Charles Stross, a science fiction writer, makes an interesting argument in his blog about the conditions under which we are living.
Among his observations:
We’re living in an era of increasing automation. And it’s trivially clear that the adoption of automation privileges capital over labour (because capital can be substituted for labour, and the profit from its deployment thereby accrues to capital rather than being shared evenly across society).
A side-effect of the rise of capital is the financialization of everything…
Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.
The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective. (This emerges organically from the needs of the organization’s employees.)fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are.
The original article is here, and well worth reading.