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The Presence of the Future is about the nature of modern capitalism, its consequences, and its replacement.
It starts with the Great Transformation in mid-eighteenth century Europe when a largely consumption-orientated society began to give way to a producer – (and merchant) – led one. The transition was not peaceful and unleashed a civil war that ultimately encompassed the world.
The internal logic of the new system results in unlimited growth through competition, the universalization of markets, and further (to be taken up in greater detail later) to the centralization of economic and social power in relatively few hands, social polarization, purposeless change, corrosive amorality, pervasive inversion and general irresponsibility.
All this is sketched in an introductory Chapter (1 – The Market System) and some of it, notably centralization, polarization, moral dissonance, is visited again in subsequent chapters.
The effects of unlimited, purposeless growth, the hallmark of the system, are everywhere. Their environmental impact – depletion, degradation, disruption of natural homeostatic systems, the effect on human health – is described in Chapter 2 (Nature), and the proximate causes examined.
The solutions proffered – technical fixes, government regulation and market incentives – are flawed and unlikely to alleviate significantly environmental stress. They’re also costly. So the outlook is grim.
The other of history’s bequests to the market system – the narrower environment of humanity – suffers in like manner from the systems implacable logic (Chapter 3 – Human Nature).
Market Being is an unbalanced creature, driven, narrow and in need of institutional props to compensate for his repressed emotions and to sustain social cohesion. He is inadequate in terms of constantly-rising expectations and demands, suffers narcissistic injury and loss of subjectivity in consequence, and loses a sense of self. Further consequences are to be found in criminal behaviour, social indifference, sexual promiscuity, alienation from self, loneliness and the splintering of personality into unrelated characteristics and a steady rise in stress, mental illness, madness, drug taking, suicide, and their growing relevance. The costs to society are enormous and growing.
The story of how the market system creates problems for itself begins in Chapter 4 (Society). The system has grown with unprecedented rapidity and has produced an explosive increase in output and productivity. Bounding productivity has diminished its ability to absorb labour with the result that hundreds of millions are excluded from working in or for the market, and have no stake in the system. Their number is on the rise which points to a growing gap between system and society.
This gap cannot be narrowed by limiting population growth. Nor can it be narrowed by “development” or faster economic growth. The result is an enormous population of “redundants” (from the system’s perspective), poor, wandering in search of work, swarming into overcrowded cities.
Torrential urbanization leads to convergence in the conditions and responses of the cities’ inhabitants, which provides a setting for turbulence and instability.
The story of how society generates problems for itself continues in Chapter 5 (Politics). As market society evolved from its early, entrepreneurial phase through a middle state-capitalist/national-economy phase to its current late, or global, phase, the state’s core functions – coercion, provisioning and arbitration – changed their relative weights. It is now finding these core functions increasingly difficult to fulfil effectively: they are too heavily armed, they are subverted and eluded by mobile, largely self-sufficient, global businesses on which they depend for their income.
They quarrel with the globals – over protectionism and free trade, and the cost of state services – in a tussle neither can win. The globals adjust by avoiding the more intransigent states; states adjust by edging towards virtual world government – the fractal state system, a clumsy system riddled with paradox.
Politics in the fractal state system is reduced to management, a specialist professional pursuit, hollowed of ideological disagreement and debate, highly dependent of presentation and spin. Its practitioners require centralization of state power in order to fulfil adequately their new management role which, coupled with a decline in their day-to-day accountability, leads to a separation of the political classes from the rest, and to their impatience and more with dissent.
The result is a growing gap between what passes for politics and people’s actual political concerns, which is invaded by the religious fundamentalism or the socialist millenarianism that seek to unite private morality with public policy.
Electoralism is the political classes’ chief response to popular disenchantment. But that response invokes a “democratic drag” which results in a general fiscal crisis. Where electoralism falters and the state resorts to coercion, it finds that its enforcement agencies share more and more of the populace’s attitudes and suffer from a loss of conviction or crisis of morale. The results of the fiscal crisis and the crisis of morale in the states enforcement agencies is a crisis of governance which shows up as an inexorable rise in the costs of control.
Chapter 6 (Culture) is the last of the three that traces the effect of the system’s growth on its internal arrangements.
The market system considers the individual the source of ultimate authority, which leads to entitification (reification in Marx).
Entitification leads to problems in the integrity and application of knowledge, to a decline in the quality of Market Being, and to the neglect of social creative potential. It encourages measurement and quantification, and their apotheosis in science and technology. It subverts or devalues other forms of cognition. It assumes lawfulness which encourages individual purpose as a privilege, and in consequence instrumental thinking. It also encourages, and is sustained by, the particular view of causality which suffuses science.
Entitification eases privatization, individual appropriation of the Commons (land, water, air, genetic material), of public assets and private office.
Science assumes the lawfulness implicit in entitification. It elbows aside all other modes of cognition, is privileged and powerful. But is under pressure from within (questioning lawfulness, nature, probability, disaggregation, causality, immutabilities) and without (questioning its outcomes, its substratum of reason, its cost, and above all its rejection of purpose).
Science’s absence of purpose leads to pervasive relativism and a series of moral conundrums that deny market society absolute imperatives and lead to moral disorder – ultimately dangerous for its future.
The collision of market society with its inherited constraints (described in Chapter 2 – Nature, and Chapter 3 – Human Nature) and with its self-generated constraints (absorptive capacity in Chapter 4 – Society, control in Chapter 5 – Politics and moral disorder in Chapter 6 – Culture) is illustrated by the long-term decline in its rate of profit and rate of growth (Chapter 7 – The Bottom Line). The cause lies mainly in the inexorable rise in enterprise and social overheads as compared with productive expenditure. For a system whose distinguishing characteristic is growth and which cannot significantly moderate the trend, the consequences are fatal.
Whether and how that system can be replaced form the substance of Chapter 8 (The Leap to Eternity).
Systems change incrementally or discontinuously/fundamentally. In human society the ultimate cause of fundamental social change (from gatherer to agrarian to market society) has been the pressure of population on conventional material resources. Change requires the active agency of particular people who, today, are thought to be the revolutionary party (the Reds) or the ecologists (the Greens). The Reds, effective in the transition from agrarian to market society, are less effectual today where power is dispersed, people mobile, information cheap and interpretation abundant. The Greens are vulnerable to corruption by the standards and policies of mainstream politics, and unable to cope with the enormous scale and violence of worldwide transition.
Ecological thinking marks the latest and most mature step in the evolution of the idea, in scope, structure, content and significance. Underpinning this evolution is the development of consciousness, itself the basis for progress. Consciousness can now be designed and consciously promoted. Conscious selection can displace cultural selection (as cultural selection displaced natural selection) as the basis for human adaptation to ever-faster environmental and social change. It promises unimaginable freedom and infinite choice. And the tools for it already exist.
The Greatest Transformation – to ecological society with its conscious evolution – is served by the multitude of evaluation and interpretation workers (heuristic workers) and the ascendancy in their roles of loyalty to purpose over organisational loyalty. Their importance was revealed in the US in the 1950s and ‘sixties, in Western Europe in the 1960s and in the state capitalist world in 1989–91.
The Presence of the Future ends with an appendix (the Evolution Game – a playable, exciting, wryly humorous table game full of reference to the text).
Last updated on 13 November 2019