what do y’all think of this? It makes some good points and Micheal Hudson is probably not right, but I have one criticism to make. One of his arguments that the richest people are still industrial capitalists (because they started businesses that do stuff), not finance capitalists, but as Cory Doctorow points out, those companies are basically just rentiers at this point. Amazon makes most of its money hosting other businesses on their site, “Meta” makes most of its money hosting being a middleman connecting advertisers and unpaid content creators poorly. Thus, it seems at least the emperial core has increased rentierism. This doesn’t mean it’s not built on peripheral industry and that reindustrializing the west would benefit average people, but it does seem to be good news about the decline of empire. Other thoughts?
I can’t really comment on the historical notes there about the dynamics of financial and industrial capital, but I definitely agree with you that none of those digital monopolies he cited could be classified mainly as industrial capital. Except maybe Wallmart, which is not digital (AFAIK), but is still mostly just a consumer-facing monopsony.
A few (possibly wrong) ideas here, but I believe that the existence of software has created the perfect conditions for rent-seeking, since software is incredibly cheap to reproduce and distribute, but can’t effect change in the material world without expensive hardware or humans. Because of that, a corporation can consolidate a Doctorow’s Chokepoint in a new market at light-speed, but the actual productive (and expensive) work-force mostly exists outside their employ.
And since the average worker doesn’t have enough money for that much rent, the corporations make the most of it cannibalising smaller companies, with shit like Windows licenses for companies, paying to have your posts be read by your followers on Metabook, Google taking a massive cut on apps payments, or stores on Amazon having to pay to have their products appear when searched.
I’m not sure why Hudson, Doctorow and Varoufakis keep calling this “feudalism” but I don’t think they’re fully wrong in drawing a distinction between those two sections of the bourgeoisie, even if it can’t be exploited for revolution.
Btw cory Doctorow is a tech enthusiast, anti-monopoly liberal. He is not a marxist.
the techno feudalism thing is really annoying to me but day’s post isn’t it either. also these companies are insurers and real estate speculators and landlords themselves
Yea the term is just a rebranding of imperialism but only to tech industries. It provides nothing of value.
Just a quick correction, this isn’t written by Day. As noted in the forward, it is by JW Mason:
J. W. Mason is Associate Professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.
sure inaccurate phrasing worth clarifying, i did reference most of the stuff on there is reposts and translation in another comment
Techno feudalism is stupid, the rentier thesis is far better, Mason’s piece is interesting, but I don’t feel like it fully addresses it.
I don’t think Hudson or Doctorow have called it feudalism. Hudson says it’s finance capitalism which is worse than industrial capitalism. That makes me think of something, in Imperialism Lenin talks about how finance capital is the destiny of capital, and the that is the point at which capital stops being progressive. However, it’s foolish to try to return to pre-monopoly because the cycle will repeat. Doctorow says rentierism is carried over from feudalism and has had a great rise in the digital age. The early capitalists hated rentierism (just look at Adam Smith), but the ultimate goal of capitalists is to be a rentier because then they don’t have to do much for profits. Varoufakis is wrong because he doesn’t understand the definition of capitalism or how it can change.
Don’t know much about Hudson, but Doctorow managed to avoid that one on his book AFAIK, but sadly started using it at least in his blog after his review of Varoufakis’s book. Him and his followers often sound like they’re trying to go back to the “free market capitalism” age like you describe (I’d put Taplin there too), but for the most part I think his analysis of current trends are often spot on and very useful.
After thinking a bit I also don’t think I agree with Mason’s argument that there is a “back and forth” between finance and industrial capital. He is correct that both have existed together since the beginning, Lenin himself even writes that, but I fail to see from his arguments that finance (stock market, real estate) hasn’t become the dominant force over the past 100 years, or specially since 1991. Most of the top companies by marketcap (but not revenue) today mainly own IP or software, maybe cloud services in the case of Google and MS, or are literal holdings. There’s still the occasional petroleum company, but that’s a far cry when a majority of the population was employed in production and extraction rather than this “service economy” rentier maintenance thing we got going on.
This is what happens when you don’t read Lenin.
Where do you think that these tech monopolies money is? It’s in the bank.
Lenin thesis was that when banks became monopolies, the finance capitalist took control of all the money capital from all society, industrial capitalists and workers, which still holds true.
The finance capitalist dictate where the money goes too, through credit. They literally plan the economy through the credits. It seems to me that you didnt read Lenin.
I did and agree with you. Besides their vast sums of investment from banks some of these corporations even have their own banking systems, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of their rent-seeking enterprises are the securities for their financial operations. What I disagree with the author (and I believe I agree with you here) is that the financial capital has in fact superseded and dominated the industrial capital, in which the latter has gone from being an useful tool and ally in the 20th century to basically an afterthought in the 21st.
I think the confusion may have happened because I did a long double negative there “I fail to see […] that finance hasn’t superseded industrial” because I was specifically disagreeing with the author, who was himself sort of disagreeing with the conclusions of Lenin’s “Imperialism.”
Adding to my last comment, the rentier economy we live in right now is a product of markets being monopolized by a handful of cartels.
My idea is that the products the different industries offer have reached the “diminishing returns” stage. This means that in order to make an improvement to a commodity, you have to exponentially invest in development. Industries have to invest more in development, for a smaller quantitative improvement. Think of moore’s law in computing power, you can’t keep doubling the computing power by just putting more transistors, we inevitably reach a physical limit. This is a building up on the falling rate of profit theory developed by Marx and the classical economist.
So in order to deal with this dialectic problem, industries have to either change paradigm and innovate, completely revolutionizing current processes of production (destructive creativity concept), or milk their cows, aka charge more for the same/less (bad and lazy and the reality we live in).
