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.
It doesn’t really fundamentally change the mode of production which is still a capitalist one but yes we are increasingly living in a society where we own less and less and rent/lease more and more. This is a way of further disempowering workers but it is also a consequence of the unprofitability of late stage capitalism from actually productive activity and its dependency on parasitic rent extraction in various forms, be it actual land rent, intellectual property rent, or other. The other notable development is the loss of stable, regular employment and the emergence of the gig economy, which increases the precarity of workers and further elevates the degree of exploitation that is possible by keeping people at just above the threshold of slipping back into the reserve army of labor at any given time.
However even if things still were as they were say 50-60 years ago and you still really owned all your own property, your house, your car, etc. and even if you still had stable full time jobs as a norm, the worker-capitalist class dichotomy would still exist just the same. Because what a worker can own does not (or only in very limited way) constitute a means of production.
I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that yes your observations are correct, but no, i don’t think this really changes the underlying nature of the system. You could maybe say that we are moving in the direction of a return to feudal relations if the trend of corporate pseudo-fiefdoms, corporate towns, etc. continues and grows. But i don’t see a need to throw out the old terminology.
That being said, you can and should be flexible in your vocabulary when talking to regular people who are not yet communists. If you find certain informal terminology is more effective at making a connection with them and getting them to understand Marxism then by all means. We have to be smart about how we engage in our propaganda, agitation and class-consciousness raising activities.