Late Stage Capitalism

In My Humble Opinion
1

So lately it seems like I am seeing lots of younger folks throw around the term “late stage capitalism” as if it were a simple fact that this is where we are. Personally, I think a lot of them are a bit disappointed (rightfully) in their own personal economic outlooks and have just decided that since everything sucks this must be late stage capitalism.

So I’ve read a bit on the term, and certainly from the Wiki article it’s neither new nor universally agreed upon as to what exactly it is.

However, it seems to me that we wouldn’t know we’re in late stage capitalism until we’ve passed on to the next thing and can look back with authority. Or is it more like “Post-Modern” which describes an aesthetic regardless of when it actually is?

Help me understand what LSC is, whether it is now, and why we’re seeing so many people declaring it so.

2

It’s a medical term. Having a late stage disease means that the patient is about to die.

3

It’s largely the mindset of an American (and elsewhere) working class born into a capitalist society with a dying democracy, no social mobility, abhorrent income inequality, and no real possibility of ever owning real estate or meaningful capital (as in investments). The system doesn’t really work for them, and is in fact designed to exploit them and depends on suppressing their real wages and undervaluing their labor to prop up the rich.

The old American Dream (middle class homeownership etc.) doesn’t really apply to a large swath of our population anymore, and they don’t have much spending power. The economy just doesn’t really have any meaningful progression for them. Either they’re lucky enough to work in big tech / finance / and maybe traditional white collar jobs, or they’re just pretty shit outta luck. And the government and powers that be sure don’t care about them. Unions are a pale shadow of what they were in the past. Labor power hasn’t been a meaningful election issue for decades, except for the small Bernie wing.

Combine all that with viral vaguely socialist or democratic socialist ideologies spreading on forums for the young (like reddit, TikTok, etc.) and the term late stage capitalism becomes a pretty easy shorthand for their woes.

Edit: And it’s late stage because it probably can’t stay this way for long before transitioning to autocracy and oligopoly (we’re pretty much there) or breaking down and causing a revolution (socialism is the hope, but unlikely to succeed – hence the often adjacent phrase “socialism or barbarism”).

4

It seems that we’re at a critical point in time where the extremely wealthy few are flexing their muscles, openly buying political, financial and cultural influence.

Democracy can stop them but the most recent election revealed that a majority of voters are either complacent or actually support a right wing oligarchy.

5

I’d be pretty surprised if we had any sort of democracy left in a few more years.

6

Yeah. “Late stage” [whatever] means the [whatever] is sufficiently advanced in a positive-feedback decay process that recovery is foreclosed and collapse is the only possible future.

A side implication is that the collapse will be soon enough to matter. So a yearish for a disease, and within the lifetime of the person talking for an economic system.

I’ll point out that Karl Marx opined that Capitalism would collapse of its inherent contradictions sometime in the latter 1800s. Turns out that was premature. I expect the current gloom is likewise misplaced in time, if not in fact.

@Reply has given some excellent info about how the zeitgeist feels to the have-nots. Where there may be a mistake in those folk’s minds is that this situation must change soon. I could see the USA operating as just one more authoritarian kleptocracy among many for another 50 or 200 years. Primer inter pares so to speak.

IMO climate change and/or demographic collapse will be what finally pushes things over the edge. Not popular discontent. Both as to the USA in particular and the world in general.

7

in a country where the president is forcing incentivizing (incoming or outgoing) international governmental travel into his own hotel-group … cleptocracy is not around the corner, its a normalized reality.

… and yes, with the vulgar display of $$$ (trump/musk/sheiks/…) we are pretty much at the eve of the french revolution (let them eat cake, then…)

8

There is a Reddit sub-reddit Late Stage Capitalism with 830,000 members:

Reddit - Dive into anything

This sub is for:

News, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge the narratives which act as legitimations for the status quo of modern class society. Posts need not be about capitalism specifically, whether late-stage or otherwise; we simply aim to cater to a socialist audience.

Philosophy:

This subreddit has its roots in broad-based anti-capitalist thought, with an emphasis on Marxist concepts and analysis and a commitment to antiracism and inclusive feminism.

When it comes to proposed alternatives to Capitalism, it is the general consensus of this subreddit that class-divisions and alienated labour must be abolished; production must be collectively organized by the laborers themselves for the direct benefit of all. We call this socialism.

