I mean the obvious answer to this nerd is that the world of Dune is distinctly not capitalist. The empire is a feudal institution, planets are personal fiefdoms, and all those in positions of power are not concerned with capital or money so much as they are prestige and power. The spice trade on Arrakis is more similar to something like the Chinese imperial salt monopoly (a state backed monopoly where most of the rents were used to fund the imperial coffers) than resource extraction under capitalism, albeit a Chinese salt monopoly that involved the Chinese colonising a distant land and using it for the sole purpose of salt extraction. The state in Dune is not concerned with capital formation or expansion, the nobles are not concerned, and while there are certainly merchants and traders (as there are in most polities) they are tangential to how the system operates and are not the ones who determine state policy. A “real universe” does not imply that capitalism exists in all places at all times, this guy is just too enmeshed in capitalist realism to understand that the kind of stuff he’s saying only makes sense in a capitalist context.
Wouldn’t it make sense for a banking guild with enough capital to buy up debt from the feudal lords to eventually develop? Even with no bourgeois revolution, the conditions for capitalism to develop are still in place, no?
Capitalism is a very specific system whereby a capitalist class is able to take the reigns of state power and direct that towards capital formation/development. Just because the conditions for capitalism to develop were in place doesn’t mean it would ever happen; China had the “conditions for capitalism” for like a thousand years but it never developed because the imperial houses kept control of the state and did not allow any would be capitalists to direct state policy. The “board of directors” for CHOAM, the massive merchant guild, are just the Padishah Emperor and the Landsraad (the nobles). There is no separate capitalist class, no merchants that are not in control of the nobles directly. No reason to think that capitalism would develop in the Dune universe when it hasn’t for literally 10,000 years since the establishment of the empire based around spice production. Dune takes place around 10,193 A.G., which is After Guild aka 10k years after the establishment of the Spacing Guild which requires spice melange to navigate the void of space, so this economic system has been in place for ten thousand years without capitalism developing. Don’t see why it would just randomly appear one day given the structure of the world.
China had the “conditions for capitalism” for like a thousand years but it never developed because the imperial houses kept control of the state and did not allow any would be capitalists to direct state policy
Do you have any reading on this?
So for China specifically, probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don’t agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it’s a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument I’ve identified above, that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel’s three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.
If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I’d recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ by Eric Mielants. It’s not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the “capitalism requires the state” bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else.
Part of the vibe of dune is that the galaxy is feudal by design roughly. The butlerian jihad did a number on people. Also the bene gesserit control politics so…
The bene gesserit could just act as a deep state behind any front facing political system, though.
All the other points already raised aside, it’s not in the interests of any of the major established stellar players to allow a new group to form that could challenge its power. It’s not impossible that such an organization did try to form but was bought out by CHOAM, or offended the Guild, or got murdered by the Emperor’s Sardukar, or got manipulated and outplayed by the Bene Geserit.
Also remember that this is a universe where FTL communication happens by couriers delivering messages on (Guild) ships. What are the bankers going to do if the Guild decides to cancel its own debts?
Very good point, telecommunications was an important prerequisite for globalization for a reason.
To give a short answer, that would require the establishment of a global connected market (think the wars started by the british to open up “trade ports” in foreign countries). Lacking globalised market, what you have, essentially, is a series of local markets that can communicate with each other only through passing traders, and, as such, one can do arbitrage infinitely among these markets, as such the real competitive advantage was securing monopoly privileges over said trade routes, which is how trade worked for the most part.
For the sake of the argument, if a banking guild would seek debt to develop, it would then do so over distinctly feudal lines, such as securing monopoly privileges, hiring mercenaries to literally bully competitors out of the market, so on. There are no market imperatives to start the capitalist quartet of:
- competitive production
- profit maximization
- reinvestment of surpluses
- need to improve labour-productivity
The reason as to why any of these is a bad idea is left as an exercise for the reader, but, for example, what’s the point of improving labour-productivity if the king just guaranteed me as the only chartered company in any given sector.
for example, what’s the point of improving labour-productivity if the king just guaranteed me as the only chartered company in any given sector
great example as like the first thing herbert writes about arrakis is how inefficiently the harkonnens harvested spice
Adding on to the other (very good) answers here, a large part of the point of Dune is that the political environment at the beginning of the books is utterly stagnant and forcibly kept that way by dozens of power brokers who don’t want change for any reason. Between the Bene Gesserit’s machinations over the course of centuries, the Spacing Guild’s monopoly of travel, CHOAM dominating all economic trade, and the Emperor and the Major Houses shoving one another back and forth politically over eons any potential new players would simply be obliterated unless they operated as just another House playing by the same rules as everyone else. The Great Convention ruthlessly enforced stringent feudalist terms while heavily restricting any potential avenues for disruption (most notably the use of atomics or thinking machines) and was enforced by every major power player simultaneously, on threat of utter annihilation.
