this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I mean the obvious answer to this nerd is that the world of Dune is distinctly not capitalist. The empire is a feudal institution, planets are personal fiefdoms, and all those in positions of power are not concerned with capital or money so much as they are prestige and power. The spice trade on Arrakis is more similar to something like the Chinese imperial salt monopoly (a state backed monopoly where most of the rents were used to fund the imperial coffers) than resource extraction under capitalism, albeit a Chinese salt monopoly that involved the Chinese colonising a distant land and using it for the sole purpose of salt extraction. The state in Dune is not concerned with capital formation or expansion, the nobles are not concerned, and while there are certainly merchants and traders (as there are in most polities) they are tangential to how the system operates and are not the ones who determine state policy. A "real universe" does not imply that capitalism exists in all places at all times, this guy is just too enmeshed in capitalist realism to understand that the kind of stuff he's saying only makes sense in a capitalist context.
Wouldn't it make sense for a banking guild with enough capital to buy up debt from the feudal lords to eventually develop? Even with no bourgeois revolution, the conditions for capitalism to develop are still in place, no?
Eventually capitalism would develop since its a feudal sistem but as far as i remember there is no banking guild or something like it, and the only organizations that control the economy of the empire in dune is the Spacing Guild that controls transportation and the CHOAM that controls all comerce
I want to contest the idea that a feudal system always develops into capitalism. The development of capitalism is in many ways a fluke, as there were feudal systems in pre-Qin dynasty China (fengjian), the Maṇḍala system in roughly 5th to 15th century Southeast Asia, Feudal Japan, and various parts of India up until European colonisation that all never developed into capitalism.
An interesting note for me is that, on average, socialist systems are better and more efficient at developing forms of capitalism out of feudalism. A revolutionary nationalist period is almost a bound requirement for capitalism to develop.
That's kind of Branko Milanovic's argument in Capitalism, Alone. Good book, even though I disagree about a lot of its conclusions (mainly that China is clearly "state capitalist").
I do as well.