Why can't contemporary capitalism create jobs anymore? Another world is possible!

Why does capitalism continue to exist, but is no longer able to create jobs? Why has it started to promote only reforms and the distant prospect of employment?

Thus, the regime merely maintains control over the majority, whom it continues to crush and exclude. Capitalism now imposes that the worker himself manage his own labor (the entrepreneurial subject), who then offers himself to the market in the expectation of being exploited in order to survive.

Although the pandemic brings us, in a distressing way, a set of questions, this question predates the issues of the present, where crises accumulate like overlapping layers.

Previously, capital drove colonial expansion across the world. Today, it is the availability of credit that has transformed debt into the engine of exploitation. It is to pay it off that people work like crazy and tolerate exploitation, hoping that something will be left over to survive. Today, globally, total debt (public and private) is almost double the GDP of nations and functions as an engine of exploitation.

Feudalism and slavery led us to conflicts and wars. The Welfare State (welfare stateThe post-World War II era brought relief to those at the bottom, while those at the top continued to profit. However, neoliberalism gradually regained ground and expanded the concentration of wealth that had grown enormously at the end of the last century.

Despite its rationality and so-called modernity, capitalism, under financial hegemony, has come to exploit more and more. In the formal economy, people are increasingly less vulnerable, while in the informal sector they are even more intensely exploited. 

Capitalism has ceased to collect surplus value solely through direct means, such as lower wages and informal employment. Gradually, it has created other mechanisms of capture, such as using income derived from labor (interest, rent, trademarks, dividends, audits, legal services, etc.) as anti-value or capitalization to vampirize labor income.

Alongside this, it also expanded the use of money as an indirect commodity amid the profusion of the issuance of papers, bonds, debentures, futures markets, etc., in a process that expanded financial dominance, sucking more and more from the real economy. The result is greater spoliation, which comes along with the largest contingent of surplus (“invisible”) people. Saskia Sassen will call this process “an exclusionary civilization” that promotes “expulsions” and brutality. [2]

Today we call this financial hegemony in contemporary capitalism, which has come to be based more on the accumulation of money as a commodity than on the capture of direct income from paid labor, which is reduced to a few select locations, according to their potential for exploitation. (Yes, without forgetting that employment differs from work)

Capitalism, besides generating fewer and fewer jobs, forces workers to generate their own labor and offer it to the market to be exploited, where most of the income ends up being siphoned off and rising to the upper echelons of high finance.

The labyrinths of capitalism seem to show a new phase, no longer expansive, but a stage of capital with a concentric phase, in a helical trajectory, which mixes the exploitation of surplus value from material production with the joint capture of fictitious value, all in shorter times and with greater intensity, leaving the leftovers behind, making them invisible.

All of this cannot be, and never has been, natural; rather, it is the result of social production in the territory where life unfolds. It is also interesting to observe that this process inherently carries within it the ideology of individuality and competitiveness. It's a world of every man for himself, based on competence and personal merit, that disregards the starting points of individuals in their respective spaces, valuing only the destination.

Anyone who reacts to this logic is immediately labeled a populist or reactionary. Or both. It is within this historical trajectory, between cycles and crises, that the idea of ​​cultural Marxism and flat-earth theory emerge as a rejection of science and the ideas of reason, universality, science, and awareness of the historical process and the interests present in society. But it is these power relations that need to be changed, because another world is possible!