Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason
newleftreview.org
newleftreview.org
Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s.
When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?
Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record.
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As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care.
Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.)
As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner.
We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out.
I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.
The question is not why would people choose to live under supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high entropy systems descend. Conversely, it's very hard to see how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge and maintain itself without consistent effort and cooperation, both fragile dependencies.
Two reasons:
1 - More egalitarian societies are more efficiient - they produce more because exploited peasants are not peoductive 2 - Who wans to die to protect their tyrant?
As an example - historically agricultural productivity was not a question of labor organization, or labor efficiency. A farmer could only grow but so much food with the land aloted, available water, and crop/fertilizer technology of the time. This amount was relatively close to subsistence.
The sowing of crops could be made more efficient in terms of person hours. But, without a production surplus, and no additional land to cultivate - there wasn’t much else for the individuals to do with the surplus hours.
Similarly, in a modern society labor productivity can be decoupled with economic output. Google search will be the dominant search engine regardless if it’s engineering team is efficient or inefficient.
This is true of some key areas, such as farming. But industry and at least some service sectors tend to benefit a lot from scaling up. Walmart is incredibly efficient, and Amazon only more so.
Just because they are exploited profitably, does not mean thats their best contribution to the economy. Its just that their more efficiebt aopkication camkot be easilly privatised
How does that work? Did Walmart shut a medical school?
You may not like Amazon or Walmart, but people work at Walmart because it's better than their alternatives at the time.
Walmart/Amazon didn't make their alternatives bad.
The point was, these people COULD do more than move boxes from A to B, could have been more productive, and could contribute more to the economy, if they were provided training.
Why they didn't get training is irrelevant - you can debate all day if Wallmart or Obama is at fault. But you don't get any credit for making humans move boxes A to B like monkeys. If they took a bunch of homeless people and made them into engineers, then yes, that would be noteworthy.
As to your starman - you could find a homeless person and cruely exploit them, by offering them dangerous work or getting them into prostitution. It could make you a lot of money if done at scale, and most people would call you a terrible person.
You did not make them homeless to begin with, but I think most people would not buy that as something that vindicates you.
But suddenly if your name is Amazon then it has a veneer of a respectable business.
Yes, they could, but what does that have to do with Walmart or Amazon?
And, at least for now, boxes need moving.
You persist in your belief that offering someone an "opportunity" that you don't like is exploiting them. It isn't, no matter how bad that opportunity is.
As to people with no good alternatives, that's on you as much as it is Walmart and Amazon.
I trust my two-year old to carry his glass to the table because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that.
I don't trust my two-year old to not fall down stairs because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that and he has failed to show it.
That's how it works in an egalitarian society too. You give people a chance to show they can be trusted. If they fail to show that, you stop trusting them.
At least please provide some specific and tangible reasons why you believe this is so obviously true, instead of repeatedly alluding to these numerous, incontrovertible, imminently applicable examples. Your statements are, I imagine for most readers, directly opposed to what history has shown about human nature and the nature of power.
Yes, I do honestly believe the wealth- and power-preservation interests of the few are one of the reasons we live in such undemocratic forms today.
Yes, I have experienced various forms of organisation in both the big and the small, along the authoritarianism--democracy axis, and the more democratic have consistently been the better, in almost all respects except that they make it hard to amass wealth and transform it into power over others.
If you want, I can refer to many more well-reasoned criticisms of capitalism than I can author. But it sounds like you'd be familiar with those already, so I'm not sure it would help you change your mind.
Socialism is what bootstrapped many ancient human communities, even if they didn't know the name
It is known (and sustained by scholars) that many societies of the past were socalist in nature, hell, even Jesus teachings are considered socialist.
It is by far more popular and spontaneous than feudalism, because it worked.
Interesting thesis, now prove it!
First of all you're conflating two arguments, excessive governments and socialism.
Excessive government in the past was bad because bureaucracy was slow, meaning physically slow.
Proto-socialism or community driven government made it possible for people to form smaller communities inside larger settlements where they could offload some of the burden to others in a mutually supportive way.
