There’s a joke floating around on social media. Anytime in aspect of the modern economy feels particularly ironic, or unfair, or absurd, it’s labeled late capitalism. When United Airlines forcibly
removed a customer, that was late capitalism. When tons of Americans are
forced to crowdfund their health care, that’s late capitalism. When rich people buy extremely expensive, unnecessary, even tone-deaf things, this too is branded late capitalism. But what does late capitalism really mean? Where did it come from, and how did it end up everywhere all of a sudden? Labeling something late capitalism is common on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Google search interest in the phrase has more than doubled in the past year. The terms late capitalism or late-stage capitalism are often associated with Karl Marx. Marx thought of
capitalism as inherently unstable because it demands spurring consumption among a disempowered and underpaid proletariat, and because it creates boom and bust cycles. A common misconception is that late capitalism is the decadent phase before the socialist revolution, when workers would rise up and seize the
means of production. Not quite. Late capitalism isn’t even Marx’s term. The person who coined it is a German economist named Werner Sombart, who used
it to describe the European economy around the turn of the century or World War I. A time of intense industrialization. The person who
popularized it among Marxist thinkers was a Belgian Holocaust survivor and
economist named Ernest Mandel, who used it to describe the economy from the end
of World War II until the 1970s. A time when multinational corporations were growing and international finance was developing. Most people in the United
States know the term from a Duke literary critic named Frederick Jameson, who first used it in a popular essay in the mid-1980s. Jameson saw late capitalism as synonymous with the post modern economy taking shape in the
70s and continuing until today. Exemplified by the collapse of high and low culture, the rise of consumerism, globalization, the growth of the Internet, and the rise of Wall Street, among other trends. One important thing to note here: the phrase late capitalism was always malleable, with different thinkers using
it to refer to different time periods and different facets of the
economy. So how did the term break out of academia and into wider culture? It took the emergence of a new, tenacious far-left to do that. The financial crisis and the Great Recession battered working families and underscored just how bad
the country’s income and wealth inequality had gotten. Take just one
statistic from the scholars Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They find that the average incomes of the top 1% in the United States have tripled since
the 1980s, where as the average incomes at the bottom 50% haven’t budged. In this climate, during and after the recession Occupy Wall Street became a full-on
social movement, ‘we are the 99%, became a rallying cry, Bernie Sanders ended up
giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the 2016 Democratic primary, the Democratic Socialists of America became one of the fastest-growing political
parties in the United States, and there’s resurgent interest in Marx and Marxism. Social media savvy Occupy types started using the phrase late capitalism to refer to the economy they saw around themselves and it became a meme The phrase developed its own funny, ironic meaning, distinct from its academic usage. Now it’s not just people on the left that use it, it’s everywhere. Silicon Valley is a perfect target. Many venture capitalists seem to be funding on-demand startups that create no benefit, sub-minimum wage jobs. It applies to the
absurd goods and services that companies are selling to the richest of the rich. And it applies to brands trying to capitalize on the populist anger and the heated social climate. There’s a Pepsi ad in which Kendall Jenner throws her wig
a black woman, takes over a protest, and help to prevent police brutality. But is late capitalism just a cynical, viral phenomenon? Might we truly be in a
revolutionary, late capitalist period? The meme does get to something profound about our economy. Just like Marx thought, capitalism has produced extraordinary
fortunes for some, and stagnation for many. A socialist revolution? That feels
far-fetched. But a more socialist left in the United States? That’s already here, and I have a feeling the late capitalism meme is only going to get more popular. This is Unprecedented, a video series where Atlantic writers explore what’s
happening in this new era of American politics. Let us know what topic you want
us to tackle next. I’m Annie Lowrey, thanks for watching.
E A T T H E R I C H
"Ernest Mandel popularized it among Marxists" ahem Lenin?!?!
Thanks AnnieLowrey, but RELATIVE GROWTH will save capitalism: https://youtu.be/Sm8cbut3YJI
Get rid of capitalism already
The truth is every form of government, taken by itself, is terrible in practice. Autocracy, Monarchy, Democracy, Oligarghy, etc. You need a mixture of kinds that counterbalance each other. Otherwise one aspect of it gets out of control.
Pure capitalism leads to monopolies that screw over the populus. Pure socialism leads to Orwellian States. Pure autocracy leads to facism. Pure democracy leads to 51% of people forcing the remaining 49% to do shit they don't like or don't believe in. You can't just have ONE thing. If you do then it spirals out of control. You need a mixture.
