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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?
Capitalism is a very specific system whereby a capitalist class is able to take the reigns of state power and direct that towards capital formation/development. Just because the conditions for capitalism to develop were in place doesn't mean it would ever happen; China had the "conditions for capitalism" for like a thousand years but it never developed because the imperial houses kept control of the state and did not allow any would be capitalists to direct state policy. The "board of directors" for CHOAM, the massive merchant guild, are just the Padishah Emperor and the Landsraad (the nobles). There is no separate capitalist class, no merchants that are not in control of the nobles directly. No reason to think that capitalism would develop in the Dune universe when it hasn't for literally 10,000 years since the establishment of the empire based around spice production. Dune takes place around 10,193 A.G., which is After Guild aka 10k years after the establishment of the Spacing Guild which requires spice melange to navigate the void of space, so this economic system has been in place for ten thousand years without capitalism developing. Don't see why it would just randomly appear one day given the structure of the world.
Do you have any reading on this?
So for China specifically, probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don't agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it's a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument I've identified above, that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel's three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.
If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I'd recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the 'Rise of the West' by Eric Mielants. It's not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the "capitalism requires the state" bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else.
Part of the vibe of dune is that the galaxy is feudal by design roughly. The butlerian jihad did a number on people. Also the bene gesserit control politics so...
The bene gesserit could just act as a deep state behind any front facing political system, though.
To give a short answer, that would require the establishment of a global connected market (think the wars started by the british to open up "trade ports" in foreign countries). Lacking globalised market, what you have, essentially, is a series of local markets that can communicate with each other only through passing traders, and, as such, one can do arbitrage infinitely among these markets, as such the real competitive advantage was securing monopoly privileges over said trade routes, which is how trade worked for the most part.
For the sake of the argument, if a banking guild would seek debt to develop, it would then do so over distinctly feudal lines, such as securing monopoly privileges, hiring mercenaries to literally bully competitors out of the market, so on. There are no market imperatives to start the capitalist quartet of:
The reason as to why any of these is a bad idea is left as an exercise for the reader, but, for example, what's the point of improving labour-productivity if the king just guaranteed me as the only chartered company in any given sector.
great example as like the first thing herbert writes about arrakis is how inefficiently the harkonnens harvested spice
All the other points already raised aside, it's not in the interests of any of the major established stellar players to allow a new group to form that could challenge its power. It's not impossible that such an organization did try to form but was bought out by CHOAM, or offended the Guild, or got murdered by the Emperor's Sardukar, or got manipulated and outplayed by the Bene Geserit.
Also remember that this is a universe where FTL communication happens by couriers delivering messages on (Guild) ships. What are the bankers going to do if the Guild decides to cancel its own debts?
Very good point, telecommunications was an important prerequisite for globalization for a reason.
Adding on to the other (very good) answers here, a large part of the point of Dune is that the political environment at the beginning of the books is utterly stagnant and forcibly kept that way by dozens of power brokers who don't want change for any reason. Between the Bene Gesserit's machinations over the course of centuries, the Spacing Guild's monopoly of travel, CHOAM dominating all economic trade, and the Emperor and the Major Houses shoving one another back and forth politically over eons any potential new players would simply be obliterated unless they operated as just another House playing by the same rules as everyone else. The Great Convention ruthlessly enforced stringent feudalist terms while heavily restricting any potential avenues for disruption (most notably the use of atomics or thinking machines) and was enforced by every major power player simultaneously, on threat of utter annihilation.
It took having the Bene Gesserit's main long-term goal of producing the Kwisatz Haderach happen without their knowledge on pure accident combined with said legendary figure uniting the entire Fremen nation behind him, catching the Emperor and Great Houses completely by surprise in one of the most one-sided battles in history, and him discovering the full lifecycle of the worms that make Spice while also giving him unprecedented control over said process (and the ability to destroy it outright) to shatter this equilibrium, and then it took his son spending nearly 4,000 years dismantling these power structures and setting up the Golden Path to allow humanity the ability to scatter and evolve once more.
Excellent textual examples being the Ixians and Bene Tleilax who in varying degrees basically hid themselves until the ossified political structures were shaken enough to allow space for them as major players (the ascension of Leto II.)
its worth noting here, that "thinking machines" also includes technology that could allow for space travel without the spice, something that traps everyone on their planets but nobles and their lackies basically. Leaving the planet as a regular person would be like your 2nd grade teacher going on a space tourism flight, very very rare
people in the Dune universe are as peasants bound to their fields for the most part, especially during Leto II's rule
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.
Space NAFTA?
Kinda but its like a corporation that you can own a stake in but its mostly control by Corrino and its supporters
capitalism is not a strictly necessary step. They already have tech and industry, they would have absolutely no productive benefit from capitalism and no need for anything before basically a full switch to communism, they have the tech and the resources needed
the spacing guild operates the banks, actually