3446 - That Sinking Feeling

Capitalism is a magnificent wild beast. It creates the best iPhones one can buy, and if you think of it, when the iPhone appeared out of thin air (not yet eight years ago), it created a whole new industry. Mostly it did so in China though.

It’s not only modernization losers who’ve got a sinking feeling nowadays. To be accurate, the whole concept of losing does not make sense any more.

You can’t lose when there’s nothing to win. Our “conservative” politicians love it to portray the world as a place of equal opportunity for all who are willing to work hard. While it never was that simple and success always was tied to luck, things have changed fundamentally.

Transport has become incredibly cheap. It has become so cheap, that we can grow potatos in one country, wash them in another and fry them in a third. And that’s even before they are sold.

The most fundamental consequence of cheap transport though is the concentration of all manufactoring in a few Asian countries. We just don’t build anything around here any more. The owners of our factories have become the owners of factories in other, cheaper countries. Countries, that offer their workers less social security, less civil rights. Globalized capitalism does just that: it shifts work away from the middle class, it shifts work away from unionized workers, it shifts work out of democracies.

This leaves cheap jobs in the service sector, and of course for a tiny minority it leaves the most profitable practice of all: buying and selling fictional goods that have no connection to anything in the real world. Credit default swaps, for instance.

No, it’s not just a bunch of modernization losers who vote far right here in Europe or there in the US, it’s just a bunch of damn idiots, who can’t understand that the Nazis always are in bed with their capitalist funders.

This image shows part of an old industrial complex here in Vienna. The fragments have been integrated into a do-it-yourself store. It’s directly opposite my office, therefore you may see it once in a while.