Our State-Corporate Plantation Economy
We’ve been persuaded that the state-cartel Plantation Economy is “capitalist,” but it isn’t. It’s a rentier skimming machine.
I have often discussed the manner in which the U.S. economy is a Plantation Economy, meaning it has a built-in financial hierarchy with corporations at the top dominating a vast populace of debt-serfs/ wage slaves with little functional freedom to escape the system’s neofeudal bonds.
Since I spent some of my youth in a classic Plantation town (and worked on the plantation as a laborer in summer), the concept of a Plantation Economy is not an abstraction to me, but a living analogy of the way our economy works.
Wal-Mart and the Plantation Economy (August 24, 2010)
Colonizing the Plantation of the Mind (August 25, 2010)
We Need a Social Economy, Not a Hyper-Financialized Plantation Economy (November 12, 2015)
Loving Our Servitude in America’s Plantation Economy (February 10, 2017)
The Plantation Economy is extremely hierarchical. Corporations and the state are both extremely hierarchical.
In the Plantation Economy, the Company has access to nearly unlimited credit.Small businesses serving the employees and the employees have enough credit to live on but not enough to buy productive assets. As a result, the Corporation can always buy up any productive assets, expanding its monopoly.
The state also has an essentially unlimited line of credit which it can use to fund its favored cartels and state fiefdoms.
In the Plantation Economy, the Company suppresses any innovation that threatens its monopoly and the state enforces whatever means the Corporation deploys: buying up patents and small companies, predatory pricing to bankrupt competitors, etc.
The Plantation Economy is a mono-culture of large corporations and their partner in rentier skimming, the state. Our economy is a state-cartel finance-debt system; it’s only capitalist on the margins, that is, in the fringes that aren’t profitable enough for corporations to control.
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