No America is not backsliding into feudalism. There have literally been company towns where people were paid in script, there have been black lists to prevent people from moving jobs, there have been agreements between companies to not hire each others workers. None of it threw the country back into pre-capitalism. Even if somehow some sort of feudal arrangement emerged in America (which would require legal protection for a class of nobles, not just a group of people who are defacto protected by their money) then capitalists outside America would be able to out compete the feudalists and force open American markets once again. This is all just capitalism in new forms. This happens at least once every generation and then will happen again and again unless socialism is achieved. That's why Marx defined capitalism as the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production and not as like idk when there are really powerful rich people who can force poor people to do stuff.
Fair point Mr Dabs though I'll add that Capitalism also doesn't mean the immediate destruction of pre-capitalist forms of labor. Slavery intensified under capitalism in America's precisely because it was needed to feed cotton to the huge industrial textile mills that capitalism created. The contradictions are shouldn't confuse us. It's all a contradiction.
Nothing today is outside of capitalism. Absolutely nothing. All of the global poor are part of the capitalist system. If consumer buying power goes down to subsistence levels then those workers can be exploited for lower wages, and the cycle of accumulation begins again. A lot of things ensure accumulation. Wars are one. The state itself is another. The state, responding to demands for jobs and demands for profit, will destroy or immiserate whoever or whatever it needs to in order to keep capitalism churning as it always has done. It will build in one place and destroy in another. The barbarism you can see coming on the horizon is just capitalism recreating itself. It does that regularly every few decades.
it will similarly collapse or successfully renegotiate conditions for workers to preserve itself.
can that hurry up and happen already?
Capitalism without debt is like Christianity without Hell
lmao
I think it's just more people waking up and realizing things are deeply fucked
As always I appreciate the discussion here and I didn’t watch the video because I’ve seen him talk about this before. Varoufakis’s ideas here are limited to the imperial core, which still depends on the global south for commodity production and surplus labor extraction, also known as capitalism (or imperialism, the highest form of capitalism). Once the global south unifies against the imperial core and cuts off the flow of treats, it’s game over for capitalism (although the bourgeoisie might nuke the planet rather than surrender it to workers).
Also, different modes of production can exist together in the same time and place. Limited forms of slavery and perhaps also feudalism coexist today with capitalism in the USA (prisons) and also the UK (the nobility). Chinese people also describe China as being mixed between capitalism and socialism and I think that’s pretty fair based on my limited knowledge.
Once the global south unifies against the imperial core
what are they waiting for? The Belt & Road?
