this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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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.
Hum... I've jumped over that part on your comment. And yeah, freedom for laborers was indeed a defining feature of capitalism. I'm not sure that puts the OP fighting against that system in a good light.
Anyway, comoditized labor is nearly dead, and the 20th century created that entire labor market oligopsony thing. "You'll never work on this city again!" was something so feared that it entered plenty of movies. Work today just does not work by the same rules as it did at the 19th century.
"Not sure fighting against feudalism and saying that in antiquity there was slavery instead puts the fight in a good light"
Do you know what you're talking about? How is commodity-labor nearly dead? What percentage of people engage in free contracts in which they exchange their labor for a wage? I'd say the vast majority.
Ok? That's not a defining feature of capitalism, ofc some things change but that's not even reflected in any Marxist literature I've read. Why do you insist we're in something fundamentally different? I feel like you haven't read on the topic