Can't Imagine The End of Capitalism?

You're not trying hard enough.

Let’s clear something up right away: I’m a capitalist.

Not a brilliant one, mind you - I’m no titan of industry - but a capitalist all the same.

You might protest, “No, Dave, I’m a Neo-Agrarian Syndicalist or a Crypto-Liberationist or maybe a Transhuman Socialist.” But that’s like saying you’re opting out of oxygen while still breathing. Dominant economic systems form through massive network effects, and capitalism’s been under construction for hundreds of years. We didn’t choose it; we inherited it. We’re all swimming in the same water, murky though it may be.

Still, I’m hardly singing its praises or claiming capitalism will lead us into a glorious sunset. In fact, I think we’ll move beyond it, unless it turns out that our planetary limits won’t stretch any further.

The surprise? That future might arrive faster than you’d guess once the main pillar of capitalism - labour as a survival mechanism - starts to wobble.

This is not to say I don’t have sympathy with solidarity movements or that we shouldn’t be talking about different systems, but we are currently owned by capitalism til we move beyond it.

And - aside from aforementioned collapse risks - I believe we will.

The Survival Paradigm: Labour as a Linchpin

The point is, what would it look like if we don’t need labour for survival? We might want to keep (or even enhance) solidarity as human beings, but not needing meal ticket type work is the place where the purpose or meaning of capital starts to break down.

Oddly, the very labour that the ‘left’ have traditionally told us we need to protect, is actually holding up the capital system we (mostly) complain about.

For this short journey, all I ask is that you suspend your disbelief for a moment or two. If you’re inclined to resist at every turn with ‘that’ll never happen’, or ‘supply chains will break if you do that’ or ‘the oligarchs won’t allow it’ you’re not in the spirit of this thought exercise.

Deal?

Ok, let’s imagine the end of capitalism.

Capital’s Core Purpose: Survival, Then Power

Some first principals thinking: The primary purpose of capital is not power. That comes later, along with status games and ice baths.

Capital serves to distance its owners, first from basic bodily survival and then even from survival thinking. After that, you start building moats, leveraging others, or shaping the rules of the game to keep yourself - if not quite on top - then at least not falling back into survival thinking. Because the survival economy is not a nice place.

But imagine a scenario in which survival is guaranteed for everyone. Doesn’t matter exactly how right now - remember our agreement? In that world, you can’t coerce someone by threatening their survival. Capital as a survival tool becomes irrelevant. That’s a big deal, because “work or starve” has been capitalism’s not-so-secret weapon since the English enclosure laws forced people off common land and into selling their labour with no subsistance backstop.

A Thought Experiment (Hang In There, It’s Not About The Replicator)

Let’s say we’ve all got a standard issue ‘replicator’, or some combination of next-level automation, fusion energy, and space-mined resources that together provide whatever you want at near-zero cost. Food assembled from the requisite atoms. Housing 3D-printed in a day. Cars? There’s no commuting when you only travel for interest. Order a near free heli-drone. It’s the universal high income that Musk has mentioned.

Ridiculous, right? Exactly. That’s why it’s a thought experiment.

But in that scenario, what exactly do you need capital for? You can already do whatever you want and you’ll be able to do that indefinitely. In your old age, just replicate up a bunch of AI robots to look after you if you really run out of people who care about you.

Capital is what capital buys; freedom, time outside of survival thinking, safety in old age.

Greed would be wanting to restrict others from having access to the same.

The Ownership Problem and Paradigm Shift

Now, let’s back off the techno-optimism Kool-aid for a moment.

In theory, highly advanced automated labour (which is what that replicator represents) could be owned by a human being with capital somewhere, even if that owner is kicking back on a yacht in Monaco.

But this is where many gung-ho (usually more sympathetic to capitalism) futurists can’t really get much beyond this level of change to the paradigm. They think in linear terms like ‘billionaires just become trillionaires’ and everyone else moves up a level but with the same inequalities. That’s not how this level of disruption will play out.

Much in the same way AI technology is owned by various corporations via shareholders today - even if that is currently an advanced remix of plagiarised content & knowledge - the replicator is the means of production without labour.

Private property in the form of capital could theoretically still exist in this scenario and expect to charge money for the use of the replicator but because it would collapse the value of labour to near-zero, no one will have any money to pay for it.

But long before you get to the replicator, earlier iterations of advanced automated labour would have rendered labour so cheap as to destroy the entire system as we know it.

So it would never happen.

If the value of labour collapses without alternative means of survival, we will very quickly come face to face with unstoppable social unrest and societal breakdown. It is my belief that this is the position we are racing towards. And before you can say ‘bitcoin will save us’, anything that can be converted into the means of survival - including using or cashing out crypto, stocks or property to get by - will collapse in value as everyone rushes to the exits.

Collective Survival Instinct: The Emerging Minimum

The good news is - unless we decide to idiotically self-immolate - we will be forced by our collective survival instinct to overhaul the system and install some new minimum standards to the civilisational contract.

