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Lenin posted:Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. I don't think I've seen the phrase "socialisation of production" before. does Lenin mean that monopolized industries are ripe for worker control? Just want to clear that up bc I feel like it's gonna come up a lot
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Mar 21, 2022 18:09
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Fleetwood posted:I don't think I've seen the phrase "socialisation of production" before. does Lenin mean that monopolized industries are ripe for worker control? Just want to clear that up bc I feel like it's gonna come up a lot I asked the same question and got a great answer: Pentecoastal Elites posted:everyone has to do the work
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Mar 21, 2022 18:26
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oh gently caress, I missed that thx
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Mar 21, 2022 18:32
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Engels talks about it some more in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which is a great book, highly recommended, and pretty short as well if I remember correctlyEngels posted:Before capitalist production — i.e., in the Middle Ages — the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman, or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. The instruments of labor — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labor of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason, they belonged as a rule to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In the fourth section of Capital, Marx has explained in detail how since the 15th century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture, and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning wheel, the handloom, the blacksmith's hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop, by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the production from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: "I made that; this is my product."
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Mar 22, 2022 22:14
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So my take aways from chapter 2 are that the same consolidation that happened in industry has happened with banks. Which then allows a small group of banking magnates to exert control over the rest of industry by turning the flow of capital on and off. This consolidation has also led to a greater number of experts/specialists working for the banks which in turn allow them to make even more profitable decisions. All the numbers mostly went over my head but I think I understand the general idea.
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Mar 23, 2022 07:24
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Mayman10 posted:So my take aways from chapter 2 are that the same consolidation that happened in industry has happened with banks. Which then allows a small group of banking magnates to exert control over the rest of industry by turning the flow of capital on and off. That's what I got out of it. I'm not so sure I understand all the mechanisms by which this consolidation happens but I don't even think that's important. Edit: as for numbers, they seemed to illustrate that as a bank got enough money, it could leverage more and more of that money into investments instead of just acting as middlemen moving currency around for other investors.
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Mar 23, 2022 16:04
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what would lenin say is the "lowest" stage of capitalism?
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Mar 24, 2022 02:37
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snaj posted:what would lenin say is the "lowest" stage of capitalism? primitive accumulation, which is to say, taking poo poo and using it to turn a profit I think when people generally talk about this they mean what happens in the transitional period between precapital and capital societies where the eg. local baron or whoever just takes your land and makes you work on it, as a proletarian laborer -- which is true -- but it's also an ongoing process and primitive accumulation happens nowadays too, often in the privatization of once-public property/goods/services/etc. Lenin's periodization goes primitive accumulation -> colonialism -> imperialism
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Mar 24, 2022 03:29
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:primitive accumulation, which is to say, taking poo poo and using it to turn a profit like how chicago's mayor/city council sold rights to parking meters to private companies as a "cost savings measure" and whoops all time highs on parking meter prices? or how water rights sold to nestle let them bottle it up and sell it back to the people? such a cool loving system
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Mar 24, 2022 08:14
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yeah, exactly. I think you could probably make the argument that the ramping up of primitive accumulation is the hallmark of capital's terminal crisis because it means that the imperial holdings are maximally exploited, or nearly so. There's no more frontier so you have to turn inwards and extract your profits by appropriating from the once-comfortable imperial core. which seems to check out
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Mar 24, 2022 17:28
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finished chapter 2 the tendency for banks to become influential and monopolist in early 20th century has me thinking about how blackrock is owning all the homes and how financial companies can just ruin and plunder companies of their assets before dumping it like vampires man lol it's almost like it's a historical process or something 
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Mar 25, 2022 01:07
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Chap 2 is pretty easy to understand and follows a similar format to chap 1 so I'm just going to quite a few passages I really liked:quote:State monopoly in capitalist society is merely a means of increasing and guaranteeing the income of millionaires in some branch of industry who are on the verge of bankruptcy. Yadoppsi has issued a correction as of 06:17 on Mar 25, 2022 |
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Mar 25, 2022 06:11
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Mayman10 posted:So my take aways from chapter 2 are that the same consolidation that happened in industry has happened with banks. Which then allows a small group of banking magnates to exert control over the rest of industry by turning the flow of capital on and off. This is what I got as well but I wasn't sure and I didn't want to post something incorrect.