It took having the Bene Gesserit’s main long-term goal of producing the Kwisatz Haderach happen without their knowledge on pure accident combined with said legendary figure uniting the entire Fremen nation behind him, catching the Emperor and Great Houses completely by surprise in one of the most one-sided battles in history, and him discovering the full lifecycle of the worms that make Spice while also giving him unprecedented control over said process (and the ability to destroy it outright) to shatter this equilibrium, and then it took his son spending nearly 4,000 years dismantling these power structures and setting up the Golden Path to allow humanity the ability to scatter and evolve once more.
any potential new players would simply be obliterated unless they operated as just another House playing by the same rules as everyone else.
Excellent textual examples being the Ixians and Bene Tleilax who in varying degrees basically hid themselves until the ossified political structures were shaken enough to allow space for them as major players (the ascension of Leto II.)
its worth noting here, that “thinking machines” also includes technology that could allow for space travel without the spice, something that traps everyone on their planets but nobles and their lackies basically. Leaving the planet as a regular person would be like your 2nd grade teacher going on a space tourism flight, very very rare
people in the Dune universe are as peasants bound to their fields for the most part, especially during Leto II’s rule
Eventually capitalism would develop since its a feudal sistem but as far as i remember there is no banking guild or something like it, and the only organizations that control the economy of the empire in dune is the Spacing Guild that controls transportation and the CHOAM that controls all comerce
I want to contest the idea that a feudal system always develops into capitalism. The development of capitalism is in many ways a fluke, as there were feudal systems in pre-Qin dynasty China (fengjian), the Maṇḍala system in roughly 5th to 15th century Southeast Asia, Feudal Japan, and various parts of India up until European colonisation that all never developed into capitalism.
An interesting note for me is that, on average, socialist systems are better and more efficient at developing forms of capitalism out of feudalism. A revolutionary nationalist period is almost a bound requirement for capitalism to develop.
That’s kind of Branko Milanovic’s argument in Capitalism, Alone. Good book, even though I disagree about a lot of its conclusions (mainly that China is clearly “state capitalist”).
I do as well.
Space NAFTA?
Kinda but its like a corporation that you can own a stake in but its mostly control by Corrino and its supporters
capitalism is not a strictly necessary step. They already have tech and industry, they would have absolutely no productive benefit from capitalism and no need for anything before basically a full switch to communism, they have the tech and the resources needed
the spacing guild operates the banks, actually
Do I look like I give a goddamn about capitalism?
how’d his head get so big i thought
spoiler
he was just like wrapped in a living biomechanical skin of baby sandworms
book 4 spoilers
that’s Children of Dune, by God Emperor he’s a full grown thousands-year-old worm with a giant human face
I think he kills one of his Duncan Idaho clones by rolling on him. weird book
oh wow that does get weird. i know warhammer 40k is basically a ripoff of dune and Micheal moorcock novels but thats seriously 40k levels of weirdness
The Dune books get weirder and weirder with each novel.
Going from book 3 to 4 is a fun and wild jump, although I don’t recall reading much past 4 if at all. Might be time for a re-read, haven’t read past book 2 since high school.
How is the series after book 4?
I mean it’s trash but I read all that shit. About the same level as the shit his son wrote.
I wouldn’t go that far. Heretics and Chapter-house are… not great, but they are nowhere near as bad as Kevin J Anderson’s crap writing.
It’s not as good, because Frank was getting on in years at that point and it doesn’t have a payoff like the first three books had with God Emperor; he died before writing the final book, so it kind of builds up to nothing. To be honest I doubt this 7th book would have been nearly as good as God Emperor anyways, so maybe it’s for the best this way.
my memory’s that god emperor’s where it started going off the rails tbh.
