The term "late capitalism" always seems somewhat presumptuous to me, because we don't really know how far along the lines of social and economic development the quote unquote capitalist system is. We could be in Stage 2 or 3 of a 6 or 7 stage capitalism, and historians in the year 2525 might find our self-descriptions of "late capitalism" amusing in the same way that someone speaking of "late feudalism" in the year 950 AD would seem amusing to us now. (Not, of course, that people in the 10th century had pretentious social speak, but if they did).

While it seems clear that "capitalism" as it exists now is very different from what it was in the 19th or early 20th century, there is no way of knowing whether this is the "late" form, or perhaps somewhere in the middle, or still towards the beginning.