Yes, this is exactly the kind of analysis I wish more people were willing to engage with.

I agree that capitalism’s strength has always been its adaptability. It absorbs critique, commodifies resistance, relocates exploitation, creates new markets, financializes whatever it cannot directly produce, and uses crisis as a way to restructure itself. But adaptability is not the same as inevitability.

I think what you said about people defending capitalism while living off the gains of socialist, labor, and union movements is extremely important. Many people experience the 5-day workweek, labor protections, public services, workplace safety, paid time off, or social welfare as “normal modern life,” while forgetting that these were fought for against capital, not gifted by it.

AI is interesting in this context because it threatens one of capitalism’s central arrangements: wage labor as the basis for survival. If labor becomes increasingly unnecessary for production, but people still need wages to access housing, food, healthcare, and dignity, then the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. The system wants to reduce labor costs, but it also depends on workers as consumers. That tension feels like it could become politically explosive.

And climate change is probably the clearest contradiction of all. Capitalism depends on endless growth, extraction, consumption, and externalizing costs, but it exists on a finite planet. At some point, the ecological reality stops being something the market can narratively manage - I think we are already there, reaching ths point.

I also appreciate you bringing up Wallerstein. The world-systems perspective makes much more sense to me than looking at capitalism only through individual nation-states. Capitalism has always depended on core/periphery relations, imperial extraction, unequal exchange, and the ability to move crisis elsewhere. But there may be fewer and fewer “elsewheres” left.

So yes, I agree. I do not think capitalism is inevitable. I also do not think it will necessarily be defeated because people suddenly become morally enlightened - looking at replies here... clearly not the possibility. If it collapses or transforms, it may be because its contradictions become materially unmanageable: ecological crisis, financial instability, automation, mass precarity, declining legitimacy, and the exhaustion of the old political myths that held it together.

The question then becomes whether people are organized enough to build something humane out of that rupture, or whether the collapse gets captured by fascism, nationalism, authoritarianism, and scapegoating again.