What's "late" about "late capitalism?"

(My take on) Marx's theory of history, technology, economics, and politics

Disclaimer: I am not a Marx scholar. Far from it. This is just one line of thought that I find in Marx that I think is really quite interesting, whether or not this is Marx’s view exactly.

It is common to hear Marxists describe the current state of the political economy as “late capitalism.” This description is usually attached to the observation of some phenomenon in the economy that feels absurd in some way or another. Consequently, it’s become something of a meme, or a joke. But I think the concept of “late capitalism” is an interesting one, since it captures some really interesting lines of thought in Marx’s theory of history, technology, and economics, and provides an interesting hint at what the future of society would might look like. I don’t really find the concept of “late capitalism” all that interesting, but the underlying theory is pretty cool. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Marx understands history as a more or less deterministic process driven, fundamentally, by technological progress. He has a three-tiered system of analysis for society. At the bottom level is technology. Technology determines the economic system. And the economic system determines the political system, with a public morality that serves to affirm the rightness of the political system that is determined by the economy.

That’s a bit abstract, so let’s give some examples to illustrate those dependencies. First, technology determines the state of the economy. Technologies that add to the productive capacity of the economy fundamentally alter the shape of the economic institutions that use those productive technologies. One common example of this is the invention of the cotton gin. With the cotton gin, it became possible to sort cotton fiber from seeds in an incredibly efficient way. This made the production of cotton textiles possible and profitable in a way that wasn’t possible before. It resulted in a huge increase in demand for cotton crops, as well as a huge increase in the supply of clothing. And these had further ripple effects throughout the whole economy. This is an example of a major economic change that was driven by evolution in technology.

While the cotton gin is an important economic technology, it’s much more interesting to look at truly transformational technologies, like the development of agriculture. Before the invention of agriculture, humans were hunter-gatherers. When we figured out how to plant and irrigate crops, that led to massive changes in human economic institutions. We built permanent settlements next to the fields that eventually blossomed into cities. Our diet changed. But most importantly, we now had the ability to support a class of people who didn’t have to farm to survive. Whereas before every person had to hunt and gather in order to survive, with the invention of agriculture, 100% of the population could be kept fed by the labor of 90% of the population. That freed up that remaining 10% to do other things. Mostly these extra people would be warriors that would conquer and enslave other groups, but there were always a small number of people dedicated to religion, philosophy, and science. That change in the economic and social structure was the result of technological development.

The second part of the story is that economics determines political institutions and the public morality. We can see this with the invention of agriculture. The fact that most people had to work all day, but a small group had the privilege of fighting or thinking or praying, led to a social structure with a harsh divide between those who had to work and those who did other things. Hunter-gather societies are egalitarian by necessity, but an agricultural society will inevitably develop some form of feudalism. Morality then enters the picture late as a way of affirming this social structure. Classical and medieval philosophy is largely concerned with providing moral and political justifications for feudalism and monarchy. This stabilizes the necessary economic structure and makes people content with their lot in life.

And that’s the view in a nutshell. Irrigation and other agriculture technologies make an agricultural society inevitable, since such a society has competitive advantages over earlier societies. The agricultural society will have a feudal system of government because that’s the only system of government that makes sense for an agricultural society. And then morality simply ratifies those inevitable social arrangements.

This system of dependencies is the key to understanding the capitalist age. It begins with technology (specifically, industrial technologies, like the steam engine). That led to an economy based primarily on manufacturing, since that’s the most productive way to use resources given the underlying technology. A manufacturing-based economy needs an investor class to plan what machines to build that can then be used in manufacturing. And since these investors have ultimate control over the shape of the economy by their control over these investment decisions, we end up in a political situation where society is ruled by those with capital, i.e. capitalism. Political institutions and political philosophy then adapt to ratify this setup, e.g. by enshrining strong property rights in law, and producing philosophical justifications for these strong property rights.

One important element in this story is the way that everything in society is driven by the advance of technology, which is treated as an independent and ever-evolving variable. This makes for a kind of determinist account of the evolution of society. We’re always driving in one direction, the tracks laid down by the linear progression of technological advance. This implies a sort of inevitable march through different eras of technologically-enabled social organizations.

