Neo-feudalism is Idealist: We are Witnessing the Re-proletarianization of the Labor Aristocracy Under Neocolonial Fascist Rule

There has been some amount of buzz about the idea of neofeudalism being what is happening to western economies under the rule of neoliberal capital. Feudalism was characterized by a relationship between serf and lord. The lord “protected” some region of land, and some peasants that worked that land for subsistence paid some amount of their food production to the lord as a rent. However, the feudal economy of Europe also depended on a class of artisans and traders that moved outside of this hierarchical feudal relationship to agricultural production of raw materials. The innovation of the bourgeois class was the ascription of a magical relationship between a person and some piece of property. Under this belief enclosures were enacted that directly led into the development of industrial capital. While we maintain this magical relationship in our laws and our relationships to each other, we will not be in a feudal economic arrangement. The rights of the renters are curtailed by the rights of the property owner in a way that they were not in the feudal economic arrangement.

Instead, we are witnessing something much more structurally complex than simply the reification of western commoners as renters. In particular in the us, the majority of workers never engaged in the kind of industrial capitalism that Marx observed in England and Germany. No more than 30% of the us workforce was ever employed in industrial roles. Instead, the most major change in us work has been a transition from agricultural work to various kinds of service and technical work. The capitalists have effectively transitioned these labor aristocratic roles into more proletarian service work that is poorer paying and more degrading. The majority of technical roles have transitioned from being industrially oriented towards being technologically oriented. What that means is that the superprofits of neocolonial exploitation of industrial and agricultural labor in the Global South are filtered down to many workers first into the myriad bullshit roles in marketing, advertising, and the almost infinite amount of technical support and infrastructure required to keep the capitalist internet structure chugging. The state largely exists to facilitate the barest amount of infrastructure required to keep the exploitation going. Thus, we see everyone in power always agree to the military budget while claiming that even the smallest amount of support for the least oppressed americans is unthinkable. that military budget is filtered outward in surprising ways: it goes to all the aerospace corporations, it goes to all the big tech companies, it goes to the science and engineering departments of major universities to develop new technologies that could potentially advantage military development, and it filters out from their to a huge web of industrial suppliers of technical components developed and manufactured throughout the first world by advanced fabrication plants.

The neoliberal solution to the capitalist crisis of western industrialism becoming unprofitable as Europe, the USSR, and China approached parity in industrial power was the guided de-industrialization of the imperial core into newly proletarian service class and an increasingly separate class of technical workers. The question is how well the people are going to accommodate these increasingly absurd and literally painful contradictions. Anyone watching for the fascist nature of this movement and its reactionary front that attempts to smooth the process via political violence and the increased exploitation of enslaved Black people, indigenous peoples, women, and now especially trans people. We are watching the material class contradictions spill out along other class lines that are deemed acceptable by the state. It’s alright for the Proud Boys to square off against Antifa over whether white women should be treated as a natural resource, but what isn’t acceptable is for the leftist group to fight the state on any front. It’s certainly amusing that fascist thugs are being weighed as an acceptable political group to back in your war to reimpose the older class orders of gender and race to their pre-neoliberal state - they certainly don’t have the same extreme mental traumas as a WWI veteran of the Somme, nor any of the seriousness. What isn’t so funny is the distinctly colonial character of how this is all being carried out. Everyone is jostling over who gets to perform violence along the lines other than economic class because economic control is felt to be so deeply removed from accessibility. And perhaps that notion is true; the american state from its very beginning has never hesitated to assert itself over any organized attempt to oppose its economic hegemony, and the three-letter organizations largely exist for those ends to this day. Capitalist state-of-the-art criminal intelligence is about maintaining stability and ensuring the validity of private property rights, little more. The terminal crisis is almost certainly the difference between how China and the us react to some particularly catastrophic upwards fluctuation in climate related events. I don’t think it’s possible to predict how these contradictions will resolve themselves. The differences between different people in different regions from different backgrounds is so disparate, it’s difficult to predict how these things resolve themselves when a terminal crisis presents itself.

