What Is Late-Stage Capitalism? Meaning and UK Impact
'Late-stage capitalism' is now a meme. The original economists meant something specific, and the modern version describes a UK most personal finance writers refuse to acknowledge.
UK wealth share by household decile
Source: ONS Wealth and Assets Survey. The bottom half of UK households own one-eleventh of what the top tenth holds.
Key takeaways
Late-stage capitalism is a label used to describe a phase where wealth concentration, corporate power, financialisation and inequality become so extreme that they visibly distort everyday life.
The term originates in early 20th century Marxist analysis (Werner Sombart, later Ernest Mandel) but is now used widely in mainstream commentary.
Common features include extreme inequality, financialisation, corporate consolidation, gig work, declining affordability, commodification of everything, political capture, and a gap between productivity and wages.
Critics call the term vague and meme-like; supporters point to genuine structural problems in housing, asset concentration, and intergenerational mobility. For UK personal finance, it is the backdrop against which FIRE, indexing and asset-building strategies make sense.