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Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?

205 points by prostoalex 6y ago

alexpetralia 6y ago
The hug of death! Here is a mirror: http://archive.is/9j05G http://archive.is/9j05G
- rbmt 6y ago
  Thanks
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Note: archive.is is blocked in some countries where archive.org is not. http://web.archive.org/web/20200517230049/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200517230049/https://lareviewof...
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
There's not much difference between this kind of far-left intellectual garbage and the insane far-right conspiracy theories on Facebook
- seibelj 6y ago
  I could barely make heads or tails of it. It's like a tornado of nonsense-words. Did anyone ever figure out what "neofeudalism" means and why it's here now?
  - dang 6y ago
    I figured out what it means in this article by reading as far as the second paragraph: Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. This seems sound. I paused at "precarity" but it's obviously a reference to economic insecurity. The only thing I can really fault this sentence for is that "changes at the level of the state" is vague. I'd hope that the article delivers on that with some details later, or else this bit shouldn't be there. (Edit: though...the other three things sound more like 19th century capitalism than feudalism.) You guys need to do a better job of critique. Denunciatory dismissals are what we don't want on HN; they're cheap, nasty, and uninteresting. Note the site guideline: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In case anyone's worried: I'm not siding for or against the article ideologically. I don't know if I agree or disagree with it; I don't even know what it says. I just know that (1) it clears the bar for an interesting discussion; and (2) commenters also need to clear that bar, or not comment. It's not that high a bar! If you don't like that I'm saying this about a left-wing article (which I guess this is?), there have been just as many right-wing ones we've treated the same way. Every time it happens in either direction, someone assumes bias, since on the internet, any data point is dispositive.
    - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
      Haven't personally seen you do a critical takedown of an unsubstantiated comment before, rather than a polite reminder of the rules. Its good. You should it do it occasionally to remind people that you know your stuff.
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    This article is very rapidly visiting a bunch of ideas that are discussed in leftist circles. I don't think it does a very good job tying them together and it's a very poor introduction to these ideas. But it's not just nonsense. There is evidence of this theory working in international affairs. The idea is that there is an informal global government that functions largely by the control of federated groups. By and large these groups are corporate but they may also be governments, power blocks within national governments, NGOs and individuals. These groups manipulate international law to receive benefits and defer consequences. They are responsible directly for the structure many peoples way of life. They get laws made and unmade. They affect the fortunes and misfortunes of countries. It is a kind of feudalism because the entities setting out the parameters of people's lives are powerful groups who are using international law and economic influence to circumvent local and democratic forms of control. So power is determined by am entity's wealth, existing influence and ability to accrue more wealth and influence. Rather than a Nobel elite there is a professional or plutocratic elite. There isn't a grand conspiracy at work but rather lots of small coordinated efforts to enrich interests and accumulate influence. It can sound crankish but there are definitely some disturbing examples that have surfaced and lend credibility. The case of Steven Donziger is a recent example. Interesting and kind of scary case to read up on. A historic example is how for nearly 100 years despite that adminstrations come and go that U.S. foreign policy in South and Central America has consistently benefited American business. From raw imperialism at the turn of the century through 1940s "good neighbor" policies that benefited United Fruit through the Commie busting Reagan era. Strange how despite varying ideologies and international objectives American foreign policy redounds to the benefit of large companies that try to monopolize natural resources and oppose any laws that might keep economic power local to those countries. Anyway, the whole theory might be crap but again I don't think it's complete nonsense. This is just a poor introduction.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      That's just plain-old public choice playing out at an inter-governmental level, and not even a very "left wing" or conspiratorial idea. Any time you have the potential for concentrated interest groups benefiting at the expense of a widely-dispersed and perhaps poorly-informed public, you can expect that these opportunities will be pursued. Just ordinary corruption at work, "lots of small conspiracies" that are extremely hard to police effectively, and thus go unpoliced.
- RangerScience 6y ago
  What do you see as being the strongest similarities / least different aspects between these two?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dang 6y ago
  Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. Edit: I read a few bits of the article and I don't think "far-left intellectual garbage" is a fair descriptor, even if you're coming from an opposing ideology. It seems like an interesting survey of a bunch of recent related works. Perhaps I missed the garbage parts?
