The fifth global Kondratiev. Low economic performance, instability and monopolization in the digital age

Abstract

The capitalist expansion based on ICTs configured could be considered an ascending Kondratiev wave, understood since the beginning of the 1980s to the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. This expansive wave has had its dynamic centre in the United States capitalism, originator and leader of digital and network technology. This Kondratiev has limitations of amplitude and rhythm that have resulted in a premature decline in the productivity performance. The weakness of the fifth Kondratiev is not due to a problem of technological exhaustion but to a precarious socio-political and institutional support in the hegemonic country. This means that the US digital monopolies supported by the peculiar institutionality of that country concentrate the economic benefits, causing general effects of exclusion and social marginalization. The only United States competitor is the People's Republic of China, which has managed and created a successful digital economy, which in the span of a decade could contest the hegemony of the leading country. This competitive struggle, which is not only commercial but politico-institutional, will determine if the fifth Kondratiev, now in a phase of economic depression, experiences a rebound, mutates in another Kondratiev based on artificial intelligence or opens a prolonged period of uncertainty and instability global accentuated. The deregulation and the absence of counterweights characteristic of United States institutions explain the conversion of powerful digital technology into a disruptive factor instead of an integrating factor. The other world powers, with the exception of the People's Republic of China, have become just users of digital products and services generated by the United States. Only the People's Republic of China has ventured, and successfully, to become a digital producer, competing directly with American monopolies. But to the extent that this competition is not primarily about trade and market in the conventional sense, but a clash of normative models of social exploitation of the digitalization, we are properly before a struggle for world hegemony.