Making Capitalism Great Again? A Critique of the “Rentier Takeover” Thesis
Making Capitalism Great Again? A Critique of the “Rentier Takeover” Thesis
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?
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Hudson and the rest of the https://nakedcapitalism.com/ https://wallstreetonparade.com/ Liz Warren book club are good at being finance and covid whistleblowers and reporting on JPMorgan's Epstein dealings. Ha Joon Chang & Stephanie Kelton type books are great at defusing the ideological bomb that is neoliberalism.
As far as actual solutions for what to do with their analysis, I don't think they see that as their job. I remember Hudson writing some UBI type thing ten years ago. They just whistleblow-blog.
What exactly does Roderic do? His website? His thinly veiled alts? I got him as a reply guy and honestly his gang is the worst. They couldn't even deal with me pointing out the internal superexploitation of parts of the working class in the imperial core without throwing a tantrum on alts. But they just make puppy dog eyes at you if you're over 10k. Mindless bastards
Like seriously how do you look at the situation with the fed being privatized and go well let's wait for Liz to try to pass a bill puncturing executive golden parachutes (she's been at this for 12 years) (also she supports apartheid)
He does write good essays, idk what else. Have you read Actually Existing Fascism or “Brainwashing?”
Brainwashing is not good lol. It's very oversimplified and what little value it does is the blatantly obvious insight that your small business owner uncle will not be persuaded by Twitter screenshots.
It has some interesting ideas, but it is probably overrated.
I remember Hudson writing some UBI type thing ten years ago.
Just to point out, Hudson has literally called UBI a far right, neoliberal, Milton Friedman-esque platform.
Hudson is a co-founder of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and the MMT people are relentless in the critique of UBI (and rightly so), and promote Federal Jobs Guarantee as the solution forward.
Yea fair lol I'll link to the paper I was talking abt with Charles Goodhardt. I'm just calling it that because it reminded me 💀💀💀
Yeah you can tell a lot from how people pick fights and Roderic picks really stupid ones.