David Graeber, OuiShare: The Era of Predatory Bureaucratization
Merged private-public bureaucracies have one effect: extracting rents. Graeber argues that this is closer to feudalism in form, something we’ve used as a figure of speech for some time — corporate feudalism.
Also some insights on the difficulty of driving change between movements and institutions.
We are living in the era of predatory bureaucratization. What percentage of the typical American household revenue is directly extracted by the financial sector? Oddly, this is the one economic statistic you cannot easily get, but when economists make estimations, it falls somewhere between 20% and 40%. Most of the profits are not coming from the industry anymore. Yet, when we think of the history of capitalism, we think of industries, wage labor… Clearly, that’s not what we have today. There is no more reason to believe that capitalism will be around forever. For centuries, the Roman Empire was able to absorb barbarian tribes, to draw them into the Roman system, to give their chiefs titles and offices… And one day, they forgot to give Alaric a promotion, which got him pretty upset. We all know what happened then. It’s permanent until it’s not, every contradiction is absorbed until it isn’t.
Wasting your breath here. This election is NOT gonna be about economics.
We’re limited to topics related to the election? Since when?
Everyone would rather dump on the “others”, it seems to me. On non-economic matters. Any skepticism about what our side is up to is met with accusations of trolling.
A side piece to Mr. Graeber’s.
Things that in all previous eras of capitalism the elite desired to be as cheap as possible – to ease wage pressures – are now made as expensive as possible, and capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.
If we do not break this cycle, you can easily see capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism.
The growth engine is the central bank, pumping money into the system; and the state, propping up effectively insolvent banks. The typical entrepreneur is the migrant labour exploiter; the innovator someone who invents a way of extracting rent from low-wage people – like Uber or AirBnB.
https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/postcapitalism-and-the-city-6dda80bc201d#.d5q3lpk9y
Did you see Bob Rubin’s piece in WaPo? That is what we are likely to get.
The growth engine never was the central bank, it was in part whatever banking system was exending loose credit. And it was the “internal improvements” part of the royal or governmental budget.
What created capitalism is when the lords of the manor decided that they had little obligation to the rest of society and enclosed common land and went to export production. And then invested in manufactories.
The new feudalism comes without any sense of feudal obligation on the part of the new masters. You’re on your own except to the degree that you agree transitory servitude.