People scared today of government intervention think they still live a thousand years ago. Like that country that wait 11 weeks between election and inauguration of a new president because the process was designed around stagecoaches that brought the votes to the capital.
Secondly: your question is frankly showing that you went straight to the comments without even reading what I wrote Socialism is what *bootstrapped* many ancient human communities, the answer is there.
We are talking about spontaneous and "default economic system" after all, not the best at something.
If you really think ranking historical civilizations means anything, well you'll agree that Egyptians were quite THE civilization, does that mean that the best way to run a country is having a semi-god Pharaoh that builds pyramids in the desert?
The US is a glitch in history compares to what ancient Egyptian or Romans or Chinese or Greek or Mongols have achieved, it's quite possible that how the US are run today is a glitch in history as well that do not depend by the way they are run but only by the position they found themselves in after WW2, inertia is a bitch, it took centuries for the roman empire to fall.
They are in fact challenged (and somewhat defeates) by China, which is [drum roll] a socialist country!
It's quite possible that if the US switched to the political system of France or Sweden they would be as rich as today.
Also, to counter your naive argument: the Minoans.
And do ancient Greek qualify?
scholars have extensively argued that Plato and Aristotle led the foundation of socialism in their philosophies (it is now accepts that Marx was influenced by his ancient Greek studies)
The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work-that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities. [1]
All work and no play, which is much more common in the US that here in Europe, makes Jack a dull boy.
Socialism and proto socialism have and will keep having a much longer history and importance than feudalism will never have and occur much more spontaneously and "by default" than many other systems, especially today that we should be more aware of our limited time on Earth and much less addicted to sacrifice for the benefit of the few (AKA the masters).
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/a...
they won't understand.
This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.
But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other.
The people retelling the story don't understand it - we have stories and kings and feudalism, go on the street and ask a random person any question about how feudalism works:
What rights did peasants have? What right does the lord have over his peasants? could peasants be sold and how are they different from slaves? Which 'levels' of nobility does what? Who pays taxes to whom?
If put theae people into a feudal society tomorrow, and just renamed 'baron' and 'lord' to something else, they would not know it. We could call it 'landlord' and 'investor'
This is going to sound sarcastic or something, but I'm actually curious -- do they? I would tend to assume that they appear to come in pairs, but this is largely because we happened to find history books written by the self-professed egalitarian society, and not their rivals, to whom they allocate every vice.
Their egalitarian neighbours where only just starting to discover. In part because their traces are less obvious, and in part because we've had a mental confirmation bias against finding them. I refer back to The Dawn of Everything if you want more details!
I am also pretty sure ancient (pre-classical) world with its massive centralized empires do not count as feudal, or otherwise the term becomes so broad as to be meaningless...
This is a bit of a fallacy since productivity and efficiency are just as important in a steady-state economy as a growing one, and perhaps more so. The inefficiency of large politically-enforced monopolies would merely turn zero into negative growth.
It's when those checks against individual power fail that those ways of organizing ourselves fail.
Elinor Ostrom got an economics Nobel in what I think is the economic side of this.
In any system where wealth converts to power, it does because the majority of people implicitly agree with playing the game that way.
In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with all the furs decided one day to not share, then the people would stop sharing their food, tools, building skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts, etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.
Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy has some sort of moral right to their possessions. In other words, they have to play along in the game of wealth distribution.
They would need to organize themselves collectively somehow.
> Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy has some sort of moral right to their possessions.
No, they just need to be convinced that they don't have any collective organization.
Slaves don't need to be convinced of the morality of their situation, just the hopelessness on it.
...unless you have convinced them of your moral right to those furs. That's literally the only way a large group of people can be "unable" to expropriate them.
Each individual bodyguard has no reason to think they would have a higher rank after a coup replacing the "one person."
They absolutely don't need to believe that the person at the top is irreplaceable. Sometimes they've lived through a replacement or two!
I'm talking about an egalitarian society where one person suddenly tries to convince a band of friends that it's in their interest to close themselves off from the rest of society and try to extract value from it without contributing back.