9

And this is different than say… 1890, how? Or say… 1780? Or even 1920?

The whole thing is a somewhat ignorant set of assumptions that this is unsustainable (why? Because these folks don’t like it?) and some pretty sour grapes that inequality exists and that some people prioritize themselves and their interests over the greater good (as they see it, of course).

It’s also ignorant as hell, because they lump a whole lot of unrelated and disparate stuff into “capitalism”, in the sense that they’re blaming our lack of social safety nets, general illiberalism, and a lot of political dissatisfaction on capitalism, which isn’t right.

And it’s mostly aimed at the nebulous idea of “corporations” and “CEOs”, and the proponents of this get really angry when you point out that most corporations and CEOs are small to medium businessmen, and aren’t in the same league as Mike Wirth (Chevron), Mary Barra (GM). or Doug McMillion(Wal-Mart).

There’s also a lot of really unfocused anger at “the wealthy”/“the rich” without defining what that means- it’s assumed to be billionaires, and there are a LOT of unfounded assumptions that are taken as absolute truths by these people. Chief among them is that someone can’t be a billionaire without having oppressed/fucked over others in some way. Which is not the case, as I see it, unless you know, owning a company, paying wages, and keeping the profits is “fucking people over”.

It’s mostly dumb-ass freshman year stuff, but for some reason, grown people are subscribing to this nonsense. I sometimes wonder if it’s the product of Russian and Chinese misinformation- it seems to have sprung up too quickly and too fully formed to be a grassroots set of beliefs.

10

The definition of sophomoric, I agree.

But you’re leaving out the possibility that the system, writ large, is worse for most people now than in the past. I am not making this claim. But college debt seems to be worse. Housing seems more unaffordable. Cars have well outpaced inflation. And the gulf between the wealthy (define that as you will; I’d say the top 5-10%) and the rest is said to have grown. And at the risk of a self-hijack, everyone is focused on what they call the 1%, but really they mean the top .1%, where the billionaires live. But that top 5-10% includes people with $4 million plus, which to someone who is 30 and can’t move out of the house looks like an awful lot of money.

Which might explain the sour grapes talk of “Late Stage Capitalism” among these young people.

11

There has been a significant shift in capitalism since 1920.

The old principle of capitalism was based on production. You invested your money in building things like factories. You then produced goods with the factories. You made your profits by selling the goods. The idea was society benefitted because everyone was getting the new goods that you had produced.

The new principle of capitalism is based on finance. You invest your money in buying stocks. You work on raising the price of the stocks and then you make your profits by selling the stocks at a higher price than you paid for them.

Industrial capitalism was based on the idea of adding new production to the economy. Financial capitalism is based on the idea of moving paper assets around.

12

That’s a bit disingenuous. There may be a lot of corporations out there but the point is they’re not all equal. For example, there may be hundreds of software companies in existence - but three quarters of computers use a Microsoft operating system. Which means Microsoft alone is three times as big as all of its competitors combined. Which means that in the real world, there’s one software corporation that matters.

The same is true in many other sections of the economy. There’s no effective free market at work because one or two big corporations effectively control the industry. And capitalism without a free market is a problem.

13

Here’s another piece of reality you’re choosing to ignore. The key to being rich in modern America is choosing the right parents. The majority of billionaires are the children and grandchildren of wealthy parents. Which means the majority of people who aren’t born into a wealthy will never become wealthy. They lost the race on the day they were born.

Our society has essentially developed a financial aristocracy where the people in power inherited their position. That’s not healthy for society.

It’s also not healthy for the rich. Because at some point the non-rich majority is going to start thinking the current system is doing nothing for them. And then they’ll start thinking about getting rid of the current system. If the rich people who are running the country don’t start some serious reforms, they’ll end up seeing a revolution.

14

Humans evolved to live in collaborative groups. We are basically lost without the ability to collaborate on a scale that matches technological advancements. those with money can collaborate simply by hiring experts but only the experts benefit from the collaboration. Our culture could easily change to a culture of collaboration through social media. The wealthiest men on the planet could not keep up with the brain power and imagination possessed by the masses. We will never see equality until we learn the art of collaboration.

