All quotations on this page are from infrared.gg/thought/communism-in-the-post-maga-age/01.
In his article disparaging Geese Magazine, Haz Al-Din, the Chairman of the American Communist Party, says the following about financial derivatives:
> Information about markets acquired total dominance over the reality of markets themselves, even when they were acutely at odds. The form of the financial derivative is in fact determined entirely by information rather than any strictly tangible use-value. Information itself is (with qualified exception) a passive receptacle of social tendencies, goals, intentions, etc. Already, the entire economy had been re-organized, methodically re-structured etc. according to the standardizing and ‘rational’ corporate-institutional principles of monopolistic cartels in conjunction with government.
The context of this is that finance is being affected by what he calls "the discrepancy between forces and relations of production":
> The productive forces corresponding to the information age (and not exclusively social media), defined by the rapid, instantaneous, simultaneous interconnectivity of knowledge, culture, language, experience, data, etc. — has leaped far ahead of the institutionalized and established productive relations of society, which are at least in part defined by the Epsteinian/Harvey Weinsteinian control of information (including the information that structures workplaces, scientific and academic environments, cultural production, organizations, political procedures, states).
Which has implications for the US government:
> The majority of Americans are conformists in practice. But the structures they conform to, had increasingly bent and twisted in unpredictable, wild ways by virtue of the objective contradictions underlying them. The mundane, habitual reality of political practice has not yet caught up to the extremism of (online) consciousness, but this gap is closing very fast, and it is the former which is catching up to the latter.
What I'm interested in from the above are the following 3 takeaways
1) The way that finance -- the so-called "free market" -- itself has been historically (yet, relatively recently) cartellized by the press and TV, since the latter have an immense amount of control over the "value" of stocks and derivatives.
2) How elections in the United States are effectively "cartellized" by the same media factors impacting finance
3) How the development of alternative media (e.g. social media) has punctured holes in the "Epsteinian/Harvey Weinsteinian control of information" mentioned above. And that this is exemplified by Trump and, for finance, by Wall Street Bets.
Wall Street Bets is an example of a force that "give[s] expression to the real tendencies within the material base of society, which mass consciousness now reflects in the most diverse and disruptive of ways." This is a force that the gatekeepers serving the global financial cartel were forced to shut this down by suspending GameStop trades on Robinhood (a stock-trading phone app).
It's worth considering how alternative media will be able to continue breaking the control of the media cartel and its control of elections and finance, and when and where seismic events like Wall Street Bets will rear themselves in the future.
I don't have the answers, this is just a mental note for later.