Magical Thinking: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (2011)

Yes. Capitalism has become a monopoly.

For a half century, from about 1920 to 1970, capitalism had competition. Communism, as an ideology, was taken seriously. There were times when it looked like the USSR might eventually outperform the US. The UK had a long-standing socialist movement.

This kept capitalism honest. For most of that period, US wages tracked productivity. Businesses were afraid of labor, and afraid of government. If companies got too uppity, they might be nationalized. Communism itself never worked all that well, but the threat of communism forced capitalism to perform better.

Then, in the 1970s, things changed. There was a plan, the famous Powell Memorandum, to take back America for the benefit of business.[1] It was a radical proposal which, through heavy promotion and lobbying, became mainstream, then dominant. If you don't know what that was, go read it.

What we ended up with is postmodern capitalism, which is rather inefficient. Only 8% of the workforce is in manufacturing, while finance and marketing are larger than that. This is the tail wagging the dog. Like most monopolies, capitalism has trouble getting out of its own way.

An economy dominated by direct labor, where labor inputs directly produce manufactured output, has a sort of built-in sanity check. Most effort goes into real output. Competition is a side effect of that. A marketing driven economy turns that on its head. It lacks a built-in sanity check. The extreme example of this is meme coins in crypto markets, which are pure Ponzi schemes and known to be such.

Almost the only other system of economic organization that seems to have worked is China, from Zhao Ziyang up to Xi Jinping's first term. Much has been written about that elsewhere.

Nobody really knows how to run a post-industrial economy. This is a problem. It leads to national leaders who look for "enemies" to blame, rather than looking into a mirror. From Xi to Putin to Trump, there are too many of those right now.

The current issue of the Economist has a boot stamping on a face on the cover, with the headline "Now what?". A very good question.

[1] https://archive.org/details/PowellMemorandum-AttackOnAmerica...