1-6 is good, after that the author died and his fool of a son ruined it
That was kind of the impression I got. I did briefly try to read one of his son’s dune books and just couldn’t get into it
Yeah it’s very unfortunate. Instead of a whole universe of spinoff and fan interpretations etc etc, we have one trash official fanfic
Fuckin copyright
Really really bad.Maybe not really really bad… but if you stopped you’d be missing nothing.
as long as you don’t read the books after he died, books 1-6, you’re fine. Unless you can’t stand unfinished stories, then pretend that the series ended with book 4, look no further or suffer
I’ve gotten through a chunk of them after the forth book and … woof… I had to stop the self abuse.
Yeah I got to the last chapter of book 8 and I was like, why the fuck am I doing this to myself and stopped reading halfway through 5he final climax lol
book 4 spoilers
Unrelated but I have no where else to post about the dune thoughts that consume my mind:
I think it would have been so much cooler if Ganema was still around in book 4, not as a sandworm but the EXTREME end case of the bene gesserit ability to alter the metabolism to basically stop aging. Their dialogue with each other in dune 3 was awesome and is something lacking in 4, clear, distinct conversations not clouded by 106 layers of leto II fucking with whatever human gnat he was speaking to. I also think it would be a sick contrast, and allow exploration of another perspective of the bitterness of the passage of time, leto is bored and complains about a lot of stuff, but imagine ganema a withered skeletal wraith, like golum but way worse, her perspective would be so different, excited for death and freedom from the golden path probably, just like leto, but very different
That would have been neat
Oh, Living Biomechanical Skin of Baby Sandworms. It’s a real shame LBSoBS broke up after their first album.
Business people don’t have the creativity to imagine a world that runs on something other than derivatives of derivatives of markets
Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM) was one of the major galactic organisations in the time of the Corrino Empire and later the Atreides Empire, a gigantic monopoly encompassing all forms of commerce across the Imperium which essentially controlled all economic affairs across the cosmos, although it relied upon the Spacing Guild for transport across space due to the Guild’s monopoly on faster-than-light travel. CHOAM touched almost all products the Guild will transport, from art forms to technology and of course melange. Many Houses depended on CHOAM profits, and an enormous proportion of those depended on melange. Most economic ventures were conducted through CHOAM, in which the Imperial House, the Landsraad, and Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild all had a stake.
CHOAM directorships were the real evidence of political power in the Imperium, passing with the shifts of voting strength within the Landsraad as it balanced itself against the Emperor and his supporters. Directorship in the CHOAM was the key to wealth, each noble House dipping from the company’s coffers whatever it could under this power.Something something monopolistic tendencies of capital, I am on my hands and knees begging these bozos to just read a fucking book
Glad someone mentioned CHOAM, it’s basically Wall Street if Wall Street physically owned all the markets as a simplification and rather blunt criticism.
NOAM CHOAMSKY 😳
Okay serious question, what the fuck is up with the names of things in Dune? Landsraad looks suspiciously like a Danish word for a house of parliament (though I think ours was specifically called Landsting rather than Landsraad) and the bad guys are apparently named Harkonen, which is also the name of every 4th guy in Finland, so like, was that writer on some weird mission against Scandinavia?
This is difficult to answer precisely without my nice thick leatherbound copy of the series in front of me with its notes and appendices to quote from directly lol.
Trying to show weird through-lines and syncretism of recognizable cultural motifs is an important part of Herbert’s world building. Here is a very good article published just before the first Villeneuve movie came out by a professor of Islamic Studies on this question but from the angle of the Islamic/Arabic influences on the text.
The trailer’s use of “crusade” obscures the fact that the series is full of vocabularies of Islam, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Words like “Mahdi”, “Shai-Hulud”, “noukker”, and “ya hya chouhada” are commonly used throughout the story. To quote Herbert himself, from an unpublished 1978 interview with Tim O’Reilly, he used this vocabulary, partly derived from “colloquial Arabic”, to signal to the reader that they are “not here and now, but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and time”. Language, he remarks, “is mind-shaping as well as used by mind”, mediating our experience of place and time. And he uses the language of Dune to show how, 20,000 years in the future, when all religion and language has fundamentally changed, there are still threads of continuity with the Arabic and Islam of our world because they are inextricable from humanity’s past, present, and future.
You can replace Arabic and Islam in that final line with “Scandinavian” if you’d like, but the point being it’s to make sure there’s something in the setting that makes it feel both familiar and alien at the same time.
Yeah I love Dune for things like this. For example, the religion of the Fremen is Zensunni, a religion founded by a breakaway sect from Maometh aka the Third Muhammad. Their holy book is the Orange Catholic Bible, which takes from the Bible of our own time but also mixes it with points of wisdom from the Butlerian Jihad.
