Michael Hudson argues that the industrial capitalism of a previous era has given way to a new form of financial capitalism. Today’s financial capitalists, unlike capitalists in Marx’s day, now claim their share of the surplus by passively extracting interest or economic rents…

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?

  • Kaplya
    ·
    8 months ago

    Literally the very first sentence from the abstract of Hudson’s paper that Mason was critiquing:

    Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism—the landlords, bankers, and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. However, that reform movement failed.

    I think Mason misunderstood what Hudson was talking about here. Monopolists are indeed extracting economic rent without producing real value.