  - HeavenBanned 6y ago
    I think what they mean to say is, "Communist Critical Theory = Garbage."
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
sand_castles 6y ago
Neofeudalism is only possible in an agrarian society, or if your income is digging stuff out of the ground. Industrialized societies quickly tear themselves apart when you need an educated workforce, and intelligent consumers. A society of serfs will only consume the bare minimum, stagnating technological progress, ask the chinese about gunpowder and naval force projection. Unlikely for the US to enter Neofeudalism when we are entering an age of great power competition. You only get to keep your power if you "bribe" your workers enough to help you.
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  > You only get to keep your power if you "bribe" your workers enough to help you. This is largely a misunderstanding of historical systems of discipline. When the enclosures started to happen, serfs were booted from their land, and were coerced into working for early capitalists at threat of subjective violence (branding, beating, &c., if caught begging) or objective violence (starvation). It's understood that the states armed bodies of men, under feudalism and neofeudalism, don't care about you. So what is to stop a reversion to the level of subjugation seen by English serfs many centuries ago? You're free to go look up cops wearing, "I CAN breathe," t-shirts and take from that what you will. These bribes you mention, although an accurate retelling of American history through westward expansion and imperial expansion, are directly threatened by the faltering american hegemony.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    These systems of discipline were indeed quite real, but they were strongly associated with the mercantile system which was pre industrial revolution. ISTM that parent comment is still correct wrt. industrial and even more so wrt. post-industrial (service-based, contemporary) economies.
    - ianleeclark 6y ago
      > These systems of discipline were indeed quite real, but they were strongly associated with the mercantile system which was pre industrial revolution. Okay, so post industrial revolution domination is what you want: Blair Mountain. Even more relevant? Literally today as America shovels an underpaid mass of it's citizens into the jaws of a pandemic so that a labor aristocracy can resume their bloomin' onions, onto the beach, and back into movie theatres.
dustingetz 6y ago
> Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it. This sentence is busted for me. Power laws are inevitable and acknowledging this is the starting point to finding a solution. You can't fix it from within.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Lay social science, even if common among techies, is hardly what I’d call “inevitable,” just because it might have “law” in the term. EDITed to address regionalism.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please keep regional swipes out of your posts here. It's needlessly provocative. HN's community is distributed all over the world; only 10% of it is in SV last I checked. The odds are higher that you're talking to someone who's geographically closer to you than either of you is to SV.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      SV has become not just a place, but a way of thinking endemic in software engineers and/or tech entrepreneurs. See the Californian Ideology for a similar related phenomenon.
      - dang 6y ago
        Well, if you want to go that route, HN has a great many members who don't subscribe to that ideology, including many who are on the cutting edge of critiquing it (or at least closely follow those who are), including many who are physically in SV. It's complicated.
- buzzkillington 6y ago
  It wasn't too long ago that there was a power law in owning people. Somehow that inevitability is no longer with us. It's almost like once we broke the political will of the slave owning class we removed the need for slaves too.
sacks2k 6y ago
"owners into billionaires on the basis of the cheap labor of their workers, the free labor of their users, and the tax breaks bestowed on them by cities desperate to attract jobs. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company name for Google) together are worth more than most every country in the world (except the United States, China, Germany, and Japan). The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.”" How are any of these companies making money on the 'cheap' labor of their workers? Amazon pays all warehouse employees a minimum of $15/hour. This is well above the minimum wage in most areas of the US and outside the US, is a very good wage for doing repetitive tasks that don't even require a high school education. This article doesn't even touch on the censorship aspects of companies like Google and Facebook becoming more and more a reality every day. They both regularly censor opposing view points and are definitely influencing our elections. "Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants" Not quite. Anyone can still start a website and sell a product without a digital overlord. In fact, there are less barriers to entry than there were a decade ago. Most people choose to give control to companies like Amazon because it's easier and more convenient.
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  > Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants Do you have anything to say about this when it comes to, say, AirBnB, Google (play store), Apple (App Store), Amazon (the web marketplace, not AWS) and Uber?
