From the Second Circuit Court decision:
“the library eBook lending market is thriving… [p]ublishers and their authors have tapped into a profitable, growing market.”
Pure #RentierSociety. Celebration of #RentBounty and glorification of bounty-motive.
Despite the colloquial use of the word "profit" in the wording above, digital lending licensing is exclusively extractive, entirely a matter of rent sought by way of resource control. There's no production here, only usury in another form.
It is that suspension of disbelief, all too easily elicited, that the first estate, #KayfabePanto, that opiate named electoralism, subsists upon.
That is their #RentBounty harvest: the #EgoValue that manifests, like zero-point energy, from the willing suspension of disbelief that accrues in the empty spaces of floating signification.
Our task is to be far less willing.
Which is to say, #RentierSociety is not capitalist society, yet neither any sort of "neo"-feudalism.
Where estates of the realm checked power of king by checking the power of each the other…
Estates of rentier society check power of each #classposture which #tensegrity cultivates for #RentBounty harvest…
Very power of those so subjugated being the crop: #conveyancée, levied for exchange value; #disaccommodation, tilled for #EgoValue; #conquistadas, reproductive labor-power, itself, harnessed.
Aglithaculture very specifically requires we be sick all the time.
https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112255506114867344
Diseases as crops for #RentBounty harvest.
Will not warn you against the saneism again.
Again, to my point, more durable protection can be achieved via better design that doesn't favor rapid turnaround over efficacy.
But the love affair of #RentierSociety with our aglithacultural industry ensures that other technologies less focused on rapid marketability—less focused on repeated harvest of #RentBounty—are less visible as alternatives.
We know mRNA has limitations. We don't fix them by throwing more mRNA at the problem.
Now, where #lumpentheory must still navigate traps is in discussion of society as #RentierSociety.
Here, we must hold steadfast to articulation of #RentBounty-motive as a colonial relation, one which includes #perquisitive extraction.
Here, rent-seeking encompasses any and all unproductive and nonproductive relations whereby value is extracted through dispossession of others.
Perquisition, a thorough seeking for perks, as a subset of rent-seeking, is the defining relation of rentier society.
ALICE is a cute acronym for what is more-or-less #conveyancée #classposture.
Not entirely, not exactly, as to be conveyancée is to be a conduit of exchange-value #RentBounty harvest, whether that flow of colonial extraction originates as a paycheck or otherwise.
Nor is ALICE postural—but rather categorical—where one may code-switch from conveyancée to #disaccommodation to #perquisitive and back again over course of a day; the definition of ALICE does not preclude homelessness.
When #lumpentheory speaks of #conveyancée #classposture under #RentierSociety, this includes all material relations where the individual is rendered as a conduit for extraction of #RentBounty harvest.
Not simply one's landlord—where the rent-bounty relation is made explicit, nor even one's creditors—but also every industry whose existence is predicated on the mere existence of one's body as source of exchange-value, however that exchange-value may originate.
Thus we have the sickwork industry.
If the two premier sources of wage-labor job growth in your vaunted economy are too embarrassing not to skip right over and talk about something else, maybe line goes up ain't the way to organize a society.
Economy's booming because of all the sickness those of oligarch #classposture get to harvest #RentBounty from!
Huzzah!
Thank Vibe'n that restaurants & entertainment industries also happen to be hiring, or else how would we distract from fact that over one in four new jobs in past year were in healthcare, and another estimated 50 thousand new jobs nationally, at minimum, were newly hired local police?
(~13% of local gov't jobs are police, local gov't jobs increased by 376K in past 12 months.)
This is #RentierSociety.
A country that spends more money per capita on healthcare than comparable countries, with poorer outcomes, including greater premature mortality, wherein a progressively sicker and more disabled population is a #RentBounty harvest of inelastic demand, hires more healthcare workers to extract those rents—and this is lauded by the #KayfabePanto…
While quietly police employment climbs.
But sure, let's talk about growth in hospitality jobs. i.e., bread and circuses. Yay‽
The term #RentierSociety operates as "capitalist society" did in writings of Marx, as distinct from the reified term "capitalism" (the use of which by others speaking in his name prompted Marx to muse that he was not a Marxist).
Rentier society refers to the complex of socio-material relations of our moment in history—organized not around a motive for wage-labor exploitative profit, but rather motives for colonial extractive #RentBounty, in both exchange-value & #EgoValue form.
#UBI, true UBI, truly universal, requires trust busting.
There's no escaping this.
Otherwise will just be more #RentBounty for harvest.
Central promise of #FrosteanBargain is that our choices make us. If you enjoy #RentBounty harvest perks of colonialism—from world offering itself up to be consumed—is because you made good choices. If you are unable to take everything you want, you've made bad choices.
Suddenly, all those good choices were for naught. Contract suspended, on threat of imminent death. Everything believed about one's place in the world is null & void. Anyone could die, like that, virtue of choices notwithstanding.
@mori Absent price competition, indeed this is inevitable.
Where UBI works, it fosters recipients to start new businesses: increasing competition. The income cushion allows them to pay for basics while bringing new goods and services to their communities, that those communities can afford because of UBI.
In an economy where consolidation underwrites captive markets, spending on basics simply feeds #RentBounty to consolidated players—who then set the rules to keep competitors from their trough.
@gentrifiedrose #RentierSociety is all about harvesting the #RentBounty of #tensegrity—falling ever more robustly into stability—in furtherance of mutually symbiotic oligarch #classposture and #perquisitive classposture interests.
UBI without anti-trust reform is recipe for price gouging.
In 1970s and 80s, Bork eviscerated anti-trust law, arguing that competition was not a public good and that consolidation served consumers through low prices.
Two generations later, we have consolidated industries—unrestrained by competition—celebrating priceflation in earnings reports.
Absent reversal of Bork doctrine, UBI would feed bumper #RentBounty harvest of uncontested market—greedflation outpacing any sustenance.
Why work to fix a problem for which there is a known and viable solution when a continuous stream of #RentBounty value can be extracted from the problem being maintained in perpetuity?
This is #RentierSociety—whether in the form of white supremacy or #KayfabePanto or monetization of perpetual pandemic—where injustice itself is a renewable resource to be cultivated and harvested for the bounty-interest of oligarch #classposture and #perquisitive classposture alike.
Etymologically, a "consumer" is one who squanders or wastes (15th century). Economic discourse elides this meaning: reducing consumption to flipside of coin of production. Not negligence, but equilibrium.
#Lumpentheory speaks to bounty-motive. Born of crisis of #surplusicity, #RentBounty harvest and #perquisitive #classposture both find negligence in what is not taken, what is not gathered.
That is, colonial bounty-motive flips "consumption" on its head, renders the consumer as virtuous.
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