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   ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 31-Oct-2024 06:37:24 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

   Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general.

   Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.

   #capitalism #imperialism #socialism #communism #monopoly

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Thursday, 31-Oct-2024 06:37:23 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     'been reading about that, but I come out with the distinct impression that the emergence of imperialism and monopolies came about when feudalism fused with capitalism and defeated competition. this thought has been somewhat hard to explain, but it seems to explain to me a lot of the problems that we often (mis?)assign to capitalism, and that varoufakis is now IMHO correctly reassigning to (techno)feudalism
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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Nov-2024 06:50:48 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva

     @lxo

     Feudalism has nothing to do with the emergence of imperialism in capitalism. The emergence of imperialism is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism once capitalist nations have exhausted the markets in their own country and must then expand to other countries to use their markets and resources. I would recommend reading Lenin's "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism" for more insight on how imperialism emerges from capitalism.
     https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 01-Nov-2024 06:50:48 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     I've just read it, and it was reading it that I sort of confirmed my theory, as more and more facts I wasn't aware of that he pointed out fit it perfectly. but it's not like a significant change in doctrine, it's just a different way of understanding big capital: it has *always* been feudal, in the sense that it doesn't really produce anything, it's just rent extraction in disguise. capitalism was born and defended on rent-free grounds, but it had the seeds for regrowth of feudalism at its very top from the beginning, because the prototypical big capitalists, those who only invest and extract and reinvest capital (contrasting with the small capitalists, that need to work in their own small businesses and get exploited by the big ones about as much as other workers) are essentially feudal lords in at least some aspects of their power and rent extraction.
     so I've come to the conclusion that feudalism fought back and swallowed capitalism, and lenin describes how that happened for the first time. now I need to study later history to understand how anti-trust law and regulations came to be and to restore some competition for a few decades after WWII, but then feudalism swallowed capitalism all over again. I'm not sure whether it's cyclic (it could be one of the economic cycles that marx wrote about), or a structure that feudal lords could consider retaining indefinitely like soldier boots on our faces forever, but... (TBC)
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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 01-Nov-2024 07:00:57 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     ... understanding the opposition between big capital (feudal lords) and small enterpreneurs (capitalist-wannabe proletariat), and how big capital exploits and seduces small enterpreneurs with a dream that's about as unachievable for them as it is for any other members of the worker class, was an insight that I was missing before, and this way of looking at big capital as a chimera of feudal lords with the prototypical top-hatted capitalists helped me see and understand some historical and economic processes that seemed a little off to be before it. now, it's clear to me that the literature covers that and understand that, much better than I do, so to me in the end it was sort of a matter of nomenclature, of rearranging my mental symbols to match the language that others use, while I phase out my own old even more limited understandings and conceptual framework. but what if this notion turns out to be useful to others? highlighting the rent-seeking behaviors that varoufakis drew my attention to, that have been present since the inception of capitalism, at first as something that scholars were very critical to, but that later came to be perceived as part of capitalism, seems far more of a break and fundamental corruption of capitalism than ML literature seems to give it credit for, even if only as an idealized mental model. disagree as you wish, but it works for me; I'll probably have to write a book about it some day ;-)
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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Nov-2024 07:04:39 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva

     @lxo

     Did you and I read the same book? Lenin doesn't mention feudalism in any way, similar to what you're describing in the book. He specifically refers to imperialism, a.k.a finance capitalism, a.k.a monopoly capitalism, as emerging from free market capitalism. I'm beginning to think you are using a completely different definition of feudalism than the contemporary definition because this theory of yours makes no sense otherwise.

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 01-Nov-2024 07:33:57 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     we probably read the same book indeed, but I read it under the light of what I learned from varoufakis about the nature of feudalism that has become dominant in technofeudalism. I've observed that in various ways it was already there. it's not that lenin called it feudalism, he called it monopolies, imperialism, but the key aspect of feudalism (according to my understanding of what I heard varoufakis say in a few speeches and interviews; I'm yet to read the book about it) were clearly (to me) dominating and swallowing the notion of rent-free capitalism that adam smith and his peers wrote about and defended. there's certainly some autistic separation of concepts going on here, but I'm growing convinced that this separation is useful for historical-materialism analysis of past and present, even more so because I keep finding more and more of those key concepts in the literature, though often using different terms. (but I'm not very much bound by terms; I don't read these things in all languages I speak, so I invariably come up with my own translations, and they don't match the official translations in the literature. people often make the mistake of assuming that this means I don't grasp the concepts, or even that I haven't read; words, as surface representations, are more fluid in my mind, concepts are the harder core)
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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Nov-2024 08:34:22 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva

     @lxo

     Capitalism and feudalism are completely different things that can't be equated in the way you're attempting. Capitalism, consisting of wage labor and the commodification of goods, are completely different from feudal economies based on serfdom and land tenure. I see that you pointed out similarities between the two, but none of the similarities justify calling imperialist capitalism feudalism since, even regarding the similarities, they are still completely different systems.