And so we can think of a sort of inevitable progression within different economic eras: an early era where the economic and political arrangements are being sorted out, a middle era where those arrangements are strong and functional, and then a later era where things start to fall apart. The technologies that will come to define the next age are just being invented, and they’re just beginning to have an effect on the economic structure. The existing politics no longer makes sense in the way that it used to. It begins to feel faintly absurd that society is structured in the way that it is. A taste of revolution is on the air.

This is the idea of “late capitalism:” we are in the late stage of the capitalist era. Technological advancement has gotten to the point where existing economic models and the political arrangements that ratify them no longer really make sense. It’s time for something new.

So what’s the key technological advancement that will take us out of the capitalist era? The answer is, again, manufacturing technology. But in particular, it is manufacturing technology that is so efficient that we will have essentially ended the economic phenomenon of scarcity. Now, it might seem silly to say that we have ended scarcity. But in a real way, we have. For most of human history, the good that we had to work to create was food, a truly necessary good without which we will literally die. “Scarcity” throughout history was, historically, food scarcity. Famine is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, after all, as awful and inevitable in the pre-modern world as disease, war, and death. And people still do starve today. But globally, we produce far more calories than are needed to support the global population. The problem of starvation today is a problem of distribution rather than a problem of productive capacity. Agricultural and logistics technology makes it possible to feed the world’s population. Food scarcity has, in principle, been eliminated by the advance of technology.

Of course, other kinds of scarcity persist. But as technology advances, we’ll steadily conquer all varieties of scarcity. We’re not fully in the post-scarcity age, we’re at the beginning, where only a few key scarcities are being eliminated. Or, perhaps more accurately, we’re still in the capitalist era, just the “late capitalist” era, where scarcity is just beginning to be eliminated, and the current arrangements no longer make sense.

One of the common criticisms of this idea of “late capitalism” is that we have apparently been in the late capitalist era for a very long time. Marx thought we were in late capitalism in the latter half of the 19th century. 150 years later, we’re still in a capitalist society. So it can’t really have been too late, now could it?

This criticism is well-known to Marxists, and it inspired a lot of discussion throughout the 20th century. Marxists were surprised that we didn’t evolve past capitalism when Marx said we would, and they came up with a variety of theories for why the promised evolution into full-blown communism never happened. One theory was that political reactionaries used the power of the state to freeze society in a state that they controlled. The obvious solution, as Lenin saw, was to eliminate the political reactionaries controlling the state: this led to the bloody history of 20th century communism. Another theory was that more nebulous cultural forces kept the existing status quo going. This was the main theory of the “Frankfurt school” of mid-20th century Marxist social critics.

But I think the best explanation of the persistence of capitalism is just that we haven’t actually managed to technologically defeat scarcity, at least not yet. A genuine technological defeat of scarcity would be the invention of something like Star Trek’s replicators. These are machines that are capable of producing absolutely anything, assembling it entirely from atoms, in mere moments, given a simple verbal command. Whatever anyone needed could be created instantly, all that is required is access to a replicator. And access to replicators would easily be widespread, since replicators can create replicators. If replicators were to exist, scarcity would truly be eliminated.

And if scarcity were truly eliminated, then society might well become more egalitarian. No one would have power over another through control of resources, since everyone would have equally perfect control over resources (atoms organized by replicators). “Wealth” would cease to be a meaningful concept. Property rights wouldn’t make sense either, except in perhaps the relatively rare case of emotionally-significant items. This kind of truly post-scarcity society would be very different from our society. Of course the politics would be different, and it’s plausible that they would be more egalitarian given the underlying egalitarianism with respect to control of resources.

Will any of that happen? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s fun to think about. I like the thought that Marx wasn’t wrong, he was just early. The 20th century Marxists sought to explain the persistence of capitalism by positing forces that had the power to counteract the technological march of history. But on Marx’s overarching theory, there is no force with that power. I think it is truer to the spirit of Marx’s theory - and perhaps simply true - that we’re still in the middle capitalist era because we haven’t technologically conquered scarcity yet. But maybe we will, and if we do, then a different and more egalitarian social arrangement could be the only one that makes sense.