Before monopolies, industries couldnt just charge more for less because other ones would take over so you did see a golden age of innovation/entrepeneurship, but now that the markets have been inevitably conquered it is not happening. So in order to further progress society we have to unfetter the productive forces from the hands of the finance capitalists.
Edit: ill try writing a blog entry on this subject to improve it, criticism is welcome
Varoufakis: “Capitalism’s changed so much it can’t be called capitalism anymore.”
Mason: “Capitalism hasn’t changed. Your eyes are deceiving you if it looks like it has to you!”
People who read Lenin: “Capitalism can change a lot without abandoning its core components and ceasing to be capitalism. What you are seeing is the tendency for monopolies to form and innovation to thusly fall.”
(i couldnt find a good meme template)
Analogous to China pre-Deng: they managed to develop the relations of production as far as they could go with the then-forces of production. To further develop the relations, they had to develop the forces, hence the need to open up the economy. Eventually they will hit another wall. Unlike the west, they’ll be ready for it.
The west has developed it’s forces of production for decades/centuries. But it’s relations of production have lagged behind. All the elements of production can develop on their own, but only so far; at that point, the other elements have to catch up. Right now, as you point out, the relations of imperialism are holding back it’s forces.
Under different management, the imperialist machinery – or, rather, the forces behind the imperialist machinery – could propel humanity into a gilded age that’s hard to imagine. Like the China model but rolled out on a world scale.
But this can only work if the relations of production develop so that imperialists are no longer in control. Because they will do daft shit like asset strip productive companies and empty pension pots before disappearing with the cash.
David Harvey likes to quote footnote 4 in chapter 15 of Capital when talking about this kind of thing (I’ll edit this comment to add the quote). The footnote includes six(?) relations, each of which develops alongside the others.
It’s not an exhaustive list. But it implies what you state: we’ve developed about as far as we can under the finance capitalists; to develop further, they can’t be in charge.
Essentially, I agree with you and I look forward to the blog post.
Edit:
(emphasis added):
Before his time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.
I feel like Hudson work here is just a simplificaton of Lenin’s book “Imperialism, highest stage of capitalism”. To butcher some of it, finance capitalism took over when banks turned big enough (monopolies), they had access to the entire money capital of all the industrial capitalists.
I will write my full thoughs later.
I mentioned that in a comment below. I feel like the title suggests that he could make a good point about Lenin’s argument showing that you can’t return from finance capitalism, but instead the piece is just trying to say capitalism has always been exactly the same in terms of industry and finance, which is simply not true.
My most sincere recommendation is you take your thoughts directly to Roderic Day. I think the reaction will explain a lot.
You mean he can answer my questions? Where would I contact him? I don’t have a Twitter account and don’t want to make one. I feel like he should be on Lemmygrad considering he’s involved in GitHub and his work is so popular here.
there’s an email listed on the RedSails “contact” page: https://redsails.org/contact/
Yet apart from Twitter and RedSails what work does he actually do? The whole Twitter circle of Roderic & various art-themed avatars reminds me of Politsturm. The self-appointed politburo in exile of getting mad online. No real political work. Only bickering!
Just being able to see through the Jamestown Foundation on Xinjiang doesn’t give one a license to sneer at everyone who knows more about dependency theory lol
When you say “involved with github”, do you mean he has work in git repos hosted on github, or that he actually works on maintaining the software used to run github?
The former, I think.
He seems to exist purely as a twitter entity linking to his blog so yeah. Twitter. He has some good translations on there.
He will reply to you in ten seconds even if you have zero followers, he is insane. You can make a twitter with just an email from Hide My Email or TutaMail.
It’s strange to me that being responsive to questions, regardless of the amount of social clout someone has, is somehow spun as a bad characteristic about Roderic here.
I think the insanity is the extent to which he is terminally online, not necessarily that he will reply to anyone.
They haven’t posted in four months 👀👀👀
Can you please let me know how often I should post such that I am neither terminally online nor suspiciously off-line?
Lol, that’s not what I meant I find the weak “too/under online” comments annoying
i mean, being terminally online is objectively bad. I think we can all agree even while being guilty of it.
Look at how long they went without commenting before this lmfao
Responding in ten seconds abt how your claims would never be taken seriously for identity politics reasons is not being responsive to questions. They’re just seething attempts at pithy remarks 60% of the time.
Literally saying nobody in Latin America would take Ruy Mauro Marini’s theories seriously. What a useless suckup Twitter blowhard.
Wow you really logged in after 4 months to defend your liege 😵💫
Hudson and the rest of the https://nakedcapitalism.com/ https://wallstreetonparade.com/ Liz Warren book club are good at being finance and covid whistleblowers and reporting on JPMorgan’s Epstein dealings. Ha Joon Chang & Stephanie Kelton type books are great at defusing the ideological bomb that is neoliberalism.
As far as actual solutions for what to do with their analysis, I don’t think they see that as their job. I remember Hudson writing some UBI type thing ten years ago. They just whistleblow-blog.
What exactly does Roderic do? His website? His thinly veiled alts? I got him as a reply guy and honestly his gang is the worst. They couldn’t even deal with me pointing out the internal superexploitation of parts of the working class in the imperial core without throwing a tantrum on alts. But they just make puppy dog eyes at you if you’re over 10k. Mindless bastards
Like seriously how do you look at the situation with the fed being privatized and go well let’s wait for Liz to try to pass a bill puncturing executive golden parachutes (she’s been at this for 12 years) (also she supports apartheid)
He does write good essays, idk what else. Have you read Actually Existing Fascism or “Brainwashing?”
Brainwashing is not good lol. It’s very oversimplified and what little value it does is the blatantly obvious insight that your small business owner uncle will not be persuaded by Twitter screenshots.
It has some interesting ideas, but it is probably overrated.