9k:RD/CapitalEatsLife 02 (Q28,21 #2)
Question / recap
Prompt
What does it matter that Google is "a monopolist" if the overall trajectory of capitalism is for all capital-territories to attempt to absorb each other and for the economy to trend toward fusing all separate capital territories into a single unit that turns into nationalized property? (Of course capitalists don't take the process all the way to the end on their own.)
I had asked a question about whether small YouTube creators are workers, and the language of the response started to suggest that even though the YouTube creators are the petty bourgeoisie there is some kind of special power held by large corporations to 'monitor everyone', 'mobilize the state's executive functions', and 'censor the press' just because they are big. It was like the response was trying to distinguish between a landlord that purely scoops up territories and a process which actually creates an expropriated class, but what it said instead was that "monopolists" having enough power to filter and put restrictions on billions of videos "served the oligarchy".
This seems to me like a weirdly postmodern thing for Trotskyists to say, focusing on the big consolidated part of the economy (modernism or modernity) in its clash against all the smallest producers or separate independent islands that would otherwise absorb them (postmodernity). If global capitalism is uniting all the world's economic activity into one economy, then aren't there simply going to be parts of the economy which become gigantic through stretching across several countries?
It seems to me like the WSWS has a particular pattern it goes through sometimes where it identifies a terrible, oppressive way capitalists have used their overall territory of things and people under their control, outlines why nobody has the ability to change that thing because only capitalists control it, and then optionally tries to justify why that setup of things is perfectly okay and useful and can be the foundation for the future even though it isn't optimal, and the last step of the cycle is that I come here and ask how it is that either the current setup is oppressive or the current setup can be the future when it seems to me it was the other one of the two, and I am almost told that I'm trying too hard to make sense of capitalism because after the beginning of world socialism everything will be different and nothing from before will matter.
I thought the new society had to begin out of the shape of the old society. Isn't the shape of global capitalism as it is somewhat relevant to understanding what it turns into when it becomes world socialism? Aren't capital-territories still going to turn into something and be something like kingdoms became bourgeois republics (nation-states) and fiefs became local-states?
Articles: [1] [2]
Motifs or claims in prompt (no AI)
Motifs or claims from response
- (not submitted. archiving here for when I redo it and submit it)
Subjective themes (no AI)
Usage notes
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