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Forum Post: Neo Feudalism: The Disease

Posted 6 years ago on Nov. 2, 2017, 6:37 p.m. EST by agkaiser (2516) from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

For centuries feudal lords were awarded lands and the people on them as a reward for service to kings, dukes etc. They paid taxes to their liege lords to be allowed continued possession of their holdings. Today we pay some taxes to keep our homes and business properties but we pay more in interest to the mortgage holders. The latter are the elite among our royalty.

Marx and others predicted that the system of lender/debtor, capitalism, will self destruct. And it is getting closer to that inevitable end every day. The economic prophets of 100 to 200 years ago mostly thought, like Marx, that the collapse would happen a couple of hundred years in our future.

But our economic geniuses have shown that the purely greedy can make the rest of us purely needy a lot faster than that. Look around. The signs are there for those willing to see them.

"The democratization of home ownership during the 20th century led middle-class voters to oppose property taxes - including taxes on commercial sites and natural resources. Tax policy in general has become pro-rentier and anti-labor - the regressive opposite of 19th-century liberalism as developed by 'Ricardian socialists' such as John Stuart Mill and Henry George. Today’s economic individualism has lost the early class consciousness that sought to tax economic rent and socialize banking."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/10/michael-hudson-socialism-land-banking-2017-compared-1917.html

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[-] 2 points by ImNotMe (1488) 6 years ago

Banking & ''The Public Bank Option - Safer, Local and Half the Cost'', by Ellen Brown ...

fiat lux ...

[-] 2 points by ImNotMe (1488) 6 years ago

''Socialism a century ago seemed to be the wave of the future. There were various schools of socialism, but the common ideal was to guarantee support for basic needs, and for state ownership to free society from landlords, predatory banking and monopolies. In the West these hopes are now much further away than they seemed in 1917. Land and natural resources, basic infrastructure monopolies, health care and pensions have been increasingly privatized and financialized.

''Instead of Germany and other advanced industrial nations leading the way as expected, Russia’s October 1917 Revolution made the greatest leap. But the failures of Stalinism became an argument against Marxism – guilt-by-association with Soviet bureaucracy. European parties calling themselves socialist or “labour” since the 1980s have supported neoliberal policies that are the opposite of socialist policy. Russia itself has chosen neoliberalism.

''Few socialist parties or theorists have dealt with the rise of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector that now accounts for most increase in wealth. Instead of evolving into socialism, Western capitalism is being overcome by predatory finance and rent extraction imposing debt deflation and austerity on industry as well as on labor.

''Failure of Western economies to recover from the 2008 crisis is leading to a revival of Marxist advocacy. The alternative to socialist reform is stagnation and a relapse into neofeudal financial and monopoly privileges.

''Socialism flowered in the 19th century as a program to reform capitalism by raising labor’s status and living standards, with a widening range of public services and subsidies to make economies more efficient. Reformers hoped to promote this evolution by extending voting rights to the working population at large.

''Most Marxists expected socialism to emerge first in Germany as the most advanced capitalist economy. After its October 1917 Revolution, Russia seemed to jump ahead, the first nation to free itself from rent and interest charges inherited from feudalism. By taking land, industry and finance into state control, Soviet Russia’s October Revolution created an economy without private landlords and bankers. Russian urban planning did not take account of the natural rent-of-location, nor did it charge for the use of money created by the state bank. The state bank created money and credit, so there was no need to rely on a wealthy financial class. And as property owner, the state did not seek to charge land rent or monopoly rent.

''By freeing society from the post-feudal rentier class of landlords, bankers and predatory finance, the Soviet regime was much more than a bourgeois revolution. The Revolution’s early leaders sought to free wage labor from exploitation by taking industry into the public domain. State companies provided labor with free lunches, education, sports and leisure activity, and modest housing.

''Marx described the mathematics of compound interest expanding to absorb the entire economy as age-old, long predating industrial capitalism. He characterized the ancient mode of production as dominated by slavery and usury, and medieval banking as predatory. These financial dynamics exist in socialist economies just as they did in medieval and ancient economies. The way in which governments manage the dynamics of credit and debt thus are the dominant force in every era, and should receive the most pressing attention today as China shapes its socialist future.''


I excerpt the above from your EXCELLENT but long Dr. Hudson link. TY and in compliment, I append:

From which, I will end with this excerpt .. ''The time is now for intellectuals to rise up and create spaces in which new futures can be created -- without putting students in harm's way -- through ourselves, and not the 1 percent. Let's think new and better futures together, from the environment to healthy food and from clean water to sustainable green energy. Intellectuals of the world unite.''

dum spiro, spero ...

[-] 1 points by ImNotMe (1488) 6 years ago

''THE SECRETIVE FAMILY MAKING BILLIONS FROM THE OPIOID CRISIS'', by Christopher Glazek:

The Sackler family that has made a fortune with Oxycontin - funded a foundation that made the original (now debunked) claim that 3 million undocumented people - voted in 2016. Also fyi, in this context, see:

multum in parvo ...