Rules: you’re not allowed to say “never.” We already know it’s possible it will end when everyone dies because of nuclear war or climate change or some other disaster. Name a specific year (within this century plz) and describe why capitalism will end at that time. Whoever is closest will get an extra food coupon at the local worker canteen. If you joke around I will be extremely disappointed in you :heartbreaking:

  • Speaker [e/em/eir]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Capitalism ended when the value of the primary proxy for productive capacity became fully divorced from the actual act of production. The most successful "capitalists" of today do not extract their wealth from the surplus value of the labor of factories and fields, but from the shuffling around of government-backed debt and the collection of ambient "information" used to funnel consumers into purchasing pipelines for companies that exist long enough to sell 300 pairs of designer socks before evaporating and being repurposed into a recycled toilet paper startup. At the end of that long road, sure, labor is there as it must be for anything to actually be made, but even the owning class are so alienated and abstracted from the process that this is an afterthought. Choose any Musk company and tell me the value he extracts from every single employee underneath amounts to anything more than line noise compared to the vast sums of money tied up in emission subsidies and crypto. The largest jump in the net worth of Jeff Bezos didn't come about when he found a slick new way to grind out an extra 15 minutes of pick-and-packing from a starving child or a more efficient way to paw through your porn browsing habits to sell you toothpaste; it came from the arbitrary increase of a numerical representation of faith during a world-shaking crisis.

    More seriously, I've got Q3 2051 in the pool, with the caveat that it's probably a lot more like the "everyone dies" option than anything else.