No America is not backsliding into feudalism. There have literally been company towns where people were paid in script, there have been black lists to prevent people from moving jobs, there have been agreements between companies to not hire each others workers. None of it threw the country back into pre-capitalism. Even if somehow some sort of feudal arrangement emerged in America (which would require legal protection for a class of nobles, not just a group of people who are defacto protected by their money) then capitalists outside America would be able to out compete the feudalists and force open American markets once again. This is all just capitalism in new forms. This happens at least once every generation and then will happen again and again unless socialism is achieved. That's why Marx defined capitalism as the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production and not as like idk when there are really powerful rich people who can force poor people to do stuff.
Fair point Mr Dabs though I'll add that Capitalism also doesn't mean the immediate destruction of pre-capitalist forms of labor. Slavery intensified under capitalism in America's precisely because it was needed to feed cotton to the huge industrial textile mills that capitalism created. The contradictions are shouldn't confuse us. It's all a contradiction.
Nothing today is outside of capitalism. Absolutely nothing. All of the global poor are part of the capitalist system. If consumer buying power goes down to subsistence levels then those workers can be exploited for lower wages, and the cycle of accumulation begins again. A lot of things ensure accumulation. Wars are one. The state itself is another. The state, responding to demands for jobs and demands for profit, will destroy or immiserate whoever or whatever it needs to in order to keep capitalism churning as it always has done. It will build in one place and destroy in another. The barbarism you can see coming on the horizon is just capitalism recreating itself. It does that regularly every few decades.
No America is not backsliding into feudalism. There have literally been company towns where people were paid in script, there have been black lists to prevent people from moving jobs, there have been agreements between companies to not hire each others workers. None of it threw the country back into pre-capitalism. Even if somehow some sort of feudal arrangement emerged in America (which would require legal protection for a class of nobles, not just a group of people who are defacto protected by their money) then capitalists outside America would be able to out compete the feudalists and force open American markets once again. This is all just capitalism in new forms. This happens at least once every generation and then will happen again and again unless socialism is achieved. That's why Marx defined capitalism as the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production and not as like idk when there are really powerful rich people who can force poor people to do stuff.
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Fair point Mr Dabs though I'll add that Capitalism also doesn't mean the immediate destruction of pre-capitalist forms of labor. Slavery intensified under capitalism in America's precisely because it was needed to feed cotton to the huge industrial textile mills that capitalism created. The contradictions are shouldn't confuse us. It's all a contradiction.
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Nothing today is outside of capitalism. Absolutely nothing. All of the global poor are part of the capitalist system. If consumer buying power goes down to subsistence levels then those workers can be exploited for lower wages, and the cycle of accumulation begins again. A lot of things ensure accumulation. Wars are one. The state itself is another. The state, responding to demands for jobs and demands for profit, will destroy or immiserate whoever or whatever it needs to in order to keep capitalism churning as it always has done. It will build in one place and destroy in another. The barbarism you can see coming on the horizon is just capitalism recreating itself. It does that regularly every few decades.
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can that hurry up and happen already?