Capitalist growth has been in secular decline since the 1970s

Evidence

Even though crisis has been conventionalized for centuries, present macroeconomic conditions show unusual stress—which sparks immediacy as a novel cultural style. Economists, historians, Marxist theorists, and even former treasury secretary Larry Summers all now concede that a serious crisis grips: capitalist growth began to lag irreversibly in the 1970s, although it took until the late 1990s for this lag to be acknowledged as a long-term trend. … Objective indicators of decline on the labor side include unemployment, wage stagnation, and diminishing benefits (or responsibilization of workers, rather than companies or governments, for their own health care and retirement); indicators on the capital side include the decreasing rate of founding new firms, decreasing daily number of New York Stock Exchange transactions, corporate stock buybacks, slow rate of computer-chip and equipment improvements, and, most importantly, the deeply slackening rate of business investment. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up the Jameson-informed chapter structure; connects to Postmodernism as the cultural logic chapter on architecture versus digital culture.