Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
Books like this combine bad history with analysis what is happening now. This amounts to a badly researched opinion piece at most.<p>&gt; Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism?<p>Ah, no sorry. That is not correct. That Communism was supposed to come after Capitalism was a believe held by guess who, COMMUNISTS. And that believe was based on a bunch books by a German philosopher who neither had the correct view of history, and then he drew even wronger conclusions from it. Basically making up Communism as a Utopian so he had a reason to criticism Capitalism, as Capitalism was clearly better then anything else to have an alternative he had to invent a utopia. That worked out great for everybody.<p>&gt; If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism<p>How about were reject historical determinism itself?<p>&gt; The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.”<p>Except that tech giants and other big companies don&#x27;t have global armies that enact genocide on other nations. Or care what you do with your life, what religion you are and so on. Or force you in any way to use their service of the alternative produce from another service, or the open source version. Or are in any way even close to as powerful as a nation state. So except for all the things that really matter, its the same.<p>&gt; he result, then, of free choice, growth, and preferential attachment is hierarchy, power law distributions where those at the top have vastly more than those at the bottom.<p>And those on Top then get replaced by something else when a new fade happens comes by. IBM will dominate everything. Microsoft will dominate everything. Netflix will dominate everything. MySpace will dominate everything.<p>Basic Market Process Theory.<p>These structures are only there as long as people want them and they are continually reshaped. And they are continuously and dynamically reshaped because people have free choice and the providers have no real powerful way to enforce them. The only power they have is to say &#x27;use this service completely or not at all&#x27;. Will governments had the power to say, use this service or we kill your children.<p>&gt; Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it.<p>So we need government centralization against the peoples will to create rules to stop people from voluntary centralization around what they want.<p>&gt; Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism documents the neoliberal strategy of undermining the authority of the nation-state over its economy in the interest of advancing global trade.<p>How horrible, they power is taken away from dictators and government burocrates who have done such a brilliant job organizing their economics.<p>We should make it as easy as possible for dictators to systematically exploit their people and natural resources and put all power in the government. That is much preferable to people being &#x27;controlled&#x27; by the evils of global trade.<p>&gt; maintaining the competitiveness of national economies has become “a top policy concern.”<p>What, being efficient has become a &#x27;top policy concern&#x27; for governments, how horrifying. We need to stop this and restore systematic inefficiency.<p>&gt; Competitiveness has replaced competition and growth as a state goal ... the dismantling of monopolies but “to aid specific economic actors — those who are best positioned to perform well in the global competition for profit.”<p>This is just a false. States sometimes push some industries, but mostly because of geo-strategy, not for profits. In actuality those industries most heavily pushed are often not those that produce those profits.<p>Its the opposite, those that produce profits, finance those that geo-strategy things your country should have.<p>And honestly, if your great fear is &#x27;the state bureaucracy&#x27; will perfectly figure out what companies can be the most profitable and smartly invest in those, you are ignorant of all history.<p>&gt; “public authority handpicks the companies on which to bestow this privilege.”<p>This is the same old fear that people had in the 70s about Japan. Find a new slant, this one is old and clearly wrong.<p>Ignoring that pretty much all of these problems have existed for a long time and the solutions actually do exist already and have been discussed since the 1800s. Those states that do a good job implementing those solutions are still doing well, and others don&#x27;t.<p>&gt; Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants.<p>I really do feel like peasant who was not allowed to leave his village under threat of death because Google provides free Gmail. This is so incredibly stupid and ignorant it actually blows my mind.