this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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"Late stage capitalism" is not a call to action, it's a call to apathy. It's used by monetized "socialist" influencers to give a permission structure for people to continue buying from their merch stores.
The logic is the failure of capitalism is inevitable so you don't need to do anything. So you may as well buy some swag to signal to others that "you get it". It's the slogan of those that want to fall in line with the "socialist" aesthetic, without thinking about how socialism is just another thing packaged and sold in a capitalist system.
While they might have co-opted it like such, I cannot imagine this being the origin.
To me "late stage" always sounded akin to late stage cancer, as capitalism is seen.
We, however should not despair in the face of the cancer, but try to heal it.
This does not seem to be the original intention according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
Ok... so why are we in "Late stage capitalism" now, and we weren't in the 1930s? Things were way worse in the 1930s than now.
Perhaps there were some changes in economic policy that fixed the problems then? What reason do we have to believe the solutions that didn't work in the past (ie. communism) will work now, and the solutions that actually did work in the past won't work now?