I honestly think it’ll implode in a few decades. The wage gap will continue to grow, we’ll get charged more for less, and the minimum wage won’t go up much at all. Conservatives will continue to blame everything on anyone else they can (like immigrants). And I think at some point things will just… break. I’m not sure what it’ll look like, but I think it’s going to be ugly. Things will get much worse before they get better.
I’m normally a pretty upbeat, positive guy, but I’m not sure how else this could realistically go down.
Tell American conservatives to tax Mike Bloomberg and other anti gun billionaires 70% and use the money to buy guns for poor people. America will become communist overnight.
Through abundance it will defeat itself by working too well. Approaching full automation the only way for capitalism to survive is via UBI, otherwise there will be no consumer markets. When we have enough productive capacity and sufficient UBI that everyone is wealthy without having to work, a society like the Federation from Star Trek becomes possible. When everyone has enough wealth that hoarding it becomes meaningless, we might achieve something like a communist society.
"Hoarding" or controlling resources will be always meaningful. There is limited amount of accessible matter, and even if all basic needs of every human is satisfied, people have inspirations to do things, including BIG things, and for that they need resources. The only way we might have something like communist society is if AI takes control, and no human is controlling anything of a value. Kind of like a "Culture" series of books by M. Banks. Or if we go completely virtual, but even then, the computation resource is of the value...
There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered “flat” (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.[2][3]
The ultimate fate of an open universe with dark energy is either universal heat death or a “Big Rip”[12][13][14][15] where the acceleration caused by dark energy eventually becomes so strong that it completely overwhelms the effects of the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong binding forces.
Neither a universal heat death nor a Big Rip — and we expect one of the two to occur — seems likely to be conducive to capitalism.
The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze)[1][2] is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy.
The theory suggests that from the “Big Bang” through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work.[15]:§VID The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years,[16] so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years.[17] After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales.
In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future, until distances between particles will infinitely increase.
In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, galaxies would begin to disintegrate as gravity becomes too weak to hold them together. Planetary systems like the Solar System would become gravitationally unbound about three months before the Big Rip, and planets would fly off into the rapidly expanding universe. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and the now-dispersed atoms would be destroyed about 10¯¹⁹ seconds before the end (the atoms will first be ionized as electrons fly off, followed by the dissociation of the atomic nuclei). At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself would be ripped apart and the scale factor would be infinity.
I think there needs to be a catalyst that can’t be known in advance. Right now, too many people have too much to lose. If something changes that, then we can bring down capitalism. Something like mortality for only the top 1% “might” do it, but probably not since the people who need it are the old people, who are also to old to fight. So it needs to be something that causes the young people to have nothing to lose.
If the "1%" was to suddenly magically die, that would just mean that the 2% becomes the new 1% and carries on. I think there needs to be a more fundamental change. Something better than capitalism will need to come along, and so far it's hard to say that any of the alternatives we currently have fit the bill.
One of these days they are going to finally sell us the rope. Or, I think Marx was probably right and eventually the productive capacity of capitalism will grow so extreme that something new and different emerges from it. Basically, capitalism probably doesn’t work post-scarcity. As far as when, possibly never but probably sometime in the next few hundred years if we don’t collapse our civilization first and get stuck Mad Maxing the wasteland.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily better, but communist idiosyncrasies seem etched in all the most capitalist societies already, and this will almost certainly grow from that.
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