There can be little doubt that we are living in a declining phase of capitalist civilisation. Indeed the consensus before and during the second world war was that capitalism had reached its terminal point and was being superseded by a type of bureaucratic collectivist social order (it would be politic I think not to use the term 'socialism' in this connexion). This view was common to both opponents as well as partisans of capitalism (e.g. J.A. Schumpeter, James Burnham, F. Von Hayek).
It came as a surprise, therefore, that capitalism would have another - extremely successful - post-war run. But like all periods of long-run expansion the system ran into the buffers of over-accumulation, stagnation and inflation (circa 1975). This gave rise to the counter-revolutionary movement of the 80s and 90s, variously termed, neo-liberalism, globalisation, free-markets, privatisation, de-regulation. This movement was led by grubby little people from the suburbs and provinces - Thatcher, Reagan, Berlusconi and their ilk; petit-bourgeois arrivistes with little or no education or culture, and certainly without any sense of noblesse oblige. Archetypal counter-revolutionaries in fact, comparable in terms of their social background and education with the fascist leaders of the 1920s and 30s. This particular phase of the capitalist cycle (1980-2000) saw the emergence of the golden age of high finance; yuppies, stock market booms, conspicuous consumption, the IT/Media/Telecommunications bubble, new paradigms, new economy, a global Anglo-American consumer culture ... and so forth.
This stage of the cycle has now ended. Now is the period of collapse (or market correction as it is now called): a collapse of overvalued equity markets; a collapse of the confidence of investors in the integrity of those executives in the command posts of the economy; a collapse in manufacturing and banking profits due to bad loans, unwise investments and over-investment; a collapse in the belief that any systemic and fundamental change can be effected through orthodox politics.
The decline of civilisations (capitalist or otherwise) is ultimately, however, a question of culture and politics, rather than of economics। The cultural and moral decline of late capitalist civilisation needs to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. This is not difficult; the indicators of disintegration and social pathology are everywhere. Rates of clinical depression have increased considerably since 1950. In America a survey of over 18,000 adults found that a person born between 1945 and 1955 was between three and ten times more likely to suffer a major depression before the age of 34 than a person born between 1905 and 1914. Another American study involving 19,000 people found that 20% of the total US population suffer from a mental illness (as defined by the psychiatric bible The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) during any given 12 months and that 32% will suffer at some point during their lifetime.
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Alienation or anomie - take your pick. Does the sty make the pig or the pig make the sty? Too much freedom or not enough? Actually I don't think that the question is ultimately very important or indeed resolvable. What is important is the fact of moral and cultural decline and the corollary of social disintegration - a crisis which is very real.
There is a tendency to look to a golden age in the past and denigrate the present। I also acknowledge that there has been real progress in science and technology, as well as political and social progress, and that certain groups have emerged from centuries of oppression and marginalisation (women, ethnic groups and gays). Concurrently, however, there have also occurred massive regressions and systematic marginalisation of other groups (the old, the poor, the third-world); such is the dialectic of history. Definitively, however, the empirical evidence points unequivocally to a societal crisis at all levels: economic, social, moral, cultural, and environmental. This is exactly the type of crisis which presages fundamental historical change. But in the short to medium term things are bound to get very ugly indeed.
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