There’s an even lazier form of “late-stage capitalism” discourse, ubiquitous on places like r/AntiWork, that basically collapses to: “My boss is an asshole, therefore down with capitalism”.
As if assholes and petty tyrants are a uniquely capitalist feature!
Wow, you must really be an alien if you have (at least) 19 fingers to count on 🙃
I became vocally pro-capitalism in liberal circles around 2015 (i.e., the primary of no return) almost as an act of rebellion. I think this helps expose the ways that anti-capitalist signaling is more of a polite social agreement, unlike conventional beliefs, which are meant to be open to impartial evaluation. As you mentioned, there's perishingly little nuance to it, and it shows when we're forced to categorize various countries as either "capitalist" or "not". A lot of social democrats laud Scandinavia, Canada - or when they're feeling lazy, just "Europe" - even though citizens therein don't tend to consider their countries to be socialist. Generally if you live under socialism, you should be able to organically form thoughts such as "yep, I live under socialism".
I'm of course fine with thoughtful opinions that run contrary to all the dogmas I hold, put people have to put more effort into it than just "noun, verb, late-stage capitalism". It also helps to check whether the thing you're criticizing exists under socialism/communism. I'm reminded of a meme that said poetry doesn't exist under capitalism (or something like that); if not, does it exist under communism? The fact that poets living under communism were often dissidents who wanted to be liberated from it shouldn't escape our attention, nor should the fact that student movements historically protested the communist regimes they suffered under.
But like seriously I always taken “late-capitalism” to be the secular leftist equivalent of “the End Times”, ostensibly an impending moment of great change but in reality a comfortably indefinite period of feeling a certain way.
Wasn't this all based on Werner Sombart's theory that capitalism was divided into 'early' (16th-18th century), 'high' (19th century), and 'late' (1914-1928 when it was written), with the 'high' variety being more hypercapitalist and the 'late' variety being more like socialism?
If anything capitalism's gotten closer to laissez-faire lately, so we're in high capitalism not late capitalism.
Thank you for this. I have wanted a good expose on the late stage capitalism phenomenon and how utterly ridiculous it is. I like to respond that late stage communism in 1987 didn’t work out well either.
Ever since reading the Frankfurt School's pronouncement on 'Spätkapitalismus' - late capitalism - fifty years ago I've been bemused by the term. Your remarks are simple and to the point, Andrew
This all protests a bit too much. You gesture at it towards the end, but basically everyone who uses that term just means it as a shorthand for everything that's wrong with our political economy right now. Maybe some more specifically mean everything that's wrong that's been caused by the conservative movement takeover of public policy 45 years ago.
Also the first link in your claim that Healthcare has eaten all wage gains says that it takes up ~10% more of total compensation. IOW, average folks would've gotten a 10% raise over the last 30 years. The top 1 or 10% would laugh in the general direction of only a 10% real raise over the last 30 years.
And then the claim that Nozick proved anything 🤦♂️ That guy serves only as an example of how fact-free/light ideological windbags/theocrats are not only on the left!
I didn't say it was a joke. I said it was a shorthand that ~nobody who uses means as a reference to the stupid, invented from whole cloth, stages of development from capitalism to socialism. I'm a professional ML/AI/statistics guy. I like clear terms and discussion and classification too. I'm just saying you're classifying what people mean by it incorrectly, or really getting hung up on it "should" mean your Marxist interpretation so is bad regardless.
I saw Yglesias's post. I think it was a disingenuous argument based on filtering and misrepresenting the facts. What I mean at least when talking about neoliberalism is the total capture of "common sense" economic intuition and deep limits imposed on acceptable policy imagination by mathy (as in truthy) ideology peddled as scientific discoveries by capital funded right wing economists. We're not going to hash it all out in the comments 😆 But I'll mention two clear demonstrations.
First is Chinese entry into the WTO without meaningful conditions, which if you have to narrow it down to one cause was the real cause of the destruction of the American industrial base. Now I'm sympathetic to global perspective arguments that the dramatic positives of lifting literally hundreds of million of Chinese people out of destitution was worth it. But that's not what drove it. It was the total penetration across parties of the right wing fantasies that free trade is a sacrosanct imperative and that markets are the Plutonian ideal instigator of freedom and justice for all.
Similarly, Yglesias references ACA spending as evidence against neoliberalism. But think about the comparison versus earlier federal health efforts. Truman proposed national health insurance. Johnson passed single national health insurance for the elderly and the poor. Clinton proposed and then Obama passed Rube Goldberg machines that twisted into knots to adhere to the ideology of markets in a space where the benefits of choice and competition don't apply with even a cursory examination. In no effective market are the person with 100% of the knowledge, the person getting the good on offer with zero knowledge, and the person paying, also with zero knowledge at the time of purchase, all separate people.
