A Massive Problem That Has Them Searching For One
For most people, I suspect, they’d be unaware of what has been lurking in the shadows for so long, for the better part of a decade, that today the purported wisdom of it is simply taken for granted by a sizable portion of the population. While recent protests and autonomous zones may have come as something of a shock, there’s been an ideological movement all the while hardened by events that refuse to refute it. The term late-stage – or even end-stage – capitalism is ubiquitous in these rather large circles; accepted as if already a proved fact.
To give you one example, I’ll provide an excerpt from an article published in October 2019 in, where else, The New York Times. Ostensibly about rowing as an effective form of outdoor exercise, and the proper technique to maximize its benefits, the author, Tara Murtha, plants her motivation right in what may seem to be a totally unrelated paragraph two:
“I’d drag all day long then lie awake in bed at night, overwhelmed by the hot buzzing sensation of intense anxiety. Sometimes I struggled to breathe. I’m being choked to death by the invisible hand of late-stage capitalism, I’d say, only half-kidding.”
For those not saturated in the modern American left, this kind of emotionalism is rejected as a form of perverse comedy. Crybabies whining about the massive amount of wealth and comfort our society has created as if this is a bad thing.
To begin with, the idea of late-stage capitalism immediately sounds vaguely Marxist, providing the most sensible who might inadvertently stumble upon these terms with a second means for straightforward rebuff without giving it another thought. Not only are they grumbling about how good we all have it, they’re also seemingly in lament over a system that failed time and again, everywhere any place had the misfortune of succumbing to it.
Furthermore, now that you mention it, this was a dogma that had led to the deaths, largely from starvation, of tens if not hundreds of millions.
Case closed. Where’s the tear gas and pepper spray?
And it seems a reasonable request; to ask these anti-capitalists to take a good long look around them and reconcile it to history. But that is actually a two-pronged invitation. Only the second part deals with the pathway to starvation and widespread death (Stalin’s budget of death warrants and lettres de cachet, as Churchill called them).
Before ever getting there, we should first ask ourselves why mostly the younger generation(s) are so infatuated with these ideals. More importantly, why now?
It’s far too easy to again dismiss this trend this time as little more than the product of indoctrination. There is no argument, not from me, that doesn’t recognize the leftward lurch of not just post-high school education but right on down to elementary school and often before even then (has anyone seen a recent episode of Sesame Street and compared it to those that aired decades ago?)
The use of the term late-stage capitalism itself offers vital clues. In a May 2017 article published in The Atlantic, author Annie Lowrey notes, in the title, how the phrase was “suddenly everywhere” and just how popular it had become – at least in what were then closed-off, insular bubbles of coastal elitism.
“This publication has used ‘late capitalism’ roughly two dozen times in recent years, describing everything from freakishly oversized turkeys to double-decker armrests for steerage-class plane seats. The New Yorker is likewise enamored of it, invoking it in discussions of Bernie Sanders and fancy lettuces, among other things. There is a wildly popular, year-old Reddit community devoted to it, as well as a Facebook page, a Tumblr, and a lively Twitter hashtag. Google search interest in its [sic] has more than doubled in the past year.”
A cultural catchphrase, yes, but one with a specific subtext. A more than vaguely Marxist vogue.
Going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has struggled often mightily with the technological change and the upset it unleashed all over the world. As I wrote last week, suddenly mass unemployment was a very real, and repeating, disaster to have to suddenly face alongside life’s more basic uncertainties.
But even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were forced to acknowledge and marvel at how this new free market capitalism had seemed to finally harness humanity’s “productive forces” churning them into undeniable economic progress. There was majesty in it, the way it could enrich entire countries even regions with a bounty no one could have dreamed about scarcely a generation or two before then.
Marx and Engels just didn’t think it could last.
Every strain of Marxism and offshoot ideologies spring largely from this one idea. Capitalism is, they all believe, inherently flawed and unstable; a temporary even necessary pox on existence enriching a society before it must then hand itself off to the revolutionaries who will then redistribute this terminal level of wealth. Marx himself said it was an internal contradiction wrapped up in its “theft” of labor for profits that firms always seek to maximize.
