Kapitalizam 101

We live in the age of rentier capitalism. It is the crisis point of the Global Transformation, during which claims made for capitalism have been wholly undermined by a developing system that is radically different from what its advocates say. They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that they are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have a most unfree market system.

How can politicians say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for 20 years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give guaranteed income for 70 years after a person’s death? Far from trying to stop these and other negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that encourage them.

The twentieth-century income distribution system has broken down. Since the 1980s, the share of income going to labour has shrunk in most economically significant countries. Real wages on average have stagnated or fallen. Today, a tiny minority of people and corporations are accumulating vast wealth, not from ‘hard work’ or productive activity, but from rental income.

‘Rentiers’ derive income from possession of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, minerals or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’; capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant position); income from subsidies; and income of financial intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.

Standing shows in relentless detail how the institutional architecture of modern capitalism is geared to benefit rentiers. When cancer drugs are overpriced, it’s because monopolies in the form of patents are granted to private “owners” of inventions, who get rent from their manufacture. When governments break trade agreements, they can be sued, generating income for the litigating company. When you use Airbnb, you’re not part of the sharing economy but of “platform capitalism”, a term Standing uses to describe how digital platforms act as labour brokers, extracting rent from every transaction (often 20%, sometimes more). These and other new technologies have enabled the outsourcing and offshoring of production, ever greater capital mobility, and make corporations more fluid and flexible. Unlike in the past, power today lies not with corporations that control the means of production, but with those that control the “technological apparatus”.


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/26/the-corruption-of-capitalism-guy-standing-review-why-rentiers-thrive-and-work-does-not-pay

ontheotherhand wrote:Gaj Stending o rentijerskom kapitalizmu.

We live in the age of rentier capitalism. It is the crisis point of the Global Transformation, during which claims made for capitalism have been wholly undermined by a developing system that is radically different from what its advocates say. They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that they are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have a most unfree market system.

How can politicians say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for 20 years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give guaranteed income for 70 years after a person’s death? Far from trying to stop these and other negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that encourage them.

The twentieth-century income distribution system has broken down. Since the 1980s, the share of income going to labour has shrunk in most economically significant countries. Real wages on average have stagnated or fallen. Today, a tiny minority of people and corporations are accumulating vast wealth, not from ‘hard work’ or productive activity, but from rental income.

‘Rentiers’ derive income from possession of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, minerals or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’; capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant position); income from subsidies; and income of financial intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.

Standing shows in relentless detail how the institutional architecture of modern capitalism is geared to benefit rentiers. When cancer drugs are overpriced, it’s because monopolies in the form of patents are granted to private “owners” of inventions, who get rent from their manufacture. When governments break trade agreements, they can be sued, generating income for the litigating company. When you use Airbnb, you’re not part of the sharing economy but of “platform capitalism”, a term Standing uses to describe how digital platforms act as labour brokers, extracting rent from every transaction (often 20%, sometimes more). These and other new technologies have enabled the outsourcing and offshoring of production, ever greater capital mobility, and make corporations more fluid and flexible. Unlike in the past, power today lies not with corporations that control the means of production, but with those that control the “technological apparatus”.


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/26/the-corruption-of-capitalism-guy-standing-review-why-rentiers-thrive-and-work-does-not-pay

Anduril wrote:

ontheotherhand wrote:Gaj Stending o rentijerskom kapitalizmu.

Jasan argument ali zaboravlja nesto - nije samo rentijerska elita ta koja treba da nauci da sama sebi puca u nogu nego i gubitnici globalizacije koji glasaju za populiste i jos gore se upucavaju. Jedini nacin da se nesto promeni je sveobuhvatni pristup a ne nuzno uvek konfrontacija na svim frontovima.

ontheotherhand wrote:Na šta konkretno misliš pod konfrontacija na svim frontovima?

otto katz wrote:Znao sam, bogati zli! Najnovije naučno otkriće! 
Rich People Literally See the World Differently
The results “show that people who are higher in socioeconomic status have diminished neural responses to others’ pain,” the authors write. “These findings suggest that empathy, at least some early component of it, is reduced among those who are higher in status.”

they stopped 61 people on New York City streets, and asked them to put on a Google Glass device and walk around one block for about a minute, looking at whatever captured their gaze — with higher-class participants having reliably shorter “social gazes,” or the amount of time dwelling at each individual person.

William Murderface wrote:Daj, Andurile, komično je to što pišeš. Kakve jebene sindikate, ti ljudi sad nemaju ni poslove, ili imaju poslove koji ne omogućavaju sindikalno organizovanje. Uopšte ne znam čemu služi ovaj opetovani performans o "krivici" tranzicionih gubitnika. Pa ne piše Stending o krivici, jbt, nego o "institutional architectur of modern capitalism". Uopšte mi nije jasno zašto stalno iznova upadaš u moralizam.

