I remember back in the reddit days telling people that the EU doesn’t have trillion dollar tech megacorps because we don’t want companies to have this much power and the americans calling it cope. Well no ones laughing now.
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demonsword@lemmy.world 3 days agoCapitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 3 days ago
demonsword@lemmy.world 3 days ago
But today’s money doesn’t really have any frontiers our boundaries. If a corp is being openly traded in the stock market, it belongs to the very same assholes that own the americans megacorps.
Four_mile_circus@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
You are right that capitalism tends towards monopolies. But I think there’s a significant difference in what, exactly, is being monopolized. Capital itself is not being monopolized. Access to the marketplace is being monopolized.
In a traditional capitalist monopoly, you would have to buy, for example, shoes, from just one shoe factory, which has a monopoly on shoes and can charge whatever price it wants.
In the current economy, you can go to Walmart or Amazon and buy hundreds of different shoes from hundreds of different factories, all competing against one another - but those shoe factories all have to pay rent to Walmart and Amazon, and have to sell their shoes at the price Walmart and Amazon tells them to, and have to agree to sell their shoes at lower prices at Walmart or Amazon than on their own website. If they refuse, they’re not allowed to sell on Walmart and Amazon at all. And because so many physical consumers only have access to a Walmart, and no other stores; and because so many online consumers default to Amazon for all their purchases; if the capitalists don’t submit to Walmart and Amazon they lose so much of the customer market they won’t be able to compete.
That’s the feudalism part. The capitalists aren’t in charge. The vectoralists are - the people who control the flow of information, the lines of communication between producers and consumers. And the vectoralists have split the economy into a handful of private fiefdoms, and make money not from producing anything, but from charging rent for access to their private fiefdom and the customers entrapped within it.
And since this phenomenon is most advanced online, where Amazon controls almost the entire online physical goods market and Google and Apple control almost the entire app market, we can call it technofeudalism.
Traditional monopolies certainly exist - for example, the American food supply is controlled by only a handful of companies - but those companies aren’t the ones controlling the price of food. Walmart and Amazon do.
Or to put it another way: in a socialist economy, like the USSR’s, the government controls the flow of goods and the allocation of resources.
In a capitalist economy, the owners of capital - the land and factories and natural resources that produce goods - control that flow.
And now, in a technocratic economy, the flow of goods and services is controlled, not by the government, and not by the owners of capital, but by the vectoralists.
I think it’s a vital distinction to make.