if you don't mind me putting a damper on this talk of late capitalism.

late capitalism was supposed to mean a period where workers were in the process of taking control of production; if you want to abstract that out of the labour conditions of the nineteenth century, you could suggest that late capitalism is supposed to be a period of democracy, where the people as a whole co-opt production from the elite, and convert it into a tool for use by the masses.

i don't see that happening anywhere.

maybe we're at a point where the technology could allow for a transition, but i don't see it actually happening anywhere in front of me. workers seem to be more afraid that they're going to lose their jobs to automation, than in control of a movement to command it.

what "late capitalism" seems to mean to the people that are throwing it around rather seems to mean a collapse into decadence, as though the founder of historical materialism was nietzsche, or not even, his critics, and the end of capitalism - perhaps with it's underlying work ethic, and the civic values imbued within it by religion - is just a collapse into nihilism. this view conflates the end of capitalism with the end of history, itself perverted from the hegelian term, to mean the end of western history. it's an ultra-paradoxical response to the co-option of marxism into the scare story to preserve religion in the face of secularism. this is what happens when you let anybody that can afford to pay for it go to school.

but, historical materialism was always a pseudo science, anyways. it set down a plausible path of events, and then claimed it was a law of history. if you even want to take the idea seriously enough to do so, you could argue that marx was presenting a classical argument, and that we understand the world today in terms of probabilities rather than certainties. if you want to take it that seriously....

i think the reality is that the united states is not only not in late capitalism, but that it's devolved from a relatively late stage of capitalism under fordism, and moving into the labour movements of the 30s, and into an earlier stage of capitalism, which was accelerated by a return to mercantilism in the 1980s, under the phoney free trade agreements, which were designed to offload labour to countries with lower working conditions.

so, forget about late capitalism. the united states has essentially overseen a global return to mercantilism - which is the decadence that people are identifying. because that is the great comedy of nietzsche, or his critics: that the collapse into nihilism happened in the seventeenth century, and that the classical period of art (and science) is a consequence of it.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.