They thought we were playing a game or giving people a puzzle, maybe doing some branding. Branding, then? Talk about late-late-stage capitalism, right? How far can consumption as praxis go?

Muir, Nona the Ninth, page 189

This is John Gaius speaking, in Tamsyn Muir’s extraordinary and hilariously subversive Nona the Ninth, the third book in the Locked Tomb series. The setting is a plausible future in which the habitability of the earth is in desperate question, and a group of people—led by John—have posited they might have a way to save the planet. But when they share some of what they’ve been up to on YouTube—and it should be noted here that what they’ve been up to is necromancy—it doesn’t get the response they were hoping for.

John is speaking to one or possibly two people, neither of whom understand what the hell he’s on about. But the reader understands, and the reader—if that reader is me—laughs and then winces a little. The combination of the doubled “late” and the posture of a phrase like “consumption as praxis” juxtaposed with a video stream of dead bodies getting up and walking around really lays bare the way that the discourse around the end of capitalism rests on a kind of desperate and cynical optimism: if things are this terrible, it must be the end, right? Right?

I was thinking about this when I came across the poem Early Capitalism by Joe Wenderoth, shared in the excellent Pome newsletter:

they are perfecting the pillow
with which
you are being suffocated

now it sings to you
and shows you pictures—

This could just have easily been titled “Late Capitalism,” and it would have been a fine poem, but Wenderoth’s inversion is telling: the pillow over your face isn’t a stunning new invention, but a modest upgrade to some very old tech. Listening to capitalism’s siren songs, watching its pictures, pretending you can still breathe—that’s consumption as praxis, alright, taken all the way to the grave.

Wenderoth is playing with the recognition that early capitalism and late capitalism are, frequently, indistinguishable. In the introduction to a 2021 edition of Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, David Graeber and Andrej Grubacić write:

It has become fashionable lately to say that capitalism has entered a new phase in which it has become parasitical of forms of creative cooperation, largely on the internet. This is nonsense. It has always been so.

Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, page 23

Which makes me wonder about that phrase, “late capitalism.” It dates to at least the early twentieth century—hence John’s late-late. But I think it’s evolved in its usage in the intervening years. It so often isn’t a description or even a prediction so much as it gives voice to a deep and necessary longing. That is, the way late capitalism—or, as I’ve taken to calling our current moment, late pandemic—is used colloquially isn’t making a claim but attempting a manifestation. We think—we hope—that we are nearing the end, because we goddamn can’t take it much longer.

But perhaps there’s a seed of something instructive in there: neither capitalism nor the pandemic will die a natural death. We can’t simply hold vigil while those fires inevitably burn down. We have to put the fires out. Perhaps, in late capitalism—in the late pandemic—the lateness isn’t a prophecy but a promise: we who choose to believe the end is near commit to acting in accordance with that belief.

The trick is that this doesn’t mean acting as if the end will simply arrive. It means moving to bring that end about. It means working to haul that wanted and possible future into the present, one hard-won inch at a time. It means forming unions and putting your mask on and making DIY air purifiers and sabotaging pipelines and checking on your neighbor when the block floods and a million other acts both large and small that center collective care. It means believing in and moving towards our own liberation, day after day after day after day.

Or, to put it another way, perhaps the late in “late capitalism” isn’t a description of capitalism but of us. Maybe it’s we who are late—late to the work of building what comes next, of believing that there can be a next, that this isn’t all there is. Happily, as the saying goes, the only thing worse than late is never.