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Mar 25, 2022 21:53
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starting chapter 3quote:As a matter of fact, experience shows that it is sufficient to own 40 per cent of the shares of a company in order to direct its affairs, since in practice a certain number of small, scattered shareholders find it impossible to attend general meetings, etc. i'm guessing the financial oligarchs just hold a few big meetings with the various companies they own huh
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Mar 29, 2022 01:56
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huhwhat posted:ah yes china makes everything therefore making it the lynchpin of the world system which automatically makes it imperialist, hmm yes amazing post/username combo. i didn't say that china is imperialist, i only said that they are not incapable of imperialism in the leninist sense. it is perfectly possible to fight an imperialist hegemon with one's own imperialist project. lynchpin was a clumsy metaphor tho. maybe fulcrum would be better? I was tryina get at the idea that china is peripheral to western cores - but it is also increasingly its own core with its own periphery. Harold Fjord posted:Having trouble understanding the difference between describing the situation accurately and assigning blame? no, i'm merely suggesting that there are perhaps more (different/better) ways to analyze a situation accurately now that it's been almost a century since lenin died (rip).
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Mar 29, 2022 10:43
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gonna read the book what chapter is the thread on?
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Mar 31, 2022 23:00
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Marzzle posted:gonna read the book what chapter is the thread on? We're on 3 now.
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Mar 31, 2022 23:39
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if anyone finds the text size on the pdf unreadable here's a .mobi format version that ereaders can adjust the font on
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Apr 2, 2022 23:24
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so Ive just started reading this and I am immediately struck by this: Railways are the summation of the basic capitalist industries. thats now the container.
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Apr 5, 2022 06:15
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concentration leads to monopoly. in the supply chain crisis concentration has lead us to instability. edit: in his time concentration was vertical integration. concentration now is specialization at a global level in a specific product/service. providing that widget/service to nearly all supply chains. it is a horizontal concentration rather than a vertical integration concentration. edit: tech concentration is a different thing that Im not going to post about right now. Bar Ran Dun has issued a correction as of 06:37 on Apr 5, 2022 |
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Apr 5, 2022 06:31
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my initial impression is that 1917 was a much different time than today and it's interesting to actually read something by lenin and see his perspective on marx as something from the distant past
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Apr 5, 2022 18:56
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Chapter 3 is pretty juicy. I like how Lenin connects the takeover of public commons and local governments thru finance capital to the outward projection of imperial coercion, and the rapid compounding of monopolies into a coordinated global effort on the part of bankers to exterminate democratization
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Apr 5, 2022 22:33
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rip the thread got unstickied guess it's time to start chapter 4
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Apr 10, 2022 04:49
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chapter 4's only five pages long!? so yeah export of capital man one can only imagine Lenin's reaction to the IMF these days
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Apr 10, 2022 06:27
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Hello I read the first three chapters. I wanted to post some of my thoughts I've had before week 4 discussion picks up. Most of the discussion hasn't been dumb long rear end posts like this so I apologize, I'll just make this a one time thing and keep subsequent thoughts to the lengths of these individual sections. Prefaces Reading this again after the first three bits is fun - I didn't really register fully his notes about subtitling Japan in for other countries. I made a mental note in one of the upcoming chapters that the callout against Japan seemed motivated perhaps by the recent Russian defeat to the Japanese - its a clever bit of faux-patriotic camouflage, then. I already knew Lenin's reputation for being catty was well deserved, but even in these sort of minor things he was obviously deserving of his reputation as a very clever sort of intellectual. Section 3's of the second preface mentions that post war conditions "cannot end otherwise than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory". Given what emerged later, that confident statement gives me a deep sense of melancholy. I don't really find this a fault in his analysis - he did mention earlier that social life is extremely complex, but I think even now its a constant source of academic angst that, even when confronted by millions of corpses and scenes of depravity, a drat lot of people will instead turn towards reactionary irrationality than accept the "objective" reality. Chapter 1 It is interesting