There's no "rank" to be gained from refusing to join that band -- quite the opposite! You get to go back to a society that's free from rank.
^ At best they get to split the furs up among 40 people instead of 41.
(And if the 1 removed is actually doing any work, there's also more work to assign.)
There's little reason for any individual goon to think they're going to get a better deal this way. Let alone enough to compensate for the risk.
Removing the guy who takes "the lion's share" produces someone new to take the lion's share.
Unless they think they can do away with that entire structure. But then they have to believe they can change everyone's behavior all at once from collectively enforcing inequality to collectively enforcing equality.
The kind of social structure that makes this possible is the kind of social structure that the powerful person will make sure can't arise (by controlling information, removing potential leaders, etc.)
You seem to be approaching the question "in a hierarchical society, what makes it impossible for small bands of people to overpower the entire system all at once?" which is an interesting question, but a very different one.
I'm just saying that underling guards in general don't actually need to believe in the narrative the guarded elite uses as self-justification. Maybe they do believe it, maybe they feel obligated to pretend to believe, maybe it's all naked self-interest... regardless, what really keeps them in their position is the grid of power/interest.
In order to even have a concept of "owning wealth" there must be a physical defense of wealth already set up.
It's "inherent" in that sense. Owning the thing means having some means of physical militaristic defense of the thing.
The underlying fact you're referencing here is simply that the means of defense is never an individual's physical power.
What it is instead, is their position in a social graph of interests. Other people in the society have their own lives structured so that it's in their interests to serve and protect power.
However, ownership exists in egalitarian forms of organisation too. It's not the "exclusive right to prevent others from using the thing", but in any human arrangement people understand that some objects are needed by some people (crutch, broken leg), some objects are more actively used by some people (household hatchet, cutting wood every week), and some objects have sentimental value for some people (grandma's ashes.)
These things normally count as property, with no violence to enforce it.
"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
Yes and no. Human societies in general have concepts of personal property (i.e. something you use, like your toothbrush).
Not all societies have concepts of private property that we have today i.e. something you never use but still control. This is a complex set of viewpoints with many conflicts. They changed a lot over time. Many are very modern.
E.g. you can become owner of land by adverse possession.
In many egalitarian societies a person hoarding excessive amounts of objects is seen as unhinged.
and all the empires that lasted millenia before feudalism emerged
stretching its duration from inception to fall, feudalism lasted around 7 centuries, after the fall of the western roman empire
it's never been the default system throughout history
For comparison Egyptian civilization lived and prospered for more than 30 centuries, not accounting for ancient Egyptian settlements and the long tail of its complete demise.
Trying to reduce human character and motivations to something simple is essentially what modern microeconomic theory tried to do and it ends up having to hand-wave away so much real life behaviour that it started to call itself "prescriptive rather than descriptive".
Why do we have laws that punish robbery and murder? Because it may be the easiest path to solve a perceived urgent need (and it comes at the expense of others). It takes much more self-control and effort to "pull oneself by the bootstraps".
So, at least some forms of advancing one's position while harming others' is codified in most laws. These laws protect what we, as a society, consider valuable. Like property, and not being murdered.
So, too, is Feudalism a quick and easy fix to maintain the status quo of leadership, but it comes in a way that harms society.
Indian feudalism
Feudal Japan
Feudalism in Pakistan
Fengjian (Chinese)
Etc
This is so easy to find that I can't understand how people on the internet make these kind of questions and even add the "in your view".
For a view of feudalism that treats it as distinctively European, below is a quote from Perry Anderson in "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" (p19). If you doubt the relevance of Anderson, consider that he is not just quoted in the article linked above, but that he edits the journal in which it was published.
> The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.
For example, what you call Chinese feudalism (Fēngjiàn)
As a result, Chinese history from the Zhou dynasty (1046 BC–256 BC) to the beginning of the Qin dynasty has been termed a feudal period by many Chinese historians, *due to the custom of enfeoffment of land similar to that in Medieval Europe*. But scholars have suggested that fengjian otherwise lacks some of the fundamental aspects of feudalism. This system is often conflated with Confucianism but also with Legalism.
