- cross-posted to:
- marxism
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?
Adding to my last comment, the rentier economy we live in right now is a product of markets being monopolized by a handful of cartels.
My idea is that the products the different industries offer have reached the "diminishing returns" stage. This means that in order to make an improvement to a commodity, you have to exponentially invest in development. Industries have to invest more in development, for a smaller quantitative improvement. Think of moore's law in computing power, you can't keep doubling the computing power by just putting more transistors, we inevitably reach a physical limit. This is a building up on the falling rate of profit theory developed by Marx and the classical economist.
So in order to deal with this dialectic problem, industries have to either change paradigm and innovate, completely revolutionizing current processes of production (destructive creativity concept), or milk their cows, aka charge more for the same/less (bad and lazy and the reality we live in).
Before monopolies, industries couldnt just charge more for less because other ones would take over so you did see a golden age of innovation/entrepeneurship, but now that the markets have been inevitably conquered it is not happening. So in order to further progress society we have to unfetter the productive forces from the hands of the finance capitalists.
Edit: ill try writing a blog entry on this subject to improve it, criticism is welcome
Varoufakis: "Capitalism's changed so much it can't be called capitalism anymore."
Mason: "Capitalism hasn't changed. Your eyes are deceiving you if it looks like it has to you!"
People who read Lenin: "Capitalism can change a lot without abandoning its core components and ceasing to be capitalism. What you are seeing is the tendency for monopolies to form and innovation to thusly fall."
(i couldnt find a good meme template)
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Analogous to China pre-Deng: they managed to develop the relations of production as far as they could go with the then-forces of production. To further develop the relations, they had to develop the forces, hence the need to open up the economy. Eventually they will hit another wall. Unlike the west, they'll be ready for it.
The west has developed it's forces of production for decades/centuries. But it's relations of production have lagged behind. All the elements of production can develop on their own, but only so far; at that point, the other elements have to catch up. Right now, as you point out, the relations of imperialism are holding back it's forces.
Under different management, the imperialist machinery – or, rather, the forces behind the imperialist machinery – could propel humanity into a gilded age that's hard to imagine. Like the China model but rolled out on a world scale.
But this can only work if the relations of production develop so that imperialists are no longer in control. Because they will do daft shit like asset strip productive companies and empty pension pots before disappearing with the cash.
David Harvey likes to quote footnote 4 in chapter 15 of Capital when talking about this kind of thing (I'll edit this comment to add the quote). The footnote includes six(?) relations, each of which develops alongside the others.
It's not an exhaustive list. But it implies what you state: we've developed about as far as we can under the finance capitalists; to develop further, they can't be in charge.
Essentially, I agree with you and I look forward to the blog post.
Edit:
Marx
(emphasis added):
Before his time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.