Anduril wrote:

Pa da gubitnici globalizacije kao interesna glupa imaju itekako veliki uticaj a time i odgovornost. Slicno kao i elita.
U tom smislu bi mogli da se ugledaju na pradedove koji su se masovno politicki organizovali u sindikate.
Mogucnosti za tako nesto su danas ionako mnogo bolje i sire nego pre 100 ili 150 godina. Svakako bolje od glasanja za populisticke mesije ili soviniste.

ontheotherhand wrote:

Anduril wrote:

Pa da gubitnici globalizacije kao interesna glupa imaju itekako veliki uticaj a time i odgovornost. Slicno kao i elita.
U tom smislu bi mogli da se ugledaju na pradedove koji su se masovno politicki organizovali u sindikate.
Mogucnosti za tako nesto su danas ionako mnogo bolje i sire nego pre 100 ili 150 godina. Svakako bolje od glasanja za populisticke mesije ili soviniste.

Pa nisu baš slični odgovornost i uticaj. Oni se uvećavaju zajedno sa uticajem na politiku, a u tom poglednu radnici kao grupa/klasa su daleko od približnog.

William Murderface wrote:Ne, Andurile, niko ne poriče uticaj, ali ti nisi potegao to. Banalno je jasno, da glasači utiču na ishod izbora i referenduma, ali tvoje insistiranje na odgvornosti, od politike pravi morality play, i na kraju završava u tome da svako dobija ono što je zaslužio. Okej, onda ništa. Neka svako i dobije šta je zaslužio. Politička teodikeja.

Dvesta godina pisanja o ideologiji i o tome kako ona formira svoje subjekte i konceptalizuje njihovu percepciju sopstvenih interesa ide u slivnik, nego ćemo sad da govorimo o apsolutno slobodnim i apsolutno odgovornim aubjektima, koji su, samo da su hteli, mogli da izaberu drugačije, a pošto nisu hteli, onda su sami krivi. Daj, jbt, čemu to? Kakve lutke isteruješ tom blesavom pričom?

Anduril wrote:
Kako nisu? Gledaj Brexit, gledaj Tramp - te odluke imaju potencijal da budu tektonske a u sustini je to izvela jedna oveca interesna grupa frustriranih glasaca.

William Murderface wrote:Ma ko je uopšte pričao o jebenoj odgovornosti? Izvukao si tu priču bukvalno iz dupeta da bi prokomentarisao tekst koji se time uopšte ne bavi. Ja te pitam - zašto? Kakva je to primedba na Stendingov tekst? On uopšte ne govori o odgovornosti, bilo rentijera, bilo gubitnika tranzicije. Zašto je svaki tvoj komnetar ta priča o odgovornosti? Koju poentu isteruješ time?

Yet he sees rentiers as parasites producing nothing of value, and sometimes suggests only income earned through “hard work” can be deserved. This is an idea long out of fashion: it slips easily into a quasi-Victorian moralising distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, and a glorification of work that produces real material goods. Standing doesn’t go there, but implicitly inverts the categories to apply to a deserving and undeserving rich. It’s not capitalist profits that bother him, nor does he differentiate between the divergent interests of small and large businesses. The problem is the idle speculator who gives nothing back.

Anduril wrote:

William Murderface wrote:Ma ko je uopšte pričao o jebenoj odgovornosti? Izvukao si tu priču bukvalno iz dupeta da bi prokomentarisao tekst koji se time uopšte ne bavi. Ja te pitam - zašto? Kakva je to primedba na Stendingov tekst? On uopšte ne govori o odgovornosti, bilo rentijera, bilo gubitnika tranzicije. Zašto je svaki tvoj komnetar ta priča o odgovornosti? Koju poentu isteruješ time?

O cemu ti to?

Yet he sees rentiers as parasites producing nothing of value, and sometimes suggests only income earned through “hard work” can be deserved. This is an idea long out of fashion: it slips easily into a quasi-Victorian moralising distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, and a glorification of work that produces real material goods. Standing doesn’t go there, but implicitly inverts the categories to apply to a deserving and undeserving rich. It’s not capitalist profits that bother him, nor does he differentiate between the divergent interests of small and large businesses. The problem is the idle speculator who gives nothing back.

Mozda ti nisi ukapirao ali drugi jesu - odgovornost lezi jasno na strani rentijera i politicara koji im to omogucavaju.
Covek ima i jasne recepte (basic income, democratic wealth fund) koje treba nekako politicki nekako ostvariti.
Kako to ostvariti sa masom politickim neodgovornih glasaca koji resenje vide u zidovima?

Significance of Veblen for Today

As the heirs to classical political economy and the German historical school, the American institutionalists retained rent theory and its corollary idea of unearned income. More than any other institutionalist, Veblen emphasized the dynamics of banks financing real estate speculation and Wall Street maneuvering to organize monopolies and trusts. Yet despite the popularity of his writings with the reading public, his contribution has remained isolated from the academic mainstream, and he did not leave a “school.” The rentier strategy has been to make rent extraction invisible, not the center of attention it occupied in classical political economy. One barely sees today a quantification of the degree to which overhead charges for rent, insurance and interest are rising above the cost of production, even as this prices financialized economies out of world markets.

The narrowing of Chicago-style monetarism and neoliberalism has left the economics discipline in much the state that Max Planck applied to physics from Maxwell to Einstein: Progress occurs one funeral at a time. The old conservatives die off, freeing the way for more progressive successors to take the steering wheel. But what makes today’s economics different is that it actually would help to look backward, to the epoch before the financial sector and its allied rentier interests hijacked the discipline. The most systematic analysis of this process was that of Veblen nearly a century ago. It remains sufficiently relevant that Marxists and more heterodox critics have incorporated his theorizing into their worldview.