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Reminder: Reading Club on Techno-Feudalism (Patreon)

Published:
2022-10-19 16:20:19
Imported:
2024-07

Content

On Friday 28 October, we'll be recording the first episode of the third and final section of this year's Reading Club.

We'll be discussing Joel Kotkin's The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class and Yanis Varoufakis' article "Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over".

Send your questions in by posting below or sending us message. 

And as always, Reading Club episodes are for Tier 2 and 3 patrons only.



Comments

Eli S

I find Kotkin seriously grating, but ah well, his book is actually surprisingly well-researched and obviously channels a whole body of middle-class homeowner types suffering generational downward mobility. That said, two years out, doesn't Kotkin's case look askew to reality, even for a middle-class socdem Boomer suburbanite? Like so many other commentators, he appears to have taken the tech oligarchs (his term) at their word that they could ensure endless labor surpluses and wage deflation forevermore. How can a "techno"-feudalism thesis account for straining energy grids, inflation, and labor shortages? IMHO the whole "tech" part of late neoliberalism was just ideology used to naturalize sweating the labor force. Similar to the way that Kotkin's clerisy spent the 2010s saying it was natural, inevitable, and good that nation-states would dissolve into globalist technocratic utopias under the onslaught of mass immigration. Then COVID restricts worldwide mobility, and oops! Suddenly every immigrant-hiring employer is desperate for labor and raising wages, from Dunkin Donuts paying $19/hour to big science desperate for postdocs. COVID accomplished what populism never quite managed. Damn clerisy was just making a rearguard ideological defense of what politics had already accomplished. Varoufakis writes, "digital platforms have replaced markets as the locus of private wealth extraction." How can we prove or disprove that? Can we detect such fundamental transitions in the political economy without all agreeing on value theory? I did the "additional reading" of Adkins, etc's "The Asset Economy", which I think makes the best case that neoliberalism imposed a significant political-economic transition which indeed revived rentierism to a significant extent. If people want to call this new rentierized asset capitalism "neo-feudalism" for short, fine, but how does that cash out in expectations about economic dynamics and engines of value extraction that can be hit with class struggle?

Eli S
>>94209017

Adding a fresh bit on hearing the episodes with Alex Gourevitch: Kotkin's strongest point is his attack on UBI. The problems there are both the issue of the technology for Zuckertopia simply not existing, and also the question of how much of the population actually lived purely on alms under feudalism. If I wanted to come back around and reinforce Kotkin's thesis for him, the new serfdom might be something more like bullshit jobs. The managerial lord rents you the opportunity of doing some minimal amount of productive work using his estate's/corporation's developed infrastructure, and in exchange you spend the rest of your time on a variety of deferential bullshit. Your striking can't really bring the primary value-capturing processes to a halt the way it could have done in an industrial workplace, so if you don't like it, you're fired.

Stone

Should the left want Post-humanism? I understand that a point of Socialism is to have mastery of humans' first and second natures. It seems that technology might be a hindrance to a socialist project. Although, I might be reading too much Land and Kaczynski. Also, reading makes me think that the real end of Neo-feudalism is a Post-humanism for the few and a non existence of the many.