However, our mixture doesn't seem very balanced anymore.
The host is hot
No, people are too stupid to understand these things. The powers will simply use racism and hate to destroy the socialist movement.
Bitcoin is the answer, buy !
This video is late capitalism
“Extraordinary fortunes and stagnation”? I think you mean plutocracy and abject poverty.
Get. A. Real. Job.
You aren't in the right position. Blame capitalism if you insist.
Who r you?
A more left capitalism isn't going to fix the problems of capitalism, meanwhile society sufferers, the environment is destroyed and many people lose the will to live once the trinkets and distractions loose their appeal.
If we don't overcome capitalism we will just repeat these cycles endlessly which may be okay for the bourgeois Atlantic who always ultimately side with fascists but not for human progress and moral decency and democracy, we did the "new deal" and it was UNDONE.
I could almost read the wikipedia page and the first three results on a google search and see the script written. What is failed to be mentioned is that people are using the term because some college kid heard it in college and then ran with it to go viral to look smart and relevant to their friends. Now it floats around like so many terms, "facts" and "truths" with the same depth of knowledge. Ask five questions to most people trying out their "big boy" words and you quickly learn that they have NEVER used the phrase "I don't know" and "I would have to do some critical thinking and research on that." As of now– reddit, buzzfeed and Huffington Post are tomes of wisdom for many cyber-intellectuals.
I'd rather be in a capitalist society than a communist one. Because there's even more inequality in communism as human devours have no rewards. People who have talent and ideas who want to work harder than others are limited by bureaucracy.
In a communism, people are all " equal ", but would someone want to live in a society where everyone has to eat the same type of dish everyday; that's one example. Entrepreneurs who want introduce better products and services to the market are forced to shutdown because the government cronies only get to play, that's why in capitalist societies the free-market exist.
Socialism just mean communist-lite.
Look at Venezuela.
Hopefully the USA will only become "more "socialist"", meaning "socialist" in this right-winger sense that has been increasingly embraced by the left, that is, just expanding/improving and adopting more welfare policies like public healthcare and so on, not strict socialism, meaning, generalized nationalization/state-ownership of industries and commerce under the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat.
"Late capitalism" is the left's own version of the right-winger/originally mostly neo-nazi "cultural marxism". A vague boogey man. Less conspiracy-theoretical, leaving implied that somehow everything Marx prophesied is unfolding, and living standards are just decreasing. When it's more like the opposite, in the big-picture (as shown beautifully in the TED talks of the late Hans Rosling), despite things being far from perfect.
How do you spend 4 minutes talking about something without saying a fuckin thing?
late capitalism is what you say when you are not on time to capitalism
More like crapitalism, amirite?
I just came here to hear corporate media tell me how capitalism is great for them. I'm glad you're doing well Atlantic, meanwhile wages are stagnant and prices rising… Corporate coup
Socialists = libfarts
The economy and the govt has always been a facade for social order. Food grows on trees, and you can do whatever you want as long as no one stops you.
This video misses the point that leaves stage capitalism has a completely different meaning than it used to. It's like trying to see what the word gay means nowadays by looking at its previous use in history.
It's not a joke tho…..
Having an economics degree, and also reading political comments are a constant war of wanting to correct people but knowing they wouldn’t listen anyway and just accepting exasperated defeat.
Real Leftism is rising, hail to the end of Capitalism.
This presenter's voice and appearance make me want to kill myself. Her inflection is so flat, so dead, so uncaring, that it removes all hope that life will ever improve. All is lost.
I realize uncanny features originating from AI assisted video editing techniques. It took me quite long to notice, a year? two years? I'm crazy? Ok
“A socialist revolution is far fetched”
2025: Hold my beer.
(and when I say beer, I mean wine fermented from the ripened grapes of wrath)
Correct me if I'm wrong. So "Late Capitalism" refers to the absurdities of our modern economy?
This is late capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8LxORztUWY&t
its a meme, you dip
A communist revolution will never succeed in America.
Banning of Religion, banning of Free Speech, killing of dissenters, one party state are just a hand full of the wonders of a Workers state.
Hahaha 'far left'. Oh America, in Europe we just call that 'the Left', as it should be ✊
I've been conditioned to hear that jingle to assume I'll be watching Cody's Showdy
BS. Yes, the 50% hasn't got much more money, but their money is now worth more. Today almost everybody can afford air conditioning, smartphones, cars, food, and almost any other thing you deem necessary. You can't say that about 70, 60, 50, 40 or even 30 years ago. That's the beauty of Capitalism.
