#The Capitalist Manifesto

[volunteerismandanarchy]

Swedish historian Johan Norberg is author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, which caught the eye of Elon Musk, who tweeted, "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right."

Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to be ditched in favor of more centralized power and control over virtually all aspects of our lives.

A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Norberg shows that life is actually getting better for all of us—especially the world's poor—and that economic globalization, political liberalization, and cultural freedom are the main drivers of that improvement. He talks about how liberals and conservatives get the past wrong, why he's not worried about China's supposedly unstoppable economic growth, and why the cases for free trade, free expression, and more immigration need to be constantly updated and renewed. He also explains why he's a libertarian and not an anarchist. Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke to Norberg in Washington, D.C., in late September. 

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

caterpillar? more like cu. more like cunty. cuntypil. um.

[guzhufuren]

In Time (2011) Love for Love’s Sake (2024)

[cookthepenguin]

remember this?

they’re trialing 27 employees and not one client

[kraniumet]

"cultural analysis" youtubers read something that isn't a medium/vouge/vox op-ed as research challange

[friendorflo]

did not mean to reblog that one I don’t smoke and i’m not a commie thank you very much 💜

[persimminwrites]

i have a lot of thoughts on glass onion and how im seeing people hyping it up as more than a who done it that happened to take jabs at billionaires and capitalism. if it was trying to convey a meaningful message about capitalism and the bourgeoisie (which I don't think was the intent and would have genuinely been an oxymoron just bc of what it inherently means to make a movie) it was always set up to fail due to the simple fact that we live in a capitalist society and it shapes everything!!!

it was entertaining it was fun and it was a well crafted story but was it saying anything actually meaningful and insightful about capitalism as a structure......

bc as much as that movie says billionaires are stinky and should burn (hopefully literally) it says almost nothing about the system that allows for the existence of billionaires and it was never going to bc that simply wasn't the point!

[13thpythagoras]

yeah half of my blog is DIY healthcare because I can technically afford the monthly premiums but what am I getting? It's basically appendicitis / accident insurance, there's not much other value I see in western medicine. And if I do get appendicitis I'm headed to the Good Sam to plead a charity case, and if I get stuck with $80 k debt for appendicitis I'll just have to fight it. Paying the copays would probably be $20k anyway and premiums over the years, another $30k so what's a last $30k to bet I'll never need any of that bs?... I mean in Cuba they do this procedure for hundreds. I could fly NetJets to Mexico (and perhaps Mexico to Cuba) and get it done in either of those countries for a zero off the USA's cash price tag, but air ambulance Netjet with me inside dying of appendicitis doesn't sound too wise so medical tourism is still likely best left for preventative / elective procedures. (can I preventatively get my appendix removed lol)

But we have remedies to diseases capitalism can't crack because our remedies aren't constrained by the need to make a fascist-level-of-profit / monopolizer's-patent for big pharma.

Can we also unpack how Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine for free and gave it away? Can we unpack the incentives for innovation at work there?

Why was Salk driven to innovate while going total George Washington mode on the victory lap, giving away his fascist prize to the public in exchange for immortality as a truly magnanimous man of the people.

Could it be?

More than just money incentivizes human beings to innovate in medicine?

Could it be, that perhaps more than money drives human action towards saving each other's very lives?

I definitely can't say this for a hospital, or a pharma corp, but I would cross the road to save your life. I would try, I would take a risk to do that, I wouldn't stick my hand out for a $100k of oncology bills like the hospital would, or they tell you to "i dunno i guess just go die of cancer ya brokeass" is what western medicine says. Even if you pay those bills, they won't cure you; you still hear from your provider who wears a pink ribbon "cancer is an incurable disease."

Then what are you researching? lmao

If western medicine is religiously committed to the idea that cancer is un-curable, why the pink ribbons?

Why flood the "awareness channels" with "awareness PSAs" for the most-well known disease on the planet? Could they possibly be doing that to hide something from the public / Google results?

Why do we spend a trillion a year on research for something for which we're religiously opposed to there being a cure?

Nothing adds up until you accept the truth seen by Rick Simpson et al, that western medicine can cure cancer easily they just can't patent that cure. That's the real problem, they can't MONOPOLIZE the many cures to cancer; they cannot control that capital as fascists so they deny that it could even exist as a possibility. Holy gaslights Batman!

