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?

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    I did and agree with you. Besides their vast sums of investment from banks some of these corporations even have their own banking systems, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of their rent-seeking enterprises are the securities for their financial operations. What I disagree with the author (and I believe I agree with you here) is that the financial capital has in fact superseded and dominated the industrial capital, in which the latter has gone from being an useful tool and ally in the 20th century to basically an afterthought in the 21st.

    I think the confusion may have happened because I did a long double negative there "I fail to see [...] that finance hasn't superseded industrial" because I was specifically disagreeing with the author, who was himself sort of disagreeing with the conclusions of Lenin's "Imperialism."