And then into your inequality argument. Even the misleading (because it's mean/avg) graph you pointed to has pay increasing more than 50% over the time period in question. You granted that the median or lower wage has been largely stagnant since Reagan (though finally ticked up in the last few years), then how is that graph proving your point? 10-12% increase in total comp for the typical or poor worker has all been in health insurance. Yet the mean worker got a 50% compensation increase, with the top 10% and 1% getting much higher increases over that time period. That was exactly the point I was making, demonstrated in your graph.
I would disagree Rawls proved anything either. They both made arguments. Rawls's at least hasn't been disproven by more or less all of history (in that doctrinaire libertarianism is a historical synonym for warlordism/oligarchy, in exactly the same manner that communism is a historical synonym for brutal totalitarianism). Though I'd be very dismissive if anyone who claimed Rawls proved anything even given that fact.
Fair enough and we're obviously not gonna agree on much of this. You interpret LSC as equivalent with "neoliberalism," which makes sense but suffers the same problems of imprecision described in the second half of my post (and in my prior one on neoliberalism). Either way, the term presupposes things I think are wrong and should not be assumed.
My next post will address the healthcare stuff and I'm happy to give you the last word on the rest.
As someone who's down to have a dialogue with someone you disagree with, I'd be interested at some point to hear your personal foundation for libertarian beliefs. As I more or less said, I view strong libertarianism as a religion. No less unrelated to the real world as strong Marxism or Christianity. Though of course that's not to say there aren't elements of wisdom in the instincts underlying and the insights communicated in all of those traditions. But what convinces you someone like Nozick isn't a fantasist when applying ideas to real life political economy rather than stories and thought experiments?
I see libertarianism as a moral sentiment, kind of like egalitarianism, rather than a descriptive theory. Everyone values liberty or equality at least a little, but some people value them especially much. Figuring out what you value - and trying to convince others about what they should value - is not "unrelated to the real world," to me; it's a prerequisite to ethically engaging with the real world.
Before we can make policy or sort through empirical questions of cause and effect, we have to decide what outcomes we're even aiming for in the first place. To many people, one of the things we should aim for is justice. Justice is nebulous! It has no objective physical existence and depends on how fair our mushy gushy consciences deem different outcomes to be. But most people feel it's very important nonetheless.
Rawls and Nozick did not engage with "real life political economy" because they were not political economists; they were political philosophers, who used thought experiments to explore our moral intuitions about what outcomes are just. That's different than a descriptive theory of history you'd find in Marx, or the Bible telling you the world is 6,000 years old (though it could overlap with some separate Biblical theory of justice I suppose).
Are you averse to the entire project of exploring our moral intuitions through thought experiments? If so, your problem is not with libertarianism specifically, and I'd be curious how you think we should identify moral priorities.
I fully agree that discussions aren't valuable unless everyone knows and communicates the normative values they're bringing to discussions about societal power and organization (i.e.politics). And that you best shape your own life, to the degree that's possible, if you're doing the reflection to understand what you value and how you can best live in accordance. On justice, I strongly disagree that's more nebulous than liberty. There's a vein of ideology that insists liberty is strictly defined as a very small number of rights understood in exactly one particular way. But as philosophical concepts or English words there's no question they're both nebulous.
My point about the real world is the deep failure of those attracted by stories of the sort Nozick told to be honest (including Nozick himself as I understand) in stepping from the realm of "What principles and values do I think are most important?" to the realm of "How should I live and what should I advocate for societally to make the world better according to my principles?" In my experience, the folks who advocate for writers labeled libertarian or who call themselves that are much more likely to be that way than those who call themselves, say, a classical liberal, even though theoretically those could be called at least near synonyms.
What do I mean by dishonesty? The pretense that government is the sole meaningful source of threats to liberty. That's why I call libertarianism ivory tower warlordism. If the government gets almost entirely out of the way and any interaction where a contract is signed is an expression of freedom and liberty by definitional fiat, then one can simply pretend that, for example, making policing private will lead to some libertarian-anarchist utopia rather than everyone "freely" entering into a protection agreement with their local warlord and his militia. Not all libertarians are so fanciful they support abolition of state provision of public safety. But the point remains the same down the line.
I didn't say justice was more nebulous than liberty. I think they're both somewhat nebulous. There can definitely be rival conceptions of both. I think liberty is comparably nebulous to equality, of which there can also be many conceptions.
