<nettime> Jodi Dean: Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, MAY 12, 2020

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/

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II.

Neofeudalism does not imply that contemporary communicative or
networked capitalism identically reproduces all the features of
European feudalism. It doesn’t. In fact, as historians have
successfully demonstrated, the very idea of a single European
feudalism is a fiction. Different feudalisms developed across the
continent in response to different pressures. Viewing contemporary
capitalism in terms of its feudalizing tendencies illuminates
a new socioeconomic structure with four interlocking features:
parcellated sovereignty, new lords and peasants, hinterlandization,
and catastrophism.



Parcellated sovereignty

Historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood present the
parcelization of sovereignty as a key feature of European feudalism.
Feudal society emerged as the imperial administration of the Romans
“gave way to a patchwork of jurisdictions in which state functions
were vertically and horizontally fragmented.” Local arrangements
taking a variety of forms, including contractual relations between
lords and kings and lords and vassals, came to supplement regional
administration. Arbitration replaced the rule of law. The line
between legality and illegality weakened. Political authority and
economic power blended together as feudal lords extracted a surplus
from peasants through legal coercion, legal in part because the lords
decided the law that applied to the peasants in their jurisdiction.
Wood writes, “The effect was to combine the private exploitation
of labour with the public role of administration, jurisdiction and
enforcement.”

Under neofeudalism, the directly political character of society
reasserts itself. Global financial institutions and digital technology
platforms use debt to redistribute wealth from the world’s poorest
to the richest. Nation-states promote and protect specific private
corporations. Political power is exercised with and as economic
power, not only taxes but fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses,
patents, jurisdictions, and borders. At the same time, economic power
shields those who wield it from the reach of state law. Ten percent
of global wealth is hoarded in off-shore accounts to avoid taxation.
Cities and states relate to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and
Google/Alphabet as if these corporations were themselves sovereign
states — negotiating with, trying to attract, and cooperating with
them on their terms. Cash-strapped municipalities use elaborate
systems of fines to expropriate money from people directly, impacting
poor people the hardest. In Punishment Without Crime, Alexandra
Natapoff documents the dramatic scope of misdemeanor law in the
already enormous US carceral system. Poor people, disproportionately
people of color, are arrested on bogus charges and convinced to
plead guilty to avoid the jail time that they could incur should
they contest the charges. Not only does the guilty plea go on their
record, but they open themselves up to fines that set them up for even
more fees and fines should they miss a payment. We got a brief look
into this system of legal illegality and unjust administration of
justice in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed
the murder of Michael Brown: “[T]he city’s municipal court and
policing apparatus openly extracted millions of dollars from its
low-income African American population.” Police were instructed
“to make arrests and issue citations in order to raise revenue.”
Like minions of feudal lords, they used force to expropriate value
from the people.



New lords and peasants

Feudal relations are characterized by a fundamental inequality that
enables the direct exploitation of peasants by lords. Perry Anderson
describes the exploitative monopolies such as watermills that were
controlled by the lord; peasants were obliged to have their grain
ground at their lord’s mill, a service for which they had to pay. So
not only did peasants occupy and till land that they did not own, but
they dwelled under conditions where the feudal lord was, as Marx says,
“the manager and master of the process of production and of the
entire process of social life.” Unlike the capitalist whose profit
rests on the surplus value generated by waged workers through the
production of commodities, the lord extracts value through monopoly,
coercion, and rent.

Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners
the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users
the new peasants. Technology companies employ a relatively small
percentage of the workforce, but their effects have been tremendous,
remaking entire industries around the acquisition, mining, and
deployment of data. The smaller workforces are indicative of digital
technology’s neofeudalizing tendency. Capital accumulation occurs
less through commodity production and wage labor than through
services, rents, licenses, fees, work done for free (often under the
masquerade of participation), and data treated as a natural resource.
Positioning themselves as intermediaries, platforms constitute grounds
for user activities, conditions of possibility for interactions to
occur. Google makes it possible to find information in an impossibly
dense and changing information environment. Amazon lets us easily
locate items, compare prices, and make purchases from established
as well as unknown vendors. Uber enables strangers to share rides.
Airbnb does the same for houses and apartments. All are enabled by an
immense generation and circulation of data. Platforms don’t just
rely on data, they produce more of it. The more people use platforms,
the more effective, and powerful these platforms become, ultimately
transforming the larger environment of which they are a part.