15

It’s different because of this:

Capitalism worked well in the first stage because, as production increased, so did compensation, so the people doing the work could afford to buy some of the new products that were becoming increasingly available.

But then wages started lagging productivity, and so over time, the percentage of the products that workers could afford to buy dropped. And that’s gotten a lot worse in the last few years.

It’s like being back in school, and every teacher said, “Oh, this homework will only take 20 minutes!”, while ignoring the fact that every other teacher was also assigning 20 minutes’ work, so your whole evening was ruined.

Every company is increasing their prices, taking “just a little bit” more profit, but it’s all coming from the same pool of cash. At some point, it will break. We’ve already seen thousands of stories about how “Millennials are killing the X industry!”, but what’s really happening is that they’re cutting back on spending on things that aren’t essential, because the essentials have gotten so much more expensive. They’re just barely making rent, no way are they going to the movies. At some point, they won’t even be able to make rent, and at that point, everything will fall apart.

16

I think it’s pretty safe to say (and kinda self-evidently obvious) that there’s a general sense of discontent among the American populace. Whatever their particular political leaning, nobody really seems to like the status quo… either they want to shift it further left or further right, closer to some utopian future or some past golden age. Neither socialism nor MAGAism would’ve really taken hold in the popular imagination if “business as usual” were working well enough for your average working adult.

Depending on who you ask, the desired transformation could be anything from full-on communism with no private ownership of production, to “Great Men” empowered to unilaterally enact their visions upon their lessers, to anything in between – yes, often in confused, self-conflicting, half-baked sociopolitical ideologies that don’t entirely make sense. Really, very few Americans are politically or historically learned, even among the college-educated crowd. But that doesn’t mean their struggles and fears are unfounded, especially their day to day difficulties trying to climb the ladder.

Yes, the scapegoat may change depending on who you ask – sometimes it’s the billionaire CEOs, sometimes it’s pharma execs, sometimes it’s the immigrants, sometimes it’s the techbros, sometimes it’s China, whatever – but at the end of the day, there are quite a lot of people who think American-style capitalism (and its inextricably linked politics) is failing them and their families.

That’s the sort of thing that really spurs this sort of political discourse. People no longer have faith that the current mechanisms can really save them; a vote here, a vote there, a tweak in the interest rates… that sort of talk might’ve worked back in the 90s and early 2000s before the recession, when people seemed to be doing well and had more faith in the system, but it doesn’t really speak to anyone anymore. Decades of declining living conditions and the shrinking middle class, combined with skyrocketing wealth for the wealthy, and all this broadcasted in hyper-real-time across various social networks… the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is starker than ever. Yes, many of the same inequalities existed in decades and centuries past, but they weren’t quite subject to the same levels of online amplification (and yes, propaganda from various actors, state or otherwise).

I don’t think it’s a bad thing that these issues are brought up and discussed.

I do wish we could do so in a way that doesn’t cause boiling blood and risk civil war at every juncture, though =/ Alas, that time seems to have come and gone.

17

I mostly agree with Bump .

Feudalism had a much larger gap between rich and poor. The poor were clearly and obviously oppressed. It was a massively unjust system.

It ended only because the black plague killed so massively many Europeans that there were nowhere near enough serfs to maintian the system, and that feudal lords had to compete for serfs in a way they never had to before.

18

I think it’s that even as the signs of impending collapse become obvious to everyone, an alternative remains unthinkable. The old adage that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism has been turned on its head into prophecy: it turns out that it actually is easier to just end the world.

19

And the golden era of US capitlaism was the immediately post WW-II years where the destruction of most of the wealth & labor of the rest of the Western world left American Labor in the catbird seat for 20-30 years.

Which was mostly our parents’ era that most of us 60-somethings caught at least some of the coattails of. Our kids & especially grandkids missed that comprehensively. But our kids were socialized by us that it was still at least partially the expectation.

They say happiness is the gap (or lack) between expectations and reality. Whole lotta Gen X & subsequent were fed the Greatest Generation / Boomer propaganda at a young and impressionable age. The expectations fostered by that are a long way above their reality. Hence their unhappiness.

20

I’m not saying people are not unhaopy. I am not saying they do not have a right ti be unhapy. I am saying that a large number of people being unhappy does not guarantee that a revolution will be attempted or succeed, or that anything will change at all.