  - sacks2k 6y ago
    "AirBnB" You can make good money renting out your place and listing it on Airbnb. Don't like it? You can always use Craigslist or advertise yourself. It's not like airBnb provides nothing. They provide a built-in stream of potential customers, which could take a lot more money and time to obtain on your own. "Google (play store)" "Apple (App Store)" People are only willing to pay a few dollars at most for an app, unless it's very specialized. I have always seen apps as a feature/benefit to a main business, which Google and Apple can't control. "Amazon (the web marketplace, not AWS)" Most businesses on Amazon have a storefront/website and use Amazon to get more business. Amazon may control the marketplace, but they don't have to control your business. This is a choice with many alternatives. "and Uber" Again, this is a choice. Uber was never meant to provide a full-time income for anyone. It's meant as a way to make some extra money on the side. When we have many choices and alternatives, the argument that these companies are the 'new lords' becomes very weak.
Barrin92 6y ago
There's only one aspect in the entire piece that I think is somewhat accurate, which is the division of society into hinterlands and centres. That really is happening, however not only between the property owning class and everyone else, but with much more nuance in between. Everything else however is I think pretty far off the mark, comparing this era to feudalism doesn't make much sense. The article posits extraction of resources from the poor to the rich, including globally, and this is just wrong. We've seen a great convergence in global equity which one can see with their own eyes if they travel to China or Poland. Lack of property or wealth also doesn't imply 'serfdom'. In today's age property isn't really a guarantor of personal autonomy any more, in fact if anything the opposite is true, the biggest benefits today fall on people who can move. Owning a house doesn't really do most people any good any more, in particular not if it's in a place that has its economy turned upside down.
- cft 6y ago
  In the hinterland there are many (relatively poor) owners (of small businesses, farms, shops). In the centers, there are salaried employees that are often richer than the hinterland's owners and very rich mega-owners, that are few. The divisions of interest of these classes are roughly represented in the blue/red map of the US.
  - wwweston 6y ago
    > The divisions of interest of these classes are roughly represented in the blue/red map of the US. Real interests, or perceived affiliative values? Example: for several things "hinterland" areas are generally underserved by markets alone (hospital/medicine, broadband, delivery). Currently, the party generally stronger in those areas, though, seems more interested in eroding public solutions to those problems rather than building them out...
    - cft 6y ago
      I think it's condescending to point out to people what their real interests are. People have agency.
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
Bruce Schneier partially agrees with it. * Feudal Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht... > Perhaps instead of hoping that our Internet-era lords will be sufficiently clever and benevolent -- or putting our faith in the Robin Hoods who block phone surveillance and circumvent DRM systems -- it's time we step in in our role as governments (both national and international) to create the regulatory environments that protect us vassals (and the lords as well). Otherwise, we really are just serfs.
627467 6y ago
Doesn't feudalism arise out of weak (practically non existent) centralized power structures? Despite the rethoric of late (particularly in Trump America) I think most of the world (including the US) is heading towards stronger Nation States not weaker... And not because the State is claiming that power, but because society seems in line with it. The speed with which many western democracies allowed/tolerated extreme measures to be taken during the covid pandemic in a syncronized manner just shows how people rely on the State when push comes to shove.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  The state has not become weaker but its power is usually used in different ways than before. Remember, the age old debate of whether the state should let the free market operate, or regulate away market failure, with bitter debate on this for over a century. Neoliberalism breaks out of this framework altogether. It says that the job of the state is to actively force an unregulated market everywhere. This active roles means discouraging unions, being part of international free trade agreements, bailing out businesses, encouraging allowing monopolies, etc. This is what the power of the state is used for today. Of course, the power is not unlimited, so in times of great need like today, we do get a temporary halt to economic activity. See for instance, http://cult320sp15.onmason.com/files/2015/01/Harvey.NeoliberalismAsCreativeDestruction.pdf http://cult320sp15.onmason.com/files/2015/01/Harvey.Neoliber...
- mindslight 6y ago
  The direct pandemic response was delayed by at least a month, and basically consisted of telling everyone to stay home and not much else. Now we're getting bored of it, so it's ending. That doesn't seem so powerful to me. Meanwhile the financial response of cutting interest rates started two weeks earlier, which certainly seems like the state trying to appease capital.