Platforms are doubly extractive. Unlike the water mill peasants had
no choice but to use, platforms not only position themselves so that
their use is basically necessary (like banks, credit cards, phones,
and roads) but that their use generates data for their owners. Users
not only pay for the service but the platform collects the data
generated by the use of the service. The cloud platform extracts
rents and data, like land squared. The most extreme examples are Uber
and Airbnb, which extract rent without property by relying on an
outsourced workforce responsible for its own maintenance, training,
and means of work. One’s car isn’t for personal transport. It’s
for making money. One’s apartment isn’t a place to live; it’s
something to rent out. Items of consumption are reconfigured as means
of accumulation as personal property becomes an instrument for the
capital and data accumulation of the lords of platform, Uber and
Airbnb. This tendency toward becoming-peasant, that is, to becoming
one who owns means of production but whose labor increases the capital
of the platform owner, is neofeudal.

The tech giants are extractive. Like so many tributary demands, their
tax breaks take money from communities. Their presence drives up
rents and real estate prices, driving out affordable apartments,
small businesses, and low-income people. Shoshana Zuboff’s study
of “surveillance capitalism” brings out a further dimension of
tech feudalism — military service. Like lords to kings, Facebook
and Google cooperate with powerful states, sharing information that
these states are legally barred from gathering themselves. Overall,
the extractive dimension of networked technologies is now pervasive,
intrusive, and unavoidable. The present is not literally an era of
peasants and lords. Nevertheless, the distance between rich and poor
is increasing, aided by a differentiated legal architecture that
protects corporations, owners, and landlords while it immiserates and
incarcerates the working and lower class.



Hinterlandization

A third feature of neofeudalism is the spatiality associated with
feudalism, one of protected, often lively centers surrounded by
agricultural and desolate hinterlands. We might also characterize
this as a split between town and country, municipal and rural
areas, urban communes and the surrounding countryside, or, more
abstractly between an inside walled off from an outside, a division
between what is secure and what is at risk, who is prosperous and
who is desperate. Wood says that medieval cities were essentially
oligarchies, “with dominant classes enriched by commerce and
financial services for kings, emperors and popes. Collectively, they
dominated the surrounding countryside […] extracting wealth from
it in one way or another.” Outside the cities were the nomads and
migrants who, facing unbearable conditions, sought new places to live
and work yet all too often came up against the walls.

US hinterlands are sites of loss and dismantlement, places with
fantasies of a flourishing capitalist past that for a while might have
let some linger in the hope that their lives and their children’s
lives might actually get better. Remnants of an industrial capitalism
that’s left them behind for cheaper labor, the hinterlands are ripe
for the new intensified exploitation of neofeudalism. No longer making
things, people in the hinterlands persist through warehouses, call
centers, Dollar Stores, and fast food. Phil A. Neel’s recent book,
Hinterland, notes patterns between China, Egypt, Ukraine, and the
United States. They are all places with desolate abandoned wastelands
and cities on the brink of overload.

Politically, the desperation of the hinterlands manifests in
the movements of those outside the cities, movements that are
sometimes around environmental issues (fracking and pipeline
struggles), sometimes around land (privatization and expropriation),
sometimes around the reduction of services (hospital and school
closings). In the United States, the politics of guns positions the
hinterlands against the urban. We might also note the way the division
between hinterlands and municipality gets reinscribed within cities
themselves. This manifests in both the abandonment of poor areas and
their eradication in capitalist gentrification land grabs. A city
gets richer and more people become homeless — think San Francisco,
Seattle, New York, Los Angeles.

The increased attention to social reproduction responds to
hinterlandization, that is, to the loss of a general capacity to
reproduce the basic conditions of livable life. This appears in rising
suicide rates, increase in anxiety and drug addiction, declining birth
rates, lower rates of life expectancy, and in the United States, the
psychotic societal self-destruction of mass shootings. It appears in
the collapsed infrastructures, undrinkable water, and unbreathable
air. The hinterlands are written on people’s bodies and on the land.
With closures of hospitals and schools, and the diminution of basic
services, life becomes more desperate and uncertain.



Catastrophism

Finally, neofeudalism brings with it the insecurity and anxiety of
an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. There is good reason to feel
insecure. The catastrophe of capitalist expropriation of the social
surplus in the setting of a grossly unequal and warming planet is
real.

