William Briggs - A Cauldron of Anxiety: Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

Capitalism in the twenty-first century

Capitalism in the twenty-first century

William Briggs

Winchester, UK

Washington, USA

First published by Zero Books, 2021

Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,
Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK

www.johnhuntpublishing.com

www.zero-books.net

For distributor details and how to order please visit the Ordering section on our website.

William Briggs 2019

ISBN: 978 1 78904 609 0

978 1 78904 610 6 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934417

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of William Briggs as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Printed in North America by CPI GPS partners

We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

Also by William Briggs

Classical Marxism in an Age of Capitalist Crisis: the past is prologue, Routledge, ISBN: 978-1-13834-428-0

Removing the Stalin Stain, Zero Books, ISBN: 978-1-78904-521-5

For those who have always known that there is a

better way

and especially for Rose

There is a real and present danger facing our world. Its name is capitalism and the danger lies in the simple but inescapable fact that capitalism is now well past its use-by date. Ours has become a world of intense anxiety, fear and alienation and it is taking a real toll on the people. These fears might appear to be localised; will my job last, will I be able to pay that bill, will my children be safe, and will they have a future? The fears might be global; will there be war, will the planet be consumed by climate change?

The existence of capitalism has always meant that people have been forced to struggle to survive. However, today we are experiencing acute levels of poverty, distress, homelessness, mental illness. To put it simply; capitalism is making us and the planet upon which we live, sick. Capitalism had a beginning, a middle and is approaching its end. It appears not to be prepared to go gently into any good night any time soon, but it is, as Trotsky described so clearly, in its death agony. This long and overdue death inevitably means a lot of misery for the people.

We are, in the main, an optimistic species. To be otherwise would be disastrous. No matter how bad things might be, there is always a light shining, if sometimes dimly, on the horizon. Things will get better. The problem is that capitalisms crisis, and the crisis that we all feel as a consequence, makes it harder and harder to be optimistic, or more accurately, have any belief that capitalism has any answers to our collective woes. In the face of utter hopelessness, Roberto, the hapless Italian migrant, in the 1986 film Down by Law, maintained an irrepressible optimism. He was in a US prison. He had been charged with murder. He had little English and nobody to support him. Life was conspiring against him. He appeared to have no chance. Despite all this he would repeat, and repeat again, a line that he had heard and committed to memory. Its a sad and beautiful world. Well Roberto, the world has become a lot sadder and its beauty has dimmed. Robertos take on things may well be just about the greatest overestimation that any of us will ever hear or read. The facts just seem to speak for themselves.

The horizon is low, there is a bleakness, and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness hangs in the air. There is more accumulated wealth on the planet than there has ever been, and yet fewer and fewer people enjoy the fruits of that wealth. According to the latest estimates, global wealth now stands at $360 trillion, and just 26 individuals have as much wealth as 3.8 billion people on the planet. Perhaps they are better managers, more astute than you or me, but something doesnt seem quite right. They are statistics that simply defy logic, that are impossible to imagine. What is easier to get your head around is the simple fact that we live in a world where inequality is growing at the same rate that wealth becomes concentrated into the hands of a shrinking but indecently rich few. For the vast majority life is a struggle. It is becoming a world once only written about by sci-fi writers, the dystopian future scenario. It is a world where ideas are censored, journalists are threatened and, as in the case of Julian Assange, threatened with a lifetime in prison. For what? For exposing war crimes. It is a world of globalising capitalism and of trade wars. It is a world where the threat of war hangs over us. It is a world of climate change and potential catastrophe. It short, it is a world of fear and alienation, where thought is to be manipulated and questioning to be mistrusted. Welcome to the world of late capitalism, a time of barbarity. It is a difficult time to be alive. But it need not be so. Humanity, unchained from alienation and fear, has the capacity to soar. This book sets itself a task. In the face of such a miserable checklist, it sets about explaining how things got to this stage and how it can be changed. Surely that is not too big a task.

There are times when even the most stoic amongst us can feel a little estranged and alienated from the world and from life. If you are ever feeling down, confused, overwhelmed by all that life throws at you; money, stress, work, unemployment, self-image, self-worth, the state of the world, climate change, urban infrastructure, commuting times, racism, aged care, youth care, rising suicide rates, sexism, anxiety, sleep deprivation, depression, housing affordability, homelessness, drug use, sexual violence, job insecurity, national security, refugees, or the threat of war, then there is a book within easy reach and available at any good bookshop, or on-line, at airport news-stands, in most news agencies, or advertised and discussed on television talk shows. There will be a book that seems to be written just for you and specially designed to help you. These books exist and proliferate because we are drowning in a sea of anxiety and fear. The fears are all real and the books that roll endlessly off the presses do, just occasionally, offer some sound advice, but more often just alert the reader to even more anxieties and fears. It is impossible to ignore the tsunami of self-help literature. The good people at Amazon, in the spirit of the times, and doubtless in an attempt at helping either us or possibly themselves, have broken the self-help genre into 28 sub-sections, so take heart, there is something for everyone.

The self-help authors respond to problems that exist, but the reader is unlikely to be better off for the experience of that one special book. The authors are good at isolating problems but are less well-equipped at explaining how the problem arose, where it came from, and what we can do, as a society, to remove the problem, and rarely link one problem with another. Diagnosis is fine but simply treating symptoms is not what is required.