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There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizin

There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizing, which has been decimated in the last few decades, but that is just one symptom of how improvements in communication and transportation technology (often shorthanded as "globalization" due to the new political forms it has incentivized -- free trade, "decolonization", financialization, etc.) have radically tilted the table toward capital. Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not. There were once very severe practical limits to how closely one could control an expansive international portfolio of capital (mercantilist trade policies, primitive/incompatible/nonexistent financial infrastructure, slow communications, etc.), and those have been relaxed considerably.

andsoitis 3mo ago
> Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not What does this mean? Trade means money has been transnational for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age, or if you’re more expansive and include non-coined money, since the Bronze Age, with the globalized trading societies around the Mediterranean.
- ElevenLathe 3mo ago
  I -- just some working stiff in flyover country, USA -- can buy African stocks from my phone while on the shitter at work. Until quite recently, if I wanted to invest in a meaningful way in Africa, I would have had to basically be an elite of some kind in a European power, and even then only in that power's sphere of influence. Even then, that would probably be almost my entire career and, to make a real go of it, I would have had to move there, and all transactions would have taken place at the speed of physical goods on boats. And that's just what I can do from my Etrade account. It's even more effortless if you have teams of accountants in various jurisdictions pushing paper around for you.

andsoitis 3mo ago

> Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not What does this mean? Trade means money has been transnational for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age, or if you’re more expansive and include non-coined money, since the Bronze Age, with the globalized trading societies around the Mediterranean.

ElevenLathe 3mo ago
I -- just some working stiff in flyover country, USA -- can buy African stocks from my phone while on the shitter at work. Until quite recently, if I wanted to invest in a meaningful way in Africa, I would have had to basically be an elite of some kind in a European power, and even then only in that power's sphere of influence. Even then, that would probably be almost my entire career and, to make a real go of it, I would have had to move there, and all transactions would have taken place at the speed of physical goods on boats. And that's just what I can do from my Etrade account. It's even more effortless if you have teams of accountants in various jurisdictions pushing paper around for you.