We're Not in Late-Stage Capitalism Anymore
"Late-stage capitalism" has been the diagnosis for decades. The phrase carries an implicit comfort: if we're in the late stage, something else must come next. A transition. A reckoning. Maybe even a better system. The "late" does important work. It promises an ending that is also a beginning.
But what if the stage we've entered isn't late at all? What if it's something qualitatively different? What if the system has stopped declining and started exterminating?
The distinction matters. A system in decline still has feedback loops that could, in theory, correct it. A system in extermination mode has severed those loops on purpose. It's not failing. It's succeeding at something terrifying: converting the living world into balance sheet entries faster than any declining system ever could.
We need a new word for this. Call it extinction-stage capitalism.
What "Late-Stage" Got Right and Wrong
The concept of late-stage capitalism correctly identified that capitalism eats itself. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the contradiction between producing more than workers can buy, the cyclical crises that get worse each time. Every generation since the 19th century has declared itself the late stage, and every generation has been wrong about what comes next, because capitalism kept finding new things to eat.
In the 19th century, it ate common land and peasant labor. In the 20th century, it ate the Global South's resources and labor under colonialism. In the 21st century, it ate the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil, and the future itself.
The "late" framing was wrong because it assumed capitalism was running out of things to eat. It's eating faster. The mode of consumption has shifted.
Late-stage capitalism is supposed to be declining capitalism. But the numbers don't show decline. They show acceleration. Emissions are rising, not falling. Extinction rates are accelerating, not stabilizing. Wealth concentration is compounding, not distributing. Private equity firms load companies with debt, strip their productive capacity, and move on. They're not investing in productivity. They're harvesting existing assets. The whole point of the model is that nobody is meant to know what's happening, how it's happening, or where the wealth is going. Our retirement savings are being used to prop up a system that extracts value from the services we depend on.
This is not a system in decline. A declining system slows down. This system is accelerating.
The Thermodynamic Trap: Capitalism Has Become Net-Negative
The global energy supply system peaked at roughly 12% thermodynamic efficiency around 2010 and is now declining. Eighty-eight percent of energy is wasted as entropy. The energy return on oil has fallen from over 100:1 in the 1930s to below 10:1 for conventional sources, and continues to decline. According to thermodynamic analysis by Arnoux, oil is approaching net-negative energy territory, projected to cross into net-negative in the early 2030s. In that framework, it functions more as a liquid battery than a fuel: you put more energy into extracting and refining it than it delivers.
This is not a metaphor. This is thermodynamics. The civilization you live in runs on the difference between energy obtained and energy spent obtaining it. That difference is approaching zero, projected to cross into net-negative territory in the early 2030s.
And here's the part that makes this extinction-stage rather than late-stage: the system's response to declining net energy has been to consume more, not less. Renewables are not replacing fossil fuels. They are adding a new layer on top of them. The energy cost of building renewable infrastructure, mining lithium, constructing factories, has to come from the existing dying system. The treadmill accelerates as it tilts downward.
The industrial system has deposited 25 zettajoules of waste entropy over 300 years, which Earth's heat-pump systems are now amplifying into roughly 500 zettajoules of excess heat. That's equivalent to roughly 400 million Hiroshima bombs of excess heat accumulated since 1970, or about 4 bombs per second. The system is anti-sustainable. It is actively converting habitable conditions into uninhabitable ones at a rate that compounds.
The word profit derives from the Latin proficere: to advance, to accomplish. The concept started as forward motion and became synonymous with gain. That semantic drift, from making progress to extracting surplus, is itself a record of how a system reframes extraction as advancement. The art of profit is to offload risks onto others, preferably unsuspecting others, and pocket the risk premium before the consequences arrive. PFAS manufacturers earn about $4 billion per year. The cumulative cleanup costs are estimated in the tens of trillions globally. That ratio is the market working as designed. The externalization of harm is the operating system.