  - 627467 6y ago
    Agreed on the description on how the State wielded the power (not very effectively I'd argue) yet I'm not claiming that the State knows what to do with power (specially in such pandemic situation), I'm merely describing that the people seem to have accepted very quickly and with little resistance whatever the State decided (late or not)
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
>Did anyone ever figure out what "neofeudalism" means and why it's here now? I'm gonna write out a notion before I actually read the article and get disappointed. Feudalism was a mode of production in which value was chiefly produced from arable land via agriculture and mainly extracted in the form of rent or tax by force, with the ruling class being the most effective military force. Merchants, traders, artisans, engineers, and bureaucrats weren't really major players under feudalism, and their rise from tolerated skilled servants to a class for themselves, the asset-owning class of capitalism, was a major historical transition. If, hypothetically, we were transitioning into a form of "neo-feudalism", it would be a mode of production in which efficiently producing valuable goods for market trade is no longer more valuable than the ability to just force other people to pay you not to plunder them by force. It would indicate that society's productive potential was either actively degrading, or being held hostage by a ruling class of rent-seekers on the limiting factors of production. For instance, a society run largely by real-estate or oil tycoons who twist the law to bully their competitors and extract rents/ransoms from anyone needing land or oil could (again, hypothetically) qualify. The nasty question in this whole thing would be: what so strangled capitalism that feudalism was able to make a comeback? The feudal-to-capitalist transition happened in the first place because the ruling class of capitalism was able to so steadily erode the economic, social, and even military relevance of the landed nobility that by the time of the French Revolution they could be executed en masse without anyone else complaining much, and the nobles of many other countries like England and Germany had to marry into industrial enterprises to keep their wealth! Are we somehow so de-industrialized that we're switching back to subsistence agriculture?
- epistasis 6y ago
  Well I think you nailed it. Too bad this comment is hidden underneath a flagged comment!
  - dang 6y ago
    Ok, I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216113 (the flagged comment) so it can float higher if such is its fate. Usually we detach things for the opposite reason...
Proven 6y ago
Both companies and individuals are being subsidized or bailed out by central banks and governments. Governments spend 35-45 percent of GDP. That is fascism. Coven is a statist. While he calls himself a libertarian, his recommendations usually don't involve les# government - very unlibertarian.
mempko 6y ago
Capitalism IS neofeudalism. Even the word 'Capitalism' was a joke making fun of the fact that it was a new form of feudalism. There is a long long history of this criticism going back all the way to the French Revolution.
trynumber9 6y ago
It sounds like box-standard capitalism to me. Maybe it'll be neo-feudalism when they force the peons to use their lord's platforms, like China with the Great Firewall. But that could also simply be described as state capitalism and protectionism.
- 0x262d 6y ago
  Yeah, this doesn’t seem to have any definition up front of capitalism. If I defined it it would involve mostly wage labor by people who don’t own enough property to support themselves, as well as predominantly private investment of capital for profit by employing more wage laborers. Which makes clear that we’re still right in it. Seems like a spurious thesis based on a lack of examination of previously existing thought about this.
- HeavenBanned 6y ago
  Interestingly enough, Chomsky asserts that what we have now is State-Sponsored Capitalism in the US. I think that's more accurate than neo-feudalism, personally.
snidane 6y ago
This of the converse - Capitalism: the the weird case in the history of Feudalism. Feudalism seems to be a natural order. Look at corporations - they are all feudal hierarchies internally. So what is capitalism among the natural order of feudalism? Technology of industrial revolution allowed new generation of aristocracy (refer to as capitalists) to replace old generation of aristocracy (landed gentry). It's more likely that we have regressed back to natural feudal order than that we are experiencing some funky next stage of capitalism, since there were no major wars or societal conflicts recently.
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
As long as generational money exists capitalism never ends.
js8 6y ago
I don't think we can call the current system something different until the ideology of the middle class changes. (I think in society, the power of upper class over middle class is maintained by ideology, while power over lower class is maintained by force). There is still by and large belief in meritocracy and American dream. Contrast that with feudalism, people in the middle class had the ideology of the divine, unchanged order. So I think the future is still open because it will crucially depend on what ideology will be taken by middle classes. They might as well adopt a social democratic ideology again, as the did in the reaction to late 19th century capitalism in the Europe and U.S.
