[nradov]

Help us out here. What would the end of capitalism look like? All of the attempts at ending capitalism so far have collapsed into disaster, so people are understandably hesitant now to start grand social experiments which historically speaking are likely to end in famine and genocide.

[sirsinsalot]

Capitalism works because it models the world without saying much about it. Just as I can pile sticks and mud to form a house, removing entropy and then giving that in exchange for a sack of grain.

It models the physics there, but adds an indirection, value stored as currency.

Money doesn't have any morality or inherent motivation. Capitalism is what happens when humans project theirs onto it, on average, with a good amount of autonomy enabled by that currency.

If people were not, on average, greedy survivalists, then the value store would produce an economy that operates much differently.

That's why capitalism persists, because we're all just advanced monkeys gathering as many rocks, sticks and mud as we can in a big pile, because it is built-in to our genetics to stockpile resource when we can.

Everything else is just advanced mechanisms of this.

The end of capitalism is the end of humanity, because while we exist, we will want to stockpile resources through increasingly elaborate means in an attempt to stave off the entropy of death.

[germinalphrase]

I think your question might be his point.

We can easily imagine the destruction of all existence because we have mental models for what that destruction might look like; however, imagining the end of capitalism requires us to invent entirely new ideas that exceed the salience of capitalism itself (which is… obviously hard much harder).