The fate of Marxism/socialism is that it will go down in history as the loyal opposition to capitalism.
Nature is a feedback loop between polarities, but with our linear, goal oriented paradigm of monist idealism, both sides, liberal/conservative, public/private, nodes/networks, organisms/ecosystems, etc. are modeled as the defining feature, one true path, while the context is just noise from which the signal is drawn.
For one thing, capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy, as markets need money to circulate, while people assume it to be the signal to extract and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.
The reality of money is that it functions as a contract, with the asset backed by an obligation, ie, debt. Even gold backed currencies are the reciept, not the gold.
Which makes it a very efficient medium of exchange, but lousy store of value, as the asset requires similar amounts of debt to be generated.
Yet we assume it to be a commodity, that can be mined and manufactured, like gold, or bitcoin.
Even Econ 101 says it is both medium of exchange and store of value, but a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. The average five year old understands there is a difference.
So we have an economy in which the saving of money is the supreme goal, but that requires an economy doing everything possible to manufacture debt.
One way is simply squeezing money flowing through the general economy, requiring it to run on debt and pulling this saved money back into circulation. Which creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of society, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.
Since banking and money function as the value circulation system of society, this is analogous to the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
The Ancients used debt jubilees to reset this dynamic, but industrialization, wars and colonialism have managed to expand our bubble past historic breaking points.
The other primary method is having the government as debtor of last resort. The capital markets could not function, without government siphoning up trillions in surplus capital. Extravagant militaries and endless wars are just a way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed.
The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The end game will be when the process starts to break down and those holding the largest piles of government debt use their considerable influence to trade it for any remaining public assets. Disaster capitalism/predatory lending coming home to roost.
Then we get real oligarchy, not this political puppet show.
The reality is that the functionality of money is its fungibility. As a medium, we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. It is a public utility and needs to be treated as such. It's not our personal picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not individually responsible for sustaining its value.
The government could tax out what it currently borrows, then people would quickly find other ways to store value.
The simple fact is that there isn't nearly enough investment potential to save the amounts we feel necessary, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the commons will have to resurrected in the next culture, as a means of storing value.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized culture is more easily manipulated by institutional authorities and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, social, cultural, civic, economic, matter as much as the nodes occupying them.
Which is not to say banking can become a direct function of government, as politicians live and die on the hope they inspire and since we experience money as quantifed hope, it creates the incentive to print excess money.
Society needs both public and private functions, like a house has personal and family spaces. It is a question of which is which.
As the executive and regulatory function of society, government is analogous to the central nervous system, as money and banking are to blood and the circulation system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the function they served to society, in order to be served by it, they were usurped. Banking is now having its, "Let them eat cake." moment.
The future we have been borrowing against has arrived.
