The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.
Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.
We've been brainwashed into believing in the supremacy of private wealth--that we somehow have no choice but to accept the self-asserted superiority of the small number of people born in access to capital. We don't. We could end it in an afternoon if we got our shit together.
The closest people have gotten to a large-scale egalitarian society is Scandinavian social democracy.
From the 7th/8th century until the 15th century, the feudal mode of production predominates in Europe. It still exists in some form today - the United Kingdom (note the name) is technically ruled by a queen, as is Spain, Holland etc. Someone in the 9th century saying feudalism would end would not have seen much of the prediction come true 500 years later in the 14th century. But then the crack-up started.
10,000 years ago slave empires arose in Sumeria, Egypt and other places. Slave latifundias in Italy lasted past the sack of Rome. Someone predicting the end of slavery in ancient Sumeria would look like a faulty predicted. Peter Mills was born a slave in the USA and did not die until 1972. So people here could have met him and discussed this with him.
Migratory hunter-gatherer bands painted in caves and carved Venus figurines tens of thousands of years ago. If you told the painter in the Chauvet cave 35,000 years ago that this mode of production would end, he might say that this would be false worldwide for another 25,000 years and that in 2022 AD, deep in the Amazon migratory hunter gatherer bands still roamed.
You seem to have a mental capacity on par with by-weekly sprint deliverables, and are looking at your watch for the end of capitalism, the commodity, bourgeois republics, Sand Hill Road VCs approaching LPs to raise new funds, corporate media, the aristocracy of heirs that send their children to Phillips Exeter, accelerating carbon into the atmosphere, dividends, rents, interest and other rentier instruments etc. I'm afraid history does not happen on this time table so you can continue to feel self-satisfied that whereas hunter gathering fell after tens of thousands of years, slavery for thousands, feudalism for centuries - that capitalism enthroned will be the mode of production henceforth and forever. History shows this is not the case. I look today at the inflation, what may be two quarters of GDP contraction, the stock market dive and firms cutting hiring and no one knowing what the year will hold amidst European and world energy potential energy crises, and think it does not look as bad yet as the subprime crisis of 2008 or dot com crash of 2000, and how Marx said such financial crises tend to worsen over time due to contradictions he pointed out, and the economic system goes on trial with each economic crisis. I see masses going out to rally for the socialist Bernie Sanders, and other masses listening to Tucker Carlson and rallying for Trump, neither of whom seem to be fond of "free trade" deals, the international migration of labor, foreign military interventions for capital etc.
In 2020 the massive crowds were for the socialist and for the other candidate lambasting free trade deals. Unlike 2016, the establishment was ready and got their candidate elected, someone no one seems to particularly care for. Young people seem to have a change of mind as well. The picture I see is quite different, but so is the timetable.
What do you make of the PRC's experience? It seems that the smartest, most sincere, most dominant communists the world has ever seen... became capitalists.
They claim to be on the Official Marxist Dialectical Materialist Path to True Socialism, but it sounds like lip service to me. Xi is taking China more towards North Korea than the elusive communist paradise.
Karl Marx said socialism would start in the most economically advanced country. Marx was just one member of the IWMA, which also included Bakunin, but Marx was remembered most. Thus Lenin's call to take over Russia surprised even the Bolsheviks initially. He maintained until his death that Russia was not the vanguard of worldwide socialist revolution - one reason the Comintern was formed.
China was even less in Marx's vision than China - the country was agricultural and essentially feudal, and the revolution was in the countryside led by peasants. Molotov called Mao Pugachev. Actually Mao realized Deng Xiaoping was a "capitalist roader" in 1962, and began working to sideline him in 1966, but Deng Xiaoping came to power after Mao died. Xi is very much in line with Deng Xiaoping. If you're saying Deng Xiaoping and his followers like Xi are capitalist readers then you're echoing what Mao realized in 1962 and expressed in 1966.
Indeed. And as we come up on two centuries later, I hope Marxists have realized why Marx was wrong. Economically advanced countries became democracies and channeled popular discontent into incremental reforms, which mitigated the bottomless proletarian desperation that Marx calculated would explode into revolution. And all of these countries have continued on the incremental path, because a supermajority feel they have a great deal to lose from a revolution that leaves a psychopath like Stalin or Mao in power... only to collapse into yet another communist-in-name-only klepto-totalitarian one-party state.
So, in these countries, I suspect we've indeed reached the end of history. All that remains to be determined is technical issues: how progressive the tax structure ought to be, how ambitious the public amenities, whether the workers wish to have collective representation, etc.
I must say, though, it's amusing to read certain bits and pieces of the Communist Manifesto in the 2022 USA...
> Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other
...well, yes, but not quite as he expected.
Why do you say that? What are you envisioning?
What's less clear is what will replace it. We could end up with an improvement--post-scarcity technological socialism (en route to automated luxury communism)--but we could also end up with something a lot worse than the current system. There's no law of nature saying that the next world order has to be better than the current, outdated and moribund, one.
Hopefully it’s not over.
To be clear, I'm not saying the CCP is a force for good. I don't really think it is; I'm not a fan of them at all. They do a lot of fucked-up shit. But it is a statistical fact that this lifting out of poverty has been going on since 1980 comes entirely from one country's influence on the data, and that's China. The rest of the world is net neutral, with some losers and some winners.
Capitalism only improves human life when heavily restrained, and what we've learned since about 1980 is that even mild, neutered, "nice guy" capitalism will, in time, erode the restraints put upon it... and then you get the catastrophe of the American 21st century... which is probably going hit Europe just as hard in 10-15 years because, ultimately, dangerous and greedy assholes aren't limited to one nation but exist everywhere.