I expect that the immediate outcome is going to be massive consolidation. As people lose their jobs, a lot of businesses will end up going bankrupt. This will allow the big surviving businesses to buy them up on the cheap.
As Marx notes in Das Kapital:
The splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals or the repulsion of its fractions from one antoher, is counteracted by their attraction. This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from the former in this, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of capital already on hand, and functioning; its field of action is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is the centralization proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.
The laws of this centralization of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital, cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, coeteris pribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and the inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hand of their conquerors, partly vanish.
At the same time mass unemployment will result in a large pool of cheap labour for the remaining companies. This will necessarily lead to complete erosion of worker rights due to overabundance of labour.
mass unemployment will result in a large pool of cheap labour for the remaining companies. This will necessarily lead to complete erosion of worker rights due to overabundance of labour.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. We will return to the conditions that gave rise to radical movements in the first place. On the one hand recruitment will never be easier, but on the other hand a great many people are going to suffer horrendously.
Yeah, it’s really depressing to see that it took only around century of thing to go back to basically the same conditions that fueled the Soviet revolution. It clearly shows that capitalism is fundamentally incapable of evolving in a positive fashion.
I expect that the immediate outcome is going to be massive consolidation. As people lose their jobs, a lot of businesses will end up going bankrupt. This will allow the big surviving businesses to buy them up on the cheap.
As Marx notes in Das Kapital:
At the same time mass unemployment will result in a large pool of cheap labour for the remaining companies. This will necessarily lead to complete erosion of worker rights due to overabundance of labour.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. We will return to the conditions that gave rise to radical movements in the first place. On the one hand recruitment will never be easier, but on the other hand a great many people are going to suffer horrendously.
Yeah, it’s really depressing to see that it took only around century of thing to go back to basically the same conditions that fueled the Soviet revolution. It clearly shows that capitalism is fundamentally incapable of evolving in a positive fashion.