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I’d prefer not to start discussing something here that is only tangentially related to this miniseries, nor am I an economist or a redditor for that matter, but if you wish to discuss late-stage capitalism in general on this site, I’ll be happy to take part. To keep this comment concise I’d make the following argument.
In early-stage capitalism: the concentration of capital is yet of a low level, some natural resources are still untapped and not depleted, some markets are still unclaimed and unexplored, the low-hanging fruit is generally yet not picked, market forces did not yet eat away at social norms and cultural traditions (fertility rates and family formation rates are still high, and labor is plentiful), the environment is not yet poisoned and contaminated all over. In late-stage capitalism, none of that is true anymore.
"Late stage capitalism" is phrase born of Marxist revolutionary optimism/wishful thinking.
"Keep fighting, comrades! The clock is ticking, the bourgeois pig system is crumbling! The masses are waking up, the revolution is just around the corner! Trust the forces of history!"
No one wants to imagine that we are still in early stage of capitalism, and communism will finally win sometime in the 40th millenium.
I think there's really two ways to think about Marxism: one is the obvious motivation of his works. But secondly, I think Marx did a lot to establish a sort of almost historical framework for the economic and political progression of human progress that others have adopted in various forms.
Plainly, Marx was wrong about the precise progression of political and economic realities. He was maybe wrong about treating class as a distinct and supremely strong force, or at least, it's complicated. But I think he was right in the general sense that (excessive, internal) financialization is a very strong, and probably harmful, force. And, again in a general sense, the idea that maybe this system of 'capitalism' is inherently in a state of almost entropic decline, where production runs into natural limits and the insatiated demand growth often distorts into rent-seeking and monopolization, is a pretty interesting one.
I definitely agree that he was wrong about things magically reversing and becoming better as the natural and inevitable result of the system's evolution. However, you can still use the term "late stage capitalism" if you buy the narrative about the trajectory of things, even if you (maybe strongly!) disagree about what happens in the "next stage". And in fact, it seems to me that at least in America, communism (under the lens of: let's seize things for the lower class and take it for ourselves, and redistribute it centrally) is 100% dead in the water. A kind of semi-democratic socialism however (let's seize some of the things, especially from the rich, and then distribute it centrally - and it's okay because we outnumber them) is very much alive. I do consider those different things, and the latter is what even young idiots (many of whom might defend communism reflexively) really want, even if they aren't able to articulate it very well. They don't actually want communism, not when you ask them straight. And really, they aren't even all that revolutionary in a classic sense, even if they say they want to burn down the system: by revealed preference they simply don't.
Revolution needs revolutionary situation - historically it was incompetent, internally split and massively discredited ruling class, unpopular (and losing) war, economic collapse thrusting the masses into desperate poverty.
Fortunately, we are in 2026, not in 1917 and no such things can happen today.
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