It is important when we organize to understand that we are not living through neofeudalism. If we were, it might make sense to attempt to organize a peasant-petit bourgeois coalition to revolt over the contemporary equivalent to the Ancien regime. Recent protest movements have shown time and again that such a coalition has no teeth, there is no real material support pressing for such changes. Control over agricultural production and logistics seems particularly important in a us that is so deeply dependent on importing goods from the Global South. Even the technological production in the core is dependent on hugely expensive fabrication plants that are almost entirely located in Taiwan, South Korea, and China, and mining operations in the most deeply exploited parts of the global south. Remember that much of what is counted as production in the us is fundamentally an illusory production. People cannot continue to be petit bourgeois sympathisers and meaningfully oppose the rise of fascism. I’m not sure where else to go with this, but I don’t think that neofeudalism is a good word for what’s happening. It exaggerates the nature of the changes in a way that is meant to be inclusive of the professional classes that produce medicine and research and lawyering and technology along with the exploitation of the increasingly proletarianized service classes. These people do not have the same class interests and it is the major source of division between liberals and a nascent socialist movement. There are certainly empathizers on both sides, but for the most part, petit bourgeois sympathy is still very much the norm, and it’s a problem.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    2 years ago

    People who believe we’re transitioning to neofeudalism need to read up on the economics of historic feudalism, the self-justifying and self-serving nature of feudal ideology, and how feudal ideology as a superstructure upholds feudalism as an economic system. One of the biggest difference between feudalism and capitalism is most feudal societies didn’t have a fully mature money economy. This isn’t to say currency didn’t exist, but that the economy was a natural economy, where monetary transactions existed alongside bartering and feudal obligations.

    Imagine if a feudal peasant suddenly found a giant bags of gold coins equivalent to a capitalist wage earner finding $10M. If you’re a wage earner, you’re set for life, but trouble awaits you if you’re a peasant:

    1. First, they’ll have to lug around a giant bag of coins around as banks weren’t ubiquitous institutions and at any rate, didn’t serve a peasant clientele. Paper currency was only invented in the Southern Song during the 11th century, so they’re stuck lugging around chunks of metal.

    2. There’s no societal framework within feudal society for a peasant to be freed from their feudal lord without either running away, in which case the gold coins would have to be abandoned, or with the feudal lord’s consent. This isn’t like liberal society where someone could just ghost their landlord upon getting the $10M and paying whatever fine that comes along because $10M is $10M.

    3. In capitalist society, outside of maybe settler-colonial states, at the end of the day, banks aren’t going to block you from depositing $10M into their bank because $10M is $10M. But within feudal society where money hasn’t completely ruled supreme, there is a societal framework in which the feudal lord could just seize the gold coins for himself. The feudal lord could argue that the peasant found the gold coins within property of the feudal lord (obviously, you can’t grow coins from thin air), it belongs to the feudal lord. The feudal lord could also just order their men-at-arms to kill the peasant and call it a day.

    4. Suppose the peasant somehow got away from their feudal lord. Well, they’re mostly stuck with a bunch of coins. They can’t buy land as land in most feudal society is not for sale. The only way to own land is either through the goodwill of the sovereign, inheritance from a feudal lord father, or conquest. The rigid social stratification also means depending on the feudal society, peasants can’t own land period.

    5. Running away to the city could be an option, but sooner or later, those gold coins are going to run out or be a target for theft since the peasant is doing the medieval equivalent of stashing their money underneath their mattress. They can’t just be an artisan without joining a guild with an entrance fee that’s coincidentally equivalent to the current number of gold coins in the peasant’s possession. They can’t join a monastery without taking a vow of poverty ie forking over the bag of gold coins to the monastery.

    6. The only real option is for the peasant to become a merchant, to get that M-C-M’ circuit going. Depending on what feudal society and what time period, being a merchant might be a pretty sweet gig, but most feudal ideologies I’ve seen like Confucianism rank the merchant class as the lowest dregs of society. In a society with extremely rigid social stratification, this is killer. There’s a reason why Jews were pushed into ghettos where they could only be merchants. bankers, and tax collectors.

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 years ago

    Yeah you’re touching on a current I’ve seen as well. A large section of the US left are fundamentally petty bourgeois socialists who turned to it because they were denied comfy professional jobs and houses after 2008. They can easily be bought out and they will struggle to be revolutionary as a class because their goal isn’t to overthrow the capitalist system, it’s to become a smallholder in a social democracy.

    I think home ownership rates are going to be the greatest signifier for the potential of this class. Right now the home ownership rate is at 65%. In urban areas this is significantly lower so you see more radical activity. Nationally if this gets to 50% we might actually have something to work with. The question then becomes whether or not they can be led to revolutionary solutions or if they’ll just pursue land reform.

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 years ago

      Currently been chatting with a midwestern friend currently freaking out at how the midwest has seen homes and rents price former residents out of areas they worked in, so there is possibility within the next few years of radicalization of rural populations that have become further exploited by capital.

        • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 years ago

          Lot of the blame is centered on coastal bougies moving into those areas and buying up places to both live as well as rent, this led to local landlords and out of state landlords raising their own prices causing a price boom for everything and anything. From his accounts on others though lot of the blame is on rich liberals moving in an ruining the local market.

      • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 years ago

        I like to think it’s possible to own (or co-own, or own a direct-use stake in) land and buildings without becoming capitalist-brained.

        Having a large number of “luxury peasants” presents more revolutionary potential to me than hoping for the average proletarian’s fortune to decrease in order to force the conditions for upheaval.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 years ago

      A large section of the US left are fundamentally petty bourgeois socialists who turned to it because they were denied comfy professional jobs and houses after 2008.

      This part seems correct, but they may not be that easily bought out. They’ve lived the majority (or all) of their adult life in precarity. At some point that makes one belive that any upswing will be fragile. You saw this a lot with the generation that grew up in the Great Depression.

      So maybe leftists who luck into money won’t always see it as a permanent ticket out. This seems especially likely if they’ve seriously engaged in theory over a long period of time. Engels was loaded, after all.

  • edwardligma [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 years ago

    good post! and i dont at all disagree, but i do think some people use some quite different definitions of neofeudalism, and im just gonna go on a bit of a tangent to talk about how david graeber talks about neofeudalism in bullshit jobs, which is something very different and i think worth considering. id also emphasise that while capitalism is the dominant mode of economic relations, it has never been the only one in all spheres of our society so i think its very possible for some parts of the global economy to operate in a way thats more characteristic of feudal society even if capitalist relations predominate in most spheres, and it doesnt have to be all-or-nothing. and i absolutely acknowledge that individuals overwhelmingly interact with the economy in a proletarian manner - hiring out their labour time in exchange for money that they use to purchase the commodities required to live, as opposed to any sort of taxed/enslaved subsistence or anything like that.

    we talk about service work but you can draw a distinction between different types of “service” work, and i think the distinction can actually very crudely be drawn along blue-collar/white-collar lines. service jobs like retail worker, cleaner, restaurant worker, delivery driver, warehouse worker etc etc are all absolutely and concretely a necessary part of the process of production and distribution of commodities (or commodified services) even if they arent directly involved in commodity production in the same way a factory worker making coats out of linen is. and a lot of white collar workers are too - there is certainly plenty of actual need for people doing the logistical organisation of complex supply chains and management both for legitimate purposes of ensuring everyone is pulling in the same direction etc and the less legitimate purposes of cracking the whip to maximise exploitation of actual workers, etc etc. all this very neatly falls into the sphere of capitalist relations that are well described by the ltv etc

    one of the main points that graeber argues is that a huge and increasing proportion of (predominantly) white-collar jobs dont fall into these categories, and perform no real useful service even to the company/organisation theyre part of. its not that theyre evil jobs and society would benefit if they didnt exist, its that the company itself is paying them to do bullshit and the company would benefit (profit-wise) if they didnt exist. capitalists can and will work them as hard as they can, but they wont really actually get any surplus value out of it because theyre not actually creating any value (unless you argue that since every company believes that making mud pies is necessary, therefore their useless labour making mud pies becomes part of the socially-necessary labour time involved in commodity production, but im not sure i agree that argument quite works). graeber argues that the ltv doesnt really explain these jobs and their proliferation, and i tend to agree. capitalist logic would fire all these people instantly for the sake of efficiency and profits, but instead these roles proliferate. his counterargument is that internally within company bureaucracies, a lot of the market rules dont apply, and that the explanation that best accounts for this is the internal development of feudal-like fiefdoms amongst the managerial classes playing their own little games of crusader kings trying to expand the power and prestige of their own departments with bigger budgets and more hangers-on and engaging in petty internal squabbles over what bit of stuff is each departments de jure territory etc. and a lot of the grunts at the bottom fall more into a category of nonproductive labour like household servants or feudal retainers - though this might be obscured, paid as a retainer for the personal edification of the employer rather than as a means of generating profit. this might just sound a bit cute, but given that some of these companies have huge numbers of staff and revenues bigger than actual countries and a lot of people spend a large portion of their lives inside these structures, i think theres some justification for suggesting this could be considered a real kind of internal neo-feudalism as graeber does. perhaps feudal-like social relations rather than feudal-like economic relations, and acknowledging that the wealth that pays for all these people to be paid to do fuckall of use comes from the very capitalist exploitation of the labour of productive workers, mostly in the global south (who would effectively play an equivalent of the serfs here). theres a real structural dynamic at play here that doesnt play by the normal “rules” of capitalism and that i think we need to account for because it affects so many workers in western countries in particular. i felt like this was possibly the most important part of the book, which got buried in the discourse under the “we should work less” side of things, and i wish he or someone else had expanded it further.

