Capitalism’s Final Expansion - How the Middle Class Becomes Collateral Damage

In this episode I look at the global economy not as a series of “crises and recoveries,” but as a single system that has reached the limits of its own design. For forty years, the West sustained growth by exporting production, inflating finance and subsidising a huge middle class with debt. That model depends on endless expansion. The planet and its markets are already full.

I start with the late Soviet Union as a structural template: an economic engine built on division of labour that stalls when there is nowhere left to expand. Then I trace the same logic in the US and EU: interest rates driven from 19% to zero, household debt pushed to 130% of disposable income, negative deposit rates in Europe, and a middle class whose lifestyle exists on borrowed time.

From there we move to incentives: how finance displaced traditional political economy, why elites attacked conservative institutions like the family, and why digital money and “green transitions” don’t fix the basic maths of energy, industry and demand.

Finally, I focus on ordinary people, especially in Europe and the Baltic states: shrinking real wages, disappearing subsidies, and a political class without a credible plan for a post-capitalist order.

No cheerleading, no simple villains – just the structure, the numbers we do have, and the consequences that follow.


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