The whole point about capitalism is that those who provide the capital to create a company, those who are “prepared to take the financial risk as entrepreneurs” (in other words, speculate on its future success), hold it hostage as a source of permanent income via the dividends paid out on profits.
In other words, for the capitalist, the company manufactures return on investment. For the capitalist, what it really produces (goods, services or whatever) is incidental, a byproduct. Imagine if investment capital were to be banned. Instead, to finance its creation, a company would loan money from a public bank at a reasonable rate of interest. Once this is paid back, all its ressources would go towards its own good, that of its workers and that of society at large. No more shareholders! Ideally the bank would finance projects on the basis of their social, cultural or environmental utility, and not on the basis of their potential profitability. Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism, invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation. Joe Rabie. > Le 5 janv. 2018 à 15:06, Norbert Bollow <[email protected]> a écrit : > > Capitalism is efficient at creating companies which benefit so much > from making sales that it makes economic sense for them to spend a lot > of money on marketing. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
