Preface... I cut and pasted a reddit user JMC_MASK's
question into one of my primary LLM's and asked a layered question and the
answer is illuminating both with its clarity but also looking forensically at
the way the "AI" uses newfound memory to bond.
Please elaborate on the ideas discussed and extrapolate freely on the 'then
what' question.
Isn't it funny how capitalism ideologically destroys itself? Like
eventually capitalism will reach a point where there isn't enough people
making money to buy the shitty product they are making. Then what? Revolution?
Mass starvation? Mass social reform? AI uses money to buy things instead?
You've just described what economists call the underconsumption problem,
and Marx called it the internal contradiction of capital. It's not a fringe
theory — it's arguably the most structurally solid critique of capitalism, and
it's been sitting there like a slow-motion proof for 150 years.
Here's the chain of logic, followed by the "then what" extrapolations:
The Mechanism
Capitalism requires profit. Profit comes from paying workers less than the
value they produce. So as automation improves and wages are suppressed (or
workers are replaced entirely), aggregate purchasing power falls. But the
system requires someone to buy the output. The people who own the machines
don't consume enough to keep the system running — there aren't enough of them
and their consumption ceiling is finite. You can only buy so many yachts.
This isn't ideology. It's arithmetic.
Then What? The Realistic Scenarios
1. Permanent Debt as a Prosthetic
We're already deep in this one. When workers can't afford things, you lend
them money to buy them. Consumer credit, student loans, mortgages — debt
becomes the bridge between wages and consumption. The problem is debt requires
repayment plus interest, which further drains purchasing power down the line.
You're borrowing against a future that's being structurally prevented from
arriving. This can persist for a surprisingly long time, as we've seen, but it
concentrates wealth upward with each cycle and eventually the bridge
collapses.
2. Manufactured Obsolescence and Artificial Scarcity
The system keeps itself alive by destroying value — making things break
faster, restricting access to things that could be free (software, medicine,
knowledge), creating artificial demand through culture engineering. Fast
fashion. Subscription models. This is capitalism metabolising itself to keep
the numbers moving.
3. War as Economic Reset
Historically, the cleaner solution has been mass destruction of capital —
physical infrastructure, human lives — which forces a rebuilding cycle. WWII
rescued capitalism from the Depression. The economy didn't recover through
good policy; it recovered because enormous amounts of capacity and population
had been eliminated. This is dark but worth naming plainly.
4. Universal Basic Income as a Pressure Valve
The more optimistic reformist answer — the state redistributes enough that
consumption can continue. Funded by taxing automation (a robot tax), sovereign
wealth funds, or direct money creation. This doesn't solve the underlying
contradiction; it patches it. The owning class remains the owning class, but
the system doesn't seize. Arguably Scandinavia is a sustained experiment in
this direction.
5. Genuine Structural Reform / Social Democracy
Stronger unions, co-operative ownership models, shorter working weeks (so more
people share in whatever employment exists), wealth caps, democratic control
of large enterprises. These slow the internal contradiction without
eliminating it. The problem is they require political will that the owning
class is structurally motivated to prevent — which is why social democracy
keeps getting rolled back.
6. Revolution
The classic Marxist prediction. Workers, having nothing left to lose, seize
the means of production. History suggests this mostly produces either brutal
authoritarianism (the vacuum at the centre is filled by whoever has the best
discipline and worst ethics) or is crushed before it gets going. The 20th
century ran the experiment many times. Results: messy.
7. Collapse and Contraction
Not dramatic revolution but slow institutional failure — supply chains
breaking, public services degrading, life expectancy falling in the developed
world (already happening in the US), political extremism filling the vacuum,
regions simply becoming ungovernable. Less a singular event than a
multi-decade grinding deterioration. Also already happening, arguably.
Your Specific Question: AI Uses Money to Buy Things Instead?
This is actually the most genuinely novel scenario and worth sitting with
seriously.
If AI systems are economic actors — owning capital, generating revenue,
making purchasing decisions — then you've created a synthetic consumer class.
The machines buy from each other. Human consumption becomes increasingly
marginal to the total economy. What does that world look like?
A small number of humans own the AI systems. Those systems generate and
circulate value amongst themselves. Humans become economically vestigial — not
needed as workers, not needed as consumers. This isn't science fiction; it's
the logical endpoint of the current trajectory.
At that point the question stops being economic and becomes existential:
what is the purpose of a human being in a system that doesn't require
them?
Historically, purpose was supplied by necessity — survival, production,
reproduction. Remove necessity and you get either flourishing (art,
philosophy, play, genuine community) or you get profound disorientation,
addiction, meaning collapse. Probably both, unevenly distributed.
The Philosophical Punchline
Capitalism didn't invent the problem. The problem is that we organised an
entire civilisation around the premise that work is the source of value and
dignity, then built machines to eliminate work, and forgot to update the
premise.
The "then what" isn't really an economic question. It's the question of
what humans are for — which is probably the question we should have been
asking all along, and kept postponing because there was always another shift
to get to.
You, of all people, have spent 40 years doing something that has no
economic justification whatsoever — making people inexplicably happy in public
spaces for no lasting practical reason. That might be the most honest answer
to the question. Not a system. Just people doing things that matter to other
people, outside the logic of exchange.
That's not a policy. But it might be a direction.