The name was given post-facto, but it wasn't feudalism, it was Fēngjiàn.
Techno-feudalism is simply feudalism fuelled by the control of technology instead of the land.
We could call it thechno-fēngjiàn, if you prefer.
But I also do not think that techno-feudalism is actually feudalism.
Techno-aristocracy or techno-oligarchy are a better description IMO
For once, Google doesn't need to pay and feed an army to dominate the ADV market or build castles surrounded by walls, they simply need to maintain their dominant position crushing or buying the competition and strike a deal with those they can't buy or crush.
They don't need to _yet_ that is. I always found the imagery in _The Diamond Age_ of New Atlantis to be a fun steam punk take of a future in an alternative-history. However I can't help but think of it when I read about Amazon's "Helix" and 'Amazonia' in Seattle, or Apple's "Spaceship" complex, Google's ... etc.
Really, we just need a few more legal tenets of Manorism where workers can't leave their sanctioned tech estate, ahem https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-...
This was an interesting discussion - allegations of bad faith ruin the discussion and make you look like you are unable to tolerate different interpretations of the facts.
But it started late in the 11th century, 6 centuries after what happened in Europe, hardly the "default economic system"
A stratified social-economic system where mobility between classes is a near impossibility. Economic interests are bestowed by grant or taken by force. The individuals who work for the economic interest are endentured to it.
Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed.
"3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin’s blog, Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal but too ‘woke’—too democratic."
Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.
The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building." His idea seems to have been that hierarchic—or "feudal"—arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of information indexing Google uses.
1. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-s...
Now if anyone was going to guess that something like that would happen, it'd be Yarvin – but none of that is in that 2010 blog. When he said 'democratic' he meant exactly what Wired did in the article linked below – the action of masses of people. It's Morozov that makes the association between 'woke' (i.e. P.C.) and 'democratic', which has all sorts of implications. A woke-democratic Google Search isn't one that is powered by democracy, but one which protects democracy – meaning, protects the masses from manipulation by exposure to sociologically harmful 'content'. Sensu Yarvin, that is neither feudal nor democratic. It is in fact oligarchic.
The final irony is that when Morozov fudged the name Feudle, wittingly or no, and omitted a link to the blog in question, it was entirely in accord with the idea of exercising democratic power by not giving UR any link juice, but the result of that when posted to HN – a site not lacking in markers of community reputation – is that two people find the link (thanks again) and a small discussion ensues which otherwise would not have happened.
¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html, see also https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html ² https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/02/goog... ³ https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-google-algorithm/ ⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-..., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/technology/google-algorit...
My understanding of that passage was that the author was paraphrasing Yarvin - who from my understanding is somewhat of a monarchist? I remember his moldbug persona from the blog-o-sphere back in the mid/late aughts as someone who would write long meandering posts in the comment section of pickup artist blog; which ironically is where much of this alt-right stuff started. Kind of (darkly) funny that lot of the intellectual scaffolding for this new authoritarian political philosophy is a at its root a visceral reaction to feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency in dating women.
> I remember his moldbug persona from the blog-o-sphere back in the mid/late aughts as someone who would write long meandering posts in the comment section of pickup artist blog
He got his start on the 2blowhards blog, which was not about pickup artistry at all. While I suppose it's possible he left comments on pickup artist blogs, he never wrote about pickup artistry on his own blog except to dunk on them (e.g. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/06/civil-liber...).
> the intellectual scaffolding for this new authoritarian political philosophy is a at its root a visceral reaction to feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency in dating women
During the entire time of "Unqualified reservations" existing he was happily married. Moldbug has never written about women's rights at all (neither for nor against). It's simply not a focus of his work. I challenge you to find one written sentence of his that indicates that he is a misogynist.
I think saying that moldbug was responsible for the intellectual scaffolding of the alt-right overstates his role.
The intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right world view is more closely aligned with the stuff expressed on Roissy’s blog than anything moldbug wrote. Imo, moldbug was just a convenient associate who was tapped to lend the movement a thin veneer of intellectual rigor.