Translating ideals to action, and willingness to prioritize, compromise, and embrace incrementalism to actually improve the world instead of just sitting in your imagined moral superiority, is a challenge for ideologues of all stripes. You don't need to convince me there are a lot of cooky libertarians out there, and also a lot of noxious racists and arch-conservatives hiding out under the libertarian label. The Libertarian Party has been taken over by these people since about 2021 or so, and prompted many of the more reasonable sorts of libertarian-leaning people to adopt other labels (including classical liberal) to avoid embarrassing association with them (you'll note no part of my blog's branding identifies me as one). But there are also plenty of more moderate libertarians who engage with the status quo (ex: Cato) or left-leaning, "bleeding heart libertarians" who like Nozick and consistently favor smaller government across the board in both social and economic issues. And before Trump came around, the Libertarian Party *used* to be led by those people! Gary Johnson was a reasonable dude with effective real-world governing experience, for example.
There's always a temptation to strawman our ideological adversaries, and I think your "ivory tower warlordism" may be a better description of anarcho-capitalists or people who like Hans Hermann Hoppe or something. Even Nozick supported a night watchman state that funded police, and again, he was engaging in high-level thought experiments rather than specific policy proposals.
I protest because of what the term reflects about our increasingly lazy discourse, which is what Exasperates this Alien. Almost everyone agrees there is a lot wrong with our country. The productive conversation is diagnosing it. If everything tangible that "late-stage capitalism" implies about that diagnosis is incorrect--if the problem is neither capitalism nor its lateness--and your defense of the term boils down to "we're not really serious/don't mean anything by it," you've conceded my point by pretending you were joking. And even if many of you were joking, it's worth exposing it as a joke for the true believers and gullible casuals who thought you meant it.
Likewise, the idea that there was a "conservative movement takeover of public policy 45 years ago" is wildly exaggerated. Yglesias had a good post a few months back explaining this, and I gave a crash course summary here: https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/elections-are-not-about-neoliberalism. Even this softer implication you pulled from thin air rests on faulty assumptions from lefty echo chambers.
And it is more unfalsifiable dogma to dismiss a 10% suppression of wages over 30 years from health insurance costs as trivial, especially for the poorest quintile, for whom that suppression has been 17% since 1988 alone, as shown in my second link. That difference inverts the sign of the cherry-picked trend on which the stagnation argument depends and refutes the narrative that the dawn of the Reagan era suddenly suppressed how much employers are paying, as should any cursory glance at the trend in total compensation since 1947: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB.
I don't have time to meander into the political philosophy now, but Nozick more than held his own against Rawls, whose veil of ignorance is certainly no less "fact-light" than Nozick's thought experiments.
Why is inequality per se a problem? If by magic I were to double the income of everyone on Earth (in real terms, not inflation), inequality would look worse, but we’d all be better off.
It's not a problem per se, and I wouldn't care if it arose solely from choice and merit. People's natural diversity of interests and abilities will of course produce unequal distributions of wealth and that's okay. And if allowing large inequalities to persist is the fastest way to alleviate poverty, improve livelihoods, or achieve other goals, we should do that. That's an open empirical question.
But the economic inequality we actually have today does not arise solely from choice and merit. It often arises from unfair legal and social advantages. Sometimes these advantages come from government; other times they're a result of prejudice or social stigma; and other times the rich and powerful leverage their wealth and influence to rig the game. So I do think we should care about inequality insofar as it reflects these other injustices. I wrote more about this on my old blog here: https://libertyandjustice.us/category/economic-policy/economic-inequality/ and here: https://libertyandjustice.us/category/economic-policy/goals-of-economic-policy/ - more to follow on this newsletter soon!
Some logic fallacies in this post. late stage capitalism being real is not a hill that I am willing to die on but your argument that 'people have been saying we were in late stage capitalism for over 150 years' does not prove a thing. Stages in a process do not need to have equal duration to be referred to as stages. Late stage capitalism can last another 1000 years and it would still be considered late stage. One of the notable aspects of capitalism is how fast it can potentially grow. A stage just needs defined characteristics. Once capitalism prevailed as the world economic system, it reached late stage status. That happened relatively fast when you think of how long humans have existed.
