Will capitalism wither away?

James Livingston in an article titled "How the Left has Won" for "Jacobin"  http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/how-the-left-has-won/ claims that socialism is alive and well in the U.S. and in surprising places.  He argues that, it can arise spontaneously as an economic system through civil society channels, just as capitalism did. He acknowledges the French and American revolutions made way for capitalism, but accidentally, not as part of a program, that only socialism was conceived as both a political and economic system simultaneously.  

It was an interesting argument, but when pressed for details, he seems to equivocate socialist programs with liberal ones--neither of which have deep purchase in the United States to date.  He thinks capitalism will be decomposed by civil society.  But how?

"The upshot of these changes, which I would summarize as the decomposition of capitalism, is a situation in which the extraction of surplus value from labor by capital has lost its investment function, and the production of value by labor has lost its income function. In short, capitalism has stopped making moral sense because it has stopped making economic sense. It’s not a technical issue. Capitalists and their political functionaries continue to extract surplus value from labor however they can–these days by fierce assertion of their prerogatives, as if they’re Charles i defending the divine right of kings against a dubious Parliament, as if the rights of property as such are at stake–but the profits that result have no purpose, no outlet, no investment function. Growth will happen with or without them, whether they’re invested in goods production or not, and so they pile up, waiting for another bubble to inflate.

Meanwhile, proletarians of all kinds continue to go to work because they know that if they don’t their incomes will disappear. But as they buy the right not to die on a daily basis, they also know that the hours they spend on the job are a waste of their time and talents: unlike the “aristocracy of finance,” they know that their incomes have no relation to the value they create while at work, because they know that their increased productivity has gone, literally, to waste. They know that what the functionaries of capital call “entitlements” and “transfer payments” are justifiable supplements to or substitutes for income that can’t be earned by working for it, either because there aren’t enough good jobs or because there aren’t enough labor unions. These supplements or substitutes have been the fastest-growing components of labor income since 1959; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the New York Times, they now account for one of every five dollars of all household income."

Time spent on the job IS largely a waste of time and talents as Livingston expresses here. The U.S. workforce is probably at its most broadly and best educated in history and yet, workers' surplus value (both in its Marxist "labor power" sense as well as in what makes up that power--talent, originality etc.) is siphoned off to stagnate through lack of investment or investment in still more exploitative forms elsewhere. 

How would either Fordism (which is presently illegal) or Keynesian redistribution solve the wasted talent problem? Not to mention the wasted talent of the unemployed? Or change the fact that workers must "buy their right not to die?" by working in jobs that exploit them and waste talent that could be put to use doing what capitalism purports to do which is provide innovative ways of serving the society?

These modes merely make existence as a coerced worker more bearable, but never fundamentally give the worker more freedom to choose what type of work he or she wants to do or whether they would prefer to live self-sufficiently on enough land. Distributions function as bribes to perpetuate capitalism, not decompose it in any way.

Real freedom to decompose capitalism would necessitate de-stabilizing the current conception of private property. Livingston clearly sees this as "going too far." The image he conjured plays into fears that abolishing private property automatically means, among other things, kicking elderly women out of their homes. What abolishing private property could look like is taking home ownership away from banks and giving the right to the home to the resident.

Further freedoms could include socialized: medicine, food, and education--including higher education and pre-k. Take the coercion ability away from capitalists. Give people real opportunity to follow through on creative and productive ideas. Participatory values already exist. It's not necessary to coerce people to work. Un-coerced people will work albeit for the right price in the right conditions toward long term positive goals.

Truly free of coercion, social lending (and even crowd sourced?) for building of cooperatives and maybe other egalitarian forms not yet imagined could make a profit, pay workers who want to be there a good dividend and then pay taxes toward a commons. Then you could talk about markets without there being a dictatorship of the market over the majority of worker/consumers. 

That's one way to decentralize wealth in a cultural, civil society way. It still requires a social and political movement, not just cultural change. And then there's the environmental resources to consider--that should always place limits on all kinds of extraction that would be integrated into decision-making. This idea is one possible phase, but one that seems realistic to me and that shouldn't preclude other further de-centralized and un-monetized cooperative practices.