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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] 5 points 1 year ago

Hudson's work is a modern contextual embedding of that kind of analysis. Some of the important developments addressed are floating currency, dollarization, and a truly hegemonic global empire that marries capital and the state, systematically forcing any country that wants to trade with anyone else to sign up for terms that lead to their own destruction. An extension of this analysis looks at how imperialism has developed beyond concentrating industry in the imperialist countries, and even concentrating services and secondary production in imperialist countries, to maintain its income primarily through military and financial weapons (echoing Lenin but being greater in degree and speed). He goes further to suggest that this creates an economic decay in the imperial core, but not countries like China that try to limit financialization, and then basically leaves it there. The basic message following up the analysis is just, "imperialists are losers" lol.