I have seen this term being thrown around a lot lately, but is there any real reason to believe that what we are seeing develop is going to be qualitatively different from capitalism? Personally, I think not, whatsay you gentlefriends?
goated show, so far the examples I've seen listed of trends getting called neofeudal(like how peoples housing,healthcare and other social services gets tied to there employer) also seem similar to earlier forms of manorial capitalism like haciendas or semifeudalism in the phillipines. Also tmk payment in kind hasn't made a huge comeback anywhere. So I think there's an element of truth to the economy beginning to resemble older forms but I wouldn't go as far as to saying we're going back to feudalism. If anything if you fully accept the premise of desert where the ecological niche/climate that modern nation-states arose in is rapidly disappearing then we'll get the material basis for neofeudalism or what
>>2146460 is talking about.
>>2146460>>2146452No. Neofeudalism would mean the disintegration of the borders and territories established down to a community level. Capitalists thrive in centralized economies where there are plenty of resources and manpower in easy reach than in a decentralized landscape that is the feudal system.
What you’re describing is the petty cruelty landlords are exerting over to those less fortunate. However, unlike in serfdom, none of these tenants are explicitly owned by their landlords or are forced to live in their estates.
>>2146461Is that the Yanis Varoufakis explanation?
>>2146460But slave societies only really made sense before industrialization
>>2146466I see what you mean. Is Desert worth reading, and have you read Blessed is the Flame?
>>2146467Yeah, that's what I initially thought, but I am open to other explanations.
>>2146452As Yannis puts it, our relationship with capital has changed to a certain degree. in 2025 we straddle the line between two modes of production - capitalism and it's emerging feudal competitor.
this emerging feudal mode of production is not capitalism because it has neither markets nor profit.
the amazon.com you visit right now looks completely different to another persons amazon.com. this is not a market since Bezos ultimately decides what you see and what you don't. this is accomplished through the appropriation of user data to customize/change amazon.com every time it's visited.
it doesn't have profits because this personal data that powers amazon is stolen without payment for it's generation and it's profit is mirrored by how many users it can extract from
traditional owners of capital pay 85% of their wages back to the workers. the tech lords pay zero as an inherent advantage.
The tech lords power is greater than that of a capitalist only in places where user data is either unprotected, in the case of the US, or monopolized, in the case of China. You will not see this new emerging mode of production in Europe as user data is protected.
>>2146470There really aren’t alternative explanations man. There are far more tenants that would refuse to leave their landlord’s home anyways in spite of the cruelty and abusive increases in rent. We’re not going to see property or fiefdom wars anymore due to the fact that most countries actually have laws that do get enforced against excessive land grabbing.
It’s easy to see the current housing crises worldwide as a precursor to the return of the feudal system, but ultimately, there’s too much shit preventing the return of such a shitty social system.
Varoufakis talks about "technofeudalism" but I've seen "neofeudalism" for longer. Basically the essence of the criticism is that pre-digital industrial capitalism was predicated on production of physical commodities that required socially necessary labor time to produce, and were sold for a profit that amounted to the difference between the total value of the commodity and the wages of the workers who were paid to prdouce it. This profit was then at least partially reinvested in expanding production, paying private service labor with bourgeois clientele (tutors, coaches, maids, lawyers, doctors etc.), and the consumption of non-essential commodities (i.e. luxury commodities).
What makes "technofeudalism" or "neofeudalism" qualitatively different from capitalism (allegedly) is the return of rent rather than profit as the primary income of the exploiting class. Think digital commodities. Software as a service. Ad Revenue. A digital commodity like a piece of software has almost no socially necessary labor time. It is produced by a development team, but to actually make copies of it is incredibly cheap. It's just a bunch of files that you download and install. So it has to be made artificially scarce through anti-piracy measures, arbitrarily limiting production, attaching licenses to it, forcing further development and updates. A digital commodity like a piece of software interestingly also has its development continued AFTER it is produced and "sold". So you RENT a LICENSE for the software commodity which is attached to a USER ACCOUNT and you pay a MONTHLY FEE or YEARLY FEE for permission to keep using the software. That is not the kind of commodity Marx was familiar with when he wrote Capital. It's a new type of commodity that is rented rather than bought. The user never "owns" it but merely rents a license to keep using it. It is produced cheaply but is not sold for profit, but is rather sold for rent. Rent was the primary income of the exploiting classes under feudalism, so this is "technofeudalism."