that Lenin spends so much time and effort showing how monopolization and concentration is inevitable - that is taken for granted by basically everyone now. Of course, they consider it 'crony capitalism' because they're dumb as hell or just intentionally specious (tho I would save that claim for lawyers and judges that decided that monopolies are not harmful as long as they dont hurt consumers - a claim too idiotic to be stated honestly by basically anyone). I like Lenin noting the capitalist neglect of agriculture, as its such an apparent fault for an economic system. This is at least recognized by states, which have to massively subsidize agriculture to make it 'work' in a capitalist economy even with the great gains in productivity, but even then it is riddled with apparent irrationalities and deficits - destruction of landscape to grow maximally profitable commodities, combined with inexcusable amounts of waste. Not to mention, destruction of the climate itself because the gain in profit in the fossil fuel industry overcomes all considerations for the harm it could cause to all other, less profitable industries. As capitalism moves to 'higher' states, the winners of the prior states end up eaten from the inside out. Chapter 2 The post office thing comes out of left field - but if they were considered important enough to mention alongside banks and such, I suppose it makes one of my favorite historical anecdotes make a lot more sense - that the german post office had its own nuclear program in WW2. What is interesting here is the writing on the falling importance on Stock Exchanges, considering how much focus they are given nowadays, and, of course, how significant the upcoming crash would be. But of course, stock markets had become inexorably linked to banks at that point as opposed to dying off and remain that way to this day. It certainty had lost its quality of being a 'measuring rod' (if it ever was - nowadays its obviously a dowsing rod instead), given how one major factor in the crash is how blatant stock manipulation had become by financers. Lenin clearly lays out how much power had become accumulated within such a small subset of people - and how much it grew to eek out every possible speck of profit. People complain constantly about state bureaucracy and meddling, but you cannot escape the realization that capitalist economies had, in fact, become "command economies" run by bureaucrats. Except now instead of 'corruption' (extraction of wealth and the increase of power) being considered criminal, it is the entire point and goal of these hordes of ministers. But its okay, as this is 'natural'... or as Lenin points out, attempting to do something about it would run afoul of some 'sacred' concepts of liberalism. Chapter 3 The most prescient stuff here is the links between these capitalist oligarchs and the states - state policy is explicitly linked to the success of these oligarchs, and yet, the desire of the oligarchs becomes international as it chases superprofits. Just like how Kings had to tolerate the despised merchants as a means to their ends, the states, with their competition with the other powers resulting in ever growing needs for organization, industrial development, and most of all, money, end up aligning with the oligarchs. This is linked with the idea of 'soft power' - as military technology has become so devastating and expensive that it became more difficult for a state to gain power from 'traditional' conquest (in fact, conquest often is a major drain on modern state's resources), it has become much simpler to use the power of these financers to loot and dominate foreigners and establish your own supremacy. 'Hard power' and 'aggression' ends up criminalized - so the 'loser' states are either forced into utter subordination via avenues such as IMF 'benevolence' (often carrying out the dirty work of local repression for their 'benefactors'), or they are compelled, by the logic of interstate anarchy, to guarantee their survival with force of arms (be it warfare, tariffs, nationalization, or revolution), they are now 'criminal' states that are justified targets for the 'pacifist' states. Of course, this does not make these 'victims' innocent or moral - their logic is often ruthless and cruel (and oftentimes delusional) but the important thing to note that these actions are not 'aberrations' driven by 'madmen' - they are the result of these materialist forces. As Lenin notes in this chapter, these forces override the 'individual character' of states, be it "Prussian Integrity" or otherwise. Do like the quote "even the widest political liberty cannot save us from being converted into a nation of unfree people". I think that's the first mention of colonies in the last chart (outside the prefaces)- which surprised me. I figured the core of the analysis of imperialism would start with discussion of colonial exploitation rather than on bank monopolization. Given how colonial powers would be overcome by the industrial imperialists, its also a very prescient decision.
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Apr 11, 2022 07:23
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Tiler Kiwi posted:Chapter 1 Good post. I was just mulling over the monopoly question myself and also reflected that it is only ever framed in the 'cost to the consumer' (which can happen even without a monopoly with price fixing between competitors), and I wonder what Lenin has to say about the idea of a monopoly so large that it not only controls some given resource/product, but also all labor (see: amazon/walmart being the only game in some towns). Your last point there was also surprising to me. I've stated in the thread before that I viewed imperialism as essentially just... colonialism with a fancier word, so the book just going right to the mat about the banks was a big eye opener. Really good stuff.