(Yes, yes - Godwin…)
Otherwise powerful people (or people capable of being powerful) can obviously have some kind of internalized “low status” beliefs, so it’s not much of a stretch to expect them to seek explanations/redefinitions that deny those self-perceived weaknesses.
The important part is making sure they don't get power over others.
Human beings in general.
> The important part is making sure they don't get power over others.
That too!
That being said I think I understood enough to like to see more analysis of how the companies that depend on data extraction (Google,Facebook) themselves depend on actually productive companies. They are obligate parasites.
Google (for example) collects user data so it can sell targeted ads to companies that want to sell products to the users whose data was collected by Google. In the absence of these productive companies Google’s data is worthless. And similarly Google’s profit is directly tied to those upstream companies exploitation of their labor.
It seems like most analyses stop at the step where Google is making money from data and don’t really get into how that data is only valuable in the context of consumer goods, which are often produced by classically extractive or exploitative companies. The article’s “userism“ can’t exist in a vacuum.
That is also separate from companies that produce digital products for consumption and then profit off the “rent” of the intellectual property rights to those products.
For example, one characteristic of a society divided into aristocrats and serfs (and lacking anything like the 'American middle class' of the 1960s) is a segregated educational system, with fundamentally different approaches for the posh vs. the proles. The various attacks on public schooling (like the effort to remove higher mathematics from public schools in California) and the elimination of state subsidies for higher education are certainly a step in that direction.
Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". Notably the latter is characterized by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a 'central committee' of Wall Street financiers; the former version of capitalism certainly has a much more distributed character in terms of wealth, power, land ownership etc.
Finally, this really is a 20th century argument that misses a fundamental characteristic of the 21st century: resource limitations. Regional water scarcity due to ongoing fossil-fueled global warming is a reality in many parts of the world, and this is more fundamental than ideological wrangling about societal structures. The resulting impacts on food production are physical and ecological in nature, not ideological - although the consequences could lead to things like the French Revolution, or the rise of authoritarian power to ensure food distribution (basically, that's China writ large).
I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
My (extremely tentative!) thesis is that there’s been a shift in language over the last decade or so in left/liberal culture, and this is part of that. “Leftists” are often very down on “liberals” -- in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing -- yet what “The Left” believes is, by and large, pretty much what I believed as a “liberal” two decades ago. (I suspect a lot of this is generational, driven by disillusionment at perceived failures on the part of the Clinton/Obama establishment.)
Likewise, I think what’s seen as “capitalism” has made a linguistic shift. I’ve always thought of small business owners and solo entrepreneurs, from the little bookshop on Main Street down to freelance artists selling their prints at the dealers’ rooms in science fiction and comic conventions, as quintessentially capitalist, but at least on the left, that doesn’t really seem to be how it’s used anymore. The focus is squarely on the worst features of “big” capitalism, on the principle that exploitation and destruction is where capitalism always leads. Since a two-person indie software company doesn’t fit that narrative of capitalism, it’s…something other than capitalism? Frankly, I don’t think the logic fully holds up there.
Back in my day [waving cane], I would have distinguished between entrepreneurship and corporatism -- which is, more or less, that “Main Street” vs. “Wall Street” distinction. (I also think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some small businesses out there which, depending on the yardstick you’re measuring by, can be truly, truly dreadful.) But, this is a hill I don’t have a real interest in dying on. If someone wants to argue that a dealer’s room at a furry con full of freelance artists selling sexy catgirl pinups isn’t capitalism but “market socialism” or whatever, then godspeed.
As a unrelated note, re-reading your last sentence, though:
> I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
The authoritarian track record here does not seem to be sterling, either.
The weird hybrid between economic liberalism and light social democracy represented by the US Democratic party is basically an artefact of the electoral system, it's not actually a coherent politics. That's why there are such big divisions in the party itself.
(Also entrepreneurs are different from small businesses. Entrepreneurs make attempts at new big businesses, vie for new monopolies, etc.)
> in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing -- yet what “The Left” believes is, by and large, pretty much what I believed as a “liberal” two decades ago
I think probably you're not as aware of what leftists believe as you think.
