archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
[...] three processes running in parallel and mutually interlocked (a ‘triple helix’, if you like): the sequence of economic crises of inflation, public debt and private debt (today followed by dramatically expanding balance sheets of central banks, and a corresponding expansion of the money supply); the political-fiscal development from tax state to debt state to consolidation state; and a progressive shifting of the arenas of class conflict ‘upwards’, from labour market to welfare state to capital markets (and from here to the arcane sphere of central banks, financial-diplomatic summit conferences and international organizations).
footnote 7
shifting the arena of class conflict upward is a good description of tech? specifically, upwards to a battleground where capital is already the incumbent, has technological +legal advantages
[...] Until now, of course, longer-term growth rates have been falling together with peak tax rates, and so has the average tax take of rich democracies. Worse still, in parallel with the declining taxability of firms, their claims for national and regional infrastructure have become more demanding; firms ask for tax reductions and tax concessions, but also and at the same time for better roads, airports, schools, universities, research funding, etc. The result is a tendency for taxation of small and medium incomes to rise, for example by way of higher consumption taxes and social security contributions, resulting in an ever more regressive tax system.
the inherent instability of basing tax policy on the Laffer curve (states lower tax rates to attract large corporations)
feels like a fairly simplistic analysis tbh but maybe worth making note of as a larger general trend in light of all the tax avoidance going on?
This is not, however, a book of prescriptions. No glorious blueprint for the left resides within its pages. Rather it brings together crucial perspectives for understanding capitalism and the world we inhabit. While the assessment of capitalism and its opponents may seem bleak, the conclusion of the book is not. The way forward is to be found by arming ourselves with unsparing analysis of the predicament we find ourselves in, while having the fortitude to once again think ambitiously about broad emancipatory change.
just inspiring
You simply couldn't have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; or the role it plays in terms of facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. [....] you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers' savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.
[...] You're creating a global capitalism within which the American state and American capital have structural power.
The structural power comes from the fact that that the U.S. is still the dominant country in terms of technology. It's increasingly playing a crucial role in terms of what I raised before--business services, accounting, legal, consulting, engineering, and of course finance. There's more concentration of American power in finance than there is in other sectors. So it's very important not to see imperialism as being only about territorial intervention. And it's very important to understand that this kind of empire grows through actually spreading production, in a sense sharing production globally in a particular way.
[...] A valuable asset of so-called sharing-economy businesses like Uber or AirBnB is typically their network of committed suppliers--Uber's drivers or AirBnB's hosts. This too is an asset of lasting value that both companies have invested heavily to develop (and which they invest to protect, for example, against legal actions requiring them to treat their suppliers as employees).
pretty straightforward, but an aspect that's often neglected in the discourse. their assets aren't just the algorithms/etc - it's the reputation, brand, community
[...] Google, Microsoft and Facebook need relatively few tangible assets compared to the manufacturing giants of yesteryear. They can scale their intangible-asset bundle or software and reputation and so get very big. This type of scalability is, of course, enhanced by network effects.
also straightforward but maybe useful to cite?
This intensifies what policymakers call "tax competition": the idea that businesses and owners of capital will shop around for the most favorable tax policies. This makes it harder for governments to increase taxes and exacerbates the problem that led to lower taxes on capital in the first place.
[...] because it is unusually internationally mobile, intangibles increase tax competition, which makes it harder for governments to reduce inequality by taxing capital more.
on the rise of intangibles being innately linked to rising incidence of shifting tax jurisdictions
A third aspect of finance is the perception that venture capital will be very important for the economies of the future. It is hard to think of a major developed country whose government has not spent taxpayers' money in an attempt to build or grow its VC sector. Most developed countries have put in place coinvestment schemes or tax breaks to try and stimulate a venture capital sector like that of the United States.
to cite for diss - claiming that govts have doubled-down on the VC model because they think it works, TINA?
like Canadian R&D credit - remember all these stupid products that were being funded it ... doubling down on this model because it's the most prominent option w/o considering whether it's structurally fucked, incentivising wasteful creations
The exercise of authority seems like a good description of the Amazon warehouse above. A lot of careful process engineering has combined to allow a system where the optimal route around the warehouse can be computed very efficiently. As the economist Luis Garicano has pointed out (2000), enhancements in information technology have improved the flow of information around the organization. A fall in the price of information might lead to less authority: the breakdown of hierarchies, with autonomous workers e-mailing ideas up tot he boss. However, monitoring has also become more efficient with the growth of IT, so, in the Amazon case, IT has reinforced a "command and control" type of organizational design.
Thus part of the reason for the perhaps unexpected growth in this type of very nonautonomous work is that the intangibles of organizational development and software enable more and more effective monitoring. Thus they are substitutes for autonomy. [...] Marxist economists have a name for this additional monitoring role: "power-biased technological change"
interesting how even these dickheads admit it