Just as Marxists once looked forward to the creation of a New Socialist Man, imbued with the values of socialism, today's dystopian capitalists imagine a new capitalist man and woman who will internalize the values of the market. These new creatures are armed with no reciprocal guarantees, only with a set of marketable skills, one of which is skill in the marketing of the self. The new insecurity also assures that newly contingent employees will be in perpetual competition with each other, which keeps labor costs low. Beyond the more obvious psychic costs, this brave new workplace exacts economic costs that are beyond the grasp of the dystopian theorists. When the entire labor market is under this kind of competitive pressure, wages tend to be battered down below rates of productivity growth.
Workers can no longer buy what they make.
Despite the wondrous ingenuity with which industry makes, manages, and markets, the economy stalls. In retrospect, the economy of the postwar boom in Europe, Japan, and America had an equipoise in which worker purchasing power rose roughly in tandem with rising productivity. Nearly everybody gained. With near-full employment, workers had the bargaining power to demand rising wages and greater job security. A social contract between worker and manager was implied and was assumed to have mutual benefits.