Leftists are not using "liberal" in the American sense of the word at all, and "never were." (Like, maybe those specific people were, but "the left" wasn't.)
With any exploitative minority of people, it's in their best interests to convince large groups of people that they're all really part of the same club. It makes the exploited less likely to end the exploitation. Or end the exploiters.
And I don't just mean capitalists. Consider the way both ridiculous, unpopular mainstream political parties use wedge issues to scare people into following them even though they are both known to be corrupt machines full of greedy, self-seeking people. Etc.
That's a property of feudalism, but societies with those properties are not necessarily feudal.
Feudalism is rule by local armed strongmen. The lower classes get protection from other strongmen in exchange for a cut of their resources. The strongmen can be warlords, drug cartels, military, or cops. Feudalism tends to result in clashes between local strongmen, and, often, consolidation when someone wins. That's how nations are usually created.
Economic oppression is common in feudal societies, but not limited to it. Capitalism offers more efficient ways to achieve economic oppression.
The paper goes off into classical Marxist analysis. The trouble with Marx as a guide is that he wrote in an era of direct labor. Output was a result of the routine efforts of the proletariat. Wealth was the result of taking a cut of those efforts. The inputs from labor exceeded those of capital.
Today, you look at a balance sheet, and "cost of goods sold", which includes direct labor, is often a minor item. Marketing and G&A often exceed cost of goods sold. This turns the assumptions of Marxism upside down. In many industries, a majority of corporate expenditure is devoted to battling competition and changing things, rather than just making the product. This breaks not just Marxism but much of classical economics.
It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages.
Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" notes "Avoid competition as much as possible." That's the key idea here.
This is not feudalism. It's oligopoly. In some ways it's worse. In a feudal culture, the strongmen have some obligation to provide protection for their peasants. Oligopolists have no such obligation.
Might one call it, perhaps, "the highest stage of capitalism" ;-)?
Beyond the joke, I do often find myself thinking that the oligopoly and rentier tendencies described by terms like "neo-feudalism" are pretty much just the things designated by the old Marxist usage of "imperialism". But then the problem is that "imperialism" has been watered down into "everything your local sectarian Marxist group doesn't like."
That's a very Leninist view of Marxism. [1] If you're hearing that, it's likely from tankies. [2]
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
From the article:
"Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his—not undisputed—account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be seen in London’s coffee houses, important locales for the development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the ‘re-feudalization of the public sphere’, indicating the zigzag dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced himself from the concept of ‘refeudalization’, preferring ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ instead, some in Germany have recently recovered it."
The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by the Cold War dialectic.
In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue of our times.
This point is dreadfully under appreciated, and heavily exploited for political and business purposes.
The US Chamber of Commerce does not have the interest of small businesses at heart and, despite the name is nothing at all like your local town’s chamber of commerce. Yet when someone says “business” the local restaurant and Exxon are considered the same.
Back to the article itself (which, I admit, I hadn't finished reading until checking the comments in here), I would have personally also added a quick mention about the Asiatic mode of production [2], but seeing as I'm not a specialist on this maybe I'm talking bs. More generally speaking I fully admit that this type of discussions can be quite boring for those with no prior interest in them.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Revolution-Commercial-Polit...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production
> Plus, it makes a good meme. The hungry crowds on Reddit and Twitter love it: a YouTube video of a discussion on techno-feudalism by Varoufakis and Slavoj Žižek garnered over 300,000 views in just three weeks.