[how the critics sound]No! Big⛽️💡 pharma billionaires would never ever ⛽️💡gaslight us! No! no ⛽️💡no no ⛽️💡no ⛽️💡no ⛽️💡no! I had a very charismatic chemistry professor in college and he said cancer has no cure and I believed him, he was so handsome! Science is never wrooooong raaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! I refuse to believe ⛽️💡Pfizer ⛽️💡would ever choose profit over saving lives! [/how the critics sound]

[wanderingmind867]

I just wrote one giant political manifesto. It's nearly 1000 words. I'd like to share it, but I don't know if it'll fit into a tumblr post. I hope it can, because I think I made some good points. I formulated an ideology I'm quite proud of, something that really shows my personal view on things.

[autolenaphilia]

It's funny how clearly uninformed a lot of criticism of Mozilla and its browser Firefox is. Like people say "it's just another corporation, out to make profit, just like Google." And that ordinary users promoting Firefox are just giving them free advertising.

It's in basically any post criticizing Mozilla, including on this site. Like using tumblr search I quickly found a post that was largely positive, but argued that Mozilla operates "under capitalist incentives" And outside tumblr I found a blog post out on the interwebs that criticized Mozilla and outright wondered "I don't know if Mozilla's business model ever made sense, it makes a lot more sense if it's something closer to a nonprofit rather than a commercial entity."

Well, let's research the Mozilla Corporation, see what that business model actually is. Let's begin that research by going to the wikipedia article, and read the two introductory paragraphs. And it turns out that it's "a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation", which is a non-profit.

"The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary."

Turns out that it is not just "closer to a non-profit", it is literally a non-profit. Turns out you only needed two paragraphs on wikipedia to learn that, the most basic online research possible, which basically every post I found criticizing Mozilla failed to do.

This is entirely different from any other entity calling itself corporation, which is all about creating profit or money for its shareholders, the "capitalist incentives" spoken about earlier.

If you read further into that article, you will learn that the Mozilla corporation literally only exists separate from the foundation for tax and legal purposes, but it's still a non-profit operation.

This makes it reasonably immune from the enshittification process I've written about before. there is no incentive to fuck over the experience for end users for the sake of shareholder profits, like what tumblr is doing right now.

It means that Firefox is an exemption to the rule that "if something is free, you are the product", because there is no product to produce profits for shareholders, it's a charitable endeavour for a free and open internet, as laid out in the Mozilla manifesto.

This doesn't mean non-profits make corruption impossible, there is plenty of corruption in non-profit foundations. But unlike actual capitalist corporations, it doesn't have the greed and corruption built in. And if you are going to criticize Mozilla and Firefox, which it does sometimes deserve, you should have your basic facts straight before doing so, if you expect me to take you seriously.

[sharp-rosee]

I can't stand watching leftist youtubers when they just have to make a comment to how TERFS are just like conservatives.

With all their readings into Marxist theory and sophisticated takedowns of capitalists and deep dives into conservative ideology you would think they would be able to tell you accurately what a radical feminist is or would be able to pick up Andrea Dworkin or find the humor in the Scum Manifesto and, y'know, do some of that Self Reflection they boast about that made them wake up from the Far Right Pipeline.

Even the most "enlightened" male can not awknowledge his own misogyny, and as always, the audience eats it up to the point where they will shoehorn that shit at the beginning of every video, and repeat the mantra Trans Women are Women on videos that aren't even about trans issues because the validation these males need is astounding.

[13thpythagoras]

30 million loyal friends would be 6 x larger than the world's largest military, you'd be the biggest mob boss in world history

take the friends yo, eat the rich together, arrest Dubya et al and put them on trial, split their estates, create UBI, fund science. Thrive. 30 million dollars is dogshit compared to 30 million loyal friends

[determinate-negation]

"Jewish Marxists have always rejected Zionism. In 1906, a leading member of the Bund published this polemic in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy. "A national economy would mean a territory where the Jewish people — and in the capitalist mode of production: the Jewish bourgeoisie — form the majority and oppress peoples who are in the minority, just as they have been oppressed until now." "Do the Zionist socialists intend to introduce … exceptional laws for immigrant, non-Jewish workers?"

