Great articles! I wanted to read and reply to this yesterday but I got pulled in by the attention-eating black hole of gaming. Very appropriate.
I've had ideas pretty adjacent to what you talk about in p3 bouncing around in my head for the past few years. In my view, the state in the USA (and elsewhere to a lesser degree) has morphed into a tool to support elite wealth extraction in a way where everything that doesn't have to do with maintaining stability (military/security/intel mainly in the US, although these are lucrative grifts too) or directly propping up the globally connected section of the "market" has basically been left to wither and die. The biopolitical idea of states seeking to become stronger and more productive by improving their population's productivity via education and public health doesn't seem to hold anymore. As you illustrate, American elites seem to have moved into full grifter mode: the health of the "real" economy has become mostly irrelevant as long as the facade of stability is maintained. It turns out that shooting yourself in the foot is actually good if you can make a profit from it. There's plenty of excess blood available to replace whatever was lost. The government's COVID-19 response was a great example of this, but I feel like the opioid epidemic is an even darker illustration of your "reverse collectivism" concept and its logical conclusion. How else were people in the de-industrialized American wasteland going to be monetized? The grift economy you describe seems to me as a clever, quasi-religious way to give meaning and cover to what is happening. Keep grinding and you might have your own blood bags one day!
My background is in development studies, and I can't help but notice the superficial similarity of this economy with the structure of certain poor countries. The countries I am thinking of have a vampiric elite living large off the rent from an easily controllable source of wealth (usually some scarce natural resource) while the rest of the country lives highly precariously on whatever they can scrounge up. The "middle class" is almost entirely dependent on the elite group economically. Of course, these countries were not always structured this way: without colonialism and Western support, this type of economy would not be able to survive. One of the critical aspects of these societies is that elites are very connected globally; a very small amount of the wealth generated circulates back into the domestic economy, much of it being reinvested outside the country. Is the grift economy another form of blowback reaching the West? The US isn't fully there yet, but it sure looks like a new economy centered on a small elite is shaping up.
Regarding part 4, I highly suggest you check out Han Byung-Chul's Burnout Society and Psychopolitics if you haven't. He's been writing a lot about the psychological impacts of neoliberalism and how it marks a very clear departure from "classical" capitalism.
Great article! I wrote about a similar topic here (https://joewrote.substack.com/p/a-critique-of-innovation), and it's great to see I'm not the only one noticing capitalism's falsities.
You're article "Grift-Stage Capitalism" is absolutely incredible, I can't wait to read these all! :)
Great articles! I wanted to read and reply to this yesterday but I got pulled in by the attention-eating black hole of gaming. Very appropriate.
I've had ideas pretty adjacent to what you talk about in p3 bouncing around in my head for the past few years. In my view, the state in the USA (and elsewhere to a lesser degree) has morphed into a tool to support elite wealth extraction in a way where everything that doesn't have to do with maintaining stability (military/security/intel mainly in the US, although these are lucrative grifts too) or directly propping up the globally connected section of the "market" has basically been left to wither and die. The biopolitical idea of states seeking to become stronger and more productive by improving their population's productivity via education and public health doesn't seem to hold anymore. As you illustrate, American elites seem to have moved into full grifter mode: the health of the "real" economy has become mostly irrelevant as long as the facade of stability is maintained. It turns out that shooting yourself in the foot is actually good if you can make a profit from it. There's plenty of excess blood available to replace whatever was lost. The government's COVID-19 response was a great example of this, but I feel like the opioid epidemic is an even darker illustration of your "reverse collectivism" concept and its logical conclusion. How else were people in the de-industrialized American wasteland going to be monetized? The grift economy you describe seems to me as a clever, quasi-religious way to give meaning and cover to what is happening. Keep grinding and you might have your own blood bags one day!
My background is in development studies, and I can't help but notice the superficial similarity of this economy with the structure of certain poor countries. The countries I am thinking of have a vampiric elite living large off the rent from an easily controllable source of wealth (usually some scarce natural resource) while the rest of the country lives highly precariously on whatever they can scrounge up. The "middle class" is almost entirely dependent on the elite group economically. Of course, these countries were not always structured this way: without colonialism and Western support, this type of economy would not be able to survive. One of the critical aspects of these societies is that elites are very connected globally; a very small amount of the wealth generated circulates back into the domestic economy, much of it being reinvested outside the country. Is the grift economy another form of blowback reaching the West? The US isn't fully there yet, but it sure looks like a new economy centered on a small elite is shaping up.
Regarding part 4, I highly suggest you check out Han Byung-Chul's Burnout Society and Psychopolitics if you haven't. He's been writing a lot about the psychological impacts of neoliberalism and how it marks a very clear departure from "classical" capitalism.