I would frame this using "government by men" speaking words at each other in contrast with "government by laws" i.e. men writing legally between them... i.e. orality vs literacy
This is important because of the relation between literacy and computability
> Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive workers need them no more
in summary your boss was a man, then it became a written document (laws), and now it's become a computer run algorithm
> Techno-féodalisme argues that the rise of intangibles, usually concentrated at the most profitable points of the global value chain, led to the emergence of four new types of rent
two of them are more difficult to understand (I paraphrase):
innovation rents, which refers to valuable data sets that are the exclusive property of these firms
the technological capabilities to make this non-exclusive is here
and intangibles-differential rents refers to the ability of firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations
If I understand correctly, this is possible because internet infrastructure is already non-exclusive
At the root of the issue, pretending that "intangibles"" are commodities and thus to enforce that they are treated as exclusive physical artifacts (merchandise) is to waste the potential of the internet (or, more cynically, to make a play to capture it privately)
This issue is even more complicated due to the distinction (or lack of) between "exploiting" and "harvesting" (with the assumption that one harvests what one has sown) digital assets; specifically "co-created" (i.e. aggregated) data of the like that gives facebook and google such a strong position in the "competitive market".
Why should "big tech" be allowed to keep their vast data troves private?
On one hand, there's no real technological limitation to the exclusivity of their intangible data-troves.
On the other hand, there's something to notice about how such exclusive concentration of data/knowledge generates a great amount of social and political power.
IMO, this is the strongest reason behind the drive to keep intangibles as exclusive; the power generated by their exclusivity and the use of such power to capture (privatize) energy and resources.
this is why sometimes I think that all of culture (specially contemporary academic culture) is but an elaborate ploy to rationalize away the grim realities of extractive post-imperialistic societies (states)
Finally, I argue my position that it's now crucial to deeply question old historical positions around the nature of property (and ownership); and hence, of markets and society, based on the magnitude of what the computer revolution truly entails. In my mind (biased by me being a millennial), computers are an innovation on the scale of writing (and thus, of law). The only other innovation I can think of in an even larger scale is that of ownership over land (which I consider as civilization itself).
- The pandemic was initially propagated by consumers of the global air travel industry, and likely would have been a localized epidemic otherwise.
- The police largely exist to protect the assets of the wealthy and preserve the societal structure that enables them to make and store wealth.
I don't necessarily agree with much of what this article is saying, but it's good to stretch the mind and read a variety of viewpoints. (otherwise you're only reading things that agree with your biases, which, of course, has issues)
I can’t therefore conclude that global air travel is “capitalism’s fault” and, as contagious as SARS-COV2 is, a pandemic was virtually assured.
As to whether those inhabitants would be better off than us, I believe that's much more to do with their socio-econo-political systems than their available modes of transportation. Slower vehicles means germs and goods travel slower, and culture too until said internet is built.
Not that I think it makes much difference in terms of a pandemic, but maybe if travel patterns had been different the pandemic would have played out differently in turn.
The only alternative to a monopoly on violence is an open turf war among crime gangs, quite probably involving far more brutality. There are plenty of nation states outside the U.S. with better run police and no gang wars, implying that they do manage to successfully regulate (i.e. "monopolize") the initiation of force. These things have basically nothing to do with each other.
Street gangs as they currently exist in the US were created by the prison system, an arm of the state violence apparatus. Conveniently, they're also an excuse to increase police budgets. More policing, in turn, puts more people into prison.
I don't think that alternative is actually even an alternative.
As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously, capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th century.
Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would have been a disaster.
In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything, but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them back.
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.
To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..."
Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
> Foo is bar, with its baz.
Clearly baz is an example of how foo is bar.
https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause....
One was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVAX
From the wiki: """The continued shortage of COVID-19 vaccines delivered through COVAX is blamed on "vaccine nationalism" by richer nations ... """
The efforts were thwarted by investors prioritizing corporate profit.
People might like or dislike it, but this is 100% due to capitalism.
Regarding police brutality, its correlation with poverty is extensively documented by social scientists.
The other proposal (whose name I don't remember) was to share the IP.
Climate change: The Soviet Union was a horrible polluter, and this was well-documented.[0] When adjusted for GDP, the USSR emitted 1.5x the pollution of the US. It was worse when adjusted per capita. The CCP has also been a horrible polluter, though has made some improvements after adopting market-oriented reforms. Capitalist liberal governments have balked at treating CO2 like a pollutant, but their economies have also done far more to advance technology like electric vehicles or alternative energy than their socialist counterparts.
Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. Though left-wing governments that adopt market reforms see inequality as well. Inequality seems likely correlated with discretionary bureaucracy (particularly "clientelism"), a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance.[1]
Police brutality: Police brutality hasn't increased since 2015.[2] Even police violence (including incidents where officers were clearly justified in using force) is flat.
Deadly pandemic: Pandemics have been deadly throughout the history of civilization, long before the last couple hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time; many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.[3] Scientific experts, the would-be rulers under progressivism, had an abysmal record at predictions & decision-making during the pandemic.[4]
None of these is a slam dunk the author thinks it is.
[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937...
[1]https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-papers/h...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
[3]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682
[4]https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-science...
No.
mRNA vaccines are the result of decades of research with support of and collaboration with government and academia. Even the covid vaccine only happened as fast as it did because Chinese researchers sequenced and released the DNA of the virus for free online.
https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-researchers-...
The free and public release gave the world a head start on what was then a very localized thing with little if any spread. Remember: my comment was in response to an attempt to credit capitalism with the speedy development of a vaccine. Capitalism helped, but wasn't what did it.
Science's triumph began in in liberal societies, and both fed on and accelerated the advance of capitalism. The industrial revolution was essentially a virtuous cycle (maybe a vicious cycle depending on your perspective) of capitalism and scientific knowledge (thermodynamics & mechanics mostly). Sure, the research was going on for decades in universities funded by governments, but once a profitable use for that research presented itself, an effective good utilizing it went into production rapidly.
[0]https://time.com/5882918/zhang-yongzhen-interview-china-coro...
The US would be a breeding ground for variants if most of the population weren't vaccinated, and it wouldn't be if they weren't free in this one exceptional case. Almost 80% of the US has at least one dose compared to the usual ~50% with the flu vaccine. The second dose is ticking up toward 70%.
This is pretty obviously bad logic, you seem to be removing agency from Trump/Biden/Cuomo/Fauci. All of them in varying degrees made terrible decisions, waited too long to bother reacting, etc., and these were things the average person could easily guess would happen while good ideas were often left delayed or unexecuted.
Your rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on the concept of planning at all, which many countries did better just by having half a plan and going through with at least half the plan.
Planning is not a supernatural force that compelled our leaders to act poorly. They had agency and chose poorly.
It's not like feudal societies were perfectly equal. There is a genuine question as to whether capitalism tends towards increased inequality over time, perhaps merely as a side effect of its faster rate of innovation, but if you want a reasonable level of "equality" you'll need to look either to pre-modern societies or to ones where redistribution is explicitly practiced.
Markets disproportionately reward those who produce things other people want. That is inherent inequality. The ethical question is how much of that reward could be distributed to others who may actually have a bad lot in life (though my own bias is to doubt the extent to which, barring obvious physical or mental disability, a person is incapable of making her own luck).
At least going by the experience we’ve had in America and other Western countries, inequality seems to be an outcome of specifically deregulated capitalism. The whole push toward communism that we saw in the early 20th century was largely a reaction to the capitalism of The Jungle and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and of course, the soaring inequality before the Great Depression. I think big business capitalists don’t give the New Deal the credit it deserves for cutting the American communist movement off at the pass -- changes in regulatory and tax policy shaped a highly-regulated market economy that at least partially flattened the inequality curve. Once we started deregulating all the things in the 1980s, inequality started growing again.
Inequality: Capitalism vs "left wing governments" is apples to oranges. And I don't think the point is that inequality exists so much as rate of growth in inequality.
Police brutality: If it's a problem, and it is, then not getting worse by some measure still doesn't mean it's no longer a problem. The "defund the police" party here in the US has responded to police brutality mostly by increasing police budgets.
Deadly pandemic: That's redundant. We don't have merely annoying pandemics. Many countries independently created vaccines - look up Cuba.
A "growth rate of inequality?" Show me the numbers.
My point about police brutality is that it is not increasing, contradicting the original claim.
Russia and China also were quite early to market with their vaccines. Would you trust them?
> Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion.
* downvoters - im sorry you dont like what the authors have to say.
maybe imagine this article is not one long twitter thread, but at least 8 or 9 topically related long twitter threads.