Today, people think capitalism:
A: Can potentially be refined to produce infinite growth,
B: can potentially be refined to create more equality and less suffering
C. Is immune to dismantling unless by revolution (and therefore is the only possible economic system)
Capitalism is an ideology, as uncomfortable as it may be to think of it in that sense. It is also a process. The way in which we think of capital has changed over time. But people's perceptions of a, B and C have remained over the over the course of dozens of decades. I think the defining characteristic of late stage capitalism is point c. The reason I say this is that as capitalism progressed, there was room for belief in another system. Before capitalism fully progressed, different people had different ways of materializing their needs. However, once capitalism truly got its footing on a world scale, there was no alternative that could take its place. Now we are taught to believe that all the troubles in the world are caused by greed, poor policy, and bad actors, as if these things aren't inevitable results of a bad system running. Proposing an alternative economic solution is a dangerous endeavor because the ideology is so embedded and people feel an obligation to defend it rather than question it. It's true that lack of greed, poor policy, and bad actors would improve the economic situation, but capitalism incentivizes these bad qualities, so we can't surprised that no matter how much time passes, the disparity between the rich and poor classes becomes greater and greater. We have been programmed by late stage capitalism to turn on our own class and blame ourselves rather than the system, Evidence of how powerful the ideology has become and highlights why despite being in its late stage, it has the potential to last decades to Millenia in that stage.
I would not say capitalism in some alternative universe couldn't have worked but statistically you can the disparity between the 2 classes has continued to increase worldwide throughout the timeline of late stage capitalism. That is enough evidence for me to say no matter what you call this time period in capitalism, it's absolutely true that capitalism has created and maintained larger disparity between the wealthy and the poor, and shows no signs of improving or creating anything that ressembles an equal and fair economy and has proved itself to be an utter failure if a project.
You bit off a lot here, but I'll focus on the accusation of logical fallacy. You write:
"Stages in a process do not need to have equal duration to be referred to as stages. Late stage capitalism can last another 1000 years and it would still be considered late stage."
Although this is technically true in the abstract, it is not true in this context. It reduces Marx's predictions to unfalsifiable dogma, and actually underscores my point about the term "late-stage capitalism" being utterly unhelpful as a diagnosis of what we should do this decade or century.
Marx did not merely predict that capitalism would end eventually. He predicted a specific causal mechanism through which it would end. He documented empirical trends that he claimed would a) necessarily continue, and b) dominate all non-material forces in shaping the course of social change. But many of those trends did not continue - often, they reversed - and the following century was shaped at least as much by the non-material factors he decided. So Marx has already been proven wrong, whether capitalism collapses tomorrow or 500 years from now. A meteor could wipe out all life on earth in 2067 for all I know, and if it did, capitalism would end. But if one of your many predictions takes 200 years to accidentally come true for reasons completely unrelated to those you anticipated, you don't get to chalk that up as a victory for your causal model.
Likewise, people using the term today have no evidence that the current stage of capitalism is "late" in its overall evolution. Maybe capitalism is just getting started. Anyone can look back and divide capitalism into eras based on some arbitrary criteria, but the future could hold momentous changes to how and where capitalism operates which are equally significant. To assert that this is the late stage implies knowledge of some underlying model for how it will progress and finish, which nobody actually has outside of their imagination.
I would also say look at companies like openAI. It has no potential to create a feasible business that produces any profit yet the investors and shareholders love it becomes it's growing fast. The fact that the company can't produce a profit is not a big deal. On top of not making a profit, it actively destroys the planets, creates an unappealing product with few real use cases and has the potential to hurt real economic prosperity by replacing real people with machines. These AI companies also get praised for constantly laying off workers. Yet Sam altmaa a billionaire. Look at Uber, which monopolized the taxi business and didn't turn a profit for many many years while hurting prior businesses and making worse economic conditions the norm (Uber drives often don't make minimum wage because of all the fees that the driver pays in order to work for them) both these companies are killing companies that did things right and had to produce profit to survive and get credited as great businesses. It's a terrible economic situation we are in and we have capitalism to thank for it.
I'm coming here almost 2 months late, but I think this response gets at what I think a good deal of people mean when they use the phrase "late-stage capitalism". There is an enclosure aspect to capitalism that has existed since it's inception, but what we're seeing now are things like data/information enclosure (for-profit AI) and even enclosure of things like dating, which has now been largely captured and platformed into app-based tech, with IRL dating becoming a funny anachronistic quirk, like seeing some hipster writing at a typewriter in a coffee shop. Facebook and social media have nearly captured people's ability to socialize without a smartphone. All of this, and yet these companies struggle even to offer a profit model that anyone would justify was worth the tradeoff in human terms, and instead are pivoting to enshittifying those same platforms in order to break even. "Growth" is now characterized by fighting over the ephemeral scraps of human experience. We're "running on fumes", so to speak.
Also forgot to note how somehow AI blatant plagerism and affect of real creators is seen as a non problem even though if any normie plagerises then it's a serious offense but if a billionaire makes a business of plagiarizing using large language models than its considered genius and a great business idea. Think of the traffic that AI is taking away from website, it's quite literally stealing their works and profits
There’s an even lazier form of “late-stage capitalism” discourse, ubiquitous on places like r/AntiWork, that basically collapses to: “My boss is an asshole, therefore down with capitalism”.
