Abstract
Global capitalism has entered a long downswing that started with the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. A debate has been opened about the causes of this slowdown, the prospect of a recovery and the role played by technology. The first point to observe is the character of the preceding long upswing. We argue that Fifth Kondratiev upswing was unstable and shortens by several weaknesses in the institutional framework. Given that weakness digital technology spread unevenly across even in the US economy, and the impact on productivity was limited. A huge excess of capital was the results of that forces mainly after 2000, driving the global economy to the financial crisis and then to global recession that still persist, in spite of the lender of last resort. At this point the prospects of recovery depend on the extension of digitization to a new level often called Artificial Intelligence. However, this new level of digitization will imply a deep impact on social relations in general and specifically in labor relations. A disturbing feature of the present time is the role played by digital monopolies that control the passage to AI. The only way to counteract that power is by a new social pact at global level.
Highlights
World capitalism is in a Kondratiev downswing that started with the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008
This economic depression, converted into a global recession, has certain characteristics that give it its historical specificity with respect to the other two depressions previously experienced by capitalism
The relatively limited depth of the world crisis in the 1970s suggests that the massive destruction/devaluation of capital was far from that which resulted from the depression of the 1930s and Second World War; the years of 1970–1980 were basically re-engineering of power, in two main senses: (a) dismantling the welfare state and nullifying the current limits to capitalist appropriation, and (b) subjecting the less developed countries to a regime of low growth through the neoliberal reform: Washington Consensus and the measures applied by the WTO (Sheppard 2016; Freeman 2019)
Summary
World capitalism is in a Kondratiev downswing that started with the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. The stage in progress is based on big data, analytics passing to machine learning and pointing to the autonomous digital systems, that is, AI Each of these phases represents a moving target in terms of social regulation of technological systems in the sense explained above; in this way, socio-institutional lags become cumulative, tending to diminish the potential for growth derived from technological systems, since the first movers pose high barriers to entry and begin to dismantle the productive bases of traditional industries to rebuild them digitally the imbalance in the distribution tends to increase the glut of capital, generating cyclical instability; we will refer to this last point later.
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