The other essence of "technofeudalism" is the techno-bourgeoisie's fetishism for decentralization, privatization, and the dismantling of modern nation states. They want everything to be privatized, they hate government of any kind, even the kind that guarantees private property. Despite being monopoly capitalists they envision a world of decentralized city states using blockchain currency ruled by technocpaitalists. So in the same way that feudalism was "decentralized" compared to both the slave empires of late anitiquity, and the capitalist empires of modernity, the post-modern neofeudal state will be decentralized. Basically the ruling class is coping with the falling rate of profit by increasing rent and focusing on dismantling governance.
>>2146480Reposting what I wrote in the IRC
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It's funny how they are against government yet they unlike feudal monarchs cannot operate their techno empire without the enforcement of a global system of governance
As seen by their 180 on loving big government when they can use it to ban competing ai open source
Really though it's just rent seeking, even if this rent seeking has become more pronounced especially given its importance to western countries which unwittingly destroyed their own production, it's not fundamentally new as a concept
Whether you are a slumlord or zuckerburg, it's rent seeking for things that already exist
I think current tech hates big government just in this phase (and that of the past few decades) because it's rules inhibit their ability to destroy established competition. Uber hates government because it requires them to respect taxi laws. But once it's become dominant, it fuses with government again. It's a tale as old as time
>>2146633>Their power only exist in the shadow of Industrial society and the infustructure of a nation stateThis is acknowledged a few times in his book, he compares it to how capitalism emerging from the old feudal structures still depended on what the serfs were producing and the power associated with collecting it. We see again today the emerging feudal structures from capitalism depend on it the same way, attaching to it like a parasite until it is no longer needed. why does bezos have no interest in producing anything in a factory? because he has what's better, the ascendant ability to pick and choose what the largest online market shows to its consumers. traditional owners of capital have no choice participating in amazon since it will be outcompeted by the owners that do. Bezos charges 40% on every sale made through amazon.com, extracting rent from both ends of the consumer producer chain. Tech lords are the ultimate rent seeker vampires!
>Amazon can't harvest and utilize the dataWith the invention of the algorithm, personal data now has market value. It can be bought and sold like any other commodity. iirc that's what amazon AWS does but im not sure on that one
>I just don't see the tech lords bringing about a new mode of production though.perhaps not. this would ideally be the modern 'enclosure of the commons' that could happen to our internet. I don't like predicting the future, but if Musk makes his 'everything app' like the american copy of wechat he envisions, we would have things like government identification tied to X.com that would be something similar.
>>2146730AWS is the money maker of Amazon. Its again just rent extraction, they rent off computing power so that spotify can operate at a deficit. lmao.
Personal data is brokered of to the advertising industry and will lose value in correlation to diminishing purchasing power of the populace.
It's really weird, i don't see all these techbros have any plan for the future but skimming off as much as possible until society collapses and then fuck off to their private islands to die of boredome.
>wage labor>commodity production>capitalist accumulationThis isn't a change in the mode of production and is just a stupid term some guy invented to sell books.
>>2146480Fictitious capital was in the first volume of Capital and we've identified the rise of finance capital (still capitalism) over a hundred years ago, i.e. the rise of speculative investment over the dominance of industrial capital. Rents from "landowners" are just another type of capitalist as he talks about a bit in the third volume of Capital. He couldn't specifically talk about computers and the internet because he wasn't alive, but there is nothing there that represents a departure from Capitalism.
It really is just trying to sound profound to CS majors that don't read anything.
>>2146774>Personal data is brokered of to the advertising industry and will lose value in correlation to diminishing purchasing power of the populace1. personal data is a value multiplier in the production chain for many industries like fintech, insurance or mortgage lenders. Personal data is a lot like the wheat serfs were producing, it loses value with time and must be regenerated. controlling the flow of new personal data is what lends feudal lords their power
2. feudal lords are not constrained by borders. facebook built a shit ton of internet infrastructure in Indonesia that interfaced with facebook only. India banned tik-tok right after covid. The global war for personal data markets is ongoing, one that reaches anyone with an internet connection
>>2147386>value multiplierooofff…
>Personal data is a lot like the wheat serfs were producingNo
>facebook built a shit ton of internet infrastructure in Indonesia that interfaced with facebook onlytakes an network engineer 5 minutes to reroute
>India banned tik-tok right after covidk
>>2161185>To maintain profitability you would need to slash american wages to the barest fraction of what they are now, and drop the bottom completely out of the remaining middle class. And now they're deporting immigrants like crazy. While consumer prices are going up too.
