While they might not share much politically, Trump and Corbyn, along with Brexit and the emergence of Podemos, Bernie Sanders and Syriza, indicate the era of capitalist realism is over.
And yet there is also a deeper story at play, one which remains largely unremarked upon. While the events of the last several years are both historic and unexpected, they are a response to an economic crisis, beginning in 2008, which itself only represents the first stage of a prolonged period of global disorder. Over coming decades we will not only endure the aftershocks of the failure of this economic model to deliver rising living standards, but also the era-defining efects of the aforementioned five crises. Individually, each poses an existential threat to our way of life. Together they could blow away the social and economic certainties of the last two and a half centuries.
But there is a deeper layer still, because we are at a crossroads as much as a clif edge. Alongside these challenges we also see the contours of something new, a society as distinct from our own as that of the twentieth century to feudalism, or urban civilisation from the life of the hunter-gatherer. It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades which, only now, are set to undermine the key features of everything we had previously presumed to be as unchanging as scarcity itself.
Its name? Fully automated luxury communism.
30
chaos under heaven