Can shared economy destroy capitalism?
Currently sharing economy is an intermediary platform that negotiates a connection between clients and services, be it Uber, Airbnb, Upwork or hundreds of other Internet platforms. Besides information transaction, they also build up new social relationships reevaluating the value of service and monetary compensation. As Hamari (The Sharing Economy: Why people participate in collaborative consumption) points out economic factor is not the only one that drives sharing. Enjoyment of sharing, sustainability, attitude, and reputation gains also affect people’s willingness to share or trust to strangers. This new quality of social relationships promises to disrupt the traditional notion of property, the need for commodity and distribution of means of production and goods. In other words, sharing economy can a potentially undermine capitalism as we know it.
Right now, On the one hand, one might argue that “shared economy” is nothing more but information powered form of capitalism that distributes greater assets to greater audience. Nevertheless, shared economy is a herald of new economic relationships and capital distribution driven by information. Was Marx right in predicting the death of capitalism and the transition of society into a new form of socialism, if not communism?
Information age has precipitated not only “Globalism” (or internationalism in Marxist terms), but also precipitated changes in our understanding of societal relationships, property, commodity, exchange of products and services. The sharing economy is poised to disrupt the current job market, education and even government, as we know it. Ability to freely exchange products and services for any unit of monetary value (be it U.S dollar or Bitcoin), degraded consumerism and diminished social value of property can undermine the role of governmental power and metabolize capitalism into new form of social relationships. It seems that governments can do little to stop such transformations. The first signs of governmental subversion is evident in Russia as it fruitlessly attempts to ban Telegram, the encrypted messenger that rapidly spread into social media business, advertisement, and monetary platform. If an authoritarian state loses fight to sharing platforms how can weaker democratic state cope with transformational power of Google or other information powerhouses?
It is very likely that we are heading into an era of informational corporatocracy. As the governmental power to control information flows diminishes, it is not hard to imagine corporations that start to provide law and order to its stakeholders. Even know a great number of corporations generate more profit than some of third world countries. It can be argued that with further globalization, national states might become just and overhead to the rule of transnational corporations. Shared economy, cryptocurrencies are just the first signs of further transformations.
