[azinman2]

You say gangster capitalism. I also hear late stage capitalism and other such modifiers being thrown around a lot.

When has power ever been limited? Certainly not in any communist society that’s existed so far, nor under feudalism, or even earlier capitalist societies to my knowledge (did the Roman’s not have this problem?).

[nimih]

> When has power ever been limited?

The question isn't really whether power has been "limited" (it's unclear to me what that would even mean, honestly), but the form in which it is constituted and what institutions it rests with. Like, it's pretty clear that the institutions which control and manage daily life and politics in 21st century America are of a much different character than the ones of the mid-20th century USSR, which are again much different than, say, 16th century Europe or what have you.

> did the Roman’s not have this problem?

I'm relatively confident that Roman society did not have to contend with the accumulation of power by multi-national corporate bodies and the relative weakening of democratic institutions that results, nor the degree to which such corporations are able to leverage 21st century technology to exert control over individuals' lives.

[azinman2]

Of course the institutions are different. But is the problem of power any different? If anything, it seems like there are more ways that power is limited in current America than 16th century Europe or the USSR.

Roman was absolutely multinational. I don’t think it had corporations, but rather the entire empire acting as a single business… which is even worse.

[nimih]

> But is the problem of power any different? If anything, it seems like there are more ways that power is limited in current America than 16th century Europe or the USSR.

I certainly think so. I think many of the way in which modern institutions exert power over individuals are of a fundamentally different nature compared to, say, slave economies, or the pre-reformation Catholic church, or the Aztec empire, or whatever. In particular:

> If anything, it seems like there are more ways that power is limited in current America than 16th century Europe or the USSR.

I half-agree here. I don't really think "power" is a one-dimensional scale where you can strictly order societies in terms of the degree to which it exists. Take, for instance, the way in which advertising companies are able to leverage their understanding of psychology and their fine-grained control over media content to directly shape our desires and emotions; these are tools which flat out didn't exist 100 years ago, and represent a mode of control which seems orthogonal to, say, a monarch ordering a summary execution of one of their subjects. These aren't theoretical distinctions, either: recognizing them can help point us in the right direction when trying to imagine what a better world looks like, and is useful for understanding what the available avenues of resistance and change even are.

[aylons]

You're not completely wrong, it is just a way too crude of an assessment.

The way power evolves from ancient times, to middle ages, to modern times and finally contemporary times, how the institutions of capitalism are different in form, but not in essence from the institutions of feudalism and other themes are a central topic of Marxist theory.

You seen to agree with him about the root of the exploitation problem, but GP is also right in that there are differences on how the institutions operate and how advanced they are in comparison to those of the past. These new institutions and techniques and dynamics require different tools for analysis.

[istjohn]

There is a long-standing idea in American political thought going back to James Madison that the centralization of capital in too few hands poses a danger for democracy.

In the Gilded Age, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and later created the FTC.

In 1941, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”

Then in the 1970s the Supreme Court nerfed the Sherman Act, and it's all been downhill from there.

[NaturalPhallacy]

>When has power ever been limited?

When we cried "Taxation without representation", shot them, and kicked them out of our country. This is literally the reason for the second amendment.

[wahnfrieden]

Graeber goes into many examples in his new/last book, Dawn of Everything, based off cutting edge anthro and archaeological evidence

[sgustard]

A hundred years ago you could buy "Drink This Arsenic Cure-All" off the shelf. Not sure that "early-stage capitalism" was any better.

[sillyquiet]

Right? These are just re-treads of the 'rich, powerful, and influential face fewer consequences for misdeeds' that has been a factor of human life since probably forever. Other economic systems have so far not proven themselves immune to this.

I won't go so far as to say that capitalism has more controls to mitigate this effect, since I think there is a fair point to be made that we do need to start checking the power of corporations, and those controls have not so far presented themselves without assuming government intervention.

[azinman2]

I think the idea behind a robust capitalist society is that there would be government intervention required, otherwise you have trust issues.

In fact, I'd argue capitalism is generally better tuned for this because it decentralizes power. It's much easier for the government to regulate someone else than to regulate itself.

Now if we could solve campaign finance issues, then corruption would be dramatically lessened.

[claudiulodro]

There is a lot of space to play around with outside of "pure" communism, feudalism, or ancient capitalism. For example, the EU seems to be making a strong attempt to balance consumer protections with corporate-friendliness.

