Part One – Terms & Goals

On the far-left, you often hear the term “late stage capitalism”. The term is usually used as a kind of prophetic one, arguing that capitalism’s chickens have finally come home to roost and that it’s going to collapse. I’m not going to be using the term in that way here per se. When used in this context, it usually refers to capitalism purely as an economic or social structure. Here, it’s going to be more of a mathematical structure.

First, we have to define capitalism, and what it aims to do as an ideology. It’s often thought that capitalism is just the free market, but this doesn’t work as a full definition (never mind the market socialist critiques of capitalist markets). True the free market came into being while capitalism was in it’s developing stages, but theoretically the free market was in one way or another theoretically possible during any other economic arrangement before it. Could an English merchant not have traded freely with a French merchant way back when? Of course he could’ve! Nothing physically stopped him, so long as he had the resources to move his product from here to there.

At it’s roots, capitalism as an economic system has three components: First, private ownership of the means of production – i.e. raw materials, factories, land, etc; Second, wage labor. Third, general commodity production. The general part is important there. Although commodities have existed for about as long as economic exchanges have been around, capitalism is unique in that commodities are the main thing being produced. Under feudalism, for example, what was generally produced was the tributes for the landlords, and then the rest was consumed by the peasantry. Also, the peasantry owned some means of production. Though they were legally & technically speaking tenants, their home, farm, tools, and crops were legally their own.

So that’s what capitalism is, but what does it want? It’s often thought among neoclassical economists that the goal is simply the balance of supply and demand. On the surface that seems to be the case, but this only describes the goal of markets broadly. Were this true, it would follow that capitalism was the only economic system we’ve ever known as a species, and historically this is wrong. We can find the goal of capitalism in it’s very name: Capital. The use of money (or assets which are tantamount to money) to create more money. Under a different name: Accumulation. Constant, ever flowing, accumulation at a continuously growing rate.

Part Two – Cost & Ethics

So, now that we’ve discussed capitalism theoretically, let’s discuss it practically. We established that capitalism’s goal is to grow and grow and grow, but how does it do this? In a market system, products are produced, distributed, consumed, and in some cases, disposed of. And, in capitalism’s case, to maintain a consistent flow of commodities and therefore money, many of these products are meant to degrade rapidly over time, lose value, and be replaced with something else. We’ve come to call this phenomenon “planned obsolescence”. With planned obsolescence, even more things have to be used in production. And in fact, more resources, labor, and money must be poured into making these products. To further add to the material cost of production, we also know that capitalism tends to overproduce.

The goal of accumulation in capitalism is the parameter from which all ethics and decision making is derived. Everything else is subordinated. If, for example, it is more profitable to outsource jobs to countries with less labor laws, a company will likely do so. If it is more profitable to make clothing using child labor in sweatshops, a company will likely do so. If it is useful to overthrow a democratically elected socialist in the name of profit and replace him with a fascist dictator (see the case of Salvador Allende in Chile), capitalist nations will likely do so. The overall human cost is generally a negligible detail.

Now of course, a diehard supporter of capitalism could argue that these actions are themselves ethically sound, but they would miss the point. Capitalism itself, when functioning as an ideology, subordinates everything to the holy scripture that is the bottom line. Ethics are second to this. Decision making here is about what benefits this or that firm, holding company, commercial entity, LLC, etc; or what maintains the system overall so that these things can carry on following this dogma.

Part Three – Mathematics & Extinction

Before we enter this last section, I want to take a moment to make a disclaimer: This conclusion is irrelevant to whether or not you believe in the reality of climate change. It’s reliant entirely on some fairly basic math.

So, we established earlier that the goal of capitalism is continuous growth, and that the cost of doing so is irrelevant so long as growth is met. What does this tell us? Well, let’s go back to those markets again. The various entities and individuals in capitalism have an interesting contradiction: They are trying to get what is effectively infinite growth from finite resources. Now, of course it should go without saying that the Earth is bountiful and that with the advancement of technology less resources will be used, but “Bountiful + Less” ≠ Infinite.

In fact, these advancements don’t appear out of thin air. Things need to be consumed in the process. On top of that, it’s not just one entity or individual pursuing this impossible goal. There’s millions chasing it. To complicate things even more, there’s a finite amount of money. Even now, while most of the money in the global economy isn’t even physical. Now the important part: What happens in late stage capitalism? What happens when finite tries to be infinity?

Well, the input is limited, and the desired effect is not. Which means in the end, the only conclusion that late stage capitalism has is total exhaustion of all resources in pursuit of this goal. Because capital is holy, and life is cost, capitalism deems living things as expendable. All of them. In truth, capitalism will not collapse on it’s own due to it’s instability. It will collapse because it will physically be impossible to carry on with it’s tasks.

Of course, there are the arguments that the market would naturally adjust to meet our needs as a species (even though by design it doesn’t do this to begin with), that we could create market incentives to reduce ecological harm, or prohibit certain practices, but these arguments again miss the point. It is not a matter of how the market is regulated, nor is it even a matter of giving a little tax write off to large corporations for doing a little less harm. The real problem is ideological: Cost and ethics are subordinated to capital. No amount of restriction changes this basic principle.

Capitalism, if it is not overthrown and completely destroyed, will continue it’s death march towards the physically and mathematically impossible holy land of infinite growth. In it’s failure, it will collapse and take every living thing with it. It is fitting then, that the professor and ecologist Guy McPherson commented:

Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.