Hi friends, I’ve been learning about some research trends through Paul Cockshott and the like. But I’ve also been reading Mao’s Red Book 📕 I also keep up on market trends, just to see the train wreck that is capitalist economics. tl;dr at bottom.

Based on my observations, I’ve noticed that, especially with the Davos elite pushing for the 4th industrial revolution and the great reset, I’m wondering if anyone has information on or has noticed that we are moving from a consumer/producer worker/capitalist mode of production, to a renter/owner one. When we generally think of economic assets, we think of houses or cars and the like, but with the Davos elite, it seems that this paradigm is either switching or already gone. Does the majority of the population actually own a significan amount of ‘their’ assets, or is it merely all pseudo-ownership; rented stuff?

Legally, we don’t own our phones, farmers don’t own their tractors, most products, especially electronic ones, are in a way, rented. We don’t have legal basis to use them for whatever we want, to even fix planned obsolescence which keep us in endless maintenance loops, like with cars. Furthermore, how many people really own their homes if they can get foreclosed on? When assets can just be seized, can ownership really exist?

It seems to me that most people rent or lease, and when they’re not renting products, they’re renting themselves(wage labor) in the form of work, or through an app overlord(twitter, YT). We don’t even own the platforms many of us use for labor purposes(Uber).

The owner class dictates how the economy works, we just get to participate. Not that worker/capitalist, prole/bourgeois dichotomies are useless, but renting/owning class seems to be ever more prevalent. I’m wondering if this is something worth looking into further.

Specifically, I’m wondering if it can be a different perspective that can be used to better articulate the global economic moment we see ourselves moving toward/in. If the owning classes dictate it, so it must be. We do live in a bourgeois dictatorship. Do you think this could be a helpful perspective or rhetoric to help describe the modern economic paradigm to a layperson?

That’s my piece. Does anyone else have any ideas floating around like that? Xi has encouraged the world to keep developing Marxism. I think it’s an excellent point. I’m only trying to follow from that invitation.

The tl;dr is I think it renting/owning class dichotomy could help agitate class consciousness in a way that more closely describes our lived lives than what could be seen as old timey gothic terms, which most people haven’t heard of or can spell. I want to lower the bar of entry for people to become class conscious.

  • @SamubaiOP
    5•1 year ago

    Ive heard enclosure described, but never by name. So you’re saying this renterism is still the same trick as enclosure, just different hand waving gestures and more tech and finance bs? Makes sense. It seems nothing in class relations has fundamentally changed lol. Any texts to check out?

    • @knfrmity
      5•1 year ago

      Rentier capitalism goes all the way back to the late 19th century as well. It’s probably been most apparent in the neoliberal Era which started in 1971, but the trend started a hundred years earlier at the latest. As already mentioned, Caliban and the Witch is a great book to learn about the first enclosures, and more broadly the social means with which the first wave of primitive accumulation were accomplished and reinforced. Marx talked about rent although not rentierism. Lenin also writes a bit about rents in Imperialism.

      When you cut away all the fancy terms and intentional obfuscation, modern neoliberal trends of privatization are exactly the same process and have exaxtly the same intended outcome as the original enclosures of the late middle ages. The point is to divorce workers from anything and everything which we may use to be even marginally self sufficient and even modestly independent. By owning nothing we owe our entire existence to our [land]lords, and they may use that power to do as they please.