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Notes -
I agree that immigration is essential for the West, albeit for different reasons. Birth rates have declined below replacement levels, and thus, western countries are facing population busts where there will not be enough people to maintain society and care for the elderly. Demography is destiny, as they say.
Throughout the rest of your post I’d replace the idea of “the regime” and “the Leviathan” with “the impersonal forces of global capitalism”, but would largely agree.
Agreed that capitalism celebrates these concepts because they are good for business. Feminism allowing women into the workplace creates a larger pool of labor to draw from. Appealing to identities in advertising and hiring practices (sexual orientation, gender identity, race, etc.) increases consumption and the potential labor pool.
I think the class of people unable to support a family is more of a side effect. Global capitalism has unlocked incredible value for the wealthy. There is excess capital to be invested, which results in the prices of assets increasing dramatically (housing, for example). However as Piketty discovered, economic growth doesn’t keep pace with the rate of return on capital, which is why wages have stagnated while asset prices have ballooned. This slow economic growth makes family formation harder.
Unhappy? Likely. I think our demographic decline is going to create a massive labor shortage in the coming decades that even a dramatic increase in immigration seems unlikely to solve. It seems to me that capital must bear this cost rather than labor in the form of higher wages, lest they risk the value of their enterprise. I think some larger companies are already realizing this, though the smaller ones may be slower to pick it up.
Violent? I’m not so sure. I’d hope that capital would realize that it must renegotiate its relationship with labor and this would occur peacefully, and given how most of the pressure from the current movement is occurring non-violently online, I think this may be the case. However, previous periods of economic transition have been marked with violence so perhaps I’m being naive.
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