Roderic Day responded

dang i caught a stray 😂

The biggest takeaway of Marx that Day points out is that workers pay rent to our bosses in the form of profit. There's no real difference between paying rent to a landlord, interest to a banker, or profit to a capitalist.

Some other things to point out about the cost of land/land rent. The price of land in the colonies was obviously significantly cheaper (you warlord and basically get it for free, same as the landlords of Britain). The land speculators (colony sellers) were primarily trading land for contracted labor, indentured servants, later sold for slaves directly. In Britain land was obtained by merchants/capitalists in trade of gold (colonial labor) and slaves or through rent (profits, labor). The price of land is labor.

Caveat: I don't know if I've read the articles in question. I certainly haven't read them this week. So I'm going by limited info.

From the text of this new post, though, I wonder if Mason /Day rely on the popular retelling of the origins of Bezos, etc. While the common view is that they got rich by setting up e.g. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, they also started rich, with cash lump sums. Does that affect the analysis at all?

I.e. did they really begin with 'control over newly created production processes'? Does it matter that social networks already existed before Facebook? It that online resellers existed before Amazon?

Does it matter whether someone begins with an investment and almost immediately starts buying out other shareholders and competitors? What's the difference between investing in a startup and being present with investment money when you and others start a startup? This isn't rhetorical.

I suppose that might be the point, that industrial and financial capital are married together. But that's not what's invoked by saying that someone starts one way and becomes something else later.

Another question is whether Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft are industrial capital, even at their inception? There's definitely finance capital involved now and to my (general) knowledge, there was from the very beginning. Does it only become finance capital when it's loaned? If so, what of any loans that are present when Facebook, etc, are created?

Does merchant capital factor into this at all, particularly with Amazon (for goods and services) and Facebook (for services)?

Finally, while I accept the value in using quotes, a quote alone doesn't necessarily mean that a writer is fully representing the person quoted. For example, take:

What promised to be a democratic and ultimately socialist dynamic has relapsed back toward feudalism and debt peonage, with the financial class today playing the role that the landlord class did in postmedieval times.

Yes, this quote uses the word 'feudalism' but taken in itself, this quote does not say to me that the author thinks that capitalism is regressing back towards feudalism-proper. It says to me that the author (Hudson?) thinks that imperialists are as decadent and dastardly as feudal lords. It's a metaphor. The context may contradict that interpretation, of course, and the sentence itself could be read literally.

Indeed, emphasis added:

Speaking of Lenin, this very much goes against his rule that “to criticise an author, to answer him, one has to quote in full at least the main propositions of his article”.

Again, I've not recently (maybe at all) read the texts in question, which may use longer quotes, but quoting one sentence from Hudson without the surrounding text does not do what Lenin is talking about here.

I'm not expecting answers to all these questions. I just think there's more to it than what's been addressed so far.

Who's Roderic?