Thorentis 6y ago
Emphasis on NEO-feudalism. What this article fails to acknowledge or discuss, is that feudalism was actually BETTER for workers than the current arrangement. Workers were entitled to earn a living from the land they lived on, their lords had obligations to them to provide for their welfare. There was a hierarchy, but the workers themselves were empowered by the value they added to their lord's land. Serfs were only serfs of they lacked the skills to be free men or craftsmen. The craft and trade economy was far more self regulating and less exploitive. What we have now is a Servile State, not a feudal one.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  With few modifications, your praise of serfdom/feudalism could also be applied to the chattel slave system. I don't think anyone in today's world would trade their lot for that of a slave or serf.
- p2t2p 6y ago
  You very conveniently forget about corvée. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  There’s 2 parts here that I think you’re tying together. They happened together, I don’t believe they’re causally linked. First: feudalism was a system that came into existence in response to circumstances after the Roman Empire fell. In exchange for binding themselves to lords, serfs were promised physical protection in a world that was getting more dangerous. The negative sides of this arrangement became intolerable once serfs no longer needed to depend on lords for physical safety. The other half is that serfs worked less than modern workers. But that’s not because they’re serfs, it’s because that in a world without refrigeration, you have a limited ability to over work, since your primary product (food) will spoil if you over produce it. Serfs didn’t work less because they were serfs, they worked less because once enough food had been collected then there was no more work to be done.
- toasterlovin 6y ago
  FWIW, your take on whether feudalism was a good arrangement for serfs goes counter to basically every historian I've ever come across. The second sentence of the Wikipedia page on Serfdom describes it as "a condition of debt bondage or indentured servitude". Then it goes on to describe that serfs "could be bought, sold, or traded", but mostly only along with the land they were tied to. Further on, it describes that a free person become a serf "usually through force or necessity".
lbarrow 6y ago
>Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company name for Google) together are worth more than most every country in the world (except the United States, China, Germany, and Japan). Did the author just compare market capitalizations with GDP? What? It's hard to take some of this stuff seriously.
- nickpinkston 6y ago
  I got interested and did a more apples to apples comparison: REVENUES (2019): Apple: $260B Facebook: $70.7B Microsoft: $126B Amazon: $233B Alphabet: $162B TOTAL: $852B _____________________________ GDPs in 1000's (copy paste from Wikipedia): 1 United States 21,439,453 — European Union 18,705,132 2 China 14,140,163 3 Japan 5,154,475 4 Germany 3,863,344 5 India 2,935,570 6 United Kingdom 2,743,586 7 France 2,707,074 8 Italy 1,988,636 9 Brazil 1,847,020 10 Canada 1,730,914 11 Russia 1,637,892 12 Korea, South 1,629,532 13 Spain 1,397,870 14 Australia 1,376,255 15 Mexico 1,274,175 16 Indonesia 1,111,713 17 Netherlands 902,355 18 Saudi Arabia 779,289 19 Turkey 743,708 20 Switzerland 715,360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
  - callmekit 6y ago
    The Wikipedia article you linked lists GDP in millions, not in 1000's.
    - ImaCake 6y ago
      By my rekoning then, there are 17 countries that have larger GDP than the combined tech companies.
    - nickpinkston 6y ago
      Yea, by the time I'm reading your comment, it won't let me change. More used to corporate numbers where everything is in 1000's haha.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I’ve begun to suspect that we’re not in a capitalist society for a while. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argues that a surprisingly large percentage (~34%) of workers don’t believe their job even helps the company turn a profit. In a capitalist society this is something that shouldn’t happen at scale; market efficiencies should theoretically eliminate all jobs that don’t help companies turn a profit. I’ve had a suspicion that we’re trending towards a feudal structure, with managers as minor lords, companies as countries, and CEO as a modern king. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it does explain why our culture doesn’t seem to be doing things that a capitalist society should do.
- TFYS 6y ago
  Oh we're in a capitalist society alright. This is exactly where capitalism leads to, and it has been foreseen a long time ago by forgotten and hated economists. This is just an attempt to clear capitalism's name by calling the negative effects of capitalism something else than capitalism.
