Cory Doctorow has often said capitalists hate capitalism, as in, they hate competitive markets and hate love monopolies.

Yanis Varoufakis says we're living under technofeudalism, because the economy has shifted to extracting rents through control over technological platforms.

And enshittification thereof, Doctorow and I would probably interject.

It's worth pointing out that capitalism is not just making and selling products for a profit, artisans and traders have existed since long before feudalism set in.

Capitalism IIUC (IANAE) amounts to making and selling products in competitive markets so as to extract value from workers and reinvesting the capital for exponential growth. Economists might differ on the exact definition of this economic system, but "free markets" meant rent-free back then.

Now, I've seen Varoufakis' assessment be disputed on the grounds that the technofeudalism economic practices he recognizes as feudalist rather than capitalist are not fundamentally different from any other "capitalism" contemporary mortals (as opposed to immortal corporations) have experienced. And that's not wrong either IMHO.

From all of these arguments, I'm coming to the conclusion that so-called capitalists aren't really capitalists, they're (neo)feudal lords in disguise, imposing capitalism on others while enjoying their lordship.

It checks out: they aim for rent extraction rather than selling products at a profit in a competitive market; they make vassals out of customers and users; they don't even sell stuff: they rent it, or they just pretend to sell it while still owning it, allowing vassals to use stuff as the lords see fit while charging vassals for the privilege, and enforcing their loyalty.

We don't seem to have had actual capitalism for over a century: during the imperial expansions and wars of the early 1900's, neofeudal lords had already taken over from capitalists, and we've been going downhill since then.

This means capitalism lasted no more than a couple of generations, and since then, it has been a lie used by neofeudal lords to keep themselves at the top of the economic food chain, while everyone else works for them to extract rents from: workers of all sorts, small business owners, small investors, public officers, you name it.

Whatever they earn through their own efforts, the neofeudal lords are there to take the lion's share. This has nothing to do with capitalism: it's rent extraction, it's feudal.

Which is not to say that neofeudal lords haven't learned from capitalism in the process of swallowing it: reinvestment for exponential growth seems to have been learned and adopted very successfully by them.

So this neofeudalism is not pure feudalism either, it is a chimera that adapted the feudal rent extraction for self-sustenance to rent extraction for capitalistic reinvestment, with self- (effectively un-) regulated explosive plutocratic growth.

It's been going for some 5 generations already, but it can't possibly last much longer. We can't stop it from ending soon, but we may be able to affect how it ends, and by how long we outlast it.

So blong,