Extract from an essay “Maintenance Capitalism: How to Keep Holding On For Forever” by Helmut Jarl, published in October magazine in 2026
As for the present stage of capitalism, I can describe it most succinctly as an extension of what David Harvey calls the “short-range turnover characteristic” of our postmodern condition, brought to an extreme. Capitalism today concerns itself not with the gleaming futures of the mid 20th century, nor the neoliberal booms of the late 20th century, nor the networked marvels of the early 21st. Today capitalism is about holding on, keeping profits, slashing wages, maintaining investor dividends at any cost. Because of supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, increased volatility in the markets, loss of earning potential, and the unprecedented number of market crashes in the last decade, dreaming big is no longer in style. The advertisements on the streets and on your phones—the means by which capitalism insofar as it has a voice may speak—have changed: they do not promise life-changing gains, only to keep what you have secure. The government cuts benefits to bail out the banks and “protect the integrity of the financial system”. Investment advisors that once boasted about APY now boast about their state of the art stop-loss algorithms. Corporations race to lay their workers off, playing at efficiency to pump their stock price and turning to gig-economy lowest-bidder labour pools to maintain productivity. The grifters who prey on the desperate with promises of impossible rewards remain, but they promise only what a CEO might have in an earnings call 10 years ago.
But this is not the security of the cautious, long-term technocrat, as was in vogue in Europe until the political upsets of the early and mid 2020s. While politicians promise autarky and legislate friendshoring or other protective trade practices, in reality these efforts are weakened by the fundamental unsustainability of current consumption levels and a new deprivation-motivated belligerence towards even former allies and neighbours. No, this is the security of minimising day-to-day losses, of playing off short-sellers until you too become a short-seller, of keeping the system going for just long enough that when the investment goes bust you’ve already sold out. Faith—in government, in corporations, in NGOs, in any social enterprise that lasts longer than a night—is dead. We dream of what was once reality, and what is reality today is an ever-present sense of uncertainty, a sense that we must keep whatever we have managed to claw out of the waste heap ours at whatever cost. Ours is a society in maintenance mode, since we already imagine ourselves as living within the wasteland.