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.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    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.