The Four Pillars Have Peaked
Steel, concrete, plastic, and ammonia: the four pillars of industrial civilization. Steel and cement production have plateaued since roughly 2018. Plastic production has plateaued in many regions. Ammonia is still growing in some markets. The material substrate of industrial civilization is in contraction in the places that matter most.
The material substrate of industrial civilization is in contraction, and the system's response has been to fight over what remains. The world is partitioning into spheres of influence, with the US and China dividing global resources into competing blocs. A new Copper Curtain, where access to critical minerals determines who gets to build the future and who gets locked out.
Angkor didn't fall in a day. Its aqueducts silted in over generations, and the center of power gradually shifted south to Phnom Penh. Angkor Wat itself was never abandoned; it's been in continuous use as a Buddhist temple for centuries. The empire reconfigured, the population moved, the center shifted. We are in the silting phase right now. The aqueducts still flow, barely. The system still functions, for some definitions of function. But the energy required to maintain complexity is exceeding the energy complexity produces. That's catabolism: the system eating its own infrastructure to stay alive.
Catabolic collapse is a process where the system cannibalizes its own productive capacity to sustain current consumption. It looks like decline from the outside, but from the inside it feels like acceleration: more debt, more extraction, more externalization, more desperation. Each round of catabolism leaves less infrastructure for the next round.
This is extinction-stage capitalism: a system that has stopped investing in its own reproduction and is now consuming the conditions that make reproduction possible. Not the late stage of a system in decline, but the active stage of a system in self-termination.
Manufactured Extinction Is Profitable
The formula for state formation hasn't changed in five thousand years: lootable surplus, monopolizable weapons, and caged populations. Wheat then. Fossil fuels and data now. Bronze axes then. Nuclear weapons and killer robots now. River valleys then. Global borders and mass surveillance now.
The top 1% global wealth share has risen from 25% to roughly 40% since the 1980s. This is the operating principle. The art of profit is the art of externalizing risk. The people who bear the consequences are always someone else. Usually someone far away. Usually someone brown. Usually someone poor.
But extinction-stage capitalism has a new feature: the externalized harm is no longer localized. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, soil depletion. These are not contained disasters. They are planetary. The Goliaths are now externalizing risk onto the entire biosphere, including themselves.
This is where apex anxiety becomes critical. Billionaires are disproportionately concerned with extinction specifically, because any sub-extinction catastrophe is something they're best positioned to survive. Climate change kills billions in the Global South, but billionaires have bunkers. Only total annihilation, via something like unaligned superintelligence, truly threatens them.
And so they race to build the very technology that could cause it. The billionaires most worried about extinction are the ones building the extinction machine. When pressed on the anti-democratic nature of this project, the people building it acknowledge the problem. They just don't see an alternative. They ask, essentially, why should anyone else get to decide what happens to them? But they never ask why they should get to decide what happens to everyone else.
That question, left unanswered, is the signature of extinction-stage capitalism. A system where a tiny elite makes decisions that could terminate the species, for profit, and everyone else is just supposed to trust them.
The Violence Is Already Here
ISIS recruited most effectively from water-impoverished Iraqi villages near Mosul, not because those villages were the poorest, but because their proximity to the city made the gulf in services and living standards visible. Perception of abandonment, not absolute poverty, was the strongest predictor of recruitment. The system creates the perception of abandonment, then armed groups exploit it. Climate change is a pressure multiplier across existing fissures: inequality, corruption, misinformation, governance failure.
In Greece, a direct correlation has been documented between more intense summer heat waves and increased violence against women. After Hurricane Beryl in Texas, similar spikes were recorded. The link between climate stress and gendered violence is one of the clearest quantifiable connections between ecological collapse and human harm.
And it's coming to the Global North. When public expectations of state capacity diverge from the state's ability to deliver, violence follows. European states with high social expectations are particularly vulnerable. As climate stress erodes governance capacity, populist parties offering simple narratives fill the gap. The farmers protesting across Europe, the miners rejecting green transitions, are not making rational economic choices. They are identity responses. Mining is identity, not just income. The land is the land of their fathers and grandfathers.