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Apr 12, 2022 19:49
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One thing I like about the analysis from Lenin is how, by going from bottom to top rather than top to bottom, he dodges several semantic traps. A monopoly does not have to be literally one company - a bank can turn a million dollars worth of "monopoly power" into several million by capturing enough boards, who then dominate other companies and industries. Same for imperialism itself - the specific mechanics and methods are not as important as the functions and class relationships. But our legal system and several moralistic arguments focus solely on the semantic minutiae instead.
Tiler Kiwi has issued a correction as of 03:26 on Apr 13, 2022 |
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Apr 13, 2022 03:24
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Tiler Kiwi posted:One thing I like about the analysis from Lenin is how, by going from bottom to top rather than top to bottom, he dodges several semantic traps. A monopoly does not have to be literally one company - a bank can turn a million dollars worth of "monopoly power" into several million by capturing enough boards, who then dominate other companies and industries. Same for imperialism itself - the specific mechanics and methods are not as important as the functions and class relationships. But our legal system and several moralistic arguments focus solely on the semantic minutiae instead. long time ago, I skimmed a math paper ostensibly showing that you can exercise absolute control over networked type complex systems' global behavior with as little as 8% direct control of central network nodes, and I think about that a lot, but I never found it back.
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Apr 13, 2022 13:26
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Zodium posted:long time ago, I skimmed a math paper ostensibly showing that you can exercise absolute control over networked type complex systems' global behavior with as little as 8% direct control of central network nodes, and I think about that a lot, but I never found it back. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game and hell, Monopoly, as intended, for how 'fair' systems actually work in practice
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Apr 14, 2022 16:26
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I know doing a group reading is difficult to do on a dying comedy forum, so I googled and checked if there were any guided reading studies out there and it looks like there are. Would anyone want to take a stab at these questions for chapter 1? Might spark some dialogue. Why does the doing away with competition not lead to the doing away of crises? Why is the idea of breaking up monopolies a reactionary and utopian one? By what specific mechanisms do monopolies assert their domination?
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Apr 18, 2022 06:23
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Kaedric posted:Why does the doing away with competition not lead to the doing away of crises? Alright, to summarize all this: Capital can only exist if it steals from labor (which capitalists call profit) and wields social control (monopolization) to steal from labor the way a human uses their physicality to secure the food they must eat to live; crises disrupt labor far more than Capital, facilitating and directly enabling theft from labor as without crisis labor is more resistant to the demands/thefts made by Capital; thus, Capital's destruction of competition via monopolistic control can never do away with crises because doing so would be suicide to Capital, and is why Capital instead both refuses to mitigate crises (e.g. Climate) and intentionally induces new crises at various scales on a given community (e.g. directing public police or private security to dispossess the most vulnerable/working poor of labor) or internationally such as open and/or clandestine wars (e.g. War on Drugs, War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, etc). Coincidentally, that warmongering is the hallmark of Imperialism; whoda thunk it. quote:Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised. That baseline drive for controlling all resources in the name of profit--including the human resources, because what else can you call the private appropriation of social labor--segues into how that control allows Capital to benefit from crisis; monopolization via cartels working in concert to control resources, especially a variety of resources as one industry's cartel becomes large enough to consume/merge with another industry, allows understanding the impacts of a given crisis by measuring pre- and post-crisis, as well as control of the technology that is being developed which is critical to supercharge capital's control and in turn growth/ability to steal profit from labor (computing and the internet being the ultimate examples in our living memory, if not accepting that Capital controls the technologies of written law and mass communication directly). That's why monopolies had to win, why the competing outfits eventually solidified into cartels and became Capital: quote:The great revolution commenced with the crash of 1873, or rather, the depression which followed it and which, with hardly discernible interruptions in the early eighties, and the unusually violent, but short-lived boom round about 1889, marks twenty-two years of