- scollet 6y ago
  Hm, but profit is not a meaningful goal to begin with.
roody15 6y ago
We are entering the world of shadowrun. Not good.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
There is no capitalism. First it is an old idea before pubic goods like knowledge and IT comes dominant. Second it is agenda setting as even then and now we have mix economy - market, gov, community (people actually know each other), social (people mostly don’t) and cyber (the link is partial both community and social. That is a reason why you have sometimes very similar act by total different regime. Third each life has both most important strategy at that time at that place for that person. All politics are local and you alone (even though it is about you and the world or your group with the world). There is no ...
Havoc 6y ago
I find the lack of consensus about anything in the comment here quite interesting too. Clearly nobody is on the same page let alone the right page whatever that may be.
fzeroracer 6y ago
This seems like a really good companion article to the other top story on HN right now talking about Doordash [1]. Specifically, we're living in an era where companies are so flush with capital that the intent isn't even to make money. It's to corner a market so that they can have monopolistic behavior over it. In a capitalistic economy companies like Doordash, Grubhub or Ubereats simply should not exist because the way they operate is contrary to how capitalism is supposed to perform. So if companies like that can thrive, the only answer is that capitalism is broken. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852
- dsego 6y ago
  On the contrary, it's a classic capitalist move, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates. The so called tollbooth strategy. Create a choke point and extract revenue. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-billionaire-strategy-tollbooth-rockefeller-warren-buffet-2019-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-billionaire-strat...
JSavageOne 6y ago
Corporatocracy is probably the more accurate term, but the term neofeudalism isn't exactly a huge stretch. The only real difference today is that at least in theory a serf can become a lord, but the same power dynamic remains. When chattel slavery ended many of the freed slaves became sharecroppers, bound to the land by eternal debts that could never be repaid. Although they were no longer legally bound to their "masters", for many their lives were not really any better. Although in principle the monopolies and the government are separate institutions, we all know that the reality is that our politicians are bought out by the corporations, and the regulators are staffed by ex-employees of the very companies they are supposed to be regulating. We used to bust monopolies, but since the 70s or so the regulators have become very lax, and practically every industry has become more consolidated than it's ever been (finance, advertising, airlines, utilities, telecom, agriculture, healthcare, etc). What's interesting to me is that whenever Google/Facebook does something authoritarian that would seem to violate some principle of liberty we deem sacred (eg. censorship, violating freedom of speech), many if not most of the comments seem to rationalize the corporation's decision as exercising their own free speech. But when you're Reddit with 430M monthly active users, your userbase is the population equivalent of the world's 3rd largest country, and so you're effectively the equivalent of a nation-state. When you're Amazon with 750k employees, then your employees could fill up a city. Does the principle of democracy only apply to country's governments, or does it also extend to corporate monopolies?
- pmiller2 6y ago
  > Corporatocracy.... I think it's usually referred to as "corporatism," but, yes. Specifically, I think our current form of government in the US is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I think it's usually referred to as "corporatism" No, corporatism is a completely different thing; it comes from the same root (“corpora” = “body”) as does “corporation”, but it doesn't come from or refer to corporations but rather to the whole of society with institutions in different domains being a singular whole body working together. It was a pretty big idea on Catholic social/political theory for a few centuries, before getting radically reworked into a central part of the basis for Italian Fascism. Rule by the capitalist class through the entities creates by the State to advance the interests of capital (of which corporations are the foremost) is called “capitalism”, a name coined for that system by it's socialist critics who were quite concerned by what it did to everyone else.
bergstromm466 6y ago
“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed. Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.” “ They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created…. How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others? Far from trying to stop these negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that allow and encourage them. That is what this book is about.”
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
I don't agree with the main idea of the article, communism never worked, we always have had capitalism and always will be. Unless some socialism happens or something in the near future nothing will change. Also people think technology is good, I don't think that. But imho I can't survive in the woods alone
tayistay 6y ago
It's as if the author hasn't ever really encountered scientific precision. Take this for example: "Most of us constitute a property-less underclass only able to survive by servicing the needs of high earners." Who is "us"? In the USA, over 60% of housing units are owner-occupied. Hardly property-less. Hyperbole much? But then to presumably provide support for this, the author goes and cherry-picks something: "A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that over the next 10 years the occupation that will add the most jobs is personal care aides, not health workers but aides who bathe and clean people. The dependence of the ruling class on the vast sector of servants..." Could this BLS statistic be because the boomers, a large cohort, are getting old? The author makes the caregivers seem like servants to the "ruling class", not people taking care of the elderly who really do need the help. Another example: "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." Let's just dismiss UBI, a complex topic, with two sentences! Why prove anything when you can simply assert plausible-sounding things? And then you have stuff like: "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." Huh? Am I just too dumb to understand? I could probably find more examples. There might be some interesting ideas in the article, but it's just obscured by all the BS.
