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Making Capitalism Great Again? A Critique of the “Rentier Takeover” Thesis (redsails.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

sure inaccurate phrasing worth clarifying, i did reference most of the stuff on there is reposts and translation in another comment

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