Commentator Katy J contributed this comment yesterday:
“Herewith a few possible alternatives to the anodyne ‘neocapitalism' – mostly verging on the outlandish, but it was fun to distract myself with this on a very hot day:
- Fat-cattery;
- fuck-you-ism;
- neo-feudalism;
- privatised profiteering;
- licensed/legalised looting;
- crony capitalism;
- rigged-marketism;
- merciless marketism;
- mass exploitery;
- bond-age;
- hedge fundism;
- unequalism;
- Trumpism;
- extractivism;
- immoralism;
- selfishism;
- greedism;
- market capitulatery;
- unthinkery;
- fiscal dysthinkery;
- extractive elitism.
Any more, and if one preference, what?
I do like unequalism.
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Talking to a working person yesterday, he knew of a mate who had been turned down for a mortgage of £800 a month, so he still had to pay £1200 a month rent in the private sector.
‘Unequalism’ would resonate I think with a lot of people.
What a country, eh?
I was also thinking about the truly awful events at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham and wondering how much of that might be attributable to Government mismanagement?
We live in a country where you can always find someone to do the worst to make a lack of funding ‘work’. Appalling.
Look after yourself Richard.
Thanks.
First treatment done.
I now gather three are likely.
E.M.A.P. (Establishment Media Assisted Parasitism)?
Fraudonomics?
Plutocracy?
Neofraudism?
I think fraudonomics wins the prize for me, it sums up the whole bun fight.
A few other possibilities off the top of my warped mind:
Demonocracy
Stubbornomics
Neo-lemmingism
“extractivism” sounds good to me.
Hoping you get your treatment, recover quickly and feel better soon. 🙂
Thanks, Tim
An excellent list!
I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I like referring to wealth as “resource hoarding”
Friedmanism
Legalised looting is very accurate!
It is a fun excerciese<p>
Varoufakis calls it Techno Feudalism, which does capture the extractive and monopolistic nature of the present set up.
That is but one branch – Katy’s neo-feudalism is broader. Extractive elitism and Crony capitalism describe it, bond-age brings wry humour, fuck-you-ism says it like it is.
The gilded apes who look up to Eel-on fit under any of these umbrellas, but Unequalism is straightforward, it describes the unfairness. Nothing new in my brain today as the mercury rises.
Rentitlism?
As something the man in the street could relate to, I favour something along the lines of a ‘system skewed toward the super-rich’, or ‘rigged for the richest’. The concept of unfairness is a powerful one.
IMHO ‘capitalism’ has ideological baggage and bashing ‘the wealthy’ doesn’t work because everyone secretly thinks they might be wealthy one day…
Richard, hope you’re on the mend. Thanks for keeping your blog active – a community is building.
Thanks
The Age of Grhoarders (greedy hoarders).
It is so un-natural.
Nature is self-balancing. Animals take what they need and no more.
Even the indians or any tribe knew this. If they caught and slaughtered an animal, they would pay respect to the spirts and nature for the animals sacrifice to aid sustain their life. They use every inch of the animal (food, clothing, shelter, tools) nothing was wasted.
This age is bizarre, in that its the complete opposite. The age of the individual, take as much as you can, hoard it. Until nothing is left. The film Wall-E still represents this in an easy digestible entertaining format for all ages.
Get well soon Richard…
Just did a quick google AI search which came up with the following (it can have its fun side)…
I asked it for… ‘unusual tongue in cheek synonyms for neocapitalism’…
It replied…
‘Here are some unusual, tongue-in-cheek synonyms for neocapitalism, categorized by their specific flavour of irony:’
Corporate Absurdity
Late-Stage Hustleocracy: Rule by non-stop grind culture.
The Spreadsheet Overlordship: Society governed strictly by profit margins.
Excel-Sheet Feudalism: Modern serfdom driven by data metrics.
Synergy-Stuffed Serfdom: Corporate buzzwords masking wealth inequality.
Dystopian Sci-Fi
Cyber-Feudalism 2.0: Old-school peasant dynamics with better Wi-Fi.
Algorithm-Driven Overlordship: Submitting completely to tech-giant automation.
The Neon-Lit Company Store: A flashy, high-tech monopoly system.
