Why the End of Capitalism Might Take the Form of a Rupture?
No human system has ended quietly. Neither empires, nor hegemonic religions, nor economic models that seemed unbreakable have gradually and orderly fallen apart. Human systems do not conclude: they break. They are sustained as long as they manage to convince the majority that their existence is natural, necessary, or at least tolerable; but when that support vanishes, when legitimacy evaporates, the end does not take the form of progressive extinction, but of a fracture. Sometimes that rupture is physical, in the form of war or revolution; other times it is institutional, symbolic, or psychological, a less visible but equally devastating collapse, in which what seemed stable suddenly crumbles.
History is plagued with these outbursts. The Roman Empire did not withdraw from the scene to make way for another era: it collapsed amidst internal wars, shortages, corruption, and an irreversible loss of trust in the imperial promise. European absolute monarchies did not cede their place to democracy out of an ethical gesture, but because the Ancien Régime ceased to offer any minimally credible justification for its continued existence. The Protestant Reformation was not an orderly doctrinal transition, but a schism that erupted when the Church could no longer sustain the consistency between its spiritual discourse and its institutional practice. Even the USSR, one of the most tightly organized political projects of the 20th century, did not disappear due to military defeat: it broke when its ideological and productive legitimacy was exhausted and the population stopped believing in the narrative that gave meaning to decades of sacrifice.
The historical constant is clear. Societies can tolerate for generations conditions that, in retrospect, are unbearable: hunger, extreme inequality, repression, systematic exploitation. But no structure survives when the majority ceases to give consent, even if that consent is passive, resigned, or silent. Because every human system, however concentrated in an elite —kings, priests, bureaucrats, technocrats, or magnates— always depends, in one way or another, on broad social legitimation. This legitimation can take many forms: fear, faith, prosperity, habit, resignation. But when it disappears, even systems that seemed eternal collapse. The French aristocracy lived for centuries convinced of its natural right to exist until the combination of hunger, fiscal crisis, and daily humiliation made it impossible to sustain the fiction. The same happened with colonial empires after World War II or with Latin American dictatorships that endured as long as the population accepted, out of desperation or fear, their authority. When a system loses the ability to persuade, intimidate, or inspire the majority, it does not reform: it breaks.
To understand why contemporary capitalism approaches this type of rupture, it is necessary to go back to the Cold War, its moment of greatest historical legitimation. During that period, capitalism was forced to show its best face, not out of altruism, but out of geopolitical rivalry. Faced with Soviet communism —capable of articulating an alternative narrative and a redistributive promise—, capitalism deployed policies that today seem exceptional: broad welfare systems, robust labor rights, unions with real bargaining power, generalized access to education, health, and housing. Between the 1950s and 1970s, in much of the West, redistribution levels reached historical highs: marginal tax rates on large fortunes exceeding 70%, wage growth aligned with productivity increases, and a sustained reduction in inequality. It was not a moral transformation of the system, but a functional parenthesis: a temporary suspension of its logic to sustain its legitimacy.
That parenthesis ended as soon as the antagonist disappeared. The fall of the Berlin Wall not only marked the end of real socialism; it freed capitalism from any obligation of restraint. Accumulation, deregulation, and profit maximization returned to the center. Neoliberalism was not an ideological deviation, but the return of capitalism to its original direction.
In this new scenario, the system demonstrated something decisive for understanding its current crisis: it can function while excluding a massive part of humanity. For four decades, capitalism did not dispense with the poorest 50% of the planet; it exploited them under conditions of extreme labor precariousness, subsistence wages, and lives reduced to mere survival. It did not guarantee a minimum quality of life, stable basic rights, or material security. It used that half of the population when it needed them —in factories, fields, construction, or services— and discarded them when they ceased to be profitable. And yet, the system did not collapse: it expanded, became sophisticated, globalized, and concentrated wealth as never before.
It did so because it still retained its basis of legitimation. Capitalism continued to function because it kept approximately the remaining half of the population within the pact: a reduced elite and a broad global middle class. Not because that middle class was morally more relevant, but because it was functional.
