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?

  • alicirce@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think the insanity is the extent to which he is terminally online, not necessarily that he will reply to anyone.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      i mean, being terminally online is objectively bad. I think we can all agree even while being guilty of it.

    • WayneBarloweFan@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.