European economic history ... .. During the short boom of 1889-90, the system of cartels was widely resorted to in order to take advantage of favourable business conditions. An ill-considered policy drove prices up still more rapidly and still higher than would have been the case if there had been no cartels, and nearly all these cartels perished ingloriously in the smash. Another five-year period of bad trade and low prices followed, but a new spirit reigned in industry; the depression was no longer regarded as something to be taken for granted: it was regarded as nothing more than a pause before another boom. ...and everything turned out OK after 1900-03, right? wait, what's that? something about rackets? bagawd is that Smedley Butler's music?! Shitposting aside, I reference War is a Racket by Smedley Butler to reinforce the drive for war inherent to capital; Lenin's citing of historic capitalism-turning-imperialism is happening as WW1 rages, and reinforced by Butler almost two decades later, who explicitly highlights war profiteering with great details similar to Lenin's as far as how Capital directly benefitted at *massive* cost to labor regardless of any comparatively minor damage Capital sustained. Lenin's closing paragraph in this chapter before his last sentence is discussing the events that lead to proto-Capital's awareness that monopolizing resources puts them in a position to control other entities by out-enduring crisis, so may as well induce them, i.e. Get Imperial: quote:Crises of every kindeconomic crises most frequently, but not only thesein their turn increase very considerably the tendency towards concentration and towards monopoly. In this connection, the following reflections of Jeidels on the significance of the crisis of 1900, which, as we have already seen, marked the turning-point in the history of modern monopoly, are exceedingly instructive: The realization that non-conglomerates, who merely focused on doing one thing well, were not as resilient in the face of crisis as cartels. Conglomerations of cartels across different industries had enough resources to be active in multiple areas so that crises impacting one part of the organization are made up for by others, and this was effectively weaponized via inducing crises that, while still damaging to Capital, are far more damaging to competitors/labor in general. Whether or not there's something left after years, decades, or centuries of that logic is never considered, or rather, when it is studied it's then dismissed via intentional control of that knowledge as yet another resource for fueling crises (e.g. effects of industrialization on climate via the measurements of resources) to ensure the systems of cartels known as Capital get their required profit at the expense--including at the cost of mass death--of labor, so that Capital can survive at all instead of the stolen social labor being returned to the commons. --------------------------- ...I don't know why I wrote any of this, I was too tired when I even started writing this, and I don't know poo poo about poo poo. Unlike Lenin, I'm not prepared to do more than dream of what happens if cartels are refocused to serve the communities their labor lives in and otherwise cooperating with other cartels for the greater good, instead of just stealing from labor to pay for things like pissyachts and juiceros.
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Apr 18, 2022 11:42
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So is it just me that did not read enough theory or does Engels paint with too rough a brush when he leans on Hegel's refutation of the thing an sich to validate the pertinence of historical materialism. I mean it may very well be true that knowing all the qualities of a thing is sufficient to know the thing. But how can we be that sure we know all the qualities of the thing ? It may be that knowing 'enough' qualities of a thing is sufficient for praxis, but that's a bit of a slippery slope ain't it ? Are we sure we understand all the qualities of horseshit, erratum, the average SA post ? Am I just backsliding into Cartesian doubt here ? E: Yeah sorry I am not commenting on the work being discussed, was referring to Engels_Socialism_Utopian_and_Scientific, page 18. Sorry for the derail, it got mentioned last page and I dove straight into it. Happy Polly logies for the confusion and undergraduate level query. two-time fee has issued a correction as of 16:23 on Apr 18, 2022 |
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Apr 18, 2022 12:25
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Tempora Mutantur posted:The realization that non-conglomerates, who merely focused on doing one thing well, were not as resilient in the face of crisis as cartels. Conglomerations of cartels across different industries had enough resources to be active in multiple areas so that crises impacting one part of the organization are made up for by others, and this was effectively weaponized via inducing crises that, while still damaging to Capital, are far more damaging to competitors/labor in general. this is currently playing out btw. the other side of globalization was a move to specialization. companies have been spinning off their non core business to focus on their core business. it has been more profitable to not be a conglomerate or vertically integrated. now those companies are going hosed by the supply chain crisis. the vertically integrated and conglomerates are handling it much better.
