Late-Stage capitalism and its negative effects

 Capitalism is the main economic system around the world, with only 3 countries being the exception. It is a system that promotes innovation and competition, but only in its early to mid stages. To understand what I mean by "Late-stage Capitalism", let's look at the earlier stages. 

When Capitalism overtakes Socialism in a particular country as happened in many countries in the past century, you have many small startup businesses that compete with each other. These same businesses, because they're small, have a high customer satisfaction focus, as well as a focus on product quality. They are also quick to respond to customer requests and complaints, as their processes are agile, and there's not a lot of bureaucracy or heavy processes to make things difficult for their customers. They also treat their employees well, which means the employees are happy to contribute their time and effort and are excited about the company succeeding. Some may even offer performance bonuses when the company is doing well.   In other words its the best that it can be.

With the passing of time, the successful small businesses grow larger, while the others may die out. With this growth, their processes grow heavier, as they serve more people and a task that may have been the responsibility of a single person, is now divided among team members, or many teams. So there's a coordination and handoff, which requires more sophisticated tools, and the total service time of any particular request grows. To meet this need, new tools and ways of working can be implemented which are in themselves an innovation. Some of the midsize firms, will now start buying up(acquisitions) or merging with other companies in an effort to acquire some of their products or tools that integrate well with the original company's ones. So now we have mid-sized companies that are potentially less efficient, but which can crank out a lot more product, as they're more industrialized in their processes. The employees of these companies often do a single function, and don't necessarily have an overview of how things fit together. How happy they are depends a lot on the culture of the company, but again budgets for bonuses, or company events are limited. So it's evident that this is less ideal than the initial stage, at least for the majority of the people, either employers or customers. Let's call this mid-stage Capitalism

The final stage, or Late-Stage capitalism, is one where the mid-sized businesses have merged or bought up their competitors. And as soon as a new small business emerges, that a larger one considers a competitor, it quickly gets bought up, whether through a large cash offer, that may exceed the value of the company, or a forced merger. Often times the companies at this stage have become public companies, which means they have a responsibility to shareholders to try and increase the stock price. If they cannot do that through innovation, they often do that through letting themselves be acquired by a larger firm. The focus now isn't the quality of the product, nor customer satisfaction, but ways of increasing profit, often by cutting costs. And the biggest cost of any large company is the salary of their employees, so bonuses are long forgotten, payrises are often controlled very tightly, and different reasons given to not increase them. And worse yet, since they've bought up, and continue to buy up their competition, people have much less choice on where they can work. These same companies will choose to hire younger, less experienced staff, because they can offer to pay them less. 

They may outsource their operations and other departments to countries like China or India that have lots of people and therefore are willing to work for less. A big focus here as well is ensuring that the executives of a public company are paid well, which can amount to hundreds of dollars per hour. The product produced may well cost less, than in the other stages, but it's quality will also be a lot less due to less experienced workmanship, and cheaper materials. So it's obvious to see that this late stage is the worst of the three, the only people benefitting are the very few people sitting at the top. Everyone else has less money, and less choice of where to buy, and is now buying a lower quality product or service. If the companies get large enough, they'll start to want to influence the government, so they pass laws that benefit them. They will invest millions into this, with various levels of success. They've now achieved a monopoly status. This is Late-Stage capitalism.

Governments normally have laws that require the control of monopolies, by forcefully splitting them up. How well governments do this, depends on how much invididual politicians have been bought. If they're getting millions for serving the large companies, they will choose to do so, instead of their constituents.

So what happens after the late-stage of Capitalism? Well, we're about to see, across the world. Marx's prediction is that:

"... as capitalism developed, a small number of powerful monopolies would drive many enterprises out of business. To successfully compete against one another, these "cut throat" monopolies would reduce worker wages. Finally, a class struggle between the workers and the capitalists would bring on a revolution, replacing capitalism with communism." (Ref: https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-19-2-a-karl-marx-a-failed-vision-of-history.html )

It's something that happened before when feudal systems that concentrated wealth in landowners hands were overtaken through bloody revolutions. It is a hard shift to the left that historically hasn't worked out very well, mainly because of dictatorial types taking over the government and funneling the value generated into their own pockets. Will the same thing happen again soon? What other alternative scenarios are possible given that we supposedly have learned from history?