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
    ·
    1 year ago

    Mason’s critique is fair to read, but misses the mark, by a very long shot.

    Hudson was talking about the financial capital takeover of industries i.e. the financialization of industries, as opposed to Marx’s predicted industrialization of finance.

    This is the paper from Hudson (2021) that Mason was responding to: Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover

    The very first sentence of the abstract reads:

    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.

    Mason argued that Amazon, Walmart etc. are still “industries” and as such should be counted as industrial capital. But this is not what Hudson was talking about - Hudson meant the financialization of these industries leading to monopolists extracting economic rent (for example, the high inflation from 2022 was in part caused by monopolists raising prices, claiming an anticipation in energy cost increase).

    A prime example is Boeing. Is Boeing an industry? Of course, it is still the world’s leading aviation manufacturer, but the top management has since been taken over by Wall Street bankers, whose direction focuses on stock market performance, share buybacks and handing out dividends to shareholders. This management style that incessantly pursues quarterly profit inevitably leads to reckless cost-cutting and mass layoffs to pay off their shareholders. The 737 MAX scandal - which almost never occurred in Boeing’s history - was a direct consequence of such financialization process.

    Another example was Intel’s mass layoff in 2022 even when receiving billions of handout from the CHIPS Act:

    Indeed, when Vermont senator Bernie Sanders attempted to attach conditions to those subsidies — including a ban on stock buybacks, a cap on executive pay, a government equity stake, and union neutrality provisions — he was thwarted by Democratic leaders.

    At the time, Democrats blocking Sanders’s initiative were bolstered by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who insisted that if the legislation did not pass immediately, the company could move factories overseas and hold up already-planned investments.

    When lawmakers ultimately passed the bill in July, Intel abruptly began changing its rhetoric about new domestic investments: That very same day, the company announced it was cutting back on capital spending by billions of dollars, but still intended to issue a “strong and growing dividend” for shareholders.

    Mason critique missed the fact that the vast majority of American industries has been financialized to such an extent that nearly 90% of corporate income is spent on share buybacks rather than investing in capital expenditure (means of production). The financial capitalists don’t care - like parasites, once the host has been sucked dry, they will simply hop on to the next industry to feed from.