Absolutely bizarre. I mean, Bezos' fortune comes from exploited Amazon workers, but at least there's an actual business there — both the retail logistics oligopoly and running a substantial proportion of the modern Internet's infrastructure. Musk owns... a small car company and a vanity project involving rockets?
Bezos wealth is built on capital development and worker exploitation. Musk has made money that way, but he's mostly just benefitting from the Ponzi scheme that is the stock market. He embodies the concept of progress out of the end of history as liberals imagine it: suave geniuses technologizing our way to safety.
Bezos wealth is built on capital development and worker exploitation.
And creating an oligopolic platform that pressures as many other businesses as possible into giving him a cut of their profits if they aren't driven out of the market outright. Amazon is a good example of what Luxemburg remarked about the petit bourgeoisie - that they regrow and get mowed down regularly, like a lawn, and that the haute bourgeoisie feeds on that process.
Yeah good point. There's a lot more nuance we could go into to help explain how Bezos and musk have taken advantage of the political possibilities within capitalism.
Absolutely, and i think he's a very good example of how capitalism has evolved since the days of Marx and Lenin, how we've seen the move away from industrial production to just dominating markets with your platform that is a driver behind capitalism today.
Musk likewise shows a key aspect of the contemporary state of capitalism. He's just the guy who happens to be most successful (not: best) at accruing more and more capital through acts of mere bullshitting, without having more stuff produced in return. He's powerpoint engineering incarnate, has become a black hole for investors simply because he's exceeded a critical mass of already having tons of capital.
ya, when it's no longer about owning the means of production, is it really still capitalism ... or maybe something worse? Monopolizing digital platforms and extracting value from the flows of information is a whole new kind of exploitation. There's many similarities, but it's not the same old thing anymore.
I mean, it's about owning capital, i'd say that is still capitalism. Moving away from just owning the means of production and more and more towards finance etc. was something that Marx correctly predicted for capitalism, the beginnings of that process where already visible when the dude was alive, even though he could obviously not foresee how technological developments a century and a half later would shape and speed up that process.
I'm not trying to critique Marx here. Just trying to encourage folks to engage with material reality in the present.
No worries, i get that and it's a good idea to do just that. Merely saying that from a superficial glance, i personaly would say "yup, that's still capitalism", but i'm about as far from being good at macroeconomics as it gets.
if you want to get some more of this perspective, it is based off ideas from McKenzie Wark
here's some videos
shorter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiV0wS_in-4
longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wBZVEnqocI
investing in tesla is the way to express climate anxiety and hope for a miracle, he is the vessel for our dreams
this is why I'm afraid to short it
people aren't holding it for analytic reasons, they're holding it like a binky
don't want to get too lookist here but this man can afford to have a haircut that doesn't provoke laughter
Some people just have a combination of head shape and hair structure that doesn't combine super well.
Alternatively, it may just be doing the Boris Johnson thing where you have a stupid hairdo on purpose to hide how much of a ratbastard you are.