As if assholes and petty tyrants are a uniquely capitalist feature!
Left-wing people regard immutable reality as policy preference and policy preference as immutable reality.
Wow, you must really be an alien if you have (at least) 19 fingers to count on 🙃
I became vocally pro-capitalism in liberal circles around 2015 (i.e., the primary of no return) almost as an act of rebellion. I think this helps expose the ways that anti-capitalist signaling is more of a polite social agreement, unlike conventional beliefs, which are meant to be open to impartial evaluation. As you mentioned, there's perishingly little nuance to it, and it shows when we're forced to categorize various countries as either "capitalist" or "not". A lot of social democrats laud Scandinavia, Canada - or when they're feeling lazy, just "Europe" - even though citizens therein don't tend to consider their countries to be socialist. Generally if you live under socialism, you should be able to organically form thoughts such as "yep, I live under socialism".
I'm of course fine with thoughtful opinions that run contrary to all the dogmas I hold, put people have to put more effort into it than just "noun, verb, late-stage capitalism". It also helps to check whether the thing you're criticizing exists under socialism/communism. I'm reminded of a meme that said poetry doesn't exist under capitalism (or something like that); if not, does it exist under communism? The fact that poets living under communism were often dissidents who wanted to be liberated from it shouldn't escape our attention, nor should the fact that student movements historically protested the communist regimes they suffered under.
"If you run out of fingers to count the criteria, the definition is probably too complicated" sounds like a decent rule of...thumb.
But like seriously I always taken “late-capitalism” to be the secular leftist equivalent of “the End Times”, ostensibly an impending moment of great change but in reality a comfortably indefinite period of feeling a certain way.
Wasn't this all based on Werner Sombart's theory that capitalism was divided into 'early' (16th-18th century), 'high' (19th century), and 'late' (1914-1928 when it was written), with the 'high' variety being more hypercapitalist and the 'late' variety being more like socialism?
If anything capitalism's gotten closer to laissez-faire lately, so we're in high capitalism not late capitalism.
Thank you for this. I have wanted a good expose on the late stage capitalism phenomenon and how utterly ridiculous it is. I like to respond that late stage communism in 1987 didn’t work out well either.
Ever since reading the Frankfurt School's pronouncement on 'Spätkapitalismus' - late capitalism - fifty years ago I've been bemused by the term. Your remarks are simple and to the point, Andrew
I didn’t realize we were in late-stage Soviet Union even in the fall of 1991. Don’t get cocky about your ability to foresee history, people.
This all protests a bit too much. You gesture at it towards the end, but basically everyone who uses that term just means it as a shorthand for everything that's wrong with our political economy right now. Maybe some more specifically mean everything that's wrong that's been caused by the conservative movement takeover of public policy 45 years ago.
Also the first link in your claim that Healthcare has eaten all wage gains says that it takes up ~10% more of total compensation. IOW, average folks would've gotten a 10% raise over the last 30 years. The top 1 or 10% would laugh in the general direction of only a 10% real raise over the last 30 years.
And then the claim that Nozick proved anything 🤦♂️ That guy serves only as an example of how fact-free/light ideological windbags/theocrats are not only on the left!
I didn't say it was a joke. I said it was a shorthand that ~nobody who uses means as a reference to the stupid, invented from whole cloth, stages of development from capitalism to socialism. I'm a professional ML/AI/statistics guy. I like clear terms and discussion and classification too. I'm just saying you're classifying what people mean by it incorrectly, or really getting hung up on it "should" mean your Marxist interpretation so is bad regardless.
I saw Yglesias's post. I think it was a disingenuous argument based on filtering and misrepresenting the facts. What I mean at least when talking about neoliberalism is the total capture of "common sense" economic intuition and deep limits imposed on acceptable policy imagination by mathy (as in truthy) ideology peddled as scientific discoveries by capital funded right wing economists. We're not going to hash it all out in the comments 😆 But I'll mention two clear demonstrations.
First is Chinese entry into the WTO without meaningful conditions, which if you have to narrow it down to one cause was the real cause of the destruction of the American industrial base. Now I'm sympathetic to global perspective arguments that the dramatic positives of lifting literally hundreds of million of Chinese people out of destitution was worth it. But that's not what drove it. It was the total penetration across parties of the right wing fantasies that free trade is a sacrosanct imperative and that markets are the Plutonian ideal instigator of freedom and justice for all.
Similarly, Yglesias references ACA spending as evidence against neoliberalism. But think about the comparison versus earlier federal health efforts. Truman proposed national health insurance. Johnson passed single national health insurance for the elderly and the poor. Clinton proposed and then Obama passed Rube Goldberg machines that twisted into knots to adhere to the ideology of markets in a space where the benefits of choice and competition don't apply with even a cursory examination. In no effective market are the person with 100% of the knowledge, the person getting the good on offer with zero knowledge, and the person paying, also with zero knowledge at the time of purchase, all separate people.
