Late Capitalism

[David Morris]

The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that
time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or
anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death,
when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can
supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living
inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a
maniac bent on suicide… though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes
back through the loudspeaker…” —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 11:30 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Good point and applicable to many semantic issues. Every generation has a
> tendency to think they are at some kind of apex. I think the term late
> capitalism as used currently  is more predictive than descriptive and may
> of course prove completely wrong through reform or some other event.
> I see it more as acknowledging that the Titanic has received a mortal blow
> and is going down. That this current arrangement is physically,
> biologically, and socially unsustainable.  I wonder what late capitalism
> means to other readers.
>
> > On Nov 9, 2021, at 10:37 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Let’s get more specific:
> >
> > Inherent in the current use of the term, “late capitalism,” is a critique
> > of observed problems of the modern practices of capitalism.  But the term
> > isn’t new:
> >
> > “ The term "late capitalism" was first used by Werner Sombart
> > <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Sombart> in his magnum opus Der
> > Moderne Kapitalismus, which was published from 1902 through 1927, and
> > subsequent writings; Sombart divided capitalism into different stages:
> > (1) proto-capitalist society from the early middle ages up to 1500 AD
> > (2) early capitalism in 1500–1800
> > (3) the heyday of capitalism from 1800-1914(WW1)
> > (4) late capitalism: 1914 until today.”
> >
> > “The term late capitalism began to be used by socialists in continental
> > Europe towards the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s, when many
> economists
> > believed capitalism was doomed.”
> >
> > At the heart of the term is the question of whether current problems are
> > due to abuses and corruptions of the system, or whether the problems are
> > inherent to the system.  Another question is about the nature of reforms
> or
> > regulations that make capitalism a hybrid system.  Is a Reformed/Hybrid
> > Capitalism still “Late Capitalism?”
> >
> > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
> > Modern usage of the phrase and further evolutionEdit
> > <
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Late_capitalism&action=edit&section=4
> >
> >
> > According to a 2017 article in The Atlantic
> > <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantic>, the term "late
> capitalism"
> > is again in vogue to describe modern business culture, although with a
> > semantic change or an ironic twist. "Late capitalism" has become a
> > catch-all term for various phenomena that express capitalism's
> distortions
> > of human life, and it is often used in critique and satire. This usage
> also
> > conveys a sense that contemporary capitalism cannot go on like it does
> > forever, because the problems created by business are getting too large
> and
> > unmanageable.
> >
> > The phrase “late stage capitalism” is used commonly as a critique of the
> > fascistic qualities that emerge in the later stages of capitalism.
> > Capitalism to many may seem to be free of this exploitation if not taken
> to
> > the extremes of “late capitalism”. A competing viewpoint is that
> > “Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative,
> > controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of
> > capitalists and workers”, and that this is not something that emerges out
> > of a devolving system but rather is present in the framework of the
> system
> > itself.
> > --
> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>
>
>
>