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Apr 18, 2022 20:13
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When spinning off their businesses I always just assumed it was paperwork fuckery and the folks at the top still organized and ran everything just about identically. Is that at all based in reality?Tempora Mutantur posted:
Thanks for doing so, I didn't really understand the question as it was worded, and your response made a lot of sense. I am never able to put my thoughts together in fancy paragraphs like that so I rely on other people to do so for me Kaedric has issued a correction as of 20:43 on Apr 18, 2022 |
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Apr 18, 2022 20:35
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Kaedric posted:When spinning off their businesses I always just assumed it was paperwork fuckery and the folks at the top still organized and ran everything just about identically. Is that at all based in reality? short answer: in the minority yes but overall it's just idiocy exchanging longterm stability of the outfit itself in the name of short term profit for shareholders it's going to sound really loving dumb but I legit think that what you're talking about is explained by The Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/) i.e. because capitalism rewards sociopathic action based on true understanding (e.g. knowing but suppressing that cigarettes/tobacco cause cancer, or that advertising is just there to sell worthless poo poo based on creating artificial demand via induced desire, but spinning it to the public/its own true believer employees as "you need the FREEDOM to choose to smoke," or "freedom of speech and free ideas means that advertising is there to help people find things they need but didn't know existed so any government censorship is bullshit! buy Smokeball today!!") a lot of companies get rich/powerful because of some key people (the corporation cannot exist without conscious human action at some point) who can spin things the way they need to these key players and their close social/professional circles drive the growth/narrative of a corporation, those who know how poo poo *actually* works and what the dependencies are and what risks exist and what relationships are critical to other orgs and how "well our key supplier comes from Company C who we can only get work with us because Bill Fucksworth supplies him with cocaine/access to his daughter, it's all very sordid," (I have a very dumb anecdote about something almost this bad sounding that happened at a "corporate leadership" event but basically: imagine a corporate fixer who is incompetent telling a room of people about how the fixer they looked up had to order an abortion for someone else to secure their role, and also the incompetent idiot speaking makes millions a year as a C-level shitlord) so when the key players and their circles eventually bail for the next best/easiest way to sock away value and build their personal holdings/enrich their cartel's cadre, the True Believer idiots left behind who are like "hell yeah brother hard work and sacrifice is the way to be! good things happen to good people!" move up the ranks, and this shuffle happens so often at a national/global scale that you just have a tiny sliver of ultra-competent assholes running the actual conglomerates to varying levels of effectiveness/competency but still all with the class consciousness that Capital beats the poo poo out of labor with (think Bill Gates buying up a fuckton of arable land and water rights while also holding real estate and whatever shadow shell corps run the private security/lobbyists with international states that have absolutely kept his rear end and his family alive for the last few decades, or Bezos building the world's largest centrally planned economy which he clearly has spun into contacts across all industry, etc) but then there's The Failchildren Left Behind who came after the key players, the failchildren only made a living off the sloppy seconds of their superiors, but are utterly convinced that they themselves were the movers and shakers after all, plus daddy left them the business when he died! wait why is my c-suite all resigning...? or replace the names with whoever Real Capital is if you think Gates/Bezos are just superficial figurehead failchildren like Musk and the Real Capital is backing them, whatever, the point stands that there are the people who perhaps literally killed to stake their corporation (East India Co comes to mind) which I highlight as these people understood and or at least risked things to the point they were willing to kill or order killing or do something even easier like just immiserate a community under threat of sending police to disrupt their lives because they had the audacity to unionize, and who eventually moved on to other things in one form or another, but the corporations/entities they created went on to be ran by whoever; even if the original players handpicked successors, you are by no means guaranteed to pick correctly, or have your pick even survive long enough to take the reins, or any other myriad of entropic events that exist to erode your creation and then you consider on top of that the ignored "externalities" (loving lol, that's up there with "collateral damage") of creating crisis after crisis to profit, of eroding the infrastructure that enabled the formations of some corporations themselves, and you have a system that ultimately refuses to act in its own self interest in terms of long-term successful survival versus the "paper clip maximization" we have been living through for about a solid century
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Apr 18, 2022 21:13
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Kaedric posted:When spinning off their businesses I always just assumed it was paperwork fuckery and the folks at the top still organized and ran everything just about identically. Is that at all based in reality? it depends sometimes its real and they divest less profitable components of the supply chain or logistics companies. Horizontal was in as part of the same thinking as JIT. some companies did really stupid stuff, for example USAA dropped investments and mortgages and a couple other services to focus on insurance.
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Apr 19, 2022 01:22
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well another example is part of the crisis chassis availability and that was .... largely driven by container lines divesting from chassis ownership in most places a ways back.
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Apr 19, 2022 01:24
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Theory is gay
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Apr 19, 2022 22:21
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Theory is gay Sounds like it's perfect for you then.
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Apr 19, 2022 22:35
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| # ? May 7, 2024 04:26 |
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:Theory is gay hello theory
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Apr 28, 2022 09:47
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