I find little wrong with this, but I don’t see how it invalidates the video that much, and I’m very skeptical of anything Hudson has to say as he’s more of a Keynesian than a Marxist. That last paragraph is the problematic bit. He makes it sound like capitalism can keep running indefinitely if run well and rich people and common prosperity can co-exist. Hudson doesn’t understand imperialism or the contradictions of capitalism. He says the rentiers and finance capitalists should be regulated out of existence, but they are a product of his favored industrial capitalist and existed back then. He doesn’t understand the inherent decaying nature of capitalism or the tendency for the rate of profit to decline. Capitalist governments need to prop up capital with absurd subsidies or else the system will collapse.

I recommend Socialism or Extinction as it has a strong criticism of “harmonists.”

P.S. I’m only saying all this because I’ve defended Hudson and lost.

[–] Kaplya@hexbear.net 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

From Michael Hudson’s Killing the Host, Ch. 28:

Industry is being financialized more than finance has become industrialized. The remedy is to write down debts and reform the tax system. Our financial problem is like a parasite on a sick body. The host needs to get rid of the intruder before it can heal itself.

Downsizing finance will not, in itself, avert the threatened privatization of the post office, water systems, roads and communication, or cure the high cost of privatized medical insurance and other infrastructure. Once you remove the debt drain and rentier burden from industrial capitalism will still leave the familiar old class tensions between employers and their workers. This will still leave the familiar labor problems of industrial capitalism – the fight to provide fair working conditions and basic necessities to all citizens, as well as to avoid war, environmental pollution and other social strains.

Hudson has never said that the goal is simply to get rid of finance capitalism. Hudson followed the true Marxist fashion of saying that industrial capitalism as envisioned by the classical political economists (Smith, Ricardo) will ultimately end in creating the material conditions necessary for socialism to be achieved.

Hudson is saying that defeating finance capitalism (rentier and landlord class) will pave the way for industrial capitalism to return, which as Marx himself had explained in Capital Vol. 1, will follow the historical process towards socialism.

In other words, Marx brought Smith and Ricardo’s theses to their logical conclusion, using historical and dialectical materialism, and showed that socialism became inevitable under (industrial) capitalism.

[–] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

That’s silly. So he wants to revert capitalism from its imperialist stage into the one Marx analyzed so Marx’s original vision would be carried out. Hudson said himself the only country close to his ideal industrial capitalism is China, and its socialist. Who is his proposition for, and how does he plan to revert away from imperialism? Also, when has industrial capitalism ever lead to socialism? Socialism has happened in pre and semi capitalist colonies.

[–] Kaplya@hexbear.net 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

???

You’re confusing me. That’s literally Capital, Vol 1.

Lenin explicitly stated in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism that imperialism was about the expansion of finance capital.

From Lenin’s Introduction to Bukharin’s Imperialism and Global Economy:

At a certain stage in the development of exchange, at a certain stage in the growth of large-scale production, namely, at the stage that was reached approximately at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, commodity exchange had created such :in internationalisation of economic relations, and such an internationalisation of capital, accompanied by such a vast increase in large-scale production, that free competition began to be replaced by monopoly. The prevailing types were no longer enterprises freely competing inside the country and through intercourse between countries, but monopoly alliances of entrepreneurs, trusts. The typical ruler of the world became finance capital, a power that is peculiarly mobile and flexible, peculiarly intertwined at home and internationally, peculiarly devoid of individuality and divorced from the immediate processes of production, peculiarly easy to concentrate, a power that has already made peculiarly large strides on the road of concentration, so that literally several hundred billionaires and millionaires hold in their hands the fate of the whole world.

[–] QueerCommie@hexbear.net 2 points 9 months ago

I know what imperialism is lol. I’m saying how the hell do you think you can reverse it rather than simply going through? It is a reactionary and petty bourgeois error to try to reverse the development of capitalism. Answer my question: why is going to a specific past stage of capitalism which had no successful socialist revolutions the best plan of action? We don’t have time for this, the climate clock is ticking.