OP gone, wanted to repost bc I link to this as a source:

The neoliberalized American economy since the 1970s has been propped up mostly by the so-called FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate - a terminology coined by the economist Michael Hudson) which are essentially non-productive sectors that do not produce real goods and services. This is a prominent feature of finance capitalism devouring industrial capitalism:

The strength of its currency is derived from real estate ownership (land value), stocks and bonds market, intellectual property rights and licensing, financial derivatives etc. Now, you might think all these are virtual and therefore the US dollar is worthless. But no, this is what the world (held under the gunpoint by the US empire) has decided to calculate their GDP and currency exchange rate, which then allows the US to wreck other economies in the Global South using the strength of its currency, maintaining dominance over them and essentially extorting free lunches from all over the world, as most of the real goods and services today are produced by the Global South countries.

In other words, the financial empire is more like a landlord who does not have to work for a single day but can get everything he wants simply through extracting rent and concession. The US empire is doing this on a global scale against other countries.

While the Imperial Core enjoys the benefits of cheap goods and services from the Global South, this does not mean that their working class truly benefits from it. Instead, their exploitation became a form of debt slavery. Wages are kept low so workers have to borrow money to sustain themselves, which transforms their class character into one of debtor.

This kind of financialized capitalism means that unlike the late 19th and early-mid 20th centry, which was dominated by industrial capital, the working class in the Imperial Core today has their labor tied to debt (mortgage, rent, credit cards, student loans, medical bills etc.) rather than to industrial productivity, which was a key argument from Marx that proletariat is a uniquely revolutionary class because being freed from the land under the feudal arrangement, the labor performed by the proletariat is now directly tied to industrial profit under capitalism. The capitalists had to rely on labor to compete with other capitalists in order to make profit.

It has been described that the Imperial Core today under finance capitalism is more like a neo-feudal society rather than the industrial capitalism of the previous centuries. And this is largely true: just like the serfs in the feudal era, whose labor was tied to their land, the working class in the Imperial Core today work bullshit jobs to earn money to pay off their debt, which is what was necessary to survive in the first place. The manufacturing and service sectors pale in comparison to the rest of the Global South (and especially against China).

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I will look for the thread, I am hoping to find the time to organize a local Socialist reading club and this sounds like a great potential text to lead with.

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