real utopias

secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

The story goes this way: The capitalists saw that production, that is the productive part of the economy, empowered workers and opted to stop investing in real productive activity, or at least to slow this investment, as a political project to undermine the working class. Wage suppression was merely another aspect of what was an assault on workers. Kliman doesn’t hold with this story. Instead he argues that Capitalist production has a tendency to undermine it’s own reason for being, or that the rate of profit has a tendency to decline due to wholly unintended consequences. He has analyzed the economic data on hand and confirmed his theoretical position empirically. This has made many people on the left unhappy.