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.
chapotraphouse
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Vaush posts go in the_dunk_tank
Dunk posts in general go in the_dunk_tank, not here
Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from the_dunk_tank
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
- competitive production
- profit maximization
- reinvestment of surpluses
- need to improve labour-productivity
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.
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
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.
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.
Do I look like I give a goddamn about capitalism?
how'd his head get so big i thought
spoiler
he was just like wrapped in a living biomechanical skin of baby sandworms
book 4 spoilers
that's Children of Dune, by God Emperor he's a full grown thousands-year-old worm with a giant human face
I think he kills one of his Duncan Idaho clones by rolling on him. weird book
oh wow that does get weird. i know warhammer 40k is basically a ripoff of dune and Micheal moorcock novels but thats seriously 40k levels of weirdness
The Dune books get weirder and weirder with each novel.
Going from book 3 to 4 is a fun and wild jump, although I don't recall reading much past 4 if at all. Might be time for a re-read, haven't read past book 2 since high school.
How is the series after book 4?
Oh, Living Biomechanical Skin of Baby Sandworms. It's a real shame LBSoBS broke up after their first album.
Business people don't have the creativity to imagine a world that runs on something other than derivatives of derivatives of markets
Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM) was one of the major galactic organisations in the time of the Corrino Empire and later the Atreides Empire, a gigantic monopoly encompassing all forms of commerce across the Imperium which essentially controlled all economic affairs across the cosmos, although it relied upon the Spacing Guild for transport across space due to the Guild's monopoly on faster-than-light travel. CHOAM touched almost all products the Guild will transport, from art forms to technology and of course melange. Many Houses depended on CHOAM profits, and an enormous proportion of those depended on melange. Most economic ventures were conducted through CHOAM, in which the Imperial House, the Landsraad, and Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild all had a stake.
CHOAM directorships were the real evidence of political power in the Imperium, passing with the shifts of voting strength within the Landsraad as it balanced itself against the Emperor and his supporters. Directorship in the CHOAM was the key to wealth, each noble House dipping from the company's coffers whatever it could under this power.
Something something monopolistic tendencies of capital, I am on my hands and knees begging these bozos to just read a fucking book
Glad someone mentioned CHOAM, it's basically Wall Street if Wall Street physically owned all the markets as a simplification and rather blunt criticism.
NOAM CHOAMSKY 😳
I don't see how adding a futures market on top would make the spice less scarce. All you are doing is creating inequality. The total spice remains the same.
I think market nerds forget that markets themselves are a form of rationing.
If there are 1000 people and 1000 pieces of bread, a perfectly fair system would give one piece of bread to every person. In market system, the amount of bread remains the same except it's rationed based on purchasing power. So if bread costs $1 and 50% of the population has no money while rest have $2, then the "Rich" could buy double the bread.
It's also the most inelastic resource ever since it both enables interworld trade and is highly addictive, and, off world, it is used exclusively by obscenely wealthy people. Interworld trade is also not optional for places like Giedi Prime without enough agriculture to feed the on world population.
it's literally space feudalism stfu theres no banks only guilds and nobles
"Why doesnt Corrino the largest of the Great houses, not simply eat the other great houses?"
Also spice was always a scarse resource since you can only get it from arrakis no markets would have fixed that.
The only person with limited Imagination is the guy that sees space feudalism and doesnt understand why it isnt like capitalism
Because there's literally a powerful order that controls everything and prevents that exact sort of thing from happening to maintain control.
Because it's a metaphor for oil.
Let me just explain to the barely-human navigator why he should let me gamble with the substance me needs to survive ... Aaaaand I've been marooned on a baren moon.
Just the idea of futures trading when so many major players have prescience is... at minimum, not going to look anything like what we have today
Lol they have all this time to post bullshit on twitter but no time to read the book. They live in a post capital monopoly owned system called CHOAM and it is corrupt, surprise!
Get a load of Numbers Fuckstein over here trying to bridge the gap into ruining fictional economies by financialisation.
Short answer: if Dune was written by Robert Hoenlein, spice-investing would be the entire plot. Don Draper-Ass white guys talking about financing in offices.
If space fascist man wrote it the book would be all about Duncan Idaho slaying fremen in the name of whatever shitty ideology most recently got him erect. My space fascism had pilot wives, my moon ancaps fuck nonstop, ect
“You mean to tell me that the success of the Golden Path hinges on a bunch of fucking bond traders?”
D-did they read the book at all?!
Clearly no, cause like CHOAM do be a thing and all of this is thoroughly explained.
I read the first two sentences and was so bored i had to close it immediately
but... like... you can't gamble with somebody sitting in a bathtub filled with spice for so long they turn into a fish so they can literally see the future...
I got the general manager of my company to nope out of a finace talk by pointing out there's plenty of profits in the company to pay for projects outright - wouldn't even hurt the company any or increase rates to our customers. Yet the way the company is structured we would rather take out a bond, have to pay interest on it, and significantly increase rates to customers. Seems inefficent.
It's just not that deep, pal
That guy should be shot for being the most annoying reactionary asshole you know