Many people claim that Zionism and Judaism are identical, as if the Jewish people, for thousands of years, had obviously longed to return to Jerusalem. Yet Zionism is a relatively new political movement — a product of the era of bourgeois nationalism and colonialism. Theodor Herzl's programmatic manifesto only appeared in 1896, at a time when Jewish socialist groups had been active in London and other cities for more than two decades. Long before anyone thought of colonizing Palestine, Jewish revolutionaries had been fighting for socialism.

Zionism was far from hegemonic among Europe's Jews. In the largest Jewish communities, in the Pale of Settlement on the western edge of the Tsarist Empire, far more Jewish people were drawn to socialism. The most important organization of the Jewish proletariat was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, or the "Bund" for short. The Bund opposed the Zionist program of emigration with a program of class struggle and "doikayt," or hereness.

Herzl's Zionism was bourgeois, and he sought support from the Tsar's antisemitic ministers, the organizers of terrible pogroms — he saw they had a common interest in getting Jews to leave the Empire and stay away from revolutionary organizations. After the 1905 revolution, the rise of class struggle in Russia and the radicalization of Jewish workers led to the emergence of various hybrid forms of socialism and Zionism. "Socialist Zionism" was founded by Ber Borochov, and its most important organization was Poale Zion (The Workers of Zion).

Poale Zion had a contradictory program: sometimes it said that Jewish workers should focus on emigrating to Palestine in order to build a socialist society there; at other times its emphasized class struggle, while the construction of a Jewish national home in the Holy Land was declared to be a goal for the distant future. Due to this contradiction, Poale Zion did not last long; after the Russian Revolution, the left wing joined the Communist International, while the right wing became a reformist and colonialist party that founded the State of Israel.

In this 1906 essay, Chaim Yakov Gelfand, a leading member of the Bund, explained why socialist Zionism was a reactionary utopia. Socialism and Zionism were fundamentally incompatible: the former depended on the political independence of the working class, whereas the latter required long-term collaboration with both the Jewish bourgeoisie and with the imperialist colonial powers. This text appeared in Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social Democracy, edited by Karl Kautsky. In his own book on the question from 1914, Kautsky also declared that oppressed Jewish workers should aim for a "revolution in Russia" instead of emigration to Palestine.

Gelfand's essay is tragically prophetic. Even in 1906, it was clear that Palestine was far from uninhabited, and that the establishment of an exclusively Jewish nation-state would inevitably lead to conflicts with the indigenous population. Marxists understood that colonization would create new forms of oppression and also new hatred against Jews. Gelfand made clear that a Jewish state could only be built in cooperation with imperialism and would therefore never be socialist.

It's interesting to read about the progressive ideals of sections of the early Zionist movement, prior to the foundation of the State of Israel. The contradictions of this "socialist" colonial project proved to be insurmountable. Over the decades, numerous young Jewish activists turned away from socialist Zionism and joined the Trotskyist movement — in some cases only after arriving in Palestine.

The most famous of them is undoubtedly Abraham Leon, a scholar-warrior who wrote a Marxist history of the Jewish people while leading the underground fight against the Nazis in Belgium, before being murdered at Auschwitz at 26. Left-wing Zionists from Berlin such as Martin Monath and Rudolf Segall also became Trotskyists — the former in exile in Belgium, the latter while working at a kibbutz in Palestine. Both, like many other former Zionists, became leaders of the Fourth International.

Today, the internationalist traditions of Jewish revolutionaries are being erased. This text, in its first English translation, is a reminder that Zionism is only a small and controversial part of Jewish history. Jewish-led protests against the war in Gaza are reviving these internationalist traditions."

[handweavers]

"Those who point to the lumpenproletariat as the revolutionary vanguard disregard the objective laws of historical development. In pre-capitalist societies, poverty and oppression were even greater than under capitalism. But oppression in itself, no matter how great, does not create the basis for the struggle to abolish oppression.

Because of the specific nature of exploitation under capitalism, the working class, which collectively operates the mass production process of the privately owned monopolies, is transformed into the gravedigger of the system. That is why Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: ��Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”

No fundamental change—or even a challenge to the monopolists—can occur without the working class. And today the proportion of Black workers in basic industries such as steel, coal, auto, transport and others is transforming the prospects for the class struggle and Black liberation.

The degree of exploitation of Black workers is clearly much greater than that of white workers. Nevertheless, the collective form of exploitation in the decisive mass production industries is suffered by all workers. This creates the objective basis for solidarity, for their unity and leadership in the struggle against the monopolist ruling class.

