And even if we nuked the world, the survivors would probably eventually just evolve something akin to capitalism again. As a species, we’re just not born equal, and as long as our genes and cultures continue to allow intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness to arise and combine in the same individual, those people will always self-organize into stronger and stronger hierarchical groupings. Capitalism and hierarchical groupings scale far better than flatter, more equal organizations, and its inherent efficiencies of scale seem to win out in the long run, every time.
Personally, I’m hoping some newfangled chatbot grows out of control and becomes the Borg and tries to rule collectivistically that way. Maybe zoo-humans would be better behaved when we’re not the apex of the food chain anymore?
As peak Gen-X (1973), I also think that my generation saw a massive increase in the number getting degrees, and we benefitted from being the vanguard of a new economy. For instance, when I entered school for Biology in 1991, the biotech industry was a fetus (Boston). 10 years later the demand for workers so outstripped the supply that I have no doubt that I benefitted greatly. And I suspect that people in computers and certain other college-industries had a similar experience. Maybe 1980-2010 was the college equivalent to the post-war boom for industry?
ETA: Although, we STILL can’t get enough workers at all levels in biotech, so maybe it’s not the same thing.
I’m not worried about a revolution, modern police and military are just too powerful now for that to be a realistic thing, at least in North America. I’m worried about a collapse, either slow or sudden. Something like the Great Depression, where a whole lot of people just kind of check out of the whole economy. Some end up homeless, some just stop paying rent/mortgages, and start squatting in their homes, hoping that there are just too many such people to evict them all. People stop going to work, because it doesn’t pay enough to be worth the effort, and everything just kind of grinds to a halt. Debt and crime skyrocket, as people do what they have to to survive. Everything just gets worse.
Covid was a fascinating glimpse into that situation. People stopped working, government gave them money out of nowhere, evictions were stopped… for years! Somehow the species survived. Wonder how long we could’ve kept that going? If there were cyclical epidemics like that every few years, could the global economy pause and resume every so often?
I’m sure we could, if we re-engineered our society to enable that. We produce a whole lot of surplus goods, more than enough to support everyone, even during the pandemic, as you noted. That’s a huge success from a human standpoint, and is why we’ve embraced capitalism for as long as we have. When it works, it works really well. I said quite often during the pandemic, “What was the point of becoming the richest society in history, if we can’t use some of that accumulated wealth to support people who are losing their jobs through no fault of their own?”
The problem being pointed out by the late-stage capitalism people is that capitalism isn’t working that well anymore. We’re still producing massive amounts of excess wealth, but more and more of that is going to fewer and fewer people, so that most of us aren’t seeing any benefit from it. We could fix that, if we had the will to do it, but far too many people lack that will. Going back to the pandemic, we had people opposed to supporting the displaced workers, using the same “Lazy welfare bums” rhetoric we’ve heard for decades, even though, as mentioned above, losing their jobs wasn’t their fault.
Colloquially, I often find “late stage capitalism” used to describe new and horrific developments in the progressive monetization of all aspects of human existence.
For instance, in another thread people are talking about a new streaming app that will demand access to your device’s camera, so that it can shut down and not work for you if it detects that your eyes aren’t focused on the screen during ads. That’s the sort of thing I usually hear the phrase used to describe.
Yeah, and I feel like related to that is the subscription of everything. Microsoft realized that people like me were using their Office 2007 for literally 15 years because for my personal use it was more than adequate. And some of the car companies are claiming you only receive a transferrable license to your vehicle. Things like that sure feel like serfdom.
Yes, that’s exactly the position of Marxist economics. You may see someone starting a company, producing useful products and employing people as doing a public service. But ask yourself WHY they were able to start the company instead of having to go be someone else’s employee, and the vast majority of the time it boils down to “because they were born into a rich family”.
If you hire me to make hats for $10 per hat and the raw materials plus upkeep for your factory costs $5 per hat, and you’re selling the hats for $20 and keeping the other $5 of profit, then of course you’re fucking me over. The only reason I’m not keeping $15 per hat is that you could afford to buy the factory and raw materials up front, and I couldn’t. You’re adding nothing of real value, you’re just using your privileged economic position to insert yourself as a middleman in the production process to keep making money off my labor forever.
