The limited liability joint stock corp has existed to make profits since its inception, and has at all times therein been the product of the people of the time and their understanding at that time of the best way to go about making big fuck off bundles of cash. The two biggest coporations (the Dutch and then the British East India companies) that ever existed had canons and they invaded countries. They stopped doing that stuff when it became difficult to manage.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 1:54 pmThank you. I don't see this as something that I can demonstrate. And as I said I also see countertrends so I am not sure it is a tale of woe and gloom yet.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 1:30 pm I wouldn't want to cause further offence by interpreting you in any way for the purposes of presenting a wider hypothesis. But I am interested in the underlying rationale of your tale of woe and gloom here.
It depends a bit where we are in the world. And I'd have to do more research then I'm will to do right now to remind myself of things I'd find out before. I think one thing that shifted a lot of power was the financialization of corporations in general. I am probably not using the f word correctly, but here's what I mean. Corporations 40 years ago, say, tended to see themselves as product makers. Certainly they invested and made money off investments, but there has been a large shift in the amount of money they make from investment. This aligns them with Wall St. There was also much more freedom given to banks and other financial type institutions. And while this led to the 2008 recession, and was supposedly taken care of, it hasn't been. The same kinds of financial shenanigans are continuing. And the same 'we have to bail them out' situation has not been prevented or undercut. How did these things happen? They happen because, again focusing on the US, corporations and the finance industry are able to unduely affect elections, oversight, legislation and enforcement. I don't think we have a democracy (or a republic) anymore. The only people who can challenge a Wall st. approved choice between candidates (not choice of candidates, that's not on the table) is if some incredibly wealthy supposed outside like Trump comes in. Otherwise we are dealing with what the financial sector, which now includes corporations in a way it didn't decades ago. (I do not view the 80s as a golden age. Apart from it being a decade that started the neo helping these shifts in power take place, I just don't see golden ages). (A related pattern is the shift from corporations focusing on profits to focusing one stockholders/bonuses)Who might this elite "they" be and how did they come to be such a powerful "they", with the power to destroy ' supportinve institutions'.
Very few companies play the stock exchange (Apple's absurd war chest being the exception that proves the rule). There's been a change in high end manufacturing to a more services based model where companies sell ongoing support contracts for their products that represent a major share of the whole cost of the item, that's largely due to the complexity of things such as airoplanes which need software support and can't really be repaired with a wrench any more anyhow. Product design, manufacturing techniques and the supply chains involved in both have all grown vastly more complex than the stuff that was made in the 70s. Firms have stopped doing the end to end manufacturing that once was normal because of this, not the financial engineering aspect. And it was already under way long ago, it was in the late 60s/ early 70s I think that Toyota and Honda introduced just in time manufacturing for car plants.
Perhaps, but for that we would be required to believe that the Wall St guys all sort of think the same and want the same policies. That's not a realistic take on human nature imo. The things they can plausibly all agree on are very limited and I can't see any way to an accidental conspiracy to ruin the world and tread heavily on the necks of the poor.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 1:54 pm Much of this requires no 10 guys in a room conspiracy. We've got vulnerabilities in the system being attacked by people with pretty common motives.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of such narratives which treat humans as a flock being led around by corporations, but I've never read the Chomsky so I can't usefully say much about it.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 1:54 pm Part and parcel with this in my being influenced by Chomsky's and the other guy's The Manufacturing of Consent. They made that argument whenever it was, back in 70s, I think, that corporate influence over media affected media's independence from corporations/finance, etc. The talked about the concentration of media control in a not very large number of corporations. Well, the situation since they wrote that book is much much worse. I also see much of this as creating storms in tea cups. Distracting. Though also suppressing information broadly. It can and will appear but at the fringes. Part of the point of their work was that you don't have to censor, just push things to the margins. You don't have to do what, then, the USSR and CCCP were doing.
The traditional way that these Decline of X things work when peopole like GrandWizard are doing them is a mercantilist zero sum sort of thing where advantage can neither be created nor destroyed. So the decline of Rome is the rise of the Franks as power transfers from one race to another. I can't tell if your theory follows that pattern or not. It seems to me that you are sort of assuming that greater wealth for the already super wealthy entails poverty for those who are not wealthy, but I can't tell if you are commited to it or not.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 1:54 pmI don't have a cyclic theory of history. I mean, it may work like that. And I kind assume that lots of cycles are happening. That we must follow the Rise and Fall or Rome or something like that, no, I don't work from that kind of hypothesis. I don't rule it out, but I don't feel like I have the tools to apply, criticize or recognize such a thing. I'm not saying others must lack these abilities. I mean, perhaps a smart person, even me, if one invested a lot of time - and Jesus, I think I'd really have to look at economics in a way that both scares me and bores me in advance) - might be able to say this was likely. But I'm not there in any case.Does all of that follow some potential narrative path or do you see no historical sequence of repeating patterns involved. Some sort of rise and fall pattern perhaps?
I think that part is predicated on some assumptions that don't bear up under scrutiny. The zero sum thing being primary. Does some of this relate to mass technological unemployment caused by bots of some sort?Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 1:54 pmAs bad as serfs had it, they had a role. Of course Stalin, for example, thought he didn't need so many, and he eliminated vast swathes of them. But in general, they had their place and function. I see trends where people may not have the role of serfs. That they will move outside. Will they be the bottom rung, as serfs were, yes. And I say yes, meaning if those trends and not the countertrends win out. I don't see them becoming argicultural laborers. I'm sure you meant it more broadly and metphorically. So, at a metaphorical level, to some degree yes. But actually more expendable.If we have talk of "they" moving to "open dystopia" while further down the page the rest of us must dine at soup kitchens or bulk purchase gruel ingredients in 50lb bags, does that not relegate the bulk of the populace to the political status of a modern day serf?