Hurtling headlong toward dystopia?

Are we returning to a world of an elite and underclass?

If you’ve managed to get all the way through Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles ,a brilliant fictional account of how the US copes in the aftermath of a trade war with China, I have just the book for you. The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, is a chilling account of the period between 1989 and the election of Donald Trump as US president. Though not fictional, the book could be regarded as a prequel to Shriver’s grim, barely fictional story.

Where did it all go wrong? Western democracy was so gung ho in 1989, nothing could stop it. It would surely be just a few short years before every government in the world adopted the capitalist democratic system that guaranteed the benefits of economic growth for all.

Shriver’s book describes how badly wrong things got. It was published before Trump’s victory but, by the day, the plot, which is set after 2025, feels less outrageous. Luce’s book describes how such a dystopian future became possible. For those who haven’t already guessed: Trump is not the cause, he is a mere symptom.

Things went wrong when growth in liberal democracies failed to benefit all citizens. Ironically, that had started to happen even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but few people paid any attention until the early 21st century.

If, after reading Shriver and Luce, you feel you can stomach more (be careful), you could glance through comments by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the dangers posed by automation.

The IT billionaires have added their voices to warnings about the threat artificial intelligence poses to jobs.

For the post-world War 2 baby boomers, as Zuckerberg points out, purpose came from jobs, religious affiliation and/or community. What Zuckerberg doesn’t say is that the unrestrained chase for profits at any cost (the mantra of capitalism) has resulted in a hollowing out of all three.

Luce questions whether, all things considered, Western democracy can survive. As US academic Barrington Moore said in the 1960s, democracy needs the bourgeoisie. Without jobs there can be no bourgeoisie. We return to a state where there is an elite and an underclass.

The prospect of that elite agreeing to pay sufficient tax to enable the underclass to sustain a decent quality of life is remote. This is an elite that has entrenched its wealth by being footloose and evading tax at almost any cost; it has allegiance to no state.

Governments across the globe have threatened to rein it in but so far have done little more than sound indignant. Soon it may be too late.

Perhaps we’re heading into a period similar to that of the 17th century enclosure of the commons in England, when self-selected elites took ownership of common land for their gain. Today, automation allows self-selected elites to accrue profit from work once done by paid workers. Enclosure did help to create the conditions leading to the Industrial Revolution, but not before widescale social unrest.

Perhaps a trip to the cinema to watch Wonder Woman would be less daunting.

Automation allows selfselected elites to accrue profit from work once done by paid workers