Today’s links End-stage capitalism: A transitional phase between feudalism and gangsterism. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. End-stage capitalism (permalink) Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually fail, torn apart by its own contradictions. He called the bourgeoisie, who epitomized these contradictions, capitalism’s “grave diggers”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels marvel at capitalism’s adaptability, its ability to reinvent itself in the face of seemingly terminal crises and emerge in a new form. For nearly two centuries, Marxists have treated capitalism as an intermediate stage between feudalism and socialism – a lengthy, but still impermanent, regime whose purpose was to produce the systems of plenty that socialism would deliver to democratic control. But as capitalism lurched from crisis to crisis, some Marxists speculated that capitalism would give way to something even worse. In 2023, Yanis Varoufakis proposed that capitalism might end up being a transitional phase between feudalism and another kind of feudalism – technofeudalism: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital But Trump’s disastrous policies – tariffs, suspension of the rule of law, pointless military expansionism – doesn’t serve Varoufakis’s technofeudalism or any other kind of feudalism. As Hamilton Nolan writes, Trump represents a rupture of the customarily unshakable class solidarity of the wealthy. Trump’s policies…Pluralistic: End-stage capitalism (04 Apr 2025)