#Futurism#Futurology#Capitalism#Progress: "Capitalism won. Even if one grants that upstart “boomers” envisioned a new way, it was a frail one, evanescent, and too enmeshed in the webs of competitive individualism and consumer culture that sustained the prevailing order. Capitalism had helped invent the future. Then it killed it.
The murder did not happen all at once, nor by design, however; it was administered without forethought and functioned more like a slow-acting poison. And if capitalism, in its distinctive neoliberal form, was the culprit, it had many accomplices.
What is commonly referred to as neoliberalism might better be characterized from a materialist standpoint as the era of deindustrialization and disaccumulation, as an asset-bubble economy with little in the way of productive investment. Arguably such a prolonged economic devolution dictated a politics of retrogression.
Deindustrialization was not only destructive but demoralizing. Whole ways of life went under. Industries, unions, towns, churches, fraternal societies, main-street businesses, local hospitals, schoolhouses, community centers, movie theaters, and dozens of social gathering places from restaurants to bowling alleys all died away or lingered on as ghostly remains. Beginning in the late 1990s, what one book has called “deaths of despair” became an epidemic. These fatalities from suicides, or suicides by drugs and alcohol-saturated livers, occurred disproportionately among middle-aged white people, those supposed beneficiaries of Progress: mainly working class, lacking higher education, often out of work, fearful of new information-age technologies, downwardly mobile, coming from failed marriages and broken families and shrinking social support networks.
Capacities to resist, the labor movement especially, became defensive, narrow, and withered."
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