An economic-cultural crisis is in the works

Guy Rundle has a couple of articles up on Crikey in which he proposes a post-capitalist system that "reverses the current relationship between culture/society and market/economy so that the former determines the latter and not, as currently happens, economy dictating to society and culture."

A neat excerpt:

2) Relocalisation and decommodification -- the current culture economy web of capitalism is based on an implicit social contract, that no-one ever signed up to. Under this contract you work longer and harder, while the price of essentials -- especially home ownership -- are ramped up into lifelong servitude to payment to institutions. The pay-off? Cheap consumer durables and entertainment services.

Forget the civilisational critique of this for a moment -- on its own terms, it pitches the whole society into trembling economic fragility in which a whole way of life is based on Xmas sales, and shopping becomes an essential patriotic activity.

Of course this can't continue -- but the expectations it has raised in people cannot be assuaged by any shift to a harsher economy. A half-century ago, you could get people to work 48 hours a week for a weatherboard, a radiogram, a pub counter meal once a week and three course meal when their daughter got married. Any breach of the current contract -- 50 hours in the office partition for $12 cocktails and DVD box sets -- ain't gonna fly.

Protestant capitalism cannot be re-established after consumer capitalism. And consumer capitalism cannot continue to sustain the Western economy. An economic-cultural crisis is in the works.

and later he says..

a left vision grounds itself ethically on the notion -- promulgated in the great religions, secularised by Kant – that humans should treated each other as ends, not means.

This is from the final part (part three) of Guy Rundle’s rather in-depth but interesting musing on the state of the modern Left, and it's vision of the future.
Part two - "The past and future of the Left" and part one - "The Australian can’t tell its left from right" are also online at Crikey.