And then into your inequality argument. Even the misleading (because it's mean/avg) graph you pointed to has pay increasing more than 50% over the time period in question. You granted that the median or lower wage has been largely stagnant since Reagan (though finally ticked up in the last few years), then how is that graph proving your point? 10-12% increase in total comp for the typical or poor worker has all been in health insurance. Yet the mean worker got a 50% compensation increase, with the top 10% and 1% getting much higher increases over that time period. That was exactly the point I was making, demonstrated in your graph.
I would disagree Rawls proved anything either. They both made arguments. Rawls's at least hasn't been disproven by more or less all of history (in that doctrinaire libertarianism is a historical synonym for warlordism/oligarchy, in exactly the same manner that communism is a historical synonym for brutal totalitarianism). Though I'd be very dismissive if anyone who claimed Rawls proved anything even given that fact.
Fair enough and we're obviously not gonna agree on much of this. You interpret LSC as equivalent with "neoliberalism," which makes sense but suffers the same problems of imprecision described in the second half of my post (and in my prior one on neoliberalism). Either way, the term presupposes things I think are wrong and should not be assumed.
My next post will address the healthcare stuff and I'm happy to give you the last word on the rest.
As someone who's down to have a dialogue with someone you disagree with, I'd be interested at some point to hear your personal foundation for libertarian beliefs. As I more or less said, I view strong libertarianism as a religion. No less unrelated to the real world as strong Marxism or Christianity. Though of course that's not to say there aren't elements of wisdom in the instincts underlying and the insights communicated in all of those traditions. But what convinces you someone like Nozick isn't a fantasist when applying ideas to real life political economy rather than stories and thought experiments?
I see libertarianism as a moral sentiment, kind of like egalitarianism, rather than a descriptive theory. Everyone values liberty or equality at least a little, but some people value them especially much. Figuring out what you value - and trying to convince others about what they should value - is not "unrelated to the real world," to me; it's a prerequisite to ethically engaging with the real world.
Before we can make policy or sort through empirical questions of cause and effect, we have to decide what outcomes we're even aiming for in the first place. To many people, one of the things we should aim for is justice. Justice is nebulous! It has no objective physical existence and depends on how fair our mushy gushy consciences deem different outcomes to be. But most people feel it's very important nonetheless.
Rawls and Nozick did not engage with "real life political economy" because they were not political economists; they were political philosophers, who used thought experiments to explore our moral intuitions about what outcomes are just. That's different than a descriptive theory of history you'd find in Marx, or the Bible telling you the world is 6,000 years old (though it could overlap with some separate Biblical theory of justice I suppose).
Are you averse to the entire project of exploring our moral intuitions through thought experiments? If so, your problem is not with libertarianism specifically, and I'd be curious how you think we should identify moral priorities.
I fully agree that discussions aren't valuable unless everyone knows and communicates the normative values they're bringing to discussions about societal power and organization (i.e.politics). And that you best shape your own life, to the degree that's possible, if you're doing the reflection to understand what you value and how you can best live in accordance. On justice, I strongly disagree that's more nebulous than liberty. There's a vein of ideology that insists liberty is strictly defined as a very small number of rights understood in exactly one particular way. But as philosophical concepts or English words there's no question they're both nebulous.
My point about the real world is the deep failure of those attracted by stories of the sort Nozick told to be honest (including Nozick himself as I understand) in stepping from the realm of "What principles and values do I think are most important?" to the realm of "How should I live and what should I advocate for societally to make the world better according to my principles?" In my experience, the folks who advocate for writers labeled libertarian or who call themselves that are much more likely to be that way than those who call themselves, say, a classical liberal, even though theoretically those could be called at least near synonyms.
What do I mean by dishonesty? The pretense that government is the sole meaningful source of threats to liberty. That's why I call libertarianism ivory tower warlordism. If the government gets almost entirely out of the way and any interaction where a contract is signed is an expression of freedom and liberty by definitional fiat, then one can simply pretend that, for example, making policing private will lead to some libertarian-anarchist utopia rather than everyone "freely" entering into a protection agreement with their local warlord and his militia. Not all libertarians are so fanciful they support abolition of state provision of public safety. But the point remains the same down the line.
I didn't say justice was more nebulous than liberty. I think they're both somewhat nebulous. There can definitely be rival conceptions of both. I think liberty is comparably nebulous to equality, of which there can also be many conceptions.
