The majority must suffer for the few to profit.
Larger and larger wealth disparities,
deregulation of the economy so the government
isn't watching the businessmen anymore,
I'm Eli Cook, historian of capitalism.
YardPuzzleheaded263 asked, What's late-stage capitalism?
Late-stage capitalism is actually more of an internet meme
I like to think of it as the moment
Some examples that I've come across
that people have used in the internet,
people who go to GoFundMe to buy their medicine
like insulin, people paying $37 for raw water.
A lot of times when I think of late-stage capitalism,
I think of a question that people often ask,
It looks like things are getting a little spicy
One Redditor, vitringur, says that the whole use
of the term is a Marxist mythology about the evolution
of capitalism before it turns into socialism.
Like with so many other pseudo-scientists,
it's always right around the corner
Late capitalism is definitely a term
that Marxists have used, not necessarily to refer
to the end of capitalism, but trying to explain
And a lot of times, late capitalism was used as an idea
of kind of very consumerist form of capitalism
where people kind of aren't being exploited
but they're kind of happy little robots.
And so in many ways, the way that the term late capitalism
has been used is very different from late-stage capitalism.
But I think there's an important point to be said here
that anybody who uses the term late-stage capitalism
I do agree that there are a lot of people who use that term
who are hoping that maybe, just maybe,
this is the last stage and not just the late stage.
Here's a good question from the LateStageCapitalism
When did the golden age of capitalism
is a term you often hear in the United States.
It's usually referring to the post-war years
from the 1940s to around the mid-1970s
that capitalism was working for almost everyone.
This is an era when inequality dropped, wages were rising,
people were moving into the middle class.
There was also a feeling that even with one job,
you could buy a house and create a good life for you
There was this moment people look back at now
This was the golden age of capitalism.
I think here it's actually pretty clear.
Some people call it the neoliberal turn.
Other people talk about deindustrialization, globalization,
financialization, but something happened in the late 1970s
and the 1980s, which really changed the American economy.
This is where you really see Wall Street
and big banks taking fuller control of the economy.
This is where you begin to see larger
This is where you see the deregulation of the economy
This is when you start seeing tuition rises, student debt.
This is where you see things getting more expensive.
After World War II, America dominated the world,
but by the 1980s, Japanese, German manufacturers,
It wasn't so easy anymore for Americans
that the world and American consumers were going to buy.
So a lot of people do think that there used to be
but let's look at some more controversial takes.
Knfrmity says, There was no golden age.
The majority must suffer for the few to profit.
In America, it looked okay for a while
if you were white labor aristocracy or petit bourgeoisie.
This is actually an important point.
When you talk about kind of the golden age of capitalism
and you imagine people with job securities
we're talking about white men in factories.
For African Americans, for other minorities, for women,
this might not have been a golden age at all.
A lot of times when people talk about the golden age
of capitalism, they're talking about suburbia.
The American dream where even working class people
usually through the government backing small banks.
It was about moving to the middle class.
It was about newer opportunities for their kids.
So for many people, that really was the golden age.
back then when the show just came out,
that here's this working class Homer Simpson
who can afford to live in a pretty nice house
in the middle of a nice little town on one salary.
A lot of people feel that American dream is over.
So let's scroll down a little for a few more perspectives.
Here's A-Matter-Of-Time saying, Sometime in the 1980s,
when Reagan was president, was the first time
that more money was made from dealing in financial products
than making actual tangible items in a factory.
This comment reminds me of the show The Wire.
They were just deindustrializing the ports in Baltimore
and there's kind of a white working class
We used to make shit in this country, build [beeps].
Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
The financialization of the economy,
kind of a turn away from building [beeps] in factories
The jobs in factories were usually really good jobs.
They had job security, they were unionized,
and they could really live a middle class lifestyle.
most people found themselves working in service industries.
The biggest employer in kind of the golden age
was General Motors and it was General Electric.
Even if you went into the bathroom,
the person cleaning the bathroom was part of the union.
biggest private employer is Walmart.
Some people today in late stage capitalism at Walmart
get paid so little money that they have to use food stamps.
And where do they take those food stamps
Walmart, because all the other small groceries closed.
Late-stage capitalism, here we are.
Now, a lot of this financialization
Once the rules changed and Wall Street
could start doing whatever it wanted.
But a lot of this is connected to the deindustrialization.
There used to be a lot of corporation in America
who actually wanted their workers to have a good wage.
But what happens in financialization
is you get these kind of corporate raters types, okay?
this is what Richard Gere used to do.
Well, I don't sell the whole company.
I break it up into pieces and then I sell that off.
and selling them for the parts, right?
And maybe the perfect example of how these corporations
have changed is the ratio to how much the CEO makes
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the golden age of capitalism,
the ratio of salary between the average worker
That's a fair amount, now it's 1 in 300.
is maximizing the price of their shares.
From now on, your compensation isn't going to be in wages.
which means you also have an incentive
to really just only care about raising stock prices.
And what do we get in the 1980s, for instance?
We get a situation where if suddenly there is a recession,
the first thing you do, not the last thing,
the first thing you do is just fire lots of workers.
They call it downsizing and hundreds of thousands
of Americans lost jobs in good industrial factories
and those jobs never ever came back
and those people lost their middle class lifestyle forever.
