Why Artificial Intelligence Signifies the End of Capitalism · Part III: The End as Rupture
No human system has ever ended in silence. Neither empires, nor hegemonic religions, nor economic models that once seemed unbreakable have ever unraveled in a gradual, orderly fashion. Human systems do not wither away: they break. They persist so long as they can 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 come as gradual extinction, but as a rupture. Sometimes that rupture is physical—in the form of war or revolution; other times, it is institutional, symbolic, or psychological, a less visible yet equally devastating collapse, in which what once seemed stable suddenly falls apart.
History is riddled with such outbursts. The Roman Empire did not quietly withdraw to make way for a new era: it collapsed amid civil war, shortages, corruption, and an irreversible loss of faith in the imperial promise. European absolute monarchies did not step aside for democracy out of ethical resolve, but because the Ancien Régime ceased to offer any remotely credible justification for its own existence. The Protestant Reformation was not an orderly doctrinal transition but a schism that exploded when the Church could no longer sustain coherence between its spiritual discourse and institutional practice. Even the USSR—one of the twentieth century’s most tightly organized political projects—did not vanish in military defeat: it fractured when it exhausted its ideological and productive legitimacy and its population ceased to believe in the narrative that gave meaning to decades of sacrifice.
The historical pattern is clear. Societies can tolerate for generations conditions that, in hindsight, are unbearable: hunger, extreme inequality, repression, systematic exploitation. But no structure survives when the majority withdraws consent—no matter how passive, resigned, or silent that consent may have been. Every human system, no matter how concentrated in an elite—kings, priests, bureaucrats, technocrats, or tycoons—ultimately depends, in one form or another, on broad social legitimacy. That legitimacy may 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 a combination of hunger, fiscal crisis, and daily humiliation made sustaining the fiction impossible. The same occurred with colonial empires after World War II, or with Latin American dictatorships that endured so 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 is approaching just such a rupture, one must look back to the Cold War, its peak period of historical legitimacy. During that era, capitalism was forced to show its best face—not out of altruism, but out of geopolitical rivalry. Confronted by Soviet communism—which articulated a compelling alternative narrative and redistributive promise—capitalism enacted what now seem like exceptional policies: expansive welfare systems, robust labor rights, unions with real bargaining power, universal access to education, healthcare, and housing. Between the 1950s and 1970s, in much of the West, levels of redistribution reached historic heights: marginal tax rates on great fortunes exceeded 70%, wage growth matched productivity gains, and inequality steadily declined. This was not a moral transformation of the system, but a functional parenthesis—a temporary suspension of its logic to preserve its legitimacy.
That parenthesis ended as soon as the adversary disappeared. The fall of the Berlin Wall not only marked the demise of real socialism but also freed capitalism from any obligation to self-limit. Accumulation, deregulation, and profit maximization once again moved to center stage. Neoliberalism was not a mere ideological deviation, but a return to capitalism’s original trajectory.
In this new setting, the system revealed a decisive feature for understanding its current crisis: it can function while excluding a vast portion of humanity. For four decades, capitalism has not merely ignored the world’s poorest 50%; it has exploited them under conditions of extreme job insecurity, subsistence wages, and lives reduced to mere survival. Basic living standards and stable rights were not guaranteed. That half of the population was used when needed—in factories, fields, construction, or services—and discarded when no longer profitable. Yet the system did not collapse: it expanded, became more sophisticated, globalized, and accumulated wealth at unprecedented scales.
It did so because it still retained a base of legitimacy. Capitalism continued to function because it kept roughly the other half—an exclusive elite and a broad global middle class—within the social contract. Not because the middle class was morally more important, but because it was functionally necessary.
This fragile balance—the global middle class, about 40% of humanity—begins to break down as cognitive automation, made possible by AI development, threatens precisely the group that still legitimizes the system. For decades, capitalism was anchored in a work-based pact: steady employment, upward mobility, merit-based reward, an identity constructed around achievement. That pact was the backbone of the middle class. But as AI renders not only manual jobs but also administrative, technical, creative, and professional roles obsolete, this symbolic contract disintegrates. Progressing further in this direction means not merely excluding half the world, but pushing toward a scenario where up to 90% of humanity may be structurally relegated.