Subscription-Model Existence: Owning absolutely nothing, forever renting life.
Darkly Playful
Hyper-Monetised Chaos: Putting a distinct price tag on everything.
Turbo-Charged Rentierism: Landlords and tech platforms extracting maximum cash.
The Gig-Economy Grindhouse: A brutal loop of endless side hustles.
Monopoly: Real World Edition: The board game, but you cannot leave.
Thank you
I was talking yesterday with my EU economist (Austrian – natch) friend. Observation: if we consider the destruction of EU energy intensive industry – due to high energy cost (because the EU is functionally incapable of reforming how it prices energy) – & we consider the destruction of value however measured (GDP … lost employment etc etc) vs the profits made by “energy traders” there are orders of magnitude difference between the two. |Traders make nice money (a few billion), the value destruction (EU industry) is many tens if not hundreds of billions of Euros. “Efficient markets” = piracy.
I am in the South of France. It is worth reflecting that until circa 1820 – most of the Italian, French and Spanish coasts were uninhabitable due to the actions of the Barbary pirates operating out of Tunis and Algiers. There was no interest on their part in “reform” (why bother – slavery was fun & profitable) . The solution was their destruction (bombardment of Algiers 1819). We are in a similar situation with neoliberalism – it is a parasite on most of humanity. It needs to be eliminated. How?
Asset-Stripping.
As it looks very much like the coup by Burnham and his sponsors will stick him in No 10 we are entering Burn’em-ism.
His nickname in Local Government circles is apparently Bambi because of his fawn-like eyes, so it could be Bambi-ism. A dystopian Walt Disney tale.
Or End Times Tech Fascism. ETTF.
Burn’emism is good except it implies he has agency
If Burnham is Bambi, does that make Richard Thumper?
We are immersed in a cult celebrating the aesthetics of waste
I think unequalism is good.
But I’d also go for contradictionism with its mantra of e.g.:
“MMT is always bad, unless it’s for defence, then it’s always great!”
Decayed Thatcherism. It is gone beyond being rotten. Being rotten implies we can visit the market and buy a fresh brand new version. Nope. Not this time. DT seeks to destroy any alternative to rotten decay.
P. S. Perhaps more seriously, might Neoliberalism be a manifestation of Catabolic Capitalism”?
“This concept describes a stage of capitalism in which profits increasingly come not from production but from consuming the social, institutional, ecological, and infrastructutral foundations built during an earlier era of greater, more genuine abundance.” [From “Catabolic Capitalism: Profiting from Collapse by Craig Collins in Counterpunch 23/06/26]
Thanks! I particularly like the words or phrases with F in them, because they lend themselves to alliterative slogans when paired with ‘failed’, eg ‘Forty Years of Fraudonomics has Failed’. But I expect people can come up with splendid snappy slogans for other words too!
Neat
My favcapitalism ourite expression is Absolute Capitalism. Just as the absolute monarchs claimed they did not have to justify their existence: I am king because I am king modern proponents of neo liberalism do no longer see the need to justify themselves, the order of things, their wealth, their power: Capitalism is, full stop.
“L’êtat c’est moi” has not ended well.
Truth be told though it could have ended better. The revolutioniaries in France at first did try to incorporate the king in their new constitution for some years.
Him in the end despite that plotting against them was what killed him. At least that was what I hopefully rightly remember from the “French Revolution”-Series by ” The Rest is History”.
I still do have the same kind of (maybe always futile) hope of being able to resocialise those modern day absolutists in society.
Extractism, an ideology or way of organising the economy around extraction as a core principle.
Hope you’re on the mend.
Marketocracy
I like extractivism and unequalism but what about plunderonomics?
🙂
Re unequalism, maybe disequalism is a tad stronger, implying a deliberate policy of unlevelling society.
Financial feudalism?
hope you feel better Richard
Financial feudalism? Neofeudalism?
hope you feel better Richard
Vampirism?
I like fuckwittery,it being the denial of factual evidence, science and expert opinion, preferring instead easy answers to complex problems. (Always the wrong answers).
Just came across this word from the IT world:
Enshittification.
It describes the phenomenon where online platforms and services progressively degrade in quality as they prioritize profit maximization over user satisfaction. Coined by author Cory Doctorow,
I know it
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