At the same time, history has assigned a doubly significant role to Black workers—as the leaders and backbone of the Black liberation movement, and as a decisive component of the working class leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle as a whole.

It is the monopolists’ fear of Black, white, Brown, Yellow, Red and working class unity, which in turn can form the basis for still broader people’s unity, that is behind racism and anti-Communism, the main ideological weapons of the ruling class.

Leninism, the Marxism of the imperialist epoch, is the ideological weapon of the working class. It is the scientific guide that enables the working class to combine its struggle with national liberation movements against imperialism.

No other theory has served to free a single working class, a single people, from imperialism anywhere in the world. Beginning with the October revolution, only those guided by Marxism-Leninism have been able to free themselves from class and national oppression and take the road of socialist construction."

— "Objective Laws of Development" Henry Winston, The Crisis of the Black Panther Party (1971)

[psychotrenny]

I know that "revolutions always make things worse" people are so fucking stupid and annoying but can we please stop talking like serf revolts are what ended feudalism. Sure you can point to specific examples where rural violence was a contributing factor to the emergence and solidification of Capitalism in a region but like it was never the primary cause. Long story short in was the fucking Bourgeoisie who ended feudalism and in a lot of cases the peasantry primarily acted as a reactionary force to maintain feudalism due to a range of factors from religious sentiment to the preservation of the feudal privileges/concessions that Liberalism was to destroy. Successful progressive peasant movements are something you only really saw in the 20th century and even then these largely took place in the context of an alliance with the Proletariat and progressive Bourgeoisie against foreign Capitalist Imperialists and their Compradors who, while often ruling in a feudal manner, did so as subordinate agents for those Imperialist Capitalists.

Like we can just say that Communism is good actually. There's no need to talk about the end of Feudalism as though the Jacquerie personally tore down every castle in France and replaced them with polling booths. This isn't exactly esoteric stuff; it's in the fucking Communist Manifesto for god's sake. Like if you're going to align with Marxism it would be great if you read even a little bit of Marx

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Yanis Varoufakis’s “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?”

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

Socialists have been hotly anticipating the end of capitalism since at least 1848, when Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto - but the Manifesto also reminds us that capitalism is only too happy to reinvent itself during its crises, coming back in new forms, over and over again:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

Now, in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis - the "libertarian Marxist" former finance minister of Greece - makes an excellent case that capitalism died a decade ago, turning into a new form of feudalism: technofeudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

To understand where Varoufakis is coming from, you need to go beyond the colloquial meanings of "capitalism" and "feudalism." Capitalism isn't just "a system where we buy and sell things." It's a system where capital rules the roost: the richest, most powerful people are those who coerce workers into using their capital (factories, tools, vehicles, etc) to create income in the form of profits.

By contrast, a feudal society is one organized around people who own things, charging others to use them to produce goods and services. In a feudal society, the most important form of income isn't profit, it's rent. To quote Varoufakis: "rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply" (land, fossil fuels, etc). Profit comes from "entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that wouldn't have otherwise existed."

This distinction is subtle, but important: "Profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not." If you have a coffee shop, then every other coffee shop that opens on your block is a competitive threat that could erode your margins. But if you own the building the coffee shop owner rents, then every other coffee shop that opens on the block raises the property values and the amount of rent you can charge.

The capitalist revolution - extolled and condemned in the Manifesto - was led by people who valorized profits as the heroic returns for making something new in this world, and who condemned rents as a parasitic drain on the true producers whose entrepreneurial spirits would enrich us all. The "free markets" extolled by Adam Smith weren't free from regulation - they were free from rents:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

But rents, Varoufakis writes, "survived only parasitically on, and in the shadows of, profit." That is, rentiers (people whose wealth comes from rents) were a small rump of the economy, slightly suspect and on the periphery of any consideration of how to organize our society. But all that changed in 2008, when the world's central banks addressed the Great Financial Crisis by bailing out not just the banks, but the bankers, funneling trillions to the people whose reckless behavior brought the world to the brink of economic ruin.

Suddenly, these wealthy people, and their banks, experienced enormous wealth-gains without profits. Their businesses lost billions in profits (the cost of offering the business's products and services vastly exceeded the money people spent on those products and services). But the business still had billions more at the end of the year than they'd had at the start: billions in public money, funneled to them by central banks.

