There's a joke floating around on social media.
Anytime in aspect of the modern economy
feels particularly ironic,
or unfair, or absurd,
it's labeled late capitalism.
When United Airlines forcibly removed a customer,
that was late capitalism.
When tons of Americans are forced to crowdfund
their health care, that's late capitalism.
When rich people buy extremely expensive,
unnecessary, even tone-deaf things,
this too is branded late capitalism.
But what does late capitalism really mean?
Where did it come from,
and how did it end up everywhere all of a sudden?
Labeling something late capitalism is common
on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.
Google search interest in the phrase
has more than doubled in the past year.
The terms late capitalism or late-stage capitalism
are often associated with Karl Marx.
Marx thought of capitalism as inherently unstable
because it demands spurring consumption
among a disempowered and underpaid proletariat,
and because it creates boom and bust cycles.
A common misconception is that late capitalism
is the decadent phase before the socialist revolution,
when workers would rise up and seize the means of production.
Not quite.
Late capitalism isn't even Marx's term.
The person who coined it is a German economist
named Werner Sombart, who used it to describe
the European economy around the turn of the century
or World War I.
A time of intense industrialization.
The person who popularized it among Marxist thinkers
was a Belgian Holocaust survivor and economist
named Ernest Mandel, who used it to describe
the economy from the end of World War II until the 1970s.
A time when multinational corporations were growing
and international finance was developing.
Most people in the United States know the term from
a Duke literary critic named Frederick Jameson,
who first used it in a popular essay in the mid-1980s.
Jameson saw late capitalism as synonymous with the
post modern economy taking shape in the 70s and continuing until today.
Exemplified by the collapse of high and low culture,
the rise of consumerism,
globalization, the growth of the Internet,
and the rise of Wall Street, among other trends.
One important thing to note here:
the phrase late capitalism was always malleable,
with different thinkers using it to refer to different
time periods and different facets of the economy.
So how did the term break out of academia
and into wider culture?
It took the emergence of a new,
tenacious far-left to do that.
The financial crisis and the Great Recession
battered working families
and underscored just how bad the country's income
and wealth inequality had gotten.
Take just one statistic from the scholars
Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.
They find that the average incomes of the top 1%
in the United States have tripled since the 1980s,
where as the average incomes at the bottom 50%
haven't budged.
In this climate, during and after the recession
Occupy Wall Street became a full-on social movement,
'we are the 99%, became a rallying cry,
Bernie Sanders ended up giving Hillary Clinton
a run for her money in the 2016 Democratic primary,
the Democratic Socialists of America became one of
the fastest-growing political parties in the United States,
and there's resurgent interest in Marx and Marxism.
Social media savvy Occupy types
started using the phrase late capitalism
to refer to the economy they saw around themselves
and it became a meme
The phrase developed its own funny, ironic meaning,
distinct from its academic usage.
Now it's not just people on the left that use it,
it's everywhere.
Silicon Valley is a perfect target.
Many venture capitalists seem to be
funding on-demand startups
that create no benefit, sub-minimum wage jobs.
It applies to the absurd goods and services
that companies are selling to the richest of the rich.
And it applies to brands
trying to capitalize on the populist anger
and the heated social climate.
There's a Pepsi ad
in which Kendall Jenner throws her wig a black woman,
takes over a protest,
and help to prevent police brutality.
But is late capitalism just a cynical,
viral phenomenon?
Might we truly be in a revolutionary, late capitalist period?
The meme does get to something profound
about our economy.
Just like Marx thought,
capitalism has produced extraordinary fortunes for some,
and stagnation for many.
A socialist revolution? That feels far-fetched.
But a more socialist left in the United States?
That's already here,
and I have a feeling the late capitalism meme
is only going to get more popular.
This is Unprecedented, a video series
where Atlantic writers explore what's happening
in this new era of American politics.
Let us know what topic you want us to tackle next.
I'm Annie Lowrey, thanks for watching.