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One has to ask whether the ruling class presiding over this mode of production is still adequately described as capitalist. It seems no longer necessary to directly own the means of production. A remarkable amount of the valuation of the leading companies of our time consists not of tangible assets, but rather of information. A company is its brands, its patents, its trademarks, its reputation, its logistics, and perhaps above all its distinctive practices of evaluating information itself.
[...] perhaps the rise of finance is really just a symptom. Yann Moulier Boutang invites us to see finance as something other than speculative or fictive excess. It has to do with the whole problem of exchange value in an age where the forces of production are extensively and intensively controlled by information: nobody knows what anything is worth. Financialization is a perverse socializing of the problem of the uncertainty of information about value.
[...] three axes: property, authority, expertise. His view of class structure offers class locations at three levels, which do not always neatly overlap. Relations of property generate the class locations of employers, petit-bourgeois, and employees. Relations of authority generate the locations of managers, supervisors, and the supervised and managed. Relations of expertise generate the locations of professionals, the skilled, and the nonskilled.
Piketty does not separate out real estate from capital, yet there might be good reasons to do so. Landlords and capitalists are already different kinds of ruling classes with overlapping but not identical interests. Ground rent and profit are not the same kinds of surplus extraction. Landlords, perversely, may benefit from the rise of the vector in ways Capital does not. As Matteo Pasquinelli says, today's landlords (often with giant global property portfolios) increase their rents by extracting the information value that the presence of the hacker class produces. [...]
I took my son to see it. I wanted him to know something of the origins and motivations of a structure of feeling that was something that I once felt deeply and to which I will remain in solidarity for the rest of my life. Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning.
on the young karl marx