Stasis

Real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages have risen less than a penny a year over the last 50 years:

https://mishtalk.com/economics/real-hourly-wages-have-risen-less-than-a-penny-a-year-since-1973

Accounting for inflation, using 1982–1984 as the base rate, a worker made $9.38 per hour in 1973 and makes $9.63 today.

* * * *

Stasis, stasis, stasis. Conditions in the inner cities remain deplorable . . . the schools, the crime, the lack of upward mobility. Towns in the rust-belt continue to wither. The labor movement has atrophied.

The left has failed. Hope (Kennedy, Obama, Sanders) is gone. Bernie’s hero had been Eugene Debs, who, a hundred years ago, really called for social transformation. Four generations later all Bernie called for was a mildly progressive social democracy. And it ain’t happening.

Life for most people in the relatively affluent countries is not terrible. But overall the human condition sucks. It’s veiled by a fog of media, entertainment, and internet chatter. Faux community.

The stasis, the withering, the ecocide, the spiritual impoverishment is a function of the non-viability of globalized capitalist industrial modernity.

It won’t be overthrown. It will be abandoned.