And “Orange Catholic Bible” in itself tells us that the schism in Christianity was healed, referring to the Orange Order of protestants in Northern Ireland and (obviously) the Catholic Church
No lie, Herbert saw the name Harkonnen in a phone book and thought it sounded Russian. He wanted a scary Russian name to suit the evil, Machiavellian, despotic homosexual villain that was Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.
Of all the names to sound Russian, it looks Nordic to me
It’s actually Ural-Hungarian, if we want to be pedantic.
it’s literally space feudalism stfu theres no banks only guilds and nobles
I don’t see how adding a futures market on top would make the spice less scarce. All you are doing is creating inequality. The total spice remains the same.
I think market nerds forget that markets themselves are a form of rationing.
If there are 1000 people and 1000 pieces of bread, a perfectly fair system would give one piece of bread to every person. In market system, the amount of bread remains the same except it’s rationed based on purchasing power. So if bread costs $1 and 50% of the population has no money while rest have $2, then the “Rich” could buy double the bread.
It’s also the most inelastic resource ever since it both enables interworld trade and is highly addictive, and, off world, it is used exclusively by obscenely wealthy people. Interworld trade is also not optional for places like Giedi Prime without enough agriculture to feed the on world population.
“Why doesnt Corrino the largest of the Great houses, not simply eat the other great houses?”
Also spice was always a scarse resource since you can only get it from arrakis no markets would have fixed that.
The only person with limited Imagination is the guy that sees space feudalism and doesnt understand why it isnt like capitalism
By the way, using profits from Arrakis to build bigger army was exactly what Atreides were doing, and why they accepted the fief change in the first place. But they had mere weeks at best before Harkonnens struck them.
If anything, Herbert at times expressed overinterest with finances, like in that scene where Paul and Jessica agree to distribute some water to needing Fremen in the Stilgar troop, in the middle of the desert after fight, and in response hear the ridiculously out of place bank talk.
Exactly. The Harkonnens had stockpiled decades of spice and gone into extreme debt on top of it in order to finance the re-invasion of Arrakis. And this is, of course, on top of the Imperial Saudakaur, who (against any but the fremen) were priceless and could fight with the strength of 10 men.
The Atreides were not a rich family - their power was in propaganda. And so their plan was to use this power to win over the Fremen, previously overlooked by the Harkonnens, to their side.
Without the Fremen, there was no amount of money that could have saved Leto Atreides and prevented the Harkonnen invasion. No amount of mercenaries could have thwarted the Saudarkar. The only thing that could have won the war for them was more time for the Atreides military leaders - Gurnie Halleck and Duncan Idaho - to train soldiers (and the building of an elite, loyal Atreides army was the reason the Harkonnens and the Emperor expedited the Atreides’ downfall in the first place - because they could have built an army to challenge the Emperor), or winning the loyalty of the Fremen sooner. Both are brought up in the books - what they needed was more time.
actually what they needed was more spice futures. sorry kid
The one unanswered question is what happened between Atreides and Corrino before. Recent Caladan trilogy by Brian is happening exactly in that time but it completely flopped since it ends with Shaddam and Fenring end up those books being in very good relations to the Atreides, and also being hair width from ordering Sardaukar to exterminate the Harkonnen.
Wasn’t it just that Leto I and the Atreides were too popular? Approaching the point where they could conceivably challenge the emperor. I seem to remember Shaddam not being happy about killing the house but felt it necessary
Yeah this is exactly it. House Atreides had the support of vast amounts of the “lesser” nobles in the Landsraad. The Emperor held no ill will against House Atreides, and was even impressed at their soldiers and “honor” or whatever but ordered their downfall because they were within an inch of being able to challenge his position.
Who was the emperor affiliated with? Did he have his own armies?
Yeah so the emperor had the Sardaukar, his elite military force, as well as a bunch of conventional forces. The Sardaukar as well as most of the Harkonnen forces are the ones who ambush the Atreides in the first part.
Oh, I thought the sardaukar were mercenaries, but idk, the emper can hire out his forces as a treat.
That was part of it too, but (leaving aside Brian entirely), Shaddam was a man whose will was severly restrained by the Great Convention, particularly Landsraad was organisation which main or one of main purpose was even explicitly stated in the book by Thufir Hawat iirc - their greatest fear was that Emperor would use the Sardaukar to kill them off one by one, and it was stated to be the reason why the masquerade with Harkonnen uniforms was done. And it was HUGE risk for the emperor, he wouldn’t dare to do that for no reason, and certainly not when he had Fenring as advisor.
