One of the big changes was Imperialism - to the point that when Lenin wrote it, if Marx was around he probably would’ve been like “oh yeah that makes sense” lol

One of the largest differences between capitalism in the 19th century and the 21st century is that it is truly globalized. There are no more frontiers to expand into. Theres imperial super profits to generate, there’s maybe some very distant isolated tribes, but there is no where else to disrupt and expand into the way they did during the scramble for Africa or whatever. We are all in capitalist relations with each other now. They still had plenty of feudalism in Europe all the way up to WW1 if you want to pick a date

For why the imperial proletariate in the global metropol doesnt agitate - they do and did but the state is remarkably efficient at destroying agitators. They’ll kill anyone who gets close like Fred Hampton. And there’s something like a comprador character to the imperial side proletariate, they’ll tolerate the international proletariate getting fucked so long as things stay mostly the status quo and they get enough of what we call (derisively) Treats. Between the modern Bread and Circuses and the whip hand of surveillance capital, people dont feel drawn enough together to risk revolution (for now)

1. Modern capitalism exists in a world where the soviet union and the socialist challenge existed. That forced them to devise new and improved methods of suppressing worker movements.

2. A big difference is the existence of world-historic economic distortions, namely the existence of a world scale chronic exporter (China) and world scale chronic importers (USA), where the capitalist powers have become massively dependant on (and technologically inferior to) a socialist power.

3. The third difference is that the trends that marx saw appear in the latter half of his life such as joint-stock companies, monopolies, vertical integration and the like have now become the utter norm. Although capitalism had become highly monopolised even as far back as lenin’s time.

4. Capitalism had literally run into its thermodynamic limits. It is a system fueled by fossil fuels and the literal engines of capitalism are literally overheating and running out of fuel. We aren’t fully there yet, but we will be sooner rather than latter.

the actual mechanisms that drive capital now need much more exploitation and in more forms than they used to

I would challenge this claim, in Marx’s time Congolese workers would have their hands cut off for missing quotas, or worse. The era of socialist revolutions helped reduce the level of exploitation around the world. Though the shape of things has changed, the core mechanisms of capital today are essentially the same as when Marx was writing (he predicted increasing automation, so even AI is within the scope of his theory).

What he didn’t discuss much in his writings (but was definitely aware of) is the nature of imperialism. Being an imperial subject himself, I think he underestimated the degree to which workers in the imperial core could be convinced their interests align with the imperial bourgeoisie instead of the international working class-- so, even as an organized working class in industrial countries advanced, their material gains actually alienated them from the international working class and severely dulled class consciousness

However, it is precisely because of the internal contractions of capitalism that Marx identified way back in the 19th century that we are seeing a return of class consciousness even in the imperial core. The capitalists just can’t help themselves, the logic of competition pushes them to dismantle the very systems that stabilize the capitalist system. Once again the choice of the workers is becoming clear-- organize or be crushed

Underdevelopment and financial imperialism wasn’t yet articulated, I don’t think.

Marx observed that capitalists continually invest in productive capacity and transition through primitive accumulation into industrial production. Then, over time, this becomes over capacity as the rate of profit declines and this leads to cyclical market crashes.

Underdevelopment seems fundamentally different. The goal in financial imperialism is to prevent the build up of production and to keep the periphery trapped at the bottom of the production chain i.e. raw resource extraction, resource production, and resource transportation.

These underdeveloped regions are trapped in unequal exchange and superexploitation, essentially primitive accumulation is extended rather than transitioning to industrial production, and in this state they generate superprofits for the metropoles to pay off workers higher up the value-added production chain.

The rate of superprofit doesn’t decline, at least, not as cyclically as profit. At this higher stage of capitalism, imperialism, they are not actually building capacity to increase productivity. They are actively preventing industrial capacity building to keep the periphery in a perpetual state of dependency, so the same cycles don’t occur like they do in the metropoles.

There are still limits to growth, but the contractions are between the metropoles and the periphery rather than the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. That’s why national liberation struggles often work with the national bourgeoisie against transnational capital and their compradores.

At least, that’s my read? I just listen to audiobooks at work lol

Capitalism today is far more atomizing than in Marxs time

A strategy needs to be developed concerning:

1. Industrial work being jettisoned from the imperial core. Organizing a factory is much more tried-and-true than organizing a litany of decentralized business ventures that are constantly acquired by corporations participating in labor aristocracy. At this point the west needs entirely different organizing tactics based on material analysis invented to supplement traditional tactics.

2. The insane modern speeds that false consciousness is injected/reinforced into/within the (western?) proletariat.

3. The US dollar hegemony makes it far too easy for the US empire to find supplicant agents in any nation to do their bidding. Whether this takes the form of bribing comprador leaders, fascist death squad financing, or fomenting color revolutions - it is just all too accessible given that the US dollar is accepted as gold everywhere and can be printed for any project the US deems worthy of any effort whatsoever.

Imperialism, capitalist realism, neocolonialism.

I think the numbness comes in part from the seeming defeat of any new possible future after WW2, with postmodernism coming to replace any semblance of meta-narrative in which human society could evolve into something radically new and positive.

The basic laws are the same, but the gradual quantitative buildup of credit, circulation, rent, etc alongside the growth of imperialism has resulted in a qualitatively different stage of capitalism. As an example, circulation now happens at a far greater speed, which increases the rate of valorization of capital. Credit is a big one, it is now a huge part of the consumer-facing sector of the economy. Of course, there’s also imperialism, the primary contradiction facing the world today, and there are now socialist governments.

It is not quite a difference of time, but something that has to be dealt with is that Marx’s idea of Revolution hasn’t panned out. Instead of the most advanced capitalist economies that had revolutions, it was the semi-periphery (Russia, China, then later decolonializing nations.)

This does tie into qualitative differences from Marx’s predictions because both factory workers or highly concentrated proletariat who could easily be organized didn’t continue increasing until they were an overwhelming majority. Even though the majority of the population was proletarianized, factory work topped off at 20-30% in most capitalist nations. This was the only point where dialectics was kind of ignored, there would be an antithesis, or saturation, rather than the current trends continuing until all firms consolidating and everyone working in a small handful of factories. The transition to service and logistics work starts much earlier in the process of industrialization.

This along with the extreme atomization of capitalism going almost a century longer than Marx expected is likely why the proletariat is so inert.

Middle management didn’t exist in Marx’s time. Management as a profession didn’t start until the 1920s.

Large middle management structures end up with interests opposed to both the workers and the owners. The owners want to maximize value (exploited from the workers) and minimize costs. But management wants to maximize the perception of value (not quite the real thing) and increase the number of middle managers (adding a cost). I think this is important for understanding a lot of the bizarre behaviors we expect from large corporations today.

And I think it may also be important for developing new theories of praxis - if worker actions can exasperate the tensions between owners and management, the two can’t form a unified front against them. (I don’t know what such an action concretely is though.)

Imperialism is an important development.

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