitalism in the West.
By 1996, production figures failed to increase, but profits were nevertheless rising. Alan Greenspan worried that unsustainable speculative bubbles were forming, but after political attacks from all sides, Greenspan changed his reasoning and suggested that new efficiencies had emerged that his data wasn't measuring.
Today, in this elevated bubble-reality, elites don't even bother to hide the absurdity of the financial markets as they profit heavily from it. Bubbles are a permanent situation, but no one seems to care. The Fed prints money and directs it straight to the big banks and corporations, which are buying their stocks in Wall Street and boost profits for their shareholders and CEOs. The elites are completely detached from the 99% that struggles to survive under an increasingly difficult situation.
We are clearly now in a post-capitalism turning point of insane instability. Yet, these are signs showing that we have chosen to take a completely wrong path, instead of realizing that capitalism is dead. And therefore, to decide to build a system that will save both the humanity and the planet.
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