[1270018080]

Maybe it's usually not limited throughout history, but our current particular flavor of collapse is late stage capitalism.

[azinman2]

What is the collapse? What is late stage about it? What is the next stage? These words have always felt so meaningless to me...

[throwawaygh]

The original answers to "late?", "collapse?, and "what's next?" questions all require recalling that the term originated in Marxist circles.

The "late" meant something like the type of capitalism that emerged out of ww2, characterized primarily by post-colonial global trade networks. That's quite a bit in the past for us, but "late" by the standards of an ideological tradition that started in the 1800s. Even still, of all your questions, this is the one that has changed meanings perhaps the least in the last 80 years or so. That's because a lot of the things that characterized "late stage capitalism" in the mid 20th century are still with us, and perhaps intensified. If it helps, think of "late stage" as "post-colonial + globalization + financialization". In contrast to the much more mixed political economies of Europe in the 1800s. Or, for an even more modern usage, you might read it as "jet-setting billionaires and the MBAs that manage their factories and open offices". That's the vibe it's supposed to give off, I think.

The "collapse?" and "what's next?" questions sort of have standard Marxist answers (or, at least, standard delineated lines of debate within mid-century Marxism, from what I understand). Careful dispassionate reading the Communist Manifesto... like, the way you would read Plato or Hegel or whatever... can give you a general sense for why "collapse" plays an important role in Marxist theories and what Marxists generally suspect is "next". (Namely, alienation of workers and a resulting violent revolution of the working class against folks who own/control capital.)

nb, I'm not really sure that most people using the term now have much -- if any -- background in Marxist economics/philosophy. I think for the average user, these terms function roughly the same way as "critical race theory" does on the social right. If that makes sense.

So, the "late" retains real descriptive meaning relative to 1800s/early 1900s capitalism, but the "collapse" and "what's next?" have sort of drifted from their original answers and probably play a more rhetorical than literal role these days. Like CRT. No one knows what they mean. They are shibboleths for "change is needed and inevitable", with no specifics for what or how.

Hope that helps.

[pempem]

^ this is a great answer.

The vibe is one where you have :searching for something accessible: a hunger games approach where society is driven towards exploitation rather than the sustenance and growth of the majority.

In general however, its dangerous to think "its always been this way". I would argue societally we've been in a continuous struggle between the two and there are many moments in the recent past where the US was building a more egalitarian society than found elsewhere, despite the rampant incessant racism that existed.

Public schools and libraries, the rise of unions and creation of the wknd, stopping child labor, centralized mailing systems, well managed interstates, growth of home ownership, social welfare, and for a moment really great emergency care at hospitals, had moments of real existence and came together in combinations rarely seen outside of the USA.

Assuming things have always been kind of shit and are likely to just get shittier takes us all off the hook far too easily imo.

[throw10920]

> Assuming things have always been kind of shit and are likely to just get shittier takes us all off the hook far too easily imo.

I've seen this same mindset that you're pointing out.

However, I don't think that it is usually used to "let people off the hook" - most of the time that I've heard it used (a bunch of times in real life, not just on the internet), the subtext is "...and so we should replace the current government with another [highly authoritarian, non-constitutionally-limited] one that can fix these issues, either through voting for an extreme candidate/party, or straight-up violent revolution".

That might be just my experience, though - I went to a university with a significant anarcho-communist group in the student body.

[rootusrootus]

> "...and so we should replace the current government with another [highly authoritarian, non-constitutionally-limited] one that can fix these issues, either through voting for an extreme candidate/party, or straight-up violent revolution".

The interesting thing to me is that this kind of attitude has become dominant across the spectrum of political ideology, in just the space of a few years. A large number of people, or at least the most vocal ones, now seem to support an authoritarian extra-constitutional goverment, they just differ on who they think should be crushed first.

[NaturalPhallacy]

Crashing birth rates, crashing home ownership, stagnant wages, billions of dollars in riot damage, skyrocketing sexlessness among young men, highest inflation in a century...

[manigandham]

What exactly are these stages?

[throwawaygh]

feudalism -> domestic industrialization and the formation of capital markets (1700s) -> imperialist competition in global markets and the height of colonial exploitation (1800s) -> the fully privatized multinational firm, global financialization, fully privatized competitors in global markets (post-ww2 ie late).