what do y’all think of this? It makes some good points and Micheal Hudson is probably not right, but I have one criticism to make. One of his arguments that the richest people are still industrial capitalists (because they started businesses that do stuff), not finance capitalists, but as Cory Doctorow points out, those companies are basically just rentiers at this point. Amazon makes most of its money hosting other businesses on their site, “Meta” makes most of its money hosting being a middleman connecting advertisers and unpaid content creators poorly. Thus, it seems at least the emperial core has increased rentierism. This doesn’t mean it’s not built on peripheral industry and that reindustrializing the west would benefit average people, but it does seem to be good news about the decline of empire. Other thoughts?
I feel like Hudson work here is just a simplificaton of Lenin’s book “Imperialism, highest stage of capitalism”. To butcher some of it, finance capitalism took over when banks turned big enough (monopolies), they had access to the entire money capital of all the industrial capitalists.
I will write my full thoughs later.
Hudson’s work is a modern contextual embedding of that kind of analysis. Some of the important developments addressed are floating currency, dollarization, and a truly hegemonic global empire that marries capital and the state, systematically forcing any country that wants to trade with anyone else to sign up for terms that lead to their own destruction. An extension of this analysis looks at how imperialism has developed beyond concentrating industry in the imperialist countries, and even concentrating services and secondary production in imperialist countries, to maintain its income primarily through military and financial weapons (echoing Lenin but being greater in degree and speed). He goes further to suggest that this creates an economic decay in the imperial core, but not countries like China that try to limit financialization, and then basically leaves it there. The basic message following up the analysis is just, “imperialists are losers” lol.
I mentioned that in a comment below. I feel like the title suggests that he could make a good point about Lenin’s argument showing that you can’t return from finance capitalism, but instead the piece is just trying to say capitalism has always been exactly the same in terms of industry and finance, which is simply not true.