Here's a good one, over at the subreddit NeutralPolitics,
What are the effects that a large wealth disparity
When you begin to have large wealth disparities,
you begin to have people who don't trust
A lot of this has to do with feeling,
Sometimes you can funnel that energy into positive places,
but sometimes it can go to very dark places.
and oftentimes, unfortunately, these energies don't go
to blaming the actual people who created these inequalities.
Another issue that happens because of inequality
If the rungs between each step on the ladder
then you don't have social mobility anymore.
The chances today to kind of move up the ladder
has diminished dramatically in the last 30 or 40 years.
There's even a graph called the Great Gatsby curve
that charts the level of inequality in a society
And you see that these things correlate almost perfectly.
The higher the inequality, the less the chance that
that smart kid from a poor background
is ever going to be able to make it big in America.
Other problems that you get with high inequality
High inequality is bad for the economy.
the economist who like to talk about the importance
of consumers and their purchasing power,
he would say that, you know, high inequality
creates a situation where a lot of money
And the problem is the rich people don't spend that money.
The money isn't moving through the economy.
And therefore, you kind of get a stagnant economy
with less innovation, with less technology changes,
and all because the average Joe doesn't have enough money
to buy all the products that he could be buying.
but it is really bad in a capitalist society
where you have to buy even your basic needs
that means you don't have healthcare.
It means you can't afford to go to college.
This is also just about people not having the opportunity
And finally, there's the question of basic justice.
they didn't make all that money on their own.
the idea that most of us are not, in the end,
receiving in return what we contribute to the economy.
And here on the AskReddit subreddit, yellowrainbird asked,
Has late-stage capitalism happened before in history?
because I think there's a lot we can learn from history.
If you look back, for instance, the 1920s,
a lot of the things that people were talking about
were the same problems we're dealing with today,
an economy dominated by huge corporations,
the government not looking out for people,
corrupt politicians who are in the pocket
These are problems that we've dealt with before.
And I want to say, yes, there have been countries
If you've heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal,
which came after the Great Depression, in many ways,
the New Deal was a way to get America
out of the extreme capitalism that had been in
He taxed the rich, jobs for the working poor,
jobs for the unemployed that the government created,
that you walk on today, infrastructure.
So I absolutely think that there's nothing inevitable
Things can be different, and in fact, they were.
That said, even the 1920s might not compare
to the levels of inequality and corporate concentration
and just power that these billionaires have today.
We are really in uncharted territory,
and that doesn't make things impossible,
in the Capitalism subreddit, dashdevs asked,
Can the concentration of wealth in just a few hands
lead to the destruction of capitalism?
And actually one of the most popular responses
from TheGreenBehren was that yes, it can,
And I think this is a very important point
because I think in many ways we are reaching a point
where late-stage capitalism is so obscene,
It might be delegitimizing capitalism itself.
This is something that capitalists themselves are aware of,
not all of them, but some of them are smart enough
maybe they've gotten a little bit too greedy.
Warren Buffett for years has been talking
that his secretary pays a higher percentage
He's saying it's because he understands
that if capitalism loses its legitimacy in the United States
or anywhere else, it might be destroyed.
and see how the Zoomers are feeling about
One Redditor writes, I hate how we're suffering the most
Billionaires spending our tax dollars
on either straight [beeps] or funding other businesses,
meanwhile, us regular folk have to use 70% of our money
for groceries, rent, and household items.
we're going through the worst of it
due to us becoming adults during this time period.
A lot of capitalism is about accumulating wealth,
and we know that kind of the boomers
got to buy houses when they were cheap
and then they kind of accumulate a lot of wealth.
But, you know, the Gen Zers, oftentimes, they see now
that they have no way that they could ever buy a house.
There's no way that they ever could really
kind of create wealth for themselves.
And it's true that, you know, for many different aspects
of everyday American life, the costs are going higher.
in almost every sector of the economy.
Gen Z are the biggest losers of this process.
I think what annoys a lot of the Gen Zers the most
is when the boomers tell them, Oh, well, you know,
We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps.
If you actually look at American history in that period,
wasn't just individuals working hard.
There was so many different social structures in place
Very cheap education, subsidized mortgages,
billionaires who paid higher taxes,
corporations that were more regulated,
labor laws that were more in favor of the little guy
It feels that even if I work hard, even if I do my best,
even if I do what everyone told me and I get good grades
and I do everything that I'm supposed to do,
I still can't make it because the system is rigged
and it's not working for me anymore.
And this brings us to the question of how can we maybe
kind of go back to a more golden age?
So in the EffectiveAltruism subreddit, AceDudeyeah asked,
How do we fight reverse late-stage capitalism?
The first thing I want to say is absolutely
The one thing that, you know, billionaires
and big corporations want you to believe
is that things are inevitable, that they're natural,
The first step towards changing things
I know it sounds corny, but that's just the truth.
I mean, again, we can just go back to America.
We don't need to look at some socialist utopia.
We can talk about unions at workplaces.
We can talk about voting for politicians
who aren't in the pockets of corporations,
passing major laws that kind of change the structure
of the economy, creating alternative forms of businesses
We need to discipline the capitalists.
Obviously, we probably need to tax them a lot more.
Just get one public option out there
and let people decide if they want that
or if they want the same [beeps] health insurance
There have been some dark moments in American history.
you would never imagine things like weekends
or that there'd be laws against children working in mines
or the fact that you have social security now.
