It's unlikely that there are 57 varieties of capitalism, although if you looked hard enough there may be that many. What is certain is that financial capitalism, which has emerged in the past 40 years, is the form that causes the most harm. In this video I explain why.
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Excellent explanation. Perhaps a presentation Starmer should be making. I doubt he will.
I am not sure what the solution is. But your key point – that business can only operate because of a stable, law based environment needs to be more widely made. I am afraid the narrative of “plucky entrepreneur battles against the forces of the state to make good and become a billionaire” gets more traction that “well (state) educated entrepreneur finds commercial application for (state funded) research which is then delivered via existing (state funded) infrastructure for (private) profit” etc..
Only if this second narrative takes hold will there be the will to tackle the problem.
I can no longer afford Burgundian wines from the finest vineyards. I am not expecting you to join me on the barricades to overthrow capitalism to rectify this injustice….. but if it were the water company that pipes water into my home?
I suspect nobody cares about small winemaking rentiers but they DO care about water – and “technology” is 21st Century “water”. Connectivity is a natural monopoly and any data business improves exponentially with scale. So, break up is not a solution – only regulation and taxation will do.
Government needs to be bolder (and not in the pockets of lobbyists/donors) and state clearly that there is no such thing as a “self-made man”…. and that the corollary to this is taxation.
Indeed…
But I could skip the Burgundy
But not a pint of Adnams Ghost Ship
The water company does not require to be private: it isn’t in Scotland. UK Railways; a triumph of private operation?
Google was a brilliant idea, a high-ideals, open-access platform as originally conceived, and that propelled it to consumer success. As private enterprise perhaps not so good, at least during the dot.com bust; which “concentrated the mind wonderfully” about all dot.coms actual profitability for investors, like an imminent hanging. I think Shoshanna Zuboff covers how this worked out in ‘The Age of Surveillance Captialism’. If we reduce everything to the mere advantages of short-term convenience and complacency, we really are in trouble. Think of pandemics.
The US used to be much tougher on monopolitstic tendencies for most of its history; but neoliberalism has never had any interest in either competition or risk; save to avoid competition, and pass the risks on to government. Neoliberalism is an exercise in the financialisation of capitalism solely in order to extract secure, risk-free rents, preferably at public expense – oh, and take all the credit for doing precisely nothing at all.
I doubt whether parliamentarians would watch a ten-minute video like this and by repeatedly flicking forward they might get little idea of power of your arguments.
Your presentation is so clear and compelling that I would like to send a transcript to my MP. I thought the same about the one in which you argue that limited companies should comply with suggested obligations in return for their privileges … for which the community as a whole so often pays. Sir Philip Green’s enterprises come to mind.
Any chance of finding a funder to have all of your remarkable series of videos transcribed? Then our rulers could see the text, view the video or both. They might even see that action would benefit almost the entire community … possibly to their own electoral advantage.
I think there is software that can do this
Does anyone know what it is?
Descript is software that transcribes a recording.
I have looked at this and am very impressed
Thank you Richard for that excellent video. May I recommend to your viewers Brett Christopher’s book, Rentier Capitalism, which considers these matters in some detail. And very interesting it is too. I think this book was mentioned here recently by one of your commentors.
An interesting analysis Richard, thanks. It is a subject which our politicians of all shades are careful to avoid – assuming they actually understand the processes you have discussed.
What the state grants by way of legal backing for rentier capitalism the state can take away. For example land taxes, unearned income taxes, licence fees, capital gains taxes, compulsory purchase, anti-monopoly legislation etc,
The more worrying is that these companies and sectors have taken over the state. and manipulate the state for their own interests in secret and unaccountable ways.
They have also encouraged anti -conspiracy memes to pooh-pooh any such suggestion. And dominate the media.
The term used by the American anti-trust movement for its target was ‘robber barons’ – very appropriate.
In Irish the term is tóraÃ, meaning “outlaw”, “robber”, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit” since outlaws were “pursued men”
Translated into English that is, quite literally, Tory
That is where the word came from
Can’t find anything in the video I disagree with. I think that even Margaret Thatcher thought that financial liberalization was the means to re-finance British industrial capacity rather than a mechanism for rentier activity. Having separated finance and production it is necessary to divide socially useful financial capitalism from that which is genuinely harmful, I don’t think all of it is bad. Some financial innovation in say insurance, annuities, modest access to credit for those on limited means has been useful (few things are more anti-social than unregulated credit for people who are poor.) A bad example of financial capitalism is the growth of the bank’s ability to create their deposits and monopolistic clearance systems, this is at the heart of hyper-inflation in the housing market. Counter-intuitively instruments that ban interest-only mortgages and the return to 40% deposits might be the way to lower house prices. Historically the use of short-life patents alongside above market returns in the drug industry was a means of rapidly turning over patents to “red in tooth and claw” drug producers. The use of state sponsored prizes for vaccines, large capital project designs with lots of design in them, bespoke mass production goods like £100 million for a car patent battery that has a range of 400 miles, less than 100 kgs and less than an hour to charge are means of using state powers to diminish sources of rent. One reason why Glasgow and Newcastle had such a great retail markets was the existence of hundreds of thousands of public sector tenants on lower rents who were spending their disposable income in the markets.
Profs Mark Blyth and Thomas Pikety the problem of financial capitalism very well. As does Brett Christopher’s analysis of UK financial capitalism, especially outsourcing that drives down terms and conditions of labour. The case studies are difficult to read. The use of Capita and Carillion in more recent outsourcing models has been disgraceful.
Thanks