This kicked off the "everything rally" in which every kind of asset - real estate, art, stocks, bonds, even monkey JPEGs - ballooned in value. That's exactly what you'd expect from an economy where rents dominate over profits. Feudal rentiers don't need to invest to keep making money - remember, their wealth comes from owning things that other people invest in to make money.

Rents are not vulnerable to competition, so rentiers don't need to plow their rents into new technology to keep the money coming in. The capitalist that leases the oil field needs to invest in new pumps and refining to stay competitive with other oil companies. But the rentier of the oil field doesn't have to do anything: either the capitalist tenant will invest in more capital and make the field more valuable, or they will lose out to another capitalist who'll replace them. Either way, the rentier gets more rent.

So when capitalists get richer, they spend some of that money on new capital, but when rentiers get richer, them spend money on more assets they can rent to capitalists. The "everything rally" made all kinds of capital more valuable, and companies that were transitioning to a feudal footing turned around and handed that money to their investors in stock buybacks and dividends, rather than spending the money on R&D, or new plants, or new technology.

The tech companies, though, were the exception. They invested in "cloud capital" - the servers, lines, and services that everyone else would have to pay rent on in order to practice capitalism.

Think of Amazon: Varoufakis likens shopping on Amazon to visiting a bustling city center filled with shops run by independent capitalists. However, all of those capitalists are subservient to a feudal lord: Jeff Bezos, who takes 51 cents out of every dollar they bring in, and furthermore gets to decide which products they can sell and how those products must be displayed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

The postcapitalist, technofeudal world isn't a world without capitalism, then. It's a world where capitalists are subservient to feudalists ("cloudalists" in Varoufakis's thesis), as are the rest of us the cloud peons, from the social media users and performers who fill the technofuedalists' siloes with "content" to the regular users whose media diet is dictated by the cloudalists' recommendation systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

A defining feature of cloudalism is the ability of the rentier lord to destroy any capitalist vassal's business with the click of a mouse. If Google kicks your business out of the search index, or if Facebook blocks your publication, or if Twitter shadowbans mentions of your product, or if Apple pulls your app from the store, you're toast.

Capitalists "still have the power to command labor from the majority who are reliant on wages," but they are still mere vassals to the cloudalists. Even the most energetic capitalist can't escape paying rent, thanks in large part to "IP," which I claim is best understood as "laws that let a company reach beyond its walls to dictate the conduct of competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Varoufakis points to ways that the cloudalists can cement their gains: for example, "green" energy doesn't rely on land-leases (like fossil fuels), but it does rely on networked grids and data-protocols that can be loaded up with IP, either or both of which can be turned into chokepoints for feudal rent-extraction. To make things worse, Varoufakis argues that cloudalists won't be able to muster the degree of coordination and patience needed to actually resolve the climate emergency - they'll not only extract rent from every source of renewables, but they'll also silo them in ways that make them incapable of doing the things we need them to do.

Energy is just one of the technofeudal implications that Varoufakis explores in this book: there are also lengthy and fascinating sections on geopolitics, monetary policy, and the New Cold War. Technofeudalism - and the struggle to produce a dominant fiefdom - is a very useful lens for understanding US/Chinese tech wars.

Though Varoufakis is laying out a technical and even esoteric argument here, he takes great pains to make it accessible. The book is structured as a long open letter to his father, a chemical engineer and leftist who was a political prisoner during the fascist takeover of Greece. The framing device works very well, especially if you've read Talking To My Daughter About the Economy, Varoufakis's 2018 radical economics primer in the form of a letter to his young daughter:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538491/talkingtomydaughterabouttheeconomy

At the very end of the book, Varoufakis calls for "a cloud rebellion to overthrow technofeudalism." This section is very short - and short on details. That's not a knock against the book: there are plenty of very good books that consist primarily or entirely of analysis of the problems with a system, without having to lay out a detailed program for solving those problems.

But for what it's worth, I think there is a way to plan and execute a "cloud rebellion" - a way to use laws, technology, reverse-engineering and human rights frameworks to shatter the platforms and seize the means of computation. I lay out that program in The Internet Con: How the Seize the Means of Computation, a book I published with Verso Books a couple weeks ago:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital