this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
The system we have right now isn't accurately described by "capitalism", and reusing the same word that describes the industrialization process is really tone-deaf.
How is this not capitalism? It may not be free market capitalism since an increasingly small bunch of rich people at the top have way too much power over everything, but that's just what happens when the game of Monopoly nears its inevitable end.
For any reasonable measure, capitalism died at the 20th century. The thing around right now is a completely different organization than what existed from the 17th to the 19th one.
Just for a start, making a lot of stuff won't make you rich. If you just get capital, invest in some random production, and go to market, you'll almost certainly fail.
But also, the state hands capital down everywhere; freedom of initiative is severely restricted everywhere; most of what we call "capital" isn't past produced value. The last one hints at calling the current system "rentism".
You're wrong in your analysis. The system hasn't qualitatively changed. It's still a system with an owning class and a working class. The difference is that capital now, as you say, mostly revalorizes in the financial sector instead of in the industrial sector. But capitalism is called capitalism, not industrialism.
Lenin already talked about this in his 1916 treatise "Imperialism: the highest form of capitalism". He describes the process of concentration of capital that took place over the 19th and especially the beginnings of the 20th century, the consolidation of trusts and cartels, and the financialization of the economy. You're describing nothing new, he calls this phase of capitalism "imperialism". But it is a phase of capitalism, the social relations haven't been changed, workers still have to sell their labor force as a commodity, goods and services are exchanged in the free market, and the owners of capital, be it financial or industrial, rake the surplus value from the workers.
Hum... So, capitalism is what? 5000 years old?
I specifically made a mention to free markets, and to workers selling their labor as a commodity, in my comment.
So... About 5000 years? (I guess more, I don't know much about Ancient history.)
For all of feudalism, serfs (majority of the population) worked the fields not for a wage on a free contract (i.e. commodity labor), but bounded legally to the land by the local aristocrat. That's why it wasn't capitalism.