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.
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
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.