After the disastrous economic crisis in 1929, John Maynard Keynes delivered a lecture extolling optimism in the certainty that capitalism will make us all happy by meeting all our seemingly insatiable needs . Believing in the miraculous power of human will, Keynes put forward the view that the intensification and development of productivity will be the decisive factor in the satisfaction of human needs , leading to the next significant step in human developmentâgoing from meeting material toward spiritual necessities. As he describes the way the crisis was seen by pessimists neglecting to see the seeds of future prosperity it theoretically conveyed:
For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come, namely, technological unemployment . This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still . (Keynes 1963)
Throughout the lecture, which appeared in literary form in 1930 titled Economic Possibilities for our grandchildren, Keynes argues, in essence, that after one hundred years peoplesâ lives will be improved. No doubt there is no more convincing counterargument to Keynes â over optimism than history itself, which is full of economic disasters, inequalities and catastrophic consequences for ordinary people, including the current crisis . The problem with Keynes â assertion is that it takes the capitalist economy as having a built-in virtue for self recovery , as if this system has an intrinsic dynamic toward welfare. Hence Keynes meets those conventional economists who falsely believe that as material prosperity increases people will search for personal satisfaction and happiness in the non-material aspects of life. Yet, this dream has not been empirically confirmed. As De Grauwe believes, capitalism keeps on shifting the critical point where people will be satisfied while at the same time it is doubtful exactly what people mean by material satisfaction. In addition, as productivity relies mainly upon technological innovations, such as the current digital one, it is worth mentioning that there is little observable effect on growth statistics especially after 1990s (De Grauwe 2017). The main reason is the dolorous combination of productivity and unemployment . The increase of the first takes place on a spatiotemporal era in which permanent low growth is marked by acute economic fragility and companies profiting from joblessness. Consider, for instance, the NAFTA agreement in 1993 between the United States , Mexico and Canada, which on paper intended to make true globalisation âs bright side; that is, investment and development. As Dowd has shown, however, this agreement was but a free pass for the recreation of the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution . Mexican workers got under two dollars wage per hour, productsâ prices, mainly cars, rose significantly in US and by 1999, 316,000 jobs were lost due to trade and investments effects (Dowd 2004: 203). As a matter of fact, globalisation entailed a steady tendency to uncertainty and to de-fixation of the supposed solid social and economic structures of the past along with the augmentation of inequalities and poverty. Thus, according to Bauman :
The International Labour Organization estimates that 3 billion people are now living below the poverty line, set at US$2 per day. John Galbraith , in the preface to the Human Development Report of the United Nations in 1998, documented that 20 percent of the world âs population cornered 86 percent of all goods and services produced worldwide, while the poorest 20 percent of them consumed only 1.3 percent; whereas today, after nearly 15 years, these figures have gone from bad to worse: the richest 20 percent of the population consume 90 percent of the goods produced, while the poorest 20 percent consume one percent. It is also estimated that 40 percent of the world âs wealth is owned by one percent of the world population, while the 20 richest people in the world have resources equal to those of the billion poorest . (Bauman 2017: 87)
It seems then that these old sayings had accurately described the inner logic of the capitalist movement: âConstant revolutionising of production , uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions , everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere â (Marx and Engels 1967: 83).
As argued elsewhere (Spyridakis 2013), within a neoliberally oriented context favouring adverse social incorporation, deregulated labour relations and massive layoffs, contemporary people experience the gradual disappearance of standard aspects of life and the advent of its insecure forms as well as the emergence of vulnerable social relationships (Castel 2000), threatening both their material survival and life trajectories. Caught in a situation defined by distant economic power structures and pedagogic political technologies that advocate less social protection for the market âs invisible hand, vulnerable people , being de-unionised and unable to forge a âclass in itselfâ solidarity , become powerless to defend themselves and are unwittingly lead to a grey area regarding their work identity and life trajectory (Spyridakis 2017b). As neoliberalism has become the dominant policy paradigm, its main philosophy being guided by a teleological faith in the assumption that unfettered markets distribute goods, services and happiness more efficiently (Durrenberger 2017), vulnerable people are not just found in the middle of the complex relation between the local and the global but they also experience its devastating effects on structural adjustment programs entailing increased poverty and restrictions on public spending. From an anthropological point of view Paul Durrenberger and Judith MartĂâs work has shown the negative burdens this paradigmâs philosophy has brought upon the disadvantaged and the underprivileged. They make clear that the first victims of this philosophy are social services as well as the more vulnerable members of society , like women and children, to the benefit of multinational corporations looking for a flexible, docile and cheap labour supply, despite their well polished rhetoric (Durrenberger and MartĂ 2006: 12â16). Without doubt profit accumulation through human labour exploitation is not a new phenomenon in the history of capitalism ; however, its recent expression connotes clear cut dissociations from the post-World War II social contract.
So, along with the ironic repetition of history, people today find themselves experiencing a new form of the Enclosures Act, which makes the weak weaker and even more vulnerable to unpredicted economic externalities. One such example is the mortgage lending process in the United States , which began in 2007 and which eventually led to a burst bubble, causing problems of liquidity and solvency for banksâleading either to their collapse or to the edge...