So there was much more of it between them. Also Leto himself was pretty keen to pursue this course so he wasn’t just a victim, by all probabilities he really was aiming at Shaddam. Possible most obvious course was 4 daughters and 0 sons of Shaddam, popular and politically savvy duke could easily push for marrying his son and heir to Irulan and became the all powerful force behind the throne. Shaddam would certainly fear that scenario, but i bet it was still not all. Well we will never know now, Brian version of the events are not even coherent with Brian version.
Yeah I think a lot of people forget (because it’s kinda obscure) that the Emperor’s strength and forces are about equal with the combined power of the Landsraad, with the Guild being an ostensibly neutral but very powerful third party. Each of those parties needs the others to survive so for the Emperor to take over military action against a Great House is a huge deal like you said.
In contemporary political terms, it might be like the president sending the Secret Service to murder a Senator or Supreme Court judge.
The real gaping plot question is why the emperor allowed the Bene Gesseret to deny him an heir
It’s not a plot hole. The Bene Geserit have mind control sex and his wife is Bene Geserit. The pussy is just too good
Isn’t the exact, ludicrous amount of control BGs have over their bodies a closely-guarded secret?
If it’s a secret they’re doing a shitty job keeping it since they keep fucking telling people. Also if he’s the only guy in the universe who doesn’t know it means every single one of the emperors daughters is betraying him and his dynasty and his spies are shit.
Doubt it’s that secret, everyone calls them witches, the most politically relevant ability of truthtrance is widely known, and every mentat worth his sapho would immediately notice some things, like the statistically improbable amount of daughters the BG have.
BG clearly have plot shield before Leto II, when he takes the role.
Exactly! Even a provincial 15 year old noble kid knew that Bene Gesserit occupation was politics, and BG sisters were everywhere not even pretending, but all powers seemingly turned a blind eye to it until God Emperor, and he was clearly training them. Maybe they just have a lot of dirt on everyone, plausible considering their other memories and breeding program involving a lot of nobility.
Oh well, at least in the abovementioned Caladan trilogy Brian did accurately portray them as incompetent and far cry from later ones like Taraza or Odrade.
Oh sorry I haven’t read anything past the one with the worm-emperor
Not bad move, first four are the best.
Its true, but Odrade is so cool…
Nothing by Brian is canon, you might as well tell me about something you dreamed
It is canon by definition, but the difference in content means there are three separate canons: Just Frank, Frank + Encyclopedia, Frank + Brian.
False, someone spill the water of this non believer!
The water of life, so i awaken and declare Brianian Jihad on all gatekeepers!
for real though, ugh, brian is such a bad writer…
also, the atreides (and every other house in the landsraad) was paying levies to the emperor out the nose. the emperor was extracting taxes, rents, and every fucking thing he could get away with.
Exploitation of the noble houses by Emperor was most probabaly done less directly, but capitalistically, through CHOAM, in which emperor had majority of shares.
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Second thing that surprised them was the scale of the attack, not only Sardaukar but that the Harkonnens basically bankrupted themselves to send overwhelming force.
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There’s also no way for him to refuse, absent exile.
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Because there’s literally a powerful order that controls everything and prevents that exact sort of thing from happening to maintain control.
Because it’s a metaphor for oil.
Why doesn’t Paul invest in WormCoin? Is he stupid?
The slurp juice melange
The original party coin
Let me just explain to the barely-human navigator why he should let me gamble with the substance me needs to survive … Aaaaand I’ve been marooned on a baren moon.
Just the idea of futures trading when so many major players have prescience is… at minimum, not going to look anything like what we have today
In a way, the Space Guild is sort of a futures market.
“If you piss us off, you will have no future in space travel”
Lol they have all this time to post bullshit on twitter but no time to read the book. They live in a post capital monopoly owned system called CHOAM and it is corrupt, surprise!
Get a load of Numbers Fuckstein over here trying to bridge the gap into ruining fictional economies by financialisation.
Short answer: if Dune was written by Robert Hoenlein, spice-investing would be the entire plot. Don Draper-Ass white guys talking about financing in offices.
If space fascist man wrote it the book would be all about Duncan Idaho slaying fremen in the name of whatever shitty ideology most recently got him erect. My space fascism had pilot wives, my moon ancaps fuck nonstop, ect
There are not enough lockers in the universe to shove this nerd into.
