alt Hacker NewsWe squeezed everything we could squeeze over the last decades, getting better products / quality of life (in the west at least). Now that there is almost no one left to abuse (ie people on the other side of the planet willing to work for pennies) we'll have to get by with shittier products, more working hours, later retirement, worse public services, etc.
Many product segments peaked and the only way left to extract more money from us is to either lower the quality so that it's cheaper to make/break faster or subscriptions/ads.
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Why do we have to get by as you say? On whose command?
Why do we always act like there's an immutable social obligation to march right along believing the prior generations had freedom to start marching in that direction, but we are forever locked in to such a direction.
You know all the people that made those choices are dying and future generations have zero obligation to carry on linearly from where they left off?
Women would not have the right to vote. We'd all be speaking Latin.
Two things that would remain true if society of the living was tightly coupled to exactly how the past worked.
Bullshit jobs (and unnecessary in-office), material waste (food, clothes, etc.), culture warring...we have much more to squeeze.
The dynamic is not a straightforward "race to the bottom" that simply runs out of victims, but rather a cyclical process that continually recreates working-class resistance and shifts capital into entirely new industries.
Maybe it seems like this strategy leads to a permanent decline in global labor power, but history shows a different pattern: "where capital goes, conflict goes". Relocating capital to exploit cheap labor does not permanently resolve crises of profitability; it merely reschedules them in time and space. By moving to new regions, multinational capital inevitably creates and strengthens entirely new industrial working classes in those areas.
Conversely (complementarily) when an industry becomes too crowded and profits are squeezed, capitalists do not just cut corners; they rely on what Beverly Silver terms the product fix—shifting capital entirely out of mature, highly competitive sectors into new, innovative, and more profitable industries.
Historically, the epicenter of capitalist accumulation (and subsequent labor unrest) shifted from textiles in the 19th century to automobiles in the 20th century. In the first decades of this century, capital shifted toward semiconductors, the "education industry," and producer services (like finance, telecommunications, and consulting).
Because a product fix involves withdrawing capital from an established industry, it usually brings about mass layoffs, deindustrialization, and the breaking of existing social compacts. In response, the workers who previously benefited from those compacts have, historically, risen up to protect their jobs, pensions, and established ways of life.
Unfortunately, they are often doomed by their diminishing economic leverage.
Almost every global graph tells the opposite story. There are far fewer people in poverty. There are much better average outcomes on basically every metric you can imagine. Almost all directly attributed to global commerce