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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 02:40:02 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • doctorow
     I'm not attempting to equate them at all. what I'm trying to say is that even the good things that philosophers who wrote in support of capitalism wrote about have long been left behind, they're in a distant past. those good things were replaced by rent-seeking behaviors that economists consider key properties of feudalism, and that early capitalists fought tooth and nail. owning businesses without working on them is rent-seeking. pursuing monopolies has rent-seeking as its primary goal. colonization has been essentially about rent-seeking, with additional aspects of serfdom and land tenure. so I perceive these movements described by lenin as feudalism striking back and defeating capitalist dominance (capitalism as described by adam smith), and replacing it with a chimera of that capitalism and feudalism value extraction strategies. contemporary writings by @doctorow and by yanis varoufakis reinforce this understanding of mine about the workings of this monstrous chimera. what I'm not saying is that capitalism, even during the early days in which it fought rent-seeking, got entirely replaced. the exploitation of workers has remained, even if their work has now been redirected, from creating products for sale and extraction of the surplus, to creating bait to seek rent from others. workers, consumers, paying customers, competitors are all targets for rent seeking. that's a far cry from the rent-free market with regulated competition that early capitalism scholars wrote about.
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     ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭ (radical_egocom@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 03:00:09 JST ☭ 𝗖 𝗔 𝗧 ☭

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva

     @lxo

     I'm still not seeing the utility in using the word "feudalim" to refer to imperialist capitalism. While there are properties of imperialist capitalism that are similar to those of feudalism, they're still two completely different systems with properties that arose under different conditions. Imperialist capitalism and its properties already have names, and using the word "feudalism" to refer to it or its properties adds unnecessary confusion to conversations about imperialist capitalism.

     Cory Doctorow, Jure Repinc :linux: :kde: and Steve Conklin and 4 others repeated this.
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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 04:33:48 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     what I've found is that different people assign very different meanings to such loaded and heavily targeted by propaganda terms as capitalism, socialism, and communism. to my neurodivergent mind, that's very upsetting, so I set out to seek names to the different aspects I find people appreciating and criticizing
     
     but there's more: one of the oldest tricks in the holy book of fooling people is overloading. capitalism started out as one set of concepts that a number of scholars wrote about, but what we're living in today isn't that any more. people who go to those books looking for enlightenment about capitalism are either going to find praise for something that no longer exists, or criticism that applies only to a small part of it
     
     there's a recent name for remaking a service so as to extract value from it more efficiently, and people are fooled into thinking of it as still the same service. if it got a different name, they wouldn't remain as attached to it.
     
     anyway, what I'm saying is that once capitalism entered the imperialistic phase, that was enshittification of capitalism. which is not to say that it wasn't already full of shit before, just that it got significantly worse.
     
     that can be objectively measurable, as lenin presented, and it's such a departure that I no longer see it as capitalism with a twist, but as feudalism with capitalism practices. feudalism, originally, seems to have been mostly about sustaining rather than expanding. capitalism brought the notion of investing to expanding capital exponentially, that marx wrote about. fusing rent seeking through land control and serfdom with exponential expansion of capital yields imperialistic colonialism.
     
     but these feudal lords that became dominant under this chimera still entice enterpreneurs with bait of riches that are no longer available, because we no longer live in that capitalism that scholars wrote about, it's multiple-times enshittified capitalism
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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 05:17:56 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • Cory Doctorow
     • doctorow
     @doctorow (or should I say @pluralistic?) has correctly IMHO diagnosed that capitalists hate capitalism, but that's because those are misidentified as capitalists, they're actually feudal lords in their rent-seeking and serfdom-cultivating behaviors, though they are capitalists in their worker-hiring and capital-expansion behaviors. it's a chimera. whereas in that phrase, capitalism refers to the original scholar definition of capitalism, in which enforced competition, and rejection of monopolies/rents, promote progress, drive prices down, and promote the circulation of goods and money, while exploiting workers to extract surplus value.
     
     those days are over. nowadays, top mislabeled capitalists are feudal lords, the petit bourgoises are hardly distinguishable from the proletariat and need to work to stand a chance of staying afloat among the big rent-seeking sharks (landlords, banks, larger competitors, and other rent-seeking monopolists), and labor is represented as about to become obsolete, so the dominant class won't even need workers to extract surplus value, I suppose they expect it's coming from rents instead.
     
     it's only so much use to look at the power dynamics that were prevalent back when the dominant class needed workers. the solutions prescribed for that scenario don't necessarily apply to what we have today. the context changed, so the solutions may need to be changed as well.
     
     I guess a lot of people much smarter than myself have also long arrived at this conclusion, and have been busy working out newer solutions. hopefully I'll run into them instead of having to figure it out by myself ;-)
     Aaron In Minnesota, Jure Repinc :linux: :kde: and Brian Smith and 3 others like this.
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     Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶 (a_cubed@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 02-Nov-2024 07:05:53 JST Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶

     in reply to

     • Alexandre Oliva
     • Cory Doctorow

     @lxo @pluralistic UBI is the primary proposed solution. Economists have email been writing about this since at least the 90s.