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/305/ Techno-Feudal Unreason
🕑 Added 2022-11-29 13:19:07 +0000 UTCOn "techno-feudalism".
In the Bungacast Reading Club for patrons, we've been discussing various works on "neo-feudalism" - a thesis that tries to explain capitalist stagnation and inequality by arguing that we are moving beyond capitalism – toward something worse.
In this free episode, we discuss one of the most thoroughgoing critiques of this thesis: Evgeny Morozov's "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason".
Why has this thesis becomes so popular today, across the political spectrum? What is the economic and political logic of feudalism, and how do current trends supposedly indicate a resurgence of these logics? Why have Marxists, who draw such a clear line between feudalism and capitalism, believe that politically-driven expropriation is replacing exploitation?
And how do Big Tech companies make money - purely through rent, or do they produce commodities?
To join the Reading Club, sign up for $10 at patreon.com/bungacast
Readings:
- Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason, Evegeny Morozov, New Left Review
- The 'New' Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession, David Harvey, Socialist Register (pdf)
- Escalating Plunder, Robert Brenner, New Left Review
Comments
Paul Brewer
I was in despair listening to the discussion of feudalism (really, the manorial economy, as feudalism is a political expression of this), when Phil retrieved matters by dealing with the most egregious points. What I think was not stressed enough is a point I drew from a long-ago reading of GEM de Ste Croix's magisterial The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. Ste Croix’s argument could be most severely condensed to the view that Antiquity’s system of slave-based extraction gradually broke down during the 250s-550s AD to be replaced by manorial organisation of the countryside. The process raised the social status of the slaves to that of serfs, while a significant portion of the previously free peasantry saw a decline to the same (which de Ste Croix sees as a general trend in any case). The most deprived actually saw a rise in their status, giving feudalism a progressive character relative to what came before.
Andrea
Marx actually DOES talk of the continuous process of expropriation inside the fully developed pure model of capitalism. He called it "the expropriation of capitalists by other capitalists", already in capital vol I when talking about competition and specifically centralization. It is located in the second model of abstraction, so a pretty fundamental feature of capitalism itself. One could question if some development of centralization in the real world can translate in Harvey's continuous expropriation. I am also not sure that his theory is very sound anyway, but I also don't think one can appeal to Capital to refute his theories.