And it therefore created this natural tension between the capitalist and his workers. At some point, in order to grow profits, having grown them so far already, the capitalist will be forced to outright impoverish those in his employ. The very extreme of inequality.
While Werner Sombat, a German economist and Marxist sympathizer, first used the term “late capitalism” in the early 20th century, it wasn’t until the Great Depression that it seemed so close to being validated. After all, the Great Collapse had hit workers the hardest, the most widespread global unemployment in history.
On November 14, 1939, Israel Amter stood right in the heart of New York City, speaking before a capacity crowd of 22,000 in Madison Square Garden where he was met by thundering applause and ovation when he told the crowd that Josef Stalin was the “greatest leader and stateman of our time”, the “wisest man on the face of the Earth.” Amter was no amateur admirer, he the New York State Chairman of the Communist Party of the USA.
The overall Party Chairman, Earl Browder, would be featured on the cover of Time Magazine that week, declaring, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” The Eighth Party Convention held five years earlier in Cleveland, Ohio, during the worst of the Depression, had already announced capitalism’s days done:
“The idea of the storming of capitalism is maturing in the minds of the masses . . . rallying them around its [the party’s] program for the overthrow of capitalism and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat-for a Soviet Government . . . The bitter truth is rapidly being learned that Roosevelt and his New Deal represent the Wall Street bankers-finance capital-just the same as Hoover before him, but carrying out even fiercer attacks against the living standards of the masses of the people.”
Not just some weird infatuation with a fringe view, no less than economist Joseph Schumpeter had begun to openly accept the possibility capitalism wasn’t necessarily eternal; once set loose, it might do a lot of good, some harm, cause an enormous mess we all hope sets free more of the former without too much of the latter, and then…
In Schumpeter’s most famous passage, the one about “creative destruction”, he acknowledges the great challenge before capitalism. In other words, it had better destroy itself from time to time lest it leave its many critics the necessary space to banish it entirely. As a system, it must never stand still.
“The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers' goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates…incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
In the post-war, post-Depression climate of the late forties and fifties, Marxism’s popularity faded not just because of the ratcheting up of the Cold War, more so due to quite visible and tangible repudiation obvious economic progress inconveniently dealt the enemies of freedom. The Great Depression, though long and deep, eventually got sorted out; it wasn’t the end-stage of anything. The adoring crowds who once celebrated Browder soon disappeared, leaving him an utterly obscure if strange figure in American history.
As an idea, late-stage capitalism had merely gone underground largely sitting out the rest of the struggle between the competing system’s two major headliners: USA vs the Soviet Union. In the eventual disintegration of the latter early in the nineties, after decades of economic stagnation leading to more food shortages, capitalism was declared king – this time with its newest feature bred out of the literal destruction of the second world war.
Globalization.
But to the Marxists who retreated during that era of global prosperity and the obvious contradiction it presented to their capitalism-is-a-temporary-phenomenon worldview, globalization has presented them with an opportunity. They’ve been able to rewrite things, a whole revisionist history which says the Communists of the thirties weren’t wrong, instead the imperialist pigs used the destruction of World War II to manage to keep the status quo afloat a little while longer.
As a consequence, globalization is thought of as merely the continuation of exploiting workers only now without any national boundaries (imperialism) to protect the labor class. Together with hyper-financialization, what the last four or five decades really represented, to these now post-modern Marxists, was capitalism’s last last gasp.
In other words, “they” managed to jerry-rig the system in order to hold on just a little while longer. Exploiting workers overseas as well as at home, propping up only the biggest corporations and doing so with massive but necessary dollops of credit drawn from the last-ditch supremacy handed to the banking system, it’s all a creaking edifice of rot held together by strands of duct tape we all know as the dollar.
Thus, to this worldview everything about today reeks of late-stage capitalism. Since 2008? Maybe even end-stage capitalism.
Having exploited the entire global labor class, there’s no exploiting left to keep it from imploding in on itself. It’s only through more intensive coercion and oppression (what the Marxists call state-sponsored capitalism, or monopolistic capitalism) that this final showdown is prevented from manifesting.