>And even if you balkanize the west under a bunch of feudal lords with their own individual productive capabilities, they will get stomped to fuck by China.Anti-monopoly in the west is great. The EU is even talking about breaking up the Big Tech companies. Glorious.
I don't think Theil believes in this concept though. It's mostly pushed by Varoufakis (and radlibs). It has some truth to it but it misses the whole picture which is way more important.
>>2146460>next mode of production will be neo-slave societySingular Porkies would have to pay for full housing, clothing and food for their slaves to keep them alive and working, all the time. In capitalism they don't really have to do that. It's always a matter of expense that will ensure that slavery atleast in it's old state will not be coming back.
Capitalism and housing market especially serve the same purpose as slavery and serfdom. Meaning that the fortunate can extract surplus value from the unfortunate. Now the 'slaves' are just owned in common by the whole capitalist class and individual porkies have to care much less how their slaves in the end fare. The workers personal welfare is outsourced to the wage working free individual while the master still gets most of the value they produce by their labor through profits, loan interests, etc. Like what would be the fundamental improvement from porky's perspective on this system?
>>2161229 (me)
>>2162147I can confidently tell you I have not read the book.
>>2162321I am a different anon. I wrote this post.
>>2146480 I read Varoufakis's book. I think he massively overstates his case. He talks a lot about the absence of profits and markets in cloud capital due to Software As A Service, and the users information getting commodified instead of the service that the users use, but really all this cloud capital is still heavily dependent on the traditional framework of capitalist industrial commodity production which is responsible for all the hardware existing in the first place.
vid related, partly joking, partly serious >>2162321to add:
the term 'technofeudalism' as varoufakis uses it actually is revisionist in it's own right and panders to a hollywoodesque understanding of feudalism. it's super reductionist and ignores how feudalism was more than le evil tyrannical feudal lord exploiting le poor peasent living in shit.
feudalism was a social order, legitimized by religion, highly decentralised, while social interactions were of utmost importance and very personal in nature.
next, 'cloud capital' which is the base of 'technofeudalism' (talk of a misleading term, lol) does not produce actual consumable commodities, it's just server farms owned by 'cloud capitalists'
"Techno-serf" here, in reality there is nothing serf-like working for Amazon on Mechanical Turk, Microsoft (on UHRS platform) or Centific (OneForma). We are purely lumpens, there is nothing different with sending workshops to India: we just do jobs/tasks that a salaryman or a freelance could do, except we are cheaper. As a europoor student, i don't feel any shame doing the work of petite bourgeoisie translators. OneForma, unlike a company "in real life", don't care about my CV as long i do the job well, much like some Asian companies that recruited me to do more translation/machine translation post-editing and AI training stuff. Sometimes i get 50€ per month, sometimes 400€ depending of the number of tasks but it's something really great as a part time job.
So for me, Varoufakis created a new term just to increase his clout and to try to clean his image after the failure of Syriza: marxism don't need a new term everytime a new kind of lumpen appear (like Uber/Delivery slaves, who are all lumpens)
>>2162343He needs to drop the 'capitalism is dead' thing and talk instead about how these 'tech lords' are a new existing social class, deriving value from rent. To paraphrase Marx from vol 3 of Capital: "There are ‘three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production’: wage-labourers, capitalists, and landowners."