She is beautiful
Nice teleprompter reading airhead.
Obvious attempt by terrified uber capitalists to sway the American public away from revolution and the desire for equality and real democracy.
Late *stage capitalism. The joke is that corporatism is the cancerous variant of capitalism that overgrows and kills off facets of society for no other reason than a notion of limitless growth. The question asked by people is to what end? Rich people see growth as some calling but don’t actually have an end goal in mind to that effect.
The problem with PIketty's work is that he didn't perform any statistical analysis on the data he collected, in attempting to test the hypothesis that wealth inequality arises from the return on capital (r) being greater than economic growth in general, (g). His conclusion (or rather, confirmation of his assertion,) seems to stem mostly from a visual examination of his data. The other problem his work faces is that he doesn't seem to account for capital depreciation; accounting for this further undermines his conclusions, and shows that the increase in wealth inequality we've seen these past few decades is mostly generated by land-assets and housing disparities.
>bad income and wealth unequality
noone gives a shit about 'inequality' you fucking neoliberal shill, and neityer did Marx
Ugh, late-capitalism isn't a meme…i mean, it is but it isn't. People are not using it in any former academic sense of the term but rather because people are becoming more and more aware that investment market capitalism, as we know it, is reaching the limits of sustainability. As a meme, it's to mock symptomatic occurrences therein. To Marxists, late stage capitalism was when capitalism begins reaching it's limit for siphoning wealth out of the proletariat and begins to siphon off it's own resources in order to sustain itself. You can see this behavior everywhere, from retail and service industry outsourcing every bit of labor it can, to video games publishers introducing predatory gambling schemes, to contractors using cheaper materials and migrant labor, to insurance institutions raising prices while lobbying against obamacare so they can engage in consumer discrimination and service limitations, to financial institutions continuing to lobby for deregulation so they can engage in riskier and riskier investments, having learned absolutely nothing from 2008, to widespread corporate welfare and tax avoidance that proliferates the entire economy…you could literally go on and on all day.
Marx understood that greed is never satiated, and sure enough we have developed a scarcity economy on the premise of infinite growth, you have to be completely fucking deluded to ignore the flaws in that logic. Unfortunately, Marx did have a blindspot; a lack of imagination. He could have never predicted we'd find ourselves in possession of the technology we have now. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a solution for the industrial revolution but today we have the potential to transcend scarcity entirely, where we can build a transitional hybrid economy where capital growth is irrelevant, if people pursue it. In a more cynical future, we may otherwise drift more and more toward the authoritarian right as we struggle to maintain life support on a terminally ill capitalist economy.
This american lads have no idea what socialism is. Unless the means of production are taken by force, you don't have a socialist country, just a welfare state.
Its going to be a shame, when the reds take control, to see all of this poor people be forced out of the career they love, journalism, into an industry that's deemed "more important".
I agree that the rich business owners need to pay their workers more at the very least $14 an hour that's enough to scrape by on anything less and you can't keep up with your bills but I also think socialism is not the answer either at least not government ran socialism community-based socialism such as your local church and welfare office as well as food banks and local rescue operations yes but if taxes aren't lowered and average wages aren't increased there will start to be unrest and violence, revolutionary violence not for quite some time but if this Trend continues then I guarantee it will eventually reach that Peak the only reason people are turning to socialism is because we're being treated unfairly I'm sure if companies would just work with us all list socialist BS would go away
China is going to eat all of you, and I can't wait. By the time you've finished figuring out that capitalism isn't going to die anytime soon, China's power will stretch to Mars and beyond.
Those claiming we're in the late stages of capitalism are very similar to those who claim the second coming of Christ is near. Both are hopeless zealots.
jesus christ i do believe this is the least compelling person on youtube.
Capture the means of production
fuck capitaism, also fiat currencies never lasted in any circunstance through history
You can tell she's reading straight off the prompter at every single second. From her eyes to her speech pattern.
I don't find #latecapitalism cynical, Capitalism sucks, deal with it. It's reality…
I always hated the term. It reflects the hubris of the purely theoretical marxist type. As if to say, not only is the system run by the casinos on Wall Street necesarily going to end, and not only will it end *predictably*, but we, in our present tense, are right at the cusp of it. How long have these armchair revolutionaries been crying "the end is nigh!" now? Seeing how things have been going since Occupy, if there were a revolution just around the corner, I wouldn't place my chips on a leftist one, unfortunately.