David Graeber, an anthropologist and self-professed anarchist teaching at the London School of Economics, wrote in 2012:
“Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.”
Neither the timing of this influential article nor its author was mere coincidence. Graeber had become a leading voice in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and had, in fact, coined the phrase “we are the 99%.” His was a response to the response to the Great “Recession”, springing up around 2011 as it was becoming clear (to everyone but Economists and those who only follow Economists) economic recovery would only fall short, and therefore to seize on what many of them believed was Marx’s founding vision finally coming true.
Capitalism’s time had finally run out.
According to Ms. Lowrey’s research, it was around this same time the term late-stage capitalism took off especially in social media.
“There were just a handful of mentions of “late capitalism” on Twitter before 2009, a few hundred in that year, and perhaps a few thousand in the next, many referring to college coursework… Now, it is everywhere, in thousands of social-media posts and listicles aimed at Millennials and news stories about modern malaise.”
Right here we see the major crosscurrents intersect; the leftist often doctrinaire Marxist thought of the university meeting the economic reality such that to many of today’s youth it all sounded quite prescient; even scientific.
Predicated on the one, and only the one, factor: no economic growth. The modern malaise of theory the leftists had been preaching for decades, following Ben Bernanke screwing up time and time and time again it finally met reality and in a way from which we’ve never recovered.
He seemed to make Wall Street rich at the touch of his keyboard, but what about the other 99%?
And in many ways these elements only reinforced the ideology; as it became fused in Occupy Wall Street. Ben Bernanke, synonymous with this rickety, old white man capitalist imperialism, unable to restart the global economy and thereby proving both parts of the Marxist dogma simultaneously. That the system only benefits the few, and, with nothing left to squeeze out of it, therefore the time has finally come for its end.
What’s preventing this self-evident revolution is the injustice of this system hanging on by a thin thread. With no real strength anymore, it’s down to the use of corrupt, militarized police forces whose sole true purpose is, as the socialists declare, to prevent the inevitable and total collapse they’d really, really like to see and celebrate.
Yes, statues are just the first step.
These are not spoiled children who know nothing, though they do know very little, especially of history, they are being enthralled by a philosophy which really looks like it has something meaningful and real to say. It certainly does to them. For most young people, they’ve never witnessed nor experienced actual economic growth. They’ve seen the stock market explode upward and heard constant stories about some distant boom, but it hasn’t shown up on the ground where they live (insert joke about parental basement here).
And that was before 2020 piled on heaps more misery. We’re already looking back at “modern malaise” quite fondly by comparison (see: jobless claims).
To simply write off this trend as the ravings of madmen finding new audience in the unappreciative, self-centered overindulged is to do them, and ourselves, tremendous disservice to the point of harm. The Marxists are winning by virtue of reality, socialism a very real threat because it really does look like, to way too many, capitalism has nothing left.
There’s certainly no economic growth left, pushing so much of our country and the world further and further to the extreme left.
Communism has been an utter disaster wherever and whenever it has been tried. But that’s not how it’s being looked at right now. Instead, today’s youth, in particular, are hearing that capitalism’s days are finished and for them it’s hard to see how that’s not true. Worse, while today’s token capitalists, central bankers, declare victory and good times, it was their Marxist professors who warned them this would happen.
The problem isn’t their preferred solution; it’s that no one wants to admit that there is this massive problem that has them searching for one. You don’t have to agree with the next step toward Marxism in order to identify with these people in seeing something’s really wrong here.
Calling them names only breeds more contempt, and in their camp further proves the thesis that capitalism really does have nothing left.
Like the forties and fifties, the term late-stage capitalism would again just disappear if the economy actually performed anywhere close to its potential. Don’t like socialism? Prove the socialists wrong! It shouldn’t be this difficult because Marx had it all wrong. There is no terminal stage or date, and though economic progress is very messy and often quite lumpy, the only thing limiting it, as history has shown repeatedly, is, ironically, the same lack of imagination which first plagued Comrade Karl and then all his intellectual descendants.
Unleash the productive forces! We’ll just have to fire all the central bankers first. It would be a lot easier and far more, well, productive, than what the left has in mind if they should continue with the economy on their side.