Translating ideals to action, and willingness to prioritize, compromise, and embrace incrementalism to actually improve the world instead of just sitting in your imagined moral superiority, is a challenge for ideologues of all stripes. You don't need to convince me there are a lot of cooky libertarians out there, and also a lot of noxious racists and arch-conservatives hiding out under the libertarian label. The Libertarian Party has been taken over by these people since about 2021 or so, and prompted many of the more reasonable sorts of libertarian-leaning people to adopt other labels (including classical liberal) to avoid embarrassing association with them (you'll note no part of my blog's branding identifies me as one). But there are also plenty of more moderate libertarians who engage with the status quo (ex: Cato) or left-leaning, "bleeding heart libertarians" who like Nozick and consistently favor smaller government across the board in both social and economic issues. And before Trump came around, the Libertarian Party *used* to be led by those people! Gary Johnson was a reasonable dude with effective real-world governing experience, for example.
There's always a temptation to strawman our ideological adversaries, and I think your "ivory tower warlordism" may be a better description of anarcho-capitalists or people who like Hans Hermann Hoppe or something. Even Nozick supported a night watchman state that funded police, and again, he was engaging in high-level thought experiments rather than specific policy proposals.
I protest because of what the term reflects about our increasingly lazy discourse, which is what Exasperates this Alien. Almost everyone agrees there is a lot wrong with our country. The productive conversation is diagnosing it. If everything tangible that "late-stage capitalism" implies about that diagnosis is incorrect--if the problem is neither capitalism nor its lateness--and your defense of the term boils down to "we're not really serious/don't mean anything by it," you've conceded my point by pretending you were joking. And even if many of you were joking, it's worth exposing it as a joke for the true believers and gullible casuals who thought you meant it.
Likewise, the idea that there was a "conservative movement takeover of public policy 45 years ago" is wildly exaggerated. Yglesias had a good post a few months back explaining this, and I gave a crash course summary here: https://exasperatedalien.substack.com/p/elections-are-not-about-neoliberalism. Even this softer implication you pulled from thin air rests on faulty assumptions from lefty echo chambers.
And it is more unfalsifiable dogma to dismiss a 10% suppression of wages over 30 years from health insurance costs as trivial, especially for the poorest quintile, for whom that suppression has been 17% since 1988 alone, as shown in my second link. That difference inverts the sign of the cherry-picked trend on which the stagnation argument depends and refutes the narrative that the dawn of the Reagan era suddenly suppressed how much employers are paying, as should any cursory glance at the trend in total compensation since 1947: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB.
I don't have time to meander into the political philosophy now, but Nozick more than held his own against Rawls, whose veil of ignorance is certainly no less "fact-light" than Nozick's thought experiments.
Why is inequality per se a problem? If by magic I were to double the income of everyone on Earth (in real terms, not inflation), inequality would look worse, but we’d all be better off.
It's not a problem per se, and I wouldn't care if it arose solely from choice and merit. People's natural diversity of interests and abilities will of course produce unequal distributions of wealth and that's okay. And if allowing large inequalities to persist is the fastest way to alleviate poverty, improve livelihoods, or achieve other goals, we should do that. That's an open empirical question.
But the economic inequality we actually have today does not arise solely from choice and merit. It often arises from unfair legal and social advantages. Sometimes these advantages come from government; other times they're a result of prejudice or social stigma; and other times the rich and powerful leverage their wealth and influence to rig the game. So I do think we should care about inequality insofar as it reflects these other injustices. I wrote more about this on my old blog here: https://libertyandjustice.us/category/economic-policy/economic-inequality/ and here: https://libertyandjustice.us/category/economic-policy/goals-of-economic-policy/ - more to follow on this newsletter soon!
Some logic fallacies in this post. late stage capitalism being real is not a hill that I am willing to die on but your argument that 'people have been saying we were in late stage capitalism for over 150 years' does not prove a thing. Stages in a process do not need to have equal duration to be referred to as stages. Late stage capitalism can last another 1000 years and it would still be considered late stage. One of the notable aspects of capitalism is how fast it can potentially grow. A stage just needs defined characteristics. Once capitalism prevailed as the world economic system, it reached late stage status. That happened relatively fast when you think of how long humans have existed.
