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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
any potential new players would simply be obliterated unless they operated as just another House playing by the same rules as everyone else.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
NOAM CHOAMSKY 😳
Okay serious question, what the fuck is up with the names of things in Dune? Landsraad looks suspiciously like a Danish word for a house of parliament (though I think ours was specifically called Landsting rather than Landsraad) and the bad guys are apparently named Harkonen, which is also the name of every 4th guy in Finland, so like, was that writer on some weird mission against Scandinavia?
No lie, Herbert saw the name Harkonnen in a phone book and thought it sounded Russian. He wanted a scary Russian name to suit the evil, Machiavellian, despotic homosexual villain that was Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.
This is difficult to answer precisely without my nice thick leatherbound copy of the series in front of me with its notes and appendices to quote from directly lol.
Trying to show weird through-lines and syncretism of recognizable cultural motifs is an important part of Herbert’s world building. Here is a very good article published just before the first Villeneuve movie came out by a professor of Islamic Studies on this question but from the angle of the Islamic/Arabic influences on the text.
The trailer’s use of “crusade” obscures the fact that the series is full of vocabularies of Islam, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Words like “Mahdi”, “Shai-Hulud”, “noukker”, and “ya hya chouhada” are commonly used throughout the story. To quote Herbert himself, from an unpublished 1978 interview with Tim O’Reilly, he used this vocabulary, partly derived from “colloquial Arabic”, to signal to the reader that they are “not here and now, but that something of here and now has been carried to that faraway place and time”. Language, he remarks, “is mind-shaping as well as used by mind”, mediating our experience of place and time. And he uses the language of Dune to show how, 20,000 years in the future, when all religion and language has fundamentally changed, there are still threads of continuity with the Arabic and Islam of our world because they are inextricable from humanity’s past, present, and future.
You can replace Arabic and Islam in that final line with “Scandinavian” if you’d like, but the point being it’s to make sure there’s something in the setting that makes it feel both familiar and alien at the same time.
Yeah I love Dune for things like this. For example, the religion of the Fremen is Zensunni, a religion founded by a breakaway sect from Maometh aka the Third Muhammad. Their holy book is the Orange Catholic Bible, which takes from the Bible of our own time but also mixes it with points of wisdom from the Butlerian Jihad.
And “Orange Catholic Bible” in itself tells us that the schism in Christianity was healed, referring to the Orange Order of protestants in Northern Ireland and (obviously) the Catholic Church
“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
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
Oh, Living Biomechanical Skin of Baby Sandworms. It’s a real shame LBSoBS broke up after their first album.
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
book 4 spoilers
Unrelated but I have no where else to post about the dune thoughts that consume my mind:
I think it would have been so much cooler if Ganema was still around in book 4, not as a sandworm but the EXTREME end case of the bene gesserit ability to alter the metabolism to basically stop aging. Their dialogue with each other in dune 3 was awesome and is something lacking in 4, clear, distinct conversations not clouded by 106 layers of leto II fucking with whatever human gnat he was speaking to. I also think it would be a sick contrast, and allow exploration of another perspective of the bitterness of the passage of time, leto is bored and complains about a lot of stuff, but imagine ganema a withered skeletal wraith, like golum but way worse, her perspective would be so different, excited for death and freedom from the golden path probably, just like leto, but very different
That would have been neat
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
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?
It’s not as good, because Frank was getting on in years at that point and it doesn’t have a payoff like the first three books had with God Emperor; he died before writing the final book, so it kind of builds up to nothing. To be honest I doubt this 7th book would have been nearly as good as God Emperor anyways, so maybe it’s for the best this way.
I mean it’s trash but I read all that shit. About the same level as the shit his son wrote.
1-6 is good, after that the author died and his fool of a son ruined it
Really really bad.Maybe not really really bad… but if you stopped you’d be missing nothing.
as long as you don’t read the books after he died, books 1-6, you’re fine. Unless you can’t stand unfinished stories, then pretend that the series ended with book 4, look no further or suffer
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.
I read the first two sentences and was so bored i had to close it immediately
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.
That guy should be shot for being the most annoying reactionary asshole you know
By the way, using profits from Arrakis to build bigger army was exactly what Atreides were doing, and why they accepted the fief change in the first place. But they had mere weeks at best before Harkonnens struck them.
If anything, Herbert at times expressed overinterest with finances, like in that scene where Paul and Jessica agree to distribute some water to needing Fremen in the Stilgar troop, in the middle of the desert after fight, and in response hear the ridiculously out of place bank talk.
Exactly. The Harkonnens had stockpiled decades of spice and gone into extreme debt on top of it in order to finance the re-invasion of Arrakis. And this is, of course, on top of the Imperial Saudakaur, who (against any but the fremen) were priceless and could fight with the strength of 10 men.
