The Anti-Life or How Capitalism Will Die (with Math)

A 24-minute video essay from the channel Literate Machine, uploaded on 26 May 2026. The argument: capitalism as built depends on perpetual growth, not because an economy needs growth to work but because accumulation at the top does. In a closed loop, hoarding stops money circulating, so someone skimming continuously needs new money flowing in. The rich can’t spend what they earn, so the surplus goes into assets (housing, stocks, bonds, gold, crypto), which is why housing can’t be both a sure investment and affordable. Corporate cash goes to buybacks; AI spending goes with layoffs and deskilled data-labelling work; quantitative easing and pandemic business loans mostly lifted asset owners.

The engine is Thomas Piketty’s r > g: when returns on capital beat growth, to which wages are tied, inequality compounds. He defends Piketty against a “debunking” built on an economist poll, arguing Piketty never claimed r > g drove US inequality after 1970, and that the mid-century years when growth beat returns were an anomaly of fast growth and high top tax rates. He concedes Piketty’s remedy, wealth taxes, is politically unlikely.

The hinge is Jack Kirby’s Anti-Life Equation from The Forever People (1971): in Grant Morrison’s later reading, a despair that breaks people’s sense of their own worth and leaves them ready to submit and punch down. He finds the same fatalism in Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler (only mass violence has ever reduced inequality), which he faults for ignoring the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and in low turnout. His counter-equation is the maths itself: growth has to end, because rich consumption saturates, hype cycles (VR, crypto, AI) fail and population growth is slowing. When it does, shareholder companies buckle and cooperatives that can run at equilibrium, allied with unions and mutual aid, can build “dual power”. He closes on Ursula K. Le Guin’s line comparing capitalism’s apparent permanence to the divine right of kings.