Friedman had found the ideological lure he was looking for because an individual’s human capital (including earnings and liabilities) can be owned by nobody else. More importantly, human capital theory provides the ultimate neoclassical retort to the Marxist slogan that workers should seize the means of production. If each person is already their own means of production, then the intractable conflict at the heart of the capitalist labour process must logically dissolve. As it turns out, according to Schultz, all workers are in fact consummate capitalists: ‘labourers have become capitalists not from the diffusion of the ownership of corporation stocks, as folk law would have it, but from the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value’.

It was only inevitable that the so-called ‘sharing economy’ would develop out of these socio-economic conditions. Technology, desperation and the continuing individualisation of culture has seen this industry dramatically expand in the USA, UK and elsewhere. Governments now officially speak about its importance and contribution to a nation’s economic wellbeing. The sharing economy has a list of alternative titles that make it look as if we are entering into a new age of utopian collectivism where amateurish goodwill reigns supreme: the peer economy, networked economy, on-demand economy, collaborative economy, gig economy and so forth. But once again we see a typical feature of wreckage economics behind the trend. Business platforms such as Airbnb ride on the informal economy, opportunistically exploiting the insecurity that has become a norm under crisis capitalism. The once laudable commons-based system of peer production has been commercialised by big business using old school middle-man or rentier tactics, thereby generating profits without production. They say that it’s about saving ‘waste’ (idle cars could be taxies, empty bedrooms could be holiday accommodation, etc.). But it’s really a method of exploiting the societal devastation that has unfolded following the recession. [...]

[...]

[...] Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit and similar firms function through a three-stage process: seek an impoverished sector of society, capture their time and resource (with minimal investment costs) and then present that resource to a customer for a surcharge. This is why some have suggested that the sharing economy is more about access.

Conventional forms of collective protest have not disappeared regardless of what is currently being said about the rise of this dangerous brand of pan-capitalism that appears to be able to absorb everything – including revolt. And no doubt class is still the central fulcrum for resisting capitalism successfully since it is the only emancipatory category that also seeks to abolish itself when it confronts the source of economic servitude, not just perpetuate its own self-identity, which is why a number of non-class protest movements can happily subsist alongside capitalist hierarchies

[...] The ‘accelerationist’ perspective, for example, is a philosophy of political intervention that has recently gained popularity. Accelerationists suggest that capitalism is now so totalising that it can absorb almost any form of protest or opposition. In fact, it might even thrive on dissent. Thus, being against capitalism has become a futile exercise. Instead we ought to use its own untenable and destructive principles, speed them up, so that it too ‘snaps’ and disintegrates, leaving a clean horizon within which we can rebuild a more democratic polity. As Steven Shaviro, a leading commenter in the movement suggests in his book No Speed Limit,

the only way out is the way through. In order to overcome globalised neoliberal capitalism, we need to drain it to the dregs, push it to its most extreme point, follow it into its furthest and strangest consequences … the hope is that, by exacerbating our current conditions of existence, we will finally be able to make them explode, and thereby move beyond them.

[...] Life itself is simply about being endlessly concerned with solving technical problems, many of which have none (e.g., debt, etc.). For example, it’s crucial for any civilised society to have a functioning and affordable nationwide public transport system (value). But the job of delivering it has been handed over to organisations who view that value-goal as secondary to making money (means). So much so that it utterly fails in its wider mission. The problem is that society as a whole is being run pretty much in the same way.

[...] One might be tempted to conduct a deconstructive reading of neoclassical economics in the style of Jacques Derrida to try and discern what precisely is the ‘absent presence’ quietly animating this vast machinery of means in the dark margins of its own impossibility. On the other hand, perhaps there’s good reason why Derrida steered clear of economics as such. For its social centre is strictly void, a perceptive abyss that is bereft of wider political reflection. This variant of nothingness is frightening since it consists of interminable tautologies: ‘the reason you do this is because you do this … now let’s model it’. From the rise of the Chicago School onwards, we are no longer permitted to ask why, for example, we have banks, prisons, markets, the cumbersome institution of work and so forth. Challenge any official about this and their gaze slowly drifts away into nothingness with a dumb ‘huh?’ expression. In a universe ruled only by means (especially prices and money) the unassuming margins that Derrida argued were so important for grasping a discourse (i.e., it’s what is not said, continuously deferred that gives a text its deceptive positivity) are suddenly missing.

None of this would be a problem if economics was confined to the endowed chairs of the academy, esoteric journal articles and boring conferences. But the lexicon of neoclassical economics is the leading language game in (post-)neoliberal societies of control. And this economisation of life in general has only gathered strength following the global financial crisis, an event that mainly become notable because it affects rich people (the Global South has had its own global crisis for many years, it’s called poverty). [...]

[...] jobs become a quantitative output (politicians only talk about them in terms of faceless numbers) rather than a qualitative or substantive input that might serve some wider social and existential role. In other words, a job is no longer a means to achieve other things but a (dead) end in itself.