We talk about "Late Stage Capitalism" like it's some special horror show. Was, like, "Mid-Stage Capitalism" great or something? Wasn't that, like, the awfulness of pre-union 7-day-work-weeks and 18-hour shifts and child labor and shit? I just sort of thought of this and am suddenly confused by this term.
@ajroach42 This makes some sense. If you restrict it to references where capitalism is basically eating its self, I could see the utility. I feel like it gets tossed around a lot like when someone is complaining about a company pulling shenanigans to avoid providing benefits to employees. That's not special to late stage. That's just the system.
@benhamill @ajroach42 it might be more of a culture change to those who grew up in more left leaning parts of USA and/or Europe with social democracy, pre-globalism.
I'm not at all a fan of nationalism but I can see how for people who remember the time when they or their parents worked in the factory (including high tech) and you could see the products they built in the shop, or if they worked in offices but their colleagues were more often in same country there would be nostalgia for this.
@benhamill Sure, sorta.
It's about wealth inequality and bullshit labor.
Early capitalism was just an extension of fuedalism. Captialism proper was the labor movement -> the great depression.
Capitalism mark II was the great depression -> 70s.
In each of those periods, wealth inequality was significantly less than it is now.
In each of those periods, most labor was directly productive.
Now we have less money being sahred by people who's labor is being used to make fewer things.
@ajroach42 @benhamill A friend of mine lives in NE England and struggles to find work in spite of being intelligent and physically in good shape and with knowledge of of high tech skills many others lack.
Environment wise its not such a bad thing the coalmines are closed; but ruthless global competition disrupted many once thriving light industries in the region, which was still a thing well into the 1990s as companies moved from "heavy" industry to electronics and computer manufacture.
@vfrmedia @benhamill@witches.townThis is capitalism eating itself.
We've grown more efficient. Owning things makes more money than making things.
We need workers to earn wages to keep the system from colapsing, we're not willing to give them anything to do.
And then we ouroboros our way out of existance.
@ajroach42 its often forgotten in Europe that when the nationalised utilities were well run (and government did not skim off profits/resources for other uses but allowed reinvestment in research and development) they didn't charge that much more than todays privatised services and created other benefits (i.e the first commercial viable fibre optic link was rolled out by British Telecom when they were still part nationalised and built upon work completed in 1970s when they were public sector)
@ajroach42 also European countries that ended up ahead of UK with regard to connectivity and tech skills waited a few years *before* privatising their PTT.
It wasn't "socialist utopia" and benefits varied wildly across regions (rural areas didn't do as well as towns) and today co-ops would likely be a better fit for telecoms than big nationalised org, but the reality is even today some areas (inc UK) only get internet b/c public sector subsidy (either direct from the local council or via EU)
@ajroach42 I am actually sending this message right now from a VDSL connection that was part funded by Suffolk County Council (because I am at a work site in a rural area), I found it amusing the young Tory MP was championing this scheme as he was ultimately reversing what Thatcho did (he wasn't even born when Thatcho was elected!)
@benhamill I could be completely wrong, but I always assumed it was a term out of Marxist theory were like communism is historically inevitable so we must be nearing the end of capitalism.
@benhamill Late-Stage Capitalism is a good thing not a bad thing in terms of potential
The distinction being that before, capitalism was able to sustain itself in the face of labour crisises and pretend like everything was fine even though it wasn't.
Now, when things go wrong, it's blatant and impossible to hide. Which generates more in the way of dark humor but also creates more potential for change.
@benhamill like yeah they had child labor and unsafe working conditions and STILL nobody looked at that and said "hmm maybe the problem here is capitalism", they just changed working conditions and said "this is fine". now we're at that point where that is becoming obvious, that it's the system itself that's the problem. so that's the distinction between the two
@kibi @benhamill However, I could also see it, especially in the US, mutating into full-on feudalism again - given sustained propaganda campaigns in favor of capitalism as the only allowable system, socialism is *not* inevitable.
@bhtooefr @benhamill oh yeah potential doesn't just mean potential for good :P
but i think given the conditions it's pretty clear that the current system isn't sustainable in a lot of ways
@benhamill I've always read "Late Stage Capitalism" as a conflation of Consumerism and Monetarism, arising from an inability to think of economics in anything other than a Marxist historical teleology.
Consumerism and Monetarism are both markedly distinct from Capitalism, but they don't fit the historicized model. Clearly capitalism isn't dead, but our world isn't 19th cen. capitalism, so it must be some later version of capitalism, rather than vanilla capitalism compounded by other practices.
@benhamill I would guess the bit of mid-stage capitalism everyone remembers is, like, 1945 to 1975, where we actually had unions and shit. Or it might be pure rose colored glasses. XD
@benhamill Oh yeah, it was no better.
AFAIK, the idea behind 'late capitalism' as a term is to convey that as a system it has matured and is completely dominant in the world. (Most use of the term seems to fit in with Jameson's analysis in 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'.)
But it also gives a sense of it coming to an end, which is what the earlier uses of the term were meant to convey.
@benhamill Compare Derrida's 'neocapitalism' (where capitalism incorporates elements of other ideologies to avoid or correct it's crises and deficiencies) or 'state monopoly capitalism' (where the State intervenes in the economy to protect monopolies or oligarchies; this thesis is pretty controversial though).
They're all aiming to describe the apparent changes in capitalism and political economy post-WWII.
@benhamill the phrase "late stage capitalism" has been in use for well over 100 years :/
@benhamill Nah.
The distinction, I think, is that labor used to be productive, and now it's time wasting.