To certain segments of the progressive left, capitalism has been “late capitalism”, or in its death throes, or already dead, for a very long time. So how come it still exists? Part of the answer may lie in the argument of this sparklingly sardonic book by Peter Fleming. Our entire lives, he argues, have been economified. The ruling narratives of work and commerce hypnotise us into thinking of our very selves as micro-businesses, so that it becomes ever harder to imagine life outside the paradigm of capital investment, productivity and profit.

“Homo economicus” is the totally made-up creature who is the proletarian hero of mid-20th-century economics: going about his daily life with unimpeachable rationality, efficiently calculating ways to maximise his self-interest. But people don’t actually live like that, as the behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out. It is a refuted model, yet its malign influence persists. Fleming offers an excellent historical analysis of the associated idea of “human capital”, according to which each employee really is a little entrepreneur, investing in his or her skills. This amounts, Fleming thinks, to a deliberate atomisation of the workforce and a hollowing-out of education itself. The skill of an individual, he insists rightly, is not a private good – and this applies not just to the most obvious examples, such as doctors, but to everyone.

Neoliberalism has now given way to what Fleming calls “wreckage capitalism”, the continuation of financial operations in the rubble of the post-crisis order. The “free-market” principles of neoliberalism are, after all, conveniently ignored in favour of monopolisation and unproductive rent extraction by, for example, the publishers of academic journals or the bankers overseeing the privatisation of utilities. (To illustrate the phenomenon of “taxpayers funding their own asset stripping”, Fleming here tells the depressing stories of Royal Mail and the British rail network.)

Human beings ‘still have to work because they are cheaper than machines’. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Neoliberals will often plead in response that we just need to be even more purely neoliberal. “The present setup is not capitalist enough,” as Fleming ventriloquises the prognosis. “Of course,” he continues, “in the last instance it never is … Leaders of industry enjoy a state-funded socialism because they understand that pure capitalism is a mere impossible abstraction that is meant for the masses to toil with, out there beyond the perimeter.”

In the meantime, especially for the young, debt has become “a way of life” and jobs are increasingly precarious. Fleming has an excellent chapter on the “theatre of work”, where looking busy and adopting the right emotional attitude in an office can be soul-destroying burdens, and he is very astute on the inhumanity of the zero-hours contract, allied to unprecedented methods of electronic surveillance over employees.

Delivery drivers, for example, are paid only for each package they deliver, with no sickness or other benefits. Fleming extends the logic remorselessly: why pay a bartender for any time other than those exact seconds when she is pouring a drink? Employers, he writes, should be paying for “availability” over a period of time; paying only for exactly measured micro-quantities of work is just the newest way to shaft the little guy. About Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit et al, Fleming is particularly scathing: what is dishonestly termed the “sharing economy” is a cynical monetisation of the widespread hardship caused by the 2008 crisis, and the final stage in the “atomisation of the employee”.

Nor will such problems somehow be solved by our coming robot overlords. New waves of automation have never, throughout industrial history, resulted in significantly less labour and more civilised leisure pursuits, as economists of the late 19th and early 20th century fondly imagined was inevitable. Today, “sophisticated technologies are now paving the way for millions of ‘crap jobs’ to flourish”, and millions of human beings are being downgraded to the undignified status of sub-automata: they still have to work because they are cheaper than machines.

This is all enlivened by a marvellously insulting turn of phrase: most economics, the author claims, takes place in “a kind of nerd’s dreamtime”. He writes contemptuously of “the state and its semi-lobotomised think-tanks” (the “semi-” might be rather generous), as well as the “sub-mental technocrats” who enforce targets in university teaching. The reader may periodically demur at what can seem like apocalyptic exaggeration, but that is after all in the nature of polemic.

What, then, is to be done? Fleming doesn’t buy the Paul Mason fantasy that voluntary cooperation on the model of Wikipedia or open-source software will somehow scale up to rebuilding society along more equitable lines. He also disapproves of the death drive he perceives in “accelerationism” (full speed ahead with rampant wreckage capitalism so as to hasten its inevitable implosion), and the misanthropic eco-fanatic’s desire to dismantle civilisation for the sake of the worms and the mosquitoes. Instead he favours a “radical de-privatisation of the public sphere”, some version of universal basic income and a fellowship of the precarious to demand universal workers’ rights – as for instance with the court victory of London Uber drivers, who argued successfully that they were employees rather than atomised contractors.

It’s notable that next to such rousing ideas the final lines of The Communist Manifesto – “Workers of the world, unite” – would not look outdated. But there is also a more contemporary hint of Game of Thrones throughout the book, as Fleming warns that if we do nothing, a dark “winter” of humanity is coming. Yet the nicest thing about his book is its avoidance of despair: it is often hilariously angry, but the stylish expression of outrage can itself be a positive and optimistic act.

• The Death of Homo Economicus is published by Pluto Press. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.