"It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all who are directly concerned in the management of capital."

Also if someone could eli5 finance capital, that would be helpful. ADHD brain makes it hard to read theory

  • furryanarchy [comrade/them,they/them]
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    4 years ago

    Basically money is kinda bullshit under capitalism, and everything is disconnected and convoluted.

    Stockholders are usually who owns a company, but with the exception of a few out of many thousands, most don't actually do anything to run the company. The ownership of the company is separated from how it's run.

    People who run hedge funds and own lots of stocks and bonds don't actually have anything to do with what those investments are supposed to represent. If you bought a ton of Tesla stock years ago and sold it now, you would have made a lot of money, but off of what? Tesla is worth a lot of money, but in actual physical terms its basically worthless compared to it's money value. It's shuffling around paperwork that leads to Tesla being able to take out more loans than they would have if it didn't happen, but loans themselves are kinda nebulous as well

    The money landlords receive doesn't have anything to do with anything actually being created. Not just in the sense they are leeches, but the money comes from nothing. They aren't receiving some sort of physical good that is worth something and is useful, it's just money skimmed off of wages, with don't have much to do with the actual value the worker who receives them is creating. You may say "aren't they getting value from what the worker is creating"? No, not really. Rent is always set as high as can be tolerated by the person renting, it isn't set by anything tied to actual physical production of anything. A business owner is receiving the value of what the business creates, landlords receive money from convoluted bullshit that is basically nothing when it comes to it.

    Ultimately, yes the landlord spends money on things workers create, but there are so many steps in between with distortions of how value is counted it is all a huge mess that is only loosely tied to reality.

    To sum it up, under capitalism the systems governing capital are so loosely and indirectly tied to actual production of useful things and to each other that nothing is connected that should be.

  • DutchGuy [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    That the people who control the money (bankers and banks and financial manager who are mostly paid in salary) don't own the money they invest.

  • emizeko [they/them]
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    4 years ago

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm#:~:text=It%20is%20characteristic%20of%20capitalism,is%20separated%20from%20the%20entrepreneur

    here it is in context

    EDIT: based on the downvote I guess I should have put some sort of disclaimer that I was posting it for everyone else so they could try to read more around it, I know you know where it is.