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.

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.

this thread really is average leftist meme

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

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:

Finally, some good post :ramsey-shining:

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.

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?