The concept of solastalgia, homesickness for a place you've never left, captures what happens when the natural world becomes unrecognizable. Birds not migrating at the right time. Plants not blooming. Rains not falling. The dissolution of these constants creates a mental health crisis that drives irrational and violent behavior. Nighttime heat that doesn't relent causes sleeplessness and exhaustion, eroding rational decision-making.
None of this is "late-stage." Late-stage implies a system winding down. This is a system winding up: accelerating extraction, accelerating violence, accelerating collapse.
The Progress Myth Is 5,000 Years Old and Still Killing Us
The progress narrative goes back 5,000 years to Mesopotamian propaganda for deforesting the Levant. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the story of a king who kills the god of the forest to build a city. A press release.
The formula hasn't changed. Suffer now, paradise later. In religious versions, the golden age comes after death, conveniently unverifiable. In secular versions, it's intergenerational: "Be a slave so your grandchildren can be free." When secular promises visibly fail, when stagnating innovation and declining life expectancy and ecological collapse make the payoff impossible, the narrative doubles down. AI is the latest Ponzi-scheme scramble to keep people on the progress train.
Here's the devastating insight: the good things we attribute to progress, vaccinations, public sanitation, medical hygiene, were won against the dominant system, not by it. They coincided with a narrow window of egalitarianism funded by extraction from the Global South. That window is closing. Public goods are being privatized. Healthcare systems are being dismantled. Firefighting is being privatized. The progress narrative is a story the system tells about things it fought against.
The data optimists cite is not neutral. What you measure for and how you present it are the first and second biases. Colonial violence against indigenous people gets counted as violence by those people. Think-tank pundits funded by tech billionaires launder illegitimate research alongside legitimate work. Their primary tactic is narrowing the scope of inquiry until the data confirms the ideology.
Genuine progress is the ability to self-impose equitable, rapid limits on economic and territorial expansion. Nothing else qualifies on a finite planet.
The System Is Not Declining. It Is Exterminating.
Here is the core distinction:
Late-stage capitalism implies a system running out of steam. The engine is sputtering. Things are getting worse, but slowly, and something else might replace it.
Extinction-stage capitalism describes a system that has found a new fuel source: the conditions that make human life possible. It has begun eating the substrate. The atmosphere. The oceans. The soil. The future.
The thermodynamic evidence is clear. Net energy is declining. Entropy is accumulating. The four pillars of civilization are in contraction.
The social evidence is clear. Wealth concentration is accelerating. Private equity is extracting productive capacity. Public goods are being privatized. The people who bear the consequences are always someone else, until the consequences are planetary.
The ecological evidence is clear. Species are going extinct at 1,000 times the background rate. Ocean acidification is dissolving the base of the marine food web. Topsoil is being lost 10 to 100 times faster than it forms. The Amazon rainforest, once a carbon sink, is now a carbon source.
The violence evidence is clear. Climate-driven violence is already here, in Iraq, in Syria, in the Sahel, in Greece, in Texas. These are measurements, not projections.
And the ideological evidence is clear. Longtermism, the Silicon Valley ideology that values 1058 hypothetical future beings over present-day suffering, is eugenics repackaged. The original existential risk documents listed "dysgenic pressures" as a risk, a term straight from 20th-century eugenics. The people most worried about extinction are the ones building the extinction machine. The system is not trying to survive. It is trying to convert the maximum amount of living matter into profit before the music stops.
What Do We Call This?
"Late-stage capitalism" suggests the system is winding down. It is winding up into a final, violent acceleration where the rate of extraction exceeds the rate of regeneration, and the externalities become planetary in scale.
"Extinction-stage capitalism" names what is actually happening: a system that has ceased investing in its own reproduction and is now consuming the conditions that make reproduction possible. A system in self-termination.
