Contemporary capitalism should be renamed infantile capitalism since everyone is born into it

Evidence

Akira Asada’s proposition is thus even more grimly profound than it is witty, that the usual figuration for the stages of capitalism (early, mature, late or advanced) is a misnomer that ought to be reversed: the earliest years now being designated as senile capitalism because it is still the affair of boring traditionalists from an older world; mature or adult capitalism would then retain its characterization, in order to reflect the coming into their own of the great robber barons and adventurers; whereas our own, hitherto late, period can henceforth be known as “infantile capitalism,” inasmuch as everyone has been born into it, takes it for granted, and has never known anything else, the friction, resistance, effort of the earlier moments having given way to the free play of automation and the malleable fungibility of multiple consumer publics and markets: roller skates and multinationals, word processors and overnight unfamiliar postmodern downtown high rises. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 782

Categorization

• SEED: An essay could use ‘infantile capitalism’ as a lens on why Gen Z finds late-capitalist conditions invisible: they had no prior era to measure against.
• XREF: Reverses the senescence narrative — connects to the reader’s attempt to map his own position as someone with no memory of pre-postmodern life. — connects to: Modernity should be defined as the civilization capitalism built. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 162
• DEFINE: Offers a memorable renaming that captures postmodernism’s defining feature: having no outside, no prior stage to contrast with.