• volodya_ilich@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It’s still a system with an owning class and a working class.

      Hum… So, capitalism is what? 5000 years old?

      • volodya_ilich@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        I specifically made a mention to free markets, and to workers selling their labor as a commodity, in my comment.

        • marcos@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          So… About 5000 years? (I guess more, I don’t know much about Ancient history.)

          • volodya_ilich@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            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.