A loose, mystical neofeudal ideology, one that knits together and
amplifies apocalyptic insecurity, seems to be taking form in the new
embrace of the occult, techno-pagan, and anti-modern. Examples include
Jordan Peterson’s mystical Jungianism and Alexander Dugin’s
mythical geopolitics of Atlantis and Hyperborea. We might also note
the rise of tech sector neo-reactionaries like PayPal’s billionaire
founder Peter Thiel, who argues that freedom is incompatible with
democracy. In a lecture in 2012, Thiel explained the link between
feudalism and tech start-ups: “No founder or CEO has absolute
power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest
the top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then blame
them if and when things go wrong.” Along with other Silicon Valley
capitalists, Thiel is concerned to protect his fortune from democratic
impingement, and so advocates strategies of exodus and isolation such
as living on the sea and space colonization, whatever it takes to save
wealth from taxation. Extreme capitalism goes over into the radical
decentralization of neofeudalism.

For those on the other side of the neofeudal divide, anxiety and
insecurity are addressed less by ideology than they are by opioids,
alcohol, and food, anything to dull the pain of hopeless, mindless,
endless drudgery. Emily Guendelsberger describes the stress caused
by constant technological surveillance on the job — the risk
of being fired for being a few seconds late, for not meeting
the quotas, for using the bathroom too many times. Repetitive,
low-control, high-stress work like that associated with work that is
technologically monitored correlates directly with “depression and
anxiety.” Uncertain schedules, lauded as flexible, unreliable pay,
because wage theft is ubiquitous, are stressful, deadening. Neofeudal
catastrophism may be individual, familial, or local. Getting worked up
about climate change is hard when you’ve lived catastrophe for a few
generations.


III.

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Finally, neofeudalism is an idea that lets us identify a primary
weakness of the contemporary left: those left ideas with the most
currency are the ones that affirm rather than contest neofeudalism.
Localism encourages parcelization. Tech and platform approaches
reinforce hierarchy and inequality. Municipalism affirms the
urban-rural divide associated with hinterlandization. Emphases
on subsistence and survival proceed as if peasant economies were
plausible not only for that half of the planet that lives in cities
(including 82 percent of North Americans and 74 percent of Europeans)
but also for the millions displaced by climate change, war, and
commercial land theft. Many who dwell in the hinterlands face
political, cultural, economic, and climatic conditions that make it so
that they can’t survive through agricultural work. Universal Basic
Income is an untenable survivalist approach. It promises just enough
to keep those in the hinterlands going and barely enough for urban
renters to handover to their landlords. Catastrophism becomes that hip
negativity denigrating hope and effort, as if the next hundred years
or so just don’t matter.

Taken together these current left ideas suggest a future of small
groups engaged in subsistence farming and the production of artisanal
cheese, perhaps on the edges of cities where survivalist enclaves
and drone-wielding tech workers alike experiment with urban gardens.
Such groupings reproduce their lives in common, yet the commons they
reproduce is necessarily small, local, and in some sense exclusive and
elite, exclusive insofar as their numbers are necessarily limited,
elite because the aspirations are culturally specific rather than
widespread.

Far from a vision anchored in the emancipation of a multinational
working class engaged in a wide array of paid, underpaid, and unpaid
labor, popular left recapitulations of neofeudalism can’t see
a working class. When work is imagined — and some on the left
think that we should adopt a “postwork imaginary” — it looks
like either romantic risk-free farming or tech-work, “immaterial
labor.” By now, the exposés on the drudgery of call center work,
not to mention the trauma-inducing labor of monitoring sites like
Facebook for disturbing, illicit content, have made the inadequacy of
the idea of “immaterial labor” undeniable. It should be similarly
apparent that the postwork imaginary likewise erases the production
and maintenance of infrastructure, the wide array of labor necessary
for social reproduction, and the underlying state structure.

The neofeudal hypothesis thus lets us see both the appeal and the
weakness of popular left ideas. They appeal because they resonate with
a dominant sense. They are weak because this dominant sense is an
expression of tendencies to neofeudalism.

Just as feudal relations persisted under capitalism so do capitalist
relations of production and exploitation continue under neofeudalism.
The difference is that non-capitalist dimensions of production —
expropriation, domination, and force — have become stronger to such
an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors
meeting in the labor market even as a governing fiction. It means
that rent and debt feature as or more heavily in accumulation than
profit, and that work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. What
happens when capitalism is global? It turns in on itself, generating,
enclosing, and mining features of human life through digital networks
and mass personalized media. This self-cannibalization produces
new lords and serfs, vast fortunes and extreme inequality, and the
parcellated sovereignties that secure this inequality while the many
wander and languish in the hinterlands.




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