Today, people think capitalism:
A: Can potentially be refined to produce infinite growth,
B: can potentially be refined to create more equality and less suffering
C. Is immune to dismantling unless by revolution (and therefore is the only possible economic system)
Capitalism is an ideology, as uncomfortable as it may be to think of it in that sense. It is also a process. The way in which we think of capital has changed over time. But people's perceptions of a, B and C have remained over the over the course of dozens of decades. I think the defining characteristic of late stage capitalism is point c. The reason I say this is that as capitalism progressed, there was room for belief in another system. Before capitalism fully progressed, different people had different ways of materializing their needs. However, once capitalism truly got its footing on a world scale, there was no alternative that could take its place. Now we are taught to believe that all the troubles in the world are caused by greed, poor policy, and bad actors, as if these things aren't inevitable results of a bad system running. Proposing an alternative economic solution is a dangerous endeavor because the ideology is so embedded and people feel an obligation to defend it rather than question it. It's true that lack of greed, poor policy, and bad actors would improve the economic situation, but capitalism incentivizes these bad qualities, so we can't surprised that no matter how much time passes, the disparity between the rich and poor classes becomes greater and greater. We have been programmed by late stage capitalism to turn on our own class and blame ourselves rather than the system, Evidence of how powerful the ideology has become and highlights why despite being in its late stage, it has the potential to last decades to Millenia in that stage.
I would not say capitalism in some alternative universe couldn't have worked but statistically you can the disparity between the 2 classes has continued to increase worldwide throughout the timeline of late stage capitalism. That is enough evidence for me to say no matter what you call this time period in capitalism, it's absolutely true that capitalism has created and maintained larger disparity between the wealthy and the poor, and shows no signs of improving or creating anything that ressembles an equal and fair economy and has proved itself to be an utter failure if a project.
You bit off a lot here, but I'll focus on the accusation of logical fallacy. You write:
"Stages in a process do not need to have equal duration to be referred to as stages. Late stage capitalism can last another 1000 years and it would still be considered late stage."
Although this is technically true in the abstract, it is not true in this context. It reduces Marx's predictions to unfalsifiable dogma, and actually underscores my point about the term "late-stage capitalism" being utterly unhelpful as a diagnosis of what we should do this decade or century.
Marx did not merely predict that capitalism would end eventually. He predicted a specific causal mechanism through which it would end. He documented empirical trends that he claimed would a) necessarily continue, and b) dominate all non-material forces in shaping the course of social change. But many of those trends did not continue - often, they reversed - and the following century was shaped at least as much by the non-material factors he decided. So Marx has already been proven wrong, whether capitalism collapses tomorrow or 500 years from now. A meteor could wipe out all life on earth in 2067 for all I know, and if it did, capitalism would end. But if one of your many predictions takes 200 years to accidentally come true for reasons completely unrelated to those you anticipated, you don't get to chalk that up as a victory for your causal model.
Likewise, people using the term today have no evidence that the current stage of capitalism is "late" in its overall evolution. Maybe capitalism is just getting started. Anyone can look back and divide capitalism into eras based on some arbitrary criteria, but the future could hold momentous changes to how and where capitalism operates which are equally significant. To assert that this is the late stage implies knowledge of some underlying model for how it will progress and finish, which nobody actually has outside of their imagination.
I would also say look at companies like openAI. It has no potential to create a feasible business that produces any profit yet the investors and shareholders love it becomes it's growing fast. The fact that the company can't produce a profit is not a big deal. On top of not making a profit, it actively destroys the planets, creates an unappealing product with few real use cases and has the potential to hurt real economic prosperity by replacing real people with machines. These AI companies also get praised for constantly laying off workers. Yet Sam altmaa a billionaire. Look at Uber, which monopolized the taxi business and didn't turn a profit for many many years while hurting prior businesses and making worse economic conditions the norm (Uber drives often don't make minimum wage because of all the fees that the driver pays in order to work for them) both these companies are killing companies that did things right and had to produce profit to survive and get credited as great businesses. It's a terrible economic situation we are in and we have capitalism to thank for it.
I'm coming here almost 2 months late, but I think this response gets at what I think a good deal of people mean when they use the phrase "late-stage capitalism". There is an enclosure aspect to capitalism that has existed since it's inception, but what we're seeing now are things like data/information enclosure (for-profit AI) and even enclosure of things like dating, which has now been largely captured and platformed into app-based tech, with IRL dating becoming a funny anachronistic quirk, like seeing some hipster writing at a typewriter in a coffee shop. Facebook and social media have nearly captured people's ability to socialize without a smartphone. All of this, and yet these companies struggle even to offer a profit model that anyone would justify was worth the tradeoff in human terms, and instead are pivoting to enshittifying those same platforms in order to break even. "Growth" is now characterized by fighting over the ephemeral scraps of human experience. We're "running on fumes", so to speak.
Also forgot to note how somehow AI blatant plagerism and affect of real creators is seen as a non problem even though if any normie plagerises then it's a serious offense but if a billionaire makes a business of plagiarizing using large language models than its considered genius and a great business idea. Think of the traffic that AI is taking away from website, it's quite literally stealing their works and profits