Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system.
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?
It's important to account for selection bias here: feudalism generally leaves very obvious archaeological traces, both in terms of infrastructure and bureaucratic artifacts (which in turn tend to be designed for longevity.)
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.
> As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms
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.
> 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.
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.
I feel like many people don't use the term feudalism quite correctly... working for a powerful person describes many systems, not just feudalism. Manoralism is a key characteristic of feudalism, and is generally the consequence of failure of trade. Trade and strong "middle classes"/"cities" were the key to many less-feudal societies, from Rome to modern day.
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...
> When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum.
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 a fallacy, but one that many people perceive as true in a steady state economy. Or rather there's enough greedy people that tend to work their way into positions of power in order to extract for themselves. Bribery at every bureaucratic level is the norm in most third world countries.
> Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system
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.
surely the space of possible large-scale human social systems is so vast, and so pockmarked with local minima that its absurd to think there is a default, or two or three possible setups
> Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system.
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.
Given the longevity and frequent re-occurance of extinction events, it's worth considering whether being extict is the default state of a life-form in this universe.
With incredible amounts of wealth, and the control of workers, I'd argue we already had capitalist frudalism during the industrial revolution. And we only got rid of that by the 40-50s of the 19th century with the development of social safety nets.
Sibling pointed out other societies which match a depiction of feudalism in scholarly work. Lacking a widely agreed upon definition of feudalism. I would personally define a feudal-like society as one with the following characteristics.
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.
"Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine, which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010"
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.
I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might have made it harder to find for you.
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.
To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as particularly “feudal”. He is basically just describing what people do by appending “Reddit” to their Google searches. I think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and (2) the adversarial environment this creates.
> Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.
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.
Sorry, this is just completely wrong, at least regarding Moldbug.
> 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.
Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” does explore the common quality of low status/perception of failure in the personal development of German authoritarian leaders.
(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.
This was an interesting read. I have to admit it mostly washed over me like a rainstorm given my lack of background on the subject.
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.
But products themselves are being dematerialised also. I.e. looking at my kids who constantly watch “gamers” and dream of getting the next battlepass. And games themselves are about data and IP etc.
It's rather amusing that a long-winded article stating that people shouldn't describe the current American economic system as 'feudalism' doesn't bother to include the concepts of 'the aristocratic class' or 'inherited wealth and power.'
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.
> 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".
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 liberalism / leftism divide is actually a return to traditional terminology that dates back to post-revolutionary French politics. Leftists essentially want answers to the 'social question' (welfare) while liberals essentially want to protect 'liberties', primarily economic liberties.
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.
Petite bourgeois vs. haute bourgeois is no new distinction.
(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.)
The shift in the use of "capitalism" to mean solely the capital class and not small business owners is a return to the actual meaning.
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.
You're interpreting this as a new meaning of capitalism but it seems to be a return to an older definition that came out of early socialist theory, where capitalism is defined by having an owner/investor class of capitalists and an (exploited) working class. I suspect the prevalence of this terminology is driven by the increasing perception that liberal (politicians) don't seem to care that large corporations have grown into monopolies, leading those concerned with this "corporatism" to turn to socialist theories as a way of conceptualizing the current system.
The more careful of (the critics), like Brenner, suggest that features of the current capitalist system—prolonged stagnation, politically driven upward redistribution of wealth, ostentatious consumption by the elites combined with increasing immiseration of the masses—recall aspects of its feudal predecessor, even if capitalism still very much rules the day.
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.
>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.
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."
Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am enjoying it.
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.
> 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.
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.
What is the point of this article? I don't have anything to do before the grocery store opens, so I gave it a full chance, and after the end I'm still really struggling to identify what the author is trying to do here. Is this an extended argument that people should avoid calling things "feudal" as a rhetorical strategy?
There are some of us who are interested in this type of subject, for example I do happen to have read books written by several of the authors mentioned in this article during the past year or so (in my case that's true for Mazzucato, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and I did try to put my hands on Brenner's Merchants and Revolution [1] but I was too lazy). The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a very interesting subject, even the discussion itself of said transition makes for an exciting piece of late 20th century (in fact the 1970s-1980s, to be fair) intellectual history.
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.
I'm pretty far to the left and have never heard of this publication. I get the feeling it's suffering the same phenomenon as movie reviews where professional critics are increasingly distant from people who watch movies for fun. People can now get their movie recs and political advocacy from people they mesh with across the world without consulting the cathedral.
I mean, the New Left Review is an academic journal. The author is probably an academic rooted in the Marxist/Marxian strain of western philosophy and thus communicating through the appropriate vernacular of the discipline.
If I had to guess, I'd say they're trying to point out that, yes, technology-powered late-stage capitalism may well share some features with pre-capitalist modes of production but this does not equate to a full return to a feudalist mode, and that processes already inherent to capitalism itself-- such as capital concentration and centralization driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall-- are still very relevant. It's hard to say because the whole distinction is pretty artificial.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
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.
(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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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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/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
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.
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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