“Maybe mental health isn’t the problem,” said Mr Z, listening to a news item about mental health on the radio. “Maybe it’s a crisis in late capitalism.”
“Funny, that’s what Sinéad O’Connor thinks,” I replied.
“Impossible. She eats her dinner in a fancy restaurant, that’s the definition of late capitalism.”
“She put it in a below-the-line comment on her New York Times profile. ‘It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’ Except all in capital letters, so you have to imagine her shouting it.”
“Or singing it?”
“Or singing it,” I agreed.
“Late capitalism” is the new “neoliberalism”, the phrase that marks you out as a leftwing wing nut. That’s why I was surprised, since my Mr’s wing-nuttery usually crescendoes through the day, climaxing at midnight. When he sounds like Noam Chomsky during the Today programme, perhaps he’s having a late-capitalism crisis?
“It’s like when cows get sore udders because you’re overmilking them. The problem isn’t the cow. The cow merely presents the problem,” he said.
“Overmilking would just be regular capitalism, though. The exploitation of workers and/or cows for profit; meh. It’s like a period drama.”
“You’re missing the point: it’s not just exploitation for production, it’s exploitation to the extent that the worker and/or cow can no longer produce.”
The reason we keep saying “late capitalism” is the same reason that people write it off as a crank’s phrase: it makes it sound as if capitalism will end and something else will come along. More than that, it sounds as if it’s already at the end of its continuum.
But the word “late” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. So, it falls upon me, as a crank, to figure out where it differs from “early” and “middle” capitalism.
Early capitalism is where everyone embarks on a major productivity wheeze, except it becomes clear over time that one person is making all the money while hundreds of people do all the work. The workers are not blind to this asymmetry, but the whole thing is novel, plus they are occupied with trying not to starve.
Middle capitalism is where everyone realises some accommodation must be reached, because starvation might be preferable to this lunacy. Rules are organised haltingly around rudimentary principles of fairness: a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, experience and expertise rewarded with greater wages, etc.
In late capitalism, you should be grateful to the wealth creators to be paid at all. Plenty of people would do this for free. Experience, if it makes you more expensive, is just wasted overhead. True productivity is when everyone is paid the same minimal amount. Late capitalism is like arguing with a teenager. Its gambit on matters of fairness and dignity is “Why should I?” and its logical endpoint is “robots”. I can’t figure out whom I blame – maybe postmodernists?
In early capitalism, you are delighted to find that you can afford wheat and the stub end of a candle; middle capitalism provokes a surge in the possibilities of consumption and asks itself searching questions about the relationship between wages and prices: what kind of capitalist will make the most money? The one producing the most expensive stuff? Or the one whose workers can afford the stuff they produce?
Late capitalism doesn’t care who can afford what; all that matters is the ferocity of their longing for the stuff they can’t afford. This is where the inconvenient postcapitalism hoves into view: you can’t long ferociously for unattainable consumer goods for ever.
Debt is only possible when you are considered credit-worthy, so we can skip straight to middle capitalism: here, debt is a source of great shame, a stain on the character, a moral failure and, consequently, a taboo. In late capitalism, debt remains shaming; it’s also petrifying, like waking up every morning having overslept by five hours.
Yet there’s also a strong hunch that indebtedness is widespread, coupled with a generalised rejection of taboos, which makes this a delicate equilibrium. If everyone were as open about debt as they are about the generalised anxiety conditions that often trace back to the debt, it would lose its power to shame. That might be something for late capitalism to mull over.
In early capitalism, you have two rooms and you sleep in one with your grumpy spouse, while your seven children sleep in the other. In middle capitalism, mature discussions are had about whether this is going to work out, long term; might it be better to pool resources and build some social housing? In late capitalism, you have two rooms, but fortunately you know that it’s very irresponsible to have any children if you can’t afford them, let alone seven, so that’s great. You have a spare room. (Narrator: you probably don’t have a spare room.)
“The trouble is,” I announced, when Mr Z returned (he always leaves the area while Thought for the Day is on), “I want to say ‘late capitalism’ because it makes me smell the winds of change, but it’s impossible to nail down what it means without sounding like Sinéad O’Connor.”
“In your dreams,” he said. “Nothing compares to her.”
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