- mamon 6y ago
  >> In the USA, over 60% of housing units are owner-occupied Does that include houses with mortgages? Because in my opinion if you're not really the owner until you've paid off your mortgage fully.
  - tayistay 6y ago
    I'm sure it does. Your ownership is in proportion to equity. It's not as if your life situation suddenly changes when you make that last mortgage payment. Your point makes me wonder if mortgages just had the effect of transferring rents from landlords over to banks.
082349872349872 6y ago
"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", by a bloke named Goldstein, may have something to say about "neofeudalism", but I haven't been able to find more a few fragmented chapters...
darawk 6y ago
> A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et cetera. People have been predicting this since Marx, and they've been wrong every single time. It's a better time to be a peasant today than at any time history, and it keeps getting better. The chattering class sure does love to chatter about this though.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  >> It's a better time to be a peasant today than at any time history, and it keeps getting better. This is quite literally the “99% of ‘poor’ people have refrigerators” argument popularized by Fox News. You should find better sources of information.
  - darawk 6y ago
    > This is quite literally the “99% of ‘poor’ people have refrigerators” argument popularized by Fox News. > You should find better sources of information. The factual claim I made is true. My sources of information are just fine, so you must be objecting to something else.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nickik 6y ago
Books like this combine bad history with analysis what is happening now. This amounts to a badly researched opinion piece at most. > Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism? Ah, no sorry. That is not correct. That Communism was supposed to come after Capitalism was a believe held by guess who, COMMUNISTS. And that believe was based on a bunch books by a German philosopher who neither had the correct view of history, and then he drew even wronger conclusions from it. Basically making up Communism as a Utopian so he had a reason to criticism Capitalism, as Capitalism was clearly better then anything else to have an alternative he had to invent a utopia. That worked out great for everybody. > If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism How about were reject historical determinism itself? > The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.” Except that tech giants and other big companies don't have global armies that enact genocide on other nations. Or care what you do with your life, what religion you are and so on. Or force you in any way to use their service of the alternative produce from another service, or the open source version. Or are in any way even close to as powerful as a nation state. So except for all the things that really matter, its the same. > he result, then, of free choice, growth, and preferential attachment is hierarchy, power law distributions where those at the top have vastly more than those at the bottom. And those on Top then get replaced by something else when a new fade happens comes by. IBM will dominate everything. Microsoft will dominate everything. Netflix will dominate everything. MySpace will dominate everything. Basic Market Process Theory. These structures are only there as long as people want them and they are continually reshaped. And they are continuously and dynamically reshaped because people have free choice and the providers have no real powerful way to enforce them. The only power they have is to say 'use this service completely or not at all'. Will governments had the power to say, use this service or we kill your children. > Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it. So we need government centralization against the peoples will to create rules to stop people from voluntary centralization around what they want. > Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism documents the neoliberal strategy of undermining the authority of the nation-state over its economy in the interest of advancing global trade. How horrible, they power is taken away from dictators and government burocrates who have done such a brilliant job organizing their economics. We should make it as easy as possible for dictators to systematically exploit their people and natural resources and put all power in the government. That is much preferable to people being 'controlled' by the evils of global trade. > maintaining the competitiveness of national economies has become “a top policy concern.” What, being efficient has become a 'top policy concern' for governments, how horrifying. We need to stop this and restore systematic inefficiency. > Competitiveness has replaced competition and growth as a state goal ... the dismantling of monopolies but “to aid specific economic actors — those who are best positioned to perform well in the global competition for profit.” This is just a false. States sometimes push some industries, but mostly because of geo-strategy, not for profits. In actuality those industries most heavily pushed are often not those that produce those profits. Its the opposite, those that produce profits, finance those that geo-strategy things your country should have. And honestly, if your great fear is 'the state bureaucracy' will perfectly figure out what companies can be the most profitable and smartly invest in those, you are ignorant of all history. > “public authority handpicks the companies on which to bestow this privilege.” This is the same old fear that people had in the 70s about Japan. Find a new slant, this one is old and clearly wrong. Ignoring that pretty much all of these problems have existed for a long time and the solutions actually do exist already and have been discussed since the 1800s. Those states that do a good job implementing those solutions are still doing well, and others don't. > Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants. I really do feel like peasant who was not allowed to leave his village under threat of death because Google provides free Gmail. This is so incredibly stupid and ignorant it actually blows my mind.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

205 points by prostoalex 6y ago

alexpetralia 6y ago

The hug of death! Here is a mirror: http://archive.is/9j05G http://archive.is/9j05G

rbmt 6y ago
Thanks
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Note: archive.is is blocked in some countries where archive.org is not. http://web.archive.org/web/20200517230049/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200517230049/https://lareviewof...