For forty years, capitalism has deliberately omitted the poorest 50% of the population, not even guaranteeing basic living conditions. At the same time, it has wearied the global middle class with bipartisan promises of social mobility and stability that have predictably resulted in more tax pressure on earnings, a lifetime of structural debt, and redistributive policies that never touched great fortunes. Merit was wielded as a domestication tool, and debt as a means of control. Giving the minimum to extract the maximum was the formula that allowed the system to persist while excluding one in every two humans. The question is no longer whether it can go on doing this, but why it believes it can.
And it has reasons to believe so.
The first is historical and anthropological. Elites have never known when to stop. Kings convinced of their divine right, emperors obsessed with eternity, aristocrats clinging to irrational privilege, tycoons seeing wealth as a sign of predestination. The global capitalist elite is no different. They behave as if their position were natural, permanent, and unquestionable, even as the system on which they depend shows clear symptoms of exhaustion.
The second reason is structural. Financialization has severed the link between population and wealth. The economy no longer directly depends on the labor or consumption of the majority. Wealth is reproduced in autonomous circuits—debt, derivatives, speculation, investment funds—that allow capital to grow apart from the material lives of the population. This fiction of self-sufficiency is maintained by a basic rule: the game is rigged from the start, since 1% of the population controls nearly 50% of financial assets. The house always wins.
The third reason is mathematical. Outside the elite, only about 25% of total global wealth remains to be absorbed. Housing, education, health, savings, and pensions have become the final frontiers for extraction. From within the system, there is little left to capture—but just enough to keep going, buoyed by four decades of experience in excluding half of humanity without immediate consequences.
These dynamics converge into a fatal error: capitalism believes it can continue without the majority because it has learned to get by without them. But this illusion crashes against the historical mechanics of all human systems. No structure survives when the distance between elites and the population becomes unlimited, when legitimacy evaporates, and daily life turns into an ongoing experience of precarity.
Contemporary capitalism, however, introduces a disturbing novelty. Never before has a system possessed such a sophisticated apparatus for managing distress, deterrence, surveillance, entertainment, and symbolic production. The erosion of legitimacy that once led to visible ruptures can now be diluted in atomized, depoliticized societies where exhaustion does not always yield collective action. Through an unprecedented global communications apparatus—concentrated in very few hands, with unlimited reach for ideological dissemination and instant entertainment—the system can prolong itself by administering frustration rather than resolving it.
The world we inhabit does not resemble Orwell’s dystopia in 1984. It increasingly resembles Huxley’s Brave New World: stagnant social segmentation, passive indoctrination disguised as popular culture, pharmaceutical anesthesia, endless entertainment as a substitute for meaning. Mass repression is unnecessary when constant distraction will suffice. Persuasion is redundant when entertainment alone is enough.
Yet even these strategies have limits. No system can sustain itself indefinitely when the majority’s material experience becomes one of relentless loss, precarity, and exhaustion. The digital management of discontent can delay the rupture, but not abolish it. It may numb the symptom, but it will not cure the disease. An order that trusts its survival to deterrence, surveillance, and precaritization may prolong its agony, but cannot change its fate.
Raised in immediacy, consumption as a substitute for desire, and entertainment as anesthesia, we conceive of only two scenarios: immediate collapse or its impossibility. If it does not happen now, we assume it never will. But history does not operate that way. Most systems do not collapse when expected; human history has proven comprehensible but not predictable.
Here lies the final paradox. Automated capitalism may not break in an abrupt way. It may degrade slowly, mutate, persist as a diffuse and emptied structure. But if it continues to assume that the total precaritization of life for the majority is manageable through more deterrence, more technology, and more social fragmentation, it will eventually encounter the same historical limit as every system that took its internal logic too far. Rupture can be delayed, disguised, anesthetized. But it cannot be avoided if the system sacrifices the human foundation that sustains it.