That fragile balance of the global middle class —40% of the world's population— begins to break when cognitive automation, made possible by the development of AI, precisely threatens the group that still legitimized the system. For decades, capitalism was sustained by the labor pact: stable employment, upward career path, rewarded effort, identity built around merit. That pact was the backbone of the middle class. But when AI makes not only manual jobs but also administrative, technical, creative, and professional jobs obsolete, that symbolic contract disintegrates. Continuing in this direction no longer implies excluding half of the population, but pushing the system towards a scenario in which up to 90% of humanity can be structurally relegated.
For forty years, capitalism has deliberately omitted the poorest 50% of the population without even guaranteeing minimum living conditions. At the same time, it has deceived the global middle class through a bipartisanship that, under recurring promises of social advancement and stability, has systematically led to more tax pressure on their incomes, structural lifelong debt, and redistributive policies that never touched large fortunes. Merit was used as a tool of domestication and debt as a form of control. Giving the minimum to extract the maximum was the formula that allowed the system to sustain itself while excluding one out of every two human beings. The question is no longer whether it can continue to do so, but why it believes it can.
And it has reasons to believe it.
The first is historical and anthropological. Elites have never known when to stop. Kings convinced of their divine right, emperors obsessed with their eternity, aristocrats clinging to irrational privileges, magnates who conceive wealth as a sign of predestination. The global capitalist elite is no different. It acts as if its position were natural, permanent, and unquestionable, even when the system on which it depends shows clear signs of exhaustion.
The second reason is structural. Financialization has broken the link between population and wealth. The economy no longer depends directly on the labor or consumption of the majority. Wealth is reproduced in autonomous circuits —debt, derivatives, speculation, and investment funds— that allow capital to grow outside the material life of the population. This fiction of self-sufficiency is sustained by a fundamental rule: the game is rigged from the start, because 1% of the population controls nearly 50% of financial assets. The house always wins.
The third reason is mathematical. Outside the elite, only approximately 25% of the world's wealth remains to be absorbed. Housing, education, healthcare, savings, and pensions have become the last territories of extraction. From within the system, there is little left to capture, but enough to continue advancing, reinforced by the previous experience of four decades in which it could leave out half of humanity without immediate consequences.
These dynamics converge in a fatal error: capitalism believes it can continue without the majority because it has learned to do without it. But that illusion clashes with the historical mechanics of all human systems. No structure survives when the distance between the elite and the population becomes limitless, when legitimacy evaporates, and daily life becomes a sustained experience of precariousness.
Contemporary capitalism introduces, however, a disturbing novelty. Never before has a system had such a sophisticated apparatus for managing discomfort, deterrence, surveillance, entertainment, and symbolic production. The erosion of legitimacy that in the past led to visible ruptures can now be diluted in atomized, depoliticized societies, where exhaustion does not always translate into collective action. Through an unprecedented global communication apparatus, concentrated in very few actors, with unlimited access to ideological dissemination and immediate entertainment, the system can prolong itself by managing frustration without resolving it.
The world we inhabit does not resemble Orwell's dystopia in his book 1984. It increasingly resembles Huxley's Brave New World: stagnant social segmentation, passive indoctrination disguised as popular culture, pharmacological anesthesia, infinite entertainment as a substitute for meaning. There is no need for massive repression when permanent distraction is possible. There is no need to convince when entertaining is enough.
But even these mutations have a limit. No system can sustain itself indefinitely when the material experience of the majority becomes a continuous succession of losses, precariousness, and exhaustion. The digital management of discontent can delay rupture, but not abolish it. It can numb the symptom, but not cure the disease. An order that entrusts its survival to deterrence, surveillance, and precariousness can prolong its agony, but not transform its destiny.
Educated in immediacy, in consumption as a substitute for desire, and in entertainment as anesthesia, we only conceive of two scenarios: immediate collapse or its impossibility. If it doesn't happen now, we assume it will never happen. But history doesn't work that way. Most systems don't collapse when they are expected to; human history has proven explicable, but not predictable.
Therein lies the final paradox. Automated capitalism may not break abruptly. It may degrade slowly, mutate, persist as a diffuse and empty structure. But if it continues to assume that the total precariousness of life for the majority is manageable with more deterrence, more technology, and more social fragmentation, it will eventually encounter the same historical limit reached by all systems that pushed their internal logic too far. It can delay the rupture. It can disguise it. It can anesthetize it. But it cannot avoid it if it sacrifices the human foundation that sustains it.