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

There's not much difference between this kind of far-left intellectual garbage and the insane far-right conspiracy theories on Facebook

seibelj 6y ago
I could barely make heads or tails of it. It's like a tornado of nonsense-words. Did anyone ever figure out what "neofeudalism" means and why it's here now?
- dang 6y ago
  I figured out what it means in this article by reading as far as the second paragraph: Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. This seems sound. I paused at "precarity" but it's obviously a reference to economic insecurity. The only thing I can really fault this sentence for is that "changes at the level of the state" is vague. I'd hope that the article delivers on that with some details later, or else this bit shouldn't be there. (Edit: though...the other three things sound more like 19th century capitalism than feudalism.) You guys need to do a better job of critique. Denunciatory dismissals are what we don't want on HN; they're cheap, nasty, and uninteresting. Note the site guideline: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In case anyone's worried: I'm not siding for or against the article ideologically. I don't know if I agree or disagree with it; I don't even know what it says. I just know that (1) it clears the bar for an interesting discussion; and (2) commenters also need to clear that bar, or not comment. It's not that high a bar! If you don't like that I'm saying this about a left-wing article (which I guess this is?), there have been just as many right-wing ones we've treated the same way. Every time it happens in either direction, someone assumes bias, since on the internet, any data point is dispositive.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    Haven't personally seen you do a critical takedown of an unsubstantiated comment before, rather than a polite reminder of the rules. Its good. You should it do it occasionally to remind people that you know your stuff.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  This article is very rapidly visiting a bunch of ideas that are discussed in leftist circles. I don't think it does a very good job tying them together and it's a very poor introduction to these ideas. But it's not just nonsense. There is evidence of this theory working in international affairs. The idea is that there is an informal global government that functions largely by the control of federated groups. By and large these groups are corporate but they may also be governments, power blocks within national governments, NGOs and individuals. These groups manipulate international law to receive benefits and defer consequences. They are responsible directly for the structure many peoples way of life. They get laws made and unmade. They affect the fortunes and misfortunes of countries. It is a kind of feudalism because the entities setting out the parameters of people's lives are powerful groups who are using international law and economic influence to circumvent local and democratic forms of control. So power is determined by am entity's wealth, existing influence and ability to accrue more wealth and influence. Rather than a Nobel elite there is a professional or plutocratic elite. There isn't a grand conspiracy at work but rather lots of small coordinated efforts to enrich interests and accumulate influence. It can sound crankish but there are definitely some disturbing examples that have surfaced and lend credibility. The case of Steven Donziger is a recent example. Interesting and kind of scary case to read up on. A historic example is how for nearly 100 years despite that adminstrations come and go that U.S. foreign policy in South and Central America has consistently benefited American business. From raw imperialism at the turn of the century through 1940s "good neighbor" policies that benefited United Fruit through the Commie busting Reagan era. Strange how despite varying ideologies and international objectives American foreign policy redounds to the benefit of large companies that try to monopolize natural resources and oppose any laws that might keep economic power local to those countries. Anyway, the whole theory might be crap but again I don't think it's complete nonsense. This is just a poor introduction.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    That's just plain-old public choice playing out at an inter-governmental level, and not even a very "left wing" or conspiratorial idea. Any time you have the potential for concentrated interest groups benefiting at the expense of a widely-dispersed and perhaps poorly-informed public, you can expect