[TulliusCicero]

> Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History[0]).

"Late stage capitalism" is a good example of this. Although in some ways it's possibly closer to secular End Times rhetoric.

[astrange]

"Late stage capitalism" is the opposite. People just keep saying it claiming history is going to resume soon, and have been saying it since it was invented 110-ish years ago, and yet capitalism continues to not go anywhere.

[pugworthy]

> continues to not go anywhere

Just like Bronze

[namaria]

Modern economy and policy is hardly the same as it was 100 years ago, or even 30...

[the_af]

I don't know. I don't find it difficult to believe capitalism can gradually morph into something else in say 500 or 1000 years, so that you could point at one end (let's say early 20th century) and say "this was capitalism" and at the other end 1000 years from now and say "this isn't capitalism by any reasonable meaning of the word" (I mean, not "future capitalism" but something that supersedes it and has a different shape). And it could also reasonably be believed by future historians that there was an era called "late stage capitalism" just like they now call a period of history the late middle ages.

It's just that in the span of some generations you wouldn't be able to recognize the phenomenon slowly unfolding.

I'm reminded of how the Roman Empire at the time of its big split wasn't acknowledged by its citizens as "Western" or "Eastern", and its slowly unfolding undoing wasn't recognized either. Had you asked a Roman citizen, he/she would have been surprised by the question: there was only one Roman Empire. And they believed it would last forever.

[unsupp0rted]

I doubt it’ll take that long. Capitalism depends on being able to make a profit.

It’s possible quite soon that everything will be commoditized (designed, built, and recycled by machines ultra-cheaply) and nothing will be profitable.

The end of profit is the end of capitalism.

[astrange]

This is Marxism, literally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...

[tacitusarc]

Capitalism is more about markets for resource allocation and private property than profit.