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:
Next week.
Scenario 1: The CPC loses power. The international bourgeoisie regains the upper hand in geopolitics as the earth warms. AI advances to the point where human labor is displaced, but it is under the firm control of the capitalist class. This results in massive violence and wars of population attrition. Climate change is still a thing; none of the social or ecological problems have been solved. Life on Earth begins to resemble a Ulysses Tuggy novel. The remaining humans are subjected to extensive cybernetic mind control, kept in perpetual digital serfdom. Assassination drones prevent anyone from building power among the underclass. The few dozen of the world’s trillionnaires and hundreds of multibillionnaires escape Earth to live on the Mars Colony. Capitalism extinguishes itself and devolves into techno-feudalism in 2055.
Scenario 2: China gradually grows and becomes the economic and military world hegemon. Luckily, they were the first to reach the breakthrough in quantum computing. The US balkanizes, and by a combination of caution and good luck, none of the nukes are fired. Led by China, world socialist movements are victorious, and we are well on our way to the next horizons of human development by around 2082.
Scenario 3: We reach the point of peak everything. Climate change gets really bad, with 1 billion refugees fleeing across the planet, and we run low on oil, phosphorus, cobalt, rare earths, topsoil, and freshwater aquifer levels. Technological collapse causes social collapse around the globe. It doesn’t happen evenly- some places hold out for a while longer- but the several thousand localities are all sent back to 1800s technology or worse. There’s a wide variety of political/economic forms that take root, but anything that can be called capitalism is defunct. The new hodgepodge of protean civilizations advance in various directions at various rates, but the most successful ones are the ones who got together early on in the collapse, dedicated to principles of ecology, appropriate technology, and communism, which are blended together in new religious movements. The global network of capital and commodities finishes flickering out by 2110.
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.
The Global Atmospheric Reengineering project failed and caused rapid ecological catastrophe, and economies around the world collapsed. However, the “Chinese Belt” proved much more resilient than the old Euro/Anglo economic system, and recovers at a staggering speed. People outside that system know that they have been cheated, and calls for reform grow to a fever pitch. Everyday more people take to the streets, a growing revolutionary movement…
…that is immediately coopted. A handful of token bourgeoisie are very publicly stripped of their wealth and thrown in prisons, but the leaders of the new workers’ parties that are taking charge in the west are mostly the same people that had been in charge before. Billionaires call for the execution of millionaires, factory owners champion unions, and the old guard of the political class abandon centrist rhetoric for empty revolutionary proclamations.
At this final stage of decay, the undead capitalist class abandons all pretenses of liberalism in order to simply maintain control at any cost. Rather than relying on the invisible hand of the market to replicate their privilege, they create highly efficient state bureaus to do it. Party purges are conducted regularly to keep upstarts from advancing in the new system. The prison industrial complex massively expands and becomes a primary source of labor, and the former capitalists find themselves committing every crime they’ve ever accused a less-liberal government of committing.
