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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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GenZedong
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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."