The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, will be marked by developments that are intimately familiar. Unable to expand and generate profits at previous levels, the capitalist system will begin to consume the very structures that sustain it. In the name of austerity and government efficiency, it will prey upon the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty, while diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.

As it has increasingly done, capitalism will relocate jobs—including both manufacturing and professional positions—to countries with cheap pools of labor. Industries will mechanize their workplaces, triggering an economic assault not only on the working class but also on the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist society. This assault will at first be masked by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes decline or remain stagnant.

Politics in the late stages of capitalism will become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real ideological content and objectively subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs. But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on the scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, he cautioned, when no new markets are available and no new pools of people can take on more debt.

Capitalism will then turn on the so-called free market itself, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. In its final stages, it will pillage the systems and structures that once made capitalism possible. As it causes widespread suffering, it will resort to harsher forms of oppression in a frantic last stand to maintain profits. It will loot and cannibalize state institutions, contradicting its own stated principles.

The final stages of capitalism, as Marx understood, are not capitalism at all. Corporations will devour government expenditures—taxpayer money—like pigs at a trough. Then, inevitably, the system crashes.  -- Chris Hedges


To summarize:  Capitalism reaches a point where job markets stagnate and demand for debt contracts, leading to austerity that harms the working class. Politicians and political parties become subservient to corporate interests.

In a frantic attempt to preserve profits, corporations loot state institutions.  Capitalism undermines the values and traditions it once purported to uphold.  Capitalism's final stage becomes cannibalistic. A willful undermining of institutions that once supported it become its death throes.

If deep and meaningful social changes are not made soon, poverty will consume all.