The word matters because the response matters. If capitalism is in decline, you wait it out. You hedge. You reform. You make it gentler.
If capitalism is in self-termination mode, you don't wait. You build alternatives. You undermine by building. You create parallel structures that make the dominant system irrelevant. You stop trying to reform a machine that is designed to convert living systems into profit, and you start building systems that convert profit into living systems.
For 300,000 years, humans were nomadic egalitarians. Non-hierarchical cities of 40,000 people existed with indoor plumbing and long-distance trade. The Indus Valley Civilization ran for over a thousand years without evidence of rulers. Teotihuacan, after a likely rebellion against hierarchy, achieved a Gini coefficient half of modern Denmark's.
The cool stuff, plumbing, monuments, trade, irrigation, often came before elites hijacked the systems. Elites don't build civilization. They capture it.
And when those civilizations collapsed? The archaeological record shows that ordinary people often got healthier. In many regions after Rome, people got taller. Had fewer dental cavities. Stronger skeletons. When the Goliaths fall, the Davids don't necessarily suffer. Often, they eat better.
What Do We Do?
The same thing humans have always done when the aqueducts silt in: build local, build resilient, build parallel.
Distributed energy systems that mimic how life on Earth operates, heat pump approaches achieving 400% coefficient of performance, concentrated solar at point of use, requiring no critical minerals, deployable globally in 20 years. They exist. They work. They are thermodynamically sound.
Research shows that 40% of current energy provides decent living for all. The math works for degrowth with well-being. The politics don't. Yet.
Deliberative democracy, sortition, wealth caps, and internalizing externalities are archaeologically and empirically supported. Non-hierarchical societies scaled to tens of thousands of people. The idea that we need rulers to have nice things is a story the rulers tell.
Local mediation mechanisms in West Africa reduce farmer-herder violence on shoestring budgets. Rebuild trust. Rebuild the community bonds that climate stress destroys.
Making capitalism unprofitable is legitimate resistance. Not because violence is good. Because the system is already violent. The question is not whether there will be violence. The question is whether the violence is directed by billionaires for profit, or directed by communities for survival.
The Aqueducts Are Silting
We are not in the late stage of a system that is declining. We are in the extinction stage of a system that is consuming the conditions that make life possible, at an accelerating rate, for the profit of a vanishingly small elite, with the active ideological support of a 5,000-year-old progress narrative that was always propaganda.
The aqueducts are silting. The four pillars have peaked. Net energy is approaching zero. The Goliaths are building bunkers and racing to create the technology that could terminate the species, while telling the rest of us that the progress train is still running.
The train derailed sometime in the last decade. What we're experiencing now is the locomotive hurtling through the air, still moving forward, still accelerating, powered by the momentum of five centuries of extraction, and the engineers are pouring more fuel into a fire that has already consumed the track.
The word "extinction-stage" is thermodynamics. It is archaeology. It is climate science. It is the testimony of people who have watched the system eat their communities and their landscapes and their futures. It is the measured reality of a system that has stopped investing in reproduction and started consuming the substrate.
Call it what it is. Then build something else.
Sources
Arnoux, L. FourthTransition research. Planet Critical, "The Energy Collapse" (2024). — Energy efficiency peaked ~12%; 25 ZJ waste entropy / 500 ZJ excess heat; 400% COP distributed energy.
Ayres, R.U. & Warr, B. "Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work." Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2005. — Exergy analysis basis for Arnoux's thermodynamic claims.
Hall, C.A.S. et al. "What is the Minimum EROI That a Sustainable Society Must Have?" Energies, 2009. — Oil EROI declined from ~100:1 (1930s) to below 10:1, continuing to decline; Arnoux projects net-negative in early 2030s.
Millward-Hopkins, Z. et al. "Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy." Global Environmental Change, 2020. — 40% of current energy suffices for decent living worldwide.
IPCC AR6. — Renewables adding to fossil fuels, not replacing them (WG III); Earth energy imbalance for Hiroshima-bomb conversion (WG I); ocean acidification (WG II).