(Actually, whether you’re “fucking me over” is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe I’m happy to just make hats and not have to deal with the other hassles of running a business. But, in the technical economic sense of the term, you are by definition exploiting me)
I’ve always seen it as Marxist-derived, it seems based on their whole idea that there’s some inevitable direction to history. Those are the sort of people I first ran into who used it, for one thing. I don’t buy it because I don’t think capitalism has “stages” in the first place, nor is oligarchy capitalism-exclusive in the first place. The Gilded Age happened, then capitalism got reined in rather than progressing to further “stages” and some inevitable collapse.
The world doesn’t have a narrative arc.
That said, for all the reasons others have said by now it’s clearly moved on to wider society and is used by people who aren’t coming from a Marxist theory perspective and just recognize the present socioeconomic system is deeply unjust, functioning badly and fundamentally unsustainable/unstable in its present form. They just need a term to describe all that, and “late stage capitalism” gets the point across well enough.
It’s humanly impossible to contribute so much more to society than the average person that you deserve billions of dollars; and looking at actual billionaires most of them are incompetents and parasites. And then there’s the issue of widespread poverty and general social decay due to most money being siphoned off the the ultrawealthy.
So yes, nobody has that much money without having screwed over vast numbers of people. It’s impossible to achieve otherwise, destructive to society, and matches the actual sorts of people who are billionaires.
I think it’s important to remember that “late stage capitalism” isn’t just a catchphrase, it has a highly specific meaning in the context of Marxist economics. And also remember that most ordinary people use the term much more broadly.
Agree, with the nitpick that it’s possible for an extremely popular entertainer or artist to become a billionaire without directly exploiting anyone for profit.
I’ve been meaning to ask some questions about Marxism. I never studied economics, but his ideas did come up in sociology. AIUI He observed stuff. He made an economic model based on his observations. The model produced testable hypotheses. (this, I don’t think is controversial). But, again as I understand it, tests disproved his hypothese and showed his model to be flawed at best.
What part or parts am I wrong about? If I am not wrong, why do people still study and follow his ideas?
I guess in this case the “testable hypothesis” was the claim that capitalism was going to destroy itself by its own contradictions, and that socialism would inevitably follow. Almost all Marxists today would concede that socialism isn’t inevitable, and that complete social collapse due to climate change is another plausible alternative.
He was certainly proven to be wrong about the time frame this was going to happen in, but Marxists, like the SDMB, can still plausibly use the excuse “It’s taking longer than we thought”. I would certainly not say that he has been proven wrong in the sense that capitalism has been proven to be capable of sustaining itself indefinitely.
I’m pretty sure that’s accurate. However for all the talk of “scientific socialism” his followers have treated it more like a religion; something to be taken on faith. It works because they know it works, it must work.
Failures and mistakes aren’t treated as a sign the theory is wrong and needs to be adapted or abandoned, they are either denied or attributed to an enemy. Either foreign agents (the CIA is popular), or a nebulous mass of “wreckers” who simply sabotage the economy for counter revolutionary reasons.
It sounds like you’re talking about the political system of “Marxism-Leninism”, which advocates for a dictatorship run by a technocratic elite as necessary for the transition from capitalism to socialism. I think it’s been pretty well demonstrated that that doesn’t work very well, but it’s certainly possible to find value in Marxist economic theory without adopting Leninist political ideology.
Threads like this often suffer because people do not agree on a definition of “capitalism.” Without some agreement, discussion is difficult.
As for “late stage capitalism,” this was talked about 40 years ago in my direct, personal experience. As one colleague remarked then, “what if this isn’t late stage capitalism? What if it’s just getting started?”
Or as the late great Dave van Ronk put it, “the left is always predicting the end of capitalism, and of course they’re right. Getting the timing correct is the hard part…”
So it’s hardly a Chinese/Russian disinformation scheme, but a reasonable enough description/wish for the moment one is in.
I don’t know that this is such a matter of necessity. To me, The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow has cast significant doubt on any inevitabilist narratives of human development. It may well be that we are experiencing the outcome of a confluence of extraordinary circumstances, rather than the unavoidable outcome of human nature. Indeed, it’s probably the case that our investigations into ‘human nature’ are severely biased by predominantly studying it in a constrained context. There’s the famous monopoly experiment where if you rig the game by giving some players an unfair starting advantage, they’ll nevertheless believe their eventual win to be justified by better play. That we’ve been born into a rigged game and act accordingly doesn’t necessarily mean that the game always ends up being rigged.