Eyes too beautiful; couldn't pay attention
Anyone else hear that "some more news" theme? Search YouTube if you're not in the know on that one.
its painfully obvious that’s she’s reading off a teleprompter and doesn’t really know what she’s talking about and it really distracts from the actual content of the video
Can’t tell if very sad or terrified
the system we live in is so unsustainable that even the planet itself is now being driven to death
don't start with jokes……create meaningful content
So much bias! Maybe if our president could keep the illusion of capital up maybe capitalism wouldn’t be crashing so fucking hard!
dfdfrakken zsee deueutschzch dasssa nicce lukn vissage rite therrre hic
Fuck you Jeff Gannett. I don't give a fuck what you are CEO of.
Eh, how can you have a discussion about the phrase "late capitalism" without discussing Lenin's pamphlet: "imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism"? I mean he doesn't use the actual phrase "late capitalism" but it is still a treatise on the highest/ultimate/latest stage of capitalism. I think Lenin had profound influence on this concept. Most certainly on the Trotskyist intellectual Ernest Mandel.
I like Abby Martin better!
It is nothing but the wishful thinking of the ever-present-yet-not-so-numerous bolshevik wannabes on Twitter. The irony is delicious.
Man, the tankies are really out in full force here
So Jews are behind it? just a coincidence goy just a coincidence
she said a more socialist left in the usa is already here, well so is a more radical right its called polititcal polarization
She's literally perfectly beautiful
Surely they mean "crony-Capitalism"? As far as my understanding goes, true capitalism has never existed. The US got close but its is a mixed economy, not a capitalist economy.
This woman is obviously late capitalism.
In early capitalism, white men with better guns stole land from poor peasants, committed genocide on indigenous populations in US, Australia,NZ, etc. They invested the profits in factories and early stage shopping centres back home in Europe..
In late capitalism, they do the same, except with much bigger,faster guns and bombing planes. The blood profits still get stashed in the very same places though, London and Switzerland mostly.
Smash down bourgeois Babylon !
Capitalism's dyin' Cloud.
So basically, socialists don't have a lot of creativity and use the same term to describe elements of the status quo they don't like.
This video is underrated..
This video is so stupid
Sounds like late stage capitalism, but okay. Might as well prepare before the upcoming storms!
The only good communist is a dead communist
FAR FETCHED
Start your dialectics boys.
I GOT A FUCKING MONOPOLY COMMERICAL IM GONNA SCREAM
It's called the Pareto distribution and Liquid Modernity.
The extremely rich and multinational corporations have only themselves to blame. Rigging the game so badly to milk every last penny from people while social ills such as poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, etc continue to fester or get worse. When people's lives begin to degrade as inflation gradually bites at stagnant wages, people will express their displeasure. The 1% better wake up to this fact before a new Bastille is chosen.
It's not a joke… late stage capitalism is reality
Atlantic needs commentators with gravitas. These wispy voiced girls just don't cut it.
…nothing, unless you’re a Marxist true believer.
Good job reading from a card and not understanding anything you’re saying.
"Late Capitalism" will meet its fateful end once folks figure out how much "free stuff" actually costs them. Judging by how much its critics are willing to pay for Apple products, I'd say we are nowhere near the end. We are probably in some sort of "Social Justice Capitalism" where companies pretend to care about social justice issues to sell products to people who pretend to hate Capitalism.
Me, living in a crumbling house from 1997 : “Well, well Well…”
It's an empty buzzword for the uneducated
She's a good reader!! LoL!
"cynical" it's not really cynical if it's reality, hm?
edit: holy shit late capitalism has been a phrase since 2017
di mo naman alam sinasabi mo hahaha
late capitalism will be here when monopolies become more prevalent and automation removes labor thus a vacuum of revenue generation is created basically making the 1% the only earners of capital. I think the government is partially to blame for this future but they will also be the ones who have to use the power of the state to redistribute wealth into a UBI. That is undoubtedly our future.
But the presenter's attractiveness IS a commodity!
The Revolution is imminent what do you stall for ?
Once again the Belgians are behind the buttons >:)
Glad capitalism is working for you lady. Because, It's a mother f*cker when it doesn't.