Wealth inequality: the past, and the future

Part V: What would late capitalism actually look like?

So we arrive at the third objection. Supposing that Marx’s law of capitalist accumulation holds, we would expect society to develop into something quite different than it is today. Predicting the future is always a dangerous affair, so we can only guess what late capitalism will look like in its barest outlines; but still, history and our theoretical understanding of inequality should be able to provide some basic clues. In much the same way as we can predict long-term climate change without knowing what tomorrow’s weather will hold, we may be able to develop a picture of what capitalism may look like in its final stages – even if we don’t know the particulars of how it will get there.