>all this cloud capital is still heavily dependent on the traditional framework of capitalist industrial commodity productionyou're right, but in the same way capitalism relied on the feudal structures it was born into. why does Bezos have no interest in putting together things in a factory if wage labor was truly the most effective way to produce value
>>2162462my guy, you earn a wage, this makes you a prole not a serf. when you start scrolling instagram that's when you become a serf
>>2162857>Amazon doesn't produce value. Its service is logistical. Delivery of commodities already produced.Wrong. Transport industry produces value. Read marx.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm#3<Quantities of products are not increased by transportation. Nor, with a few exceptions, is the possible alteration of their natural qualities, brought about by transportation, an intentional useful effect; it is rather an unavoidable evil. But the use-value of things is materialised only in their consumption, and their consumption may necessitate a change of location of these things, hence may require an additional process of production, in the transport industry. The productive capital invested in this industry imparts value to the transported products, partly by transferring value from the means of transportation, partly by adding value through the labour performed in transport. This last-named increment of value consists, as it does in all capitalist production, of a replacement of wages and of surplus-value.>>2162867I am Himothy. Barista realize surplus-value, their prime function as retail workers isn't to produce surplus-value. Read section one same chapter share above
>>2162867Anon I didn't say that nor did I think that
>>2162885Anon I didn't say the labor theory of value is wrong
You're right about transport. I should have simply said amazon operates at a loss. Because that was my real point.
Elon Musk, the worlds richest tech lord, now has unfettered access to the data housed in any federal agency. In this article, the Financial Times imagines a future where this data provides a competitive edge to Musk and his enterprises, framing it as a war against 'business'. If he is successful in implementing the data he's already monopolized, traditional owners of capital risk falling behind in competitiveness. Data is king.
>Much has already been said about the threats to individuals’ privacy, financial security, health and safety that may result from giving Musk unfettered access to the data housed within any federal agency. Far less has been made of the threats to business — excluding those owned by Musk, Trump and their immediate circle, of course.
<First is the unprecedented competitive advantage that Musk could gain by having access to things such as Department of Transportation safety data, Food and Drug Administration trial information, proprietary Department of Agriculture research or pre-publication information about patent applications.
<If I were running an automotive company like GM or a ride-sharing corporation such as Uber, I’d be wondering if Musk was hoovering up information about the self-driving car tests of Tesla competitors. If I were a venture capitalist, I’d wonder if he was able to see which new technologies were closest to being commercialised and how, so as to better jump ahead of potential competitors.
<Then, there are the longer-term competitive advantages that Musk could gain by incorporating data sets from different departments into his own artificial intelligence systems. (The White House claims he isn’t doing this, but there’s no proof either way.) “You could conceivably create an AI tool to predict innovation patterns, or make associations across, say, drug trials,” says Suzanne Harrison, the principal of Percipience, an intellectual property consultancy. As she testified before a Senate subcommittee in 2023, patent data can be used to “visualise the emerging economic and technological battlefields” of the future.
>It’s unclear exactly what Doge is mining, and how data is being used. This has frustrated judges looking at the myriad lawsuits over its access that have been filed against the administration. It’s hard to believe Trump’s claim that Musk will recuse himself from any conflict — consider how he has targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was investigating X Money, the peer-to-peer payment system associated with his social media company.https://archive.ph/HuKEJmfw saudi arabia already has plans to harvest user data in a variety of ways and give back a portion of the sale to citizens
the mega infrastructure projects may or may not materialize but it's important to see how these ideas are already being thought about
>While NEOM will feature manufacturing and tourism zones, The Line will stack homes and offices vertically, and mine the data of its 9 million people, giving residents more say over their data and paying them for it - a world first, said an official.
>Data will also be collected from residents' smartphones, their homes, facial recognition cameras, and a host of other sensors, a data sweep that Bradley said would feed information back to the city and help it predict user needs.
<"Without trust, there is no data. Without data, there is no value," said Joseph Bradley, chief executive of NEOM Tech & Digital Co., which will oversee the consent management platform.
<"This technology enables users to review and easily understand the intention behind the use of their personal data, while offering financial rewards for authorising the use of their data," he said, without giving further details.https://archive.ph/aGp0O>>2146480It’s my understanding they don’t want to decentralize and privatize for no reason though, it’s a new multipolar world order where independent actors will self organize into dangerous factions against existing systems, independently agreeing to the most effective vectors of attack. Top down doesn’t work anymore when your enemies don’t have any leader and no plan, yet always have all information available to them.
On the flip side of this, China and Iran ect stand zero chance of tanking your financial system and overthrowing you if you have no government, your citizens are everyone, and your economy is reliant on decentralized nodes scattered in space.
Unique IPs: 57