    and then of course the finance/insurance/real estate sector that has exploded under modern neoliberalism, which are much more m-m’ rather than m-c-m’ with very often nobody doing anything that could be described as c in the middle. as solaranus discusses they very well could be described as like a feudal rentier class. but also because theyre large employers of people in the west and also make tonnes of money without having to really worry so much about the actual productive labour like industrial capitalists do, their ability to generate these useless feudal-like internal hierarchies is much greater than other organisations.

    and theres a real question of “yeah so what does this matter?” and apart from the tremendous waste of labour and time, to be honest im not sure. for one, that we maybe need to be careful in trying to understand these jobs through purely capitalist market lenses. and certainly, as the sense that youre involved in “production” becomes ever more distant in these structures, the possibility of people ever identifying as a “worker” looks ever more remote (the pmc types i know would be very offended if you called them workers). and as they see less difference in what they do and what the parasites at the top do, its much easier for them to identify as a class with the bosses rather than with other workers (remember theyre closer to feudal retainers than to serfs). but also i think as contradictions heighten and companies struggle to maintain profit, while such people will absolutely get fired and have their pay and conditions cut etc, because their employment is operating under such different logic, the dynamics of this can potentially follow very different patterns from that of productive workers. maybe theyll be the first to go, but i suspect (as we have been seeing) that theyll often be closer to the last. and if nothing else this has the potential to really undermine solidarity even further. certainly my attempts to organise pmc types has been a struggle and a half, and i think this extra distance from “normal” capitalist relations makes it even harder to get them to see themselves as workers or exploited.

    sorry this is a bit of a ramble, but this is one of those things that doesnt really get talked about much and i thought it was worth bringing up

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      oh yeah for sure, there are tons of feudal superstructural elements in capitalism, and that’s a whole class of people that I consider to be an inefficient blight masking the extractive process. i think the thing is that the logic of capital always loses to whatever superstructure has to take root to make sense of the contradictions. and built on the magical thinking of property relations, it can be anything. it’s a lovecraftian horror. at a certain point, the technological efficiency of capitalism created a constant state of overproduction. it would genuinely be more efficient to automate almost everything and the technology to do so to a meaningful degree already exists.

  • machiabelly [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    So the “fancy labour” people see it as neofuedalism because they see how subservient they have recently been made to capitalist power. But this isn’t really true because it’s just how capitalism already was for a lot of oppressed people and poor people. People who were “fancy labor” feel reduced to peasants by being proletarianized, and they don’t realize it because they struggle to see their true situation.

    If this is true then isn’t the future just living in a company town? Whoever can hire the most brownshirts writes the laws and debt is used to control the population? This would mean that fianance would be the primary tool of capitalist exploitation, which makes total sense.

    So to counteract this we need to reduce our dependence on finance through mutual aid and sharing of resources/community building. Other stuff too obviously, but pooling resources in a way that reduces the need to go into debt will be a serious blow to capitalist control in the system that your write up seems to imply.

    :cat-trans: :lenin-cat:

    • VIPLenin [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      So to counteract this we need to reduce our dependence on finance through mutual aid and sharing of resources/community building. Other stuff too obviously, but pooling resources in a way that reduces the need to go into debt will be a serious blow to capitalist control in the system that your write up seems to imply.

      There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

  • KiaKaha [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    You’re right that it’s not neofeudalism, and that neofeudalism is optimistic, but you’re confusing intelligentsia/‘PMC’ with petit bourgeois.

    the professional classes that produce medicine and research and lawyering and technology along with the exploitation of the increasingly proletarianized service classes. These people do not have the same class interests and it is the major source of division between liberals and a nascent socialist movement

    For the most part, these are just particularly well-compensated segments of the proletariat, much as the rest of the proletariat was bought out during the mid 20th century. A reversal of their fortunes will have the same effect.

  • happyandhappy [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    sorry im trying to grasp the whole post. so in practice you are saying the issue is forming unity with petty bourgeois classes is fundamentally flawed ? because the enemy isnt the imperialist class but includes the petty bourgeois as well as the “neofeudalist” notion has no basis in production?

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      in the sense that there is an enemy of the communist struggle against class society, the enemy is any person that would betray The Working People in exchange for the fruits of exploitation, but for that not to be reactionary it has to recognize the revolutionary struggle against all classes. we can neither tear down race or gender or economic class without tearing them down all together. the point of my post was that somewhat, but also just an argument that neofeudalism is a flawed lens for trying to understand the current moment. I think it’s flawed both in terms of accurately reflecting material reality but also practically as a guide for organizing. I think you can organize people in petit bourgeois roles but only if they’re people who are willing to understand themselves as opposed to class rule. if you got google engineers to organize with the janitors as equals, you might actually have something for instance. but i’ve also just been thinking about this because i like yannis varoufakis but something has always been off to me about his analysis.