The Atreides were not a rich family - their power was in propaganda. And so their plan was to use this power to win over the Fremen, previously overlooked by the Harkonnens, to their side.
Without the Fremen, there was no amount of money that could have saved Leto Atreides and prevented the Harkonnen invasion. No amount of mercenaries could have thwarted the Saudarkar. The only thing that could have won the war for them was more time for the Atreides military leaders - Gurnie Halleck and Duncan Idaho - to train soldiers (and the building of an elite, loyal Atreides army was the reason the Harkonnens and the Emperor expedited the Atreides’ downfall in the first place - because they could have built an army to challenge the Emperor), or winning the loyalty of the Fremen sooner. Both are brought up in the books - what they needed was more time.
actually what they needed was more spice futures. sorry kid
The one unanswered question is what happened between Atreides and Corrino before. Recent Caladan trilogy by Brian is happening exactly in that time but it completely flopped since it ends with Shaddam and Fenring end up those books being in very good relations to the Atreides, and also being hair width from ordering Sardaukar to exterminate the Harkonnen.
Nothing by Brian is canon, you might as well tell me about something you dreamed
It is canon by definition, but the difference in content means there are three separate canons: Just Frank, Frank + Encyclopedia, Frank + Brian.
Wasn’t it just that Leto I and the Atreides were too popular? Approaching the point where they could conceivably challenge the emperor. I seem to remember Shaddam not being happy about killing the house but felt it necessary
That was part of it too, but (leaving aside Brian entirely), Shaddam was a man whose will was severly restrained by the Great Convention, particularly Landsraad was organisation which main or one of main purpose was even explicitly stated in the book by Thufir Hawat iirc - their greatest fear was that Emperor would use the Sardaukar to kill them off one by one, and it was stated to be the reason why the masquerade with Harkonnen uniforms was done. And it was HUGE risk for the emperor, he wouldn’t dare to do that for no reason, and certainly not when he had Fenring as advisor.
So there was much more of it between them. Also Leto himself was pretty keen to pursue this course so he wasn’t just a victim, by all probabilities he really was aiming at Shaddam. Possible most obvious course was 4 daughters and 0 sons of Shaddam, popular and politically savvy duke could easily push for marrying his son and heir to Irulan and became the all powerful force behind the throne. Shaddam would certainly fear that scenario, but i bet it was still not all. Well we will never know now, Brian version of the events are not even coherent with Brian version.
The real gaping plot question is why the emperor allowed the Bene Gesseret to deny him an heir
It’s not a plot hole. The Bene Geserit have mind control sex and his wife is Bene Geserit. The pussy is just too good
Isn’t the exact, ludicrous amount of control BGs have over their bodies a closely-guarded secret?
Doubt it’s that secret, everyone calls them witches, the most politically relevant ability of truthtrance is widely known, and every mentat worth his sapho would immediately notice some things, like the statistically improbable amount of daughters the BG have.
BG clearly have plot shield before Leto II, when he takes the role.
If it’s a secret they’re doing a shitty job keeping it since they keep fucking telling people. Also if he’s the only guy in the universe who doesn’t know it means every single one of the emperors daughters is betraying him and his dynasty and his spies are shit.
But they had mere weeks at best before Harkonnens struck them.
Yeah there’s been lots of memes about Leto falling for the trap. But in book and film he clearly states he knows it’s a trap. Except he expected that the Harkonnens would sabotage the equipment they left behind, while leaving spies, saboteurs, assassins to impede him, then when spice profits fell to all time lows the Atreides name would be tarnished and the Harkonnen would strike (in the book he even anticipates some Sardoukar disguised as Harkonnens to bolster their chances).
His plan is basically to hit the ground running, get spice production up to standards as fast as possible while courting the Fremen as an auxillary force to surprise the inevitable attack, then he aims to call the Landsraad and display the Sardoukar as proof the Emperor was interfering.
What he doesn’t realise is that they are planning to attack him and his house almost immediately. With the entire forces of Sardoukar. Not the Emperor putting his finger subtly on the scale but flipping the table. That combined with the traitor Dr Yueh who he never expected take him by surprise.
Second thing that surprised them was the scale of the attack, not only Sardaukar but that the Harkonnens basically bankrupted themselves to send overwhelming force.
Yeah it was all out. All of the Harkonnen. Shitloads of Sardoukar. The Harkonnen even reinvented conventional artillery for the attack (something that gets nicely referenced in Dune Part 2)
Why doesn’t Paul invest in WormCoin? Is he stupid?
The slurp juice melange
D-did they read the book at all?!
Clearly no, cause like CHOAM do be a thing and all of this is thoroughly explained.
it’s literally space feudalism stfu theres no banks only guilds and nobles
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
In a way, the Space Guild is sort of a futures market.
“If you piss us off, you will have no future in space travel”
