Sublime

Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable

if the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but really any radically different technological future at all.

Our argument in this chapter will go through the following propositions, which serve as headings for their own sections of discussion: Value is subjective; uncertainty is not risk; economic complexity resists equilibria; markets aggregate prices, not information; and, markets tend to leverage efficiency.

in the present phase of capitalist development, the distinction between production and reproduction has become totally blurred, as work becomes the production of states of being, “affects,” and “immaterial” rather than physical objects.36

Yet nearly 250 years after Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the publication most committed to defending his legacy was now uncertain whether one of the central premises of his thinking would endure for much longer. Such doubt resides at the very heart of what the Third Disruption means. If capital can become labour – if tools produced by humans

Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante write in Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington, “The ideology of modern finance replaced the capitalist’s appreciation for free markets as a context for human creativity with the worship of efficient markets as substitutes for that creativity. The result was a divorce of entrepreneurial