There is currently no institution outside of nation states advanced enough to implement these changes but I don’t rule out ways for a universal democracy to emerge in a crisis. I’ve outlined that in this article (but finish this article first!):

The end of capitalism as we know it would therefore be pretty simple.

Every human being has access to an agreed minimum level of sustenance. Doesn’t have to be luxury and it’s not a net to catch the falling. It’s the minimum platform for everyone at all times. Above that, do whatever you want but you won’t fall below that level. Exactly how that happens and what those policies are exactly will be thrashed out at that time but you’ll be surprised by how quickly human beings can prioritise and reach consensus when looking into the abyss.

Also, there’s plenty of ideas lying around this time unlike 2008 or 1929.

The Critical Threshold: When Survival Pressure Fades

If nobody can fall below a certain level automatically (not via welfare which is actually a deliberate form of punishment and social stigma), the paradigm changes more dramatically than appears at first. If you remove that survival pressure, the entire basis for capitalism - at least as we know it - starts to wobble.

It’s a bit like the introduction of steam power toppling the old craft guilds. Once machines could churn out goods on a massive scale, the guild system lost its monopoly, and the entire economic structure shifted.

So, if labour loses its survival imperative, what remains? Of course, humans love competition and status games, so let’s not pretend we’ll all hold hands singing Kumbaya. But those games would revolve around something other than climbing the corporate ladder or hoarding piles of money to gain validation and social recognition.

Some of us might vie for prestige in science, art, or community leadership. Status wouldn’t vanish; it’d just float free of the “get rich or die trying” treadmill because not everyone will want validation through accumulation. Capital will exist to a point but if vital human needs of recognition and survival can be taken care of in other ways, capital and the entire finance industry just fades into the background again.

Not many will want to exist simply at the survival level for long so innovation won’t stop. In fact because survival thinking is known to reduce IQ by up to 13 points, it will actually increase. But instead of coming from a few expensively educated first worlders, it’ll pop up from millions of newly freed ‘anywheres’.

The Ruling Class Dilemma Vs Technology’s Steamroller

Now, the Marxist types out there (and maybe even the traditional conservative types) will likely hear this and grumble; “but the ruling class will never let that happen.”

Of course people in power cling to advantage. History is full of elites bending laws and narratives to hold on to what they have as explained above. But it’s also full of mass movements that couldn’t be suppressed, especially when new technology or social conditions made the old order obsolete. It’s like fighting the printing press: you can smash a few machines, imprison a few printers, but once the idea is out there - cheap, reproducible, and widely demanded - you can’t bottle it up again.

Labour value is getting fatally eroded and it will be the end of capitalism as well.

That’s the linchpin of a post-capitalist world: it isn’t about overthrowing the old guard so much as undermining its ability to dominate through scarcity. If you can’t starve people out, you can’t strong-arm them into working for you. If you can’t threaten them with homelessness, you can’t demand their labour for peanuts. If automated labour is incredibly cheap (which the new post-crisis system could now support), why would you bother anyway? And that changes everything, because the relationship between boss and worker stops looking like a hostage situation.

Hyper efficient and productive human-machine processes across every sector will then lead to either lower prices or simply a long period in which prices do not increase but their utility value increases dramatically - like electronic goods today.

Work then becomes, not so much optional but rather a mix of very well paid contracts for work that is hard to automate and voluntary passion projects that allow you to contribute meaningfully to gain status. I’m already living that life today but a minimum platform would give me the confidence to pursue more ambitious voluntary projects.

Imagining a Post-Capital Horizon

This might sound utopian, so let’s keep our heads. Technology has a track record of creating new problems as it solves old ones, and any path to universal abundance is littered with practical and ethical potholes. But it’s not about predicting a perfect tomorrow. It’s about stretching our imaginations so we’re not shackled by the narrow vision that capitalism will only end by labour demanding higher wages and stronger unions (not that you’ll find me arguing against that per se I just think it’s fighting the last war). As I see it, that tactic will now only accelerate automated labour options.

Opening ourselves to this possibility ahead of a crisis allows us to better adapt to what will be on the other side. If survival isn’t the point of the game anymore, what do we really want to play for?

In that sense, imagining the end of capitalism isn’t just about hatching an exit strategy from a sinking ship. It’s about allowing ourselves to see a new coastline, one with different rules and priorities. Sure, it’s a massive shift, but so was moving from feudalism to industrial economies, from horse-drawn carriages to supersonic jets, from monks copying books by hand to all of human knowledge condensed into a slim, always on glass and silicone rectangle that can fit into the palm of your hand. Each time, the old guard claimed the future was impossible -right up until it wasn’t.

So, suspend your disbelief a bit longer. If we can glimpse a future where survival is guaranteed, we can start building the foundations for it. That might mean discussing universal basic income, a job guarantee, open-source technology, post-scarcity distribution, or whatever else helps break the link between labour and life-or-death necessity. Every time you carry the conversation beyond the current paradigm, you open the horizon just a little bit more and give permission for others to do the same.

Once that link is broken, capital will lose its most powerful tool, and perhaps one day soon we will finally swim together for the simple thrill and fun of it.