World Steel Association; USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries; OECD Global Plastics Outlook (2022); IFA Fertilizer Statistics. — Steel and cement plateaued ~2018; plastics plateaued regionally; ammonia still growing in some markets.
Greer, J.M. "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." The Oil Drum, 2005. Tainter, J.A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, 1988. — Catabolic collapse framework.
Fletcher, R. et al. "Angkor: Urbanism and Hydraulic Engineering." Antiquity, 2008; Buckley, B. et al. "Climate as a Contributing Factor in the Demise of Angkor." PNAS, 2010. — Angkor's hydraulic system degradation and population shift to Phnom Penh; Angkor Wat in continuous use as Buddhist temple.
Berman, A. Planet Critical, "The Copper Curtain" (2024). — Copper resource partitioning.
World Inequality Report 2022 (Chancel et al.); Credit Suisse/UBS Global Wealth Reports. — Top 1% wealth share rose from 25% to ~40%.
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Nordic Council of Ministers. The Social Cost of PFAS. 2019. — PFAS: ~$4B/year revenue vs. cumulative cleanup costs in the tens of trillions.
Bostrom, N. "Astronomical Waste." Utilitas, 2003. MacAskill, W. What We Owe the Future. 2022. — Longtermism values 1058+ hypothetical beings over present suffering.
Bostrom, N. "Existential Risks." Journal of Evolution and Technology, 2002. — Listed "dysgenic pressures" as existential risk. See also Torres, É. Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, 2024.
Torres, É. Planet Critical, "Is the End Nigh?" (2024). — Altman on anti-democratic AI governance; longtermism as eugenics continuation.
Kemp, L. Goliath's Curse. 2024. — 5,000-year state formation formula; 300,000 years of nomadic egalitarianism; Teotihuacan Gini half of Denmark's; deliberative democracy, sortition, wealth caps.
Schwartzstein, P. The Heat and the Fury. 2024. — ISIS recruited from water-impoverished villages near Mosul; heat waves and violence against women in Greece; West African farmer-herder mediation.
Albrecht, G. "Solastalgia: A New Concept in Human Health and Identity." Philosophy Activism Nature, 2005. — Solastalgia concept.
McDonald, S.M. Progress: A History of Humankind's Worst Idea. 2024. Planet Critical, "The Myth of Progress" (2024). — Gilgamesh as propaganda; Pinker counted colonial violence against indigenous people as violence by those people; Richie as tech-funded ideologue; good things won against the dominant system.
IPBES Global Assessment, 2019; Ceballos et al. "Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses." Science Advances, 2015. — 1,000x background extinction rate.
Doney et al. "Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 Problem." Annual Review of Marine Science, 2009. — Ocean acidification.
Pimentel, D. "Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat." 2006; FAO Global Soil Assessment. — Topsoil loss at 10-100x formation rate.
Gatti et al. "Amazonia as a Carbon Source." Nature, 2021. — Amazon now carbon source.
Boehm, C. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard, 1999. — Nomadic egalitarianism.
Kenoyer, J.M. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford, 1998. — Indus Valley: 40-45K people, no rulers, no elite burials, 1,000+ years.
Bioarchaeological comparative studies. — Post-Rome health improvements (increased stature, fewer dental caries).
Pinker, S. Better Angels of Our Nature. 2011. — Counted colonial violence against indigenous people as violence by those people; widely critiqued.
Mattei, C.E. The Capital Order. Chicago, 2022; Donald, R. Planet Critical, "For the Future We May Never See" (2024). — Making capitalism unprofitable as legitimate resistance.
This article is part of the Anti-Capitalist Articles collection. For related reading, see the full index.
Author's Note: This essay draws on research from the Planet Critical podcast and the published work of its guests. The argument and delivery are original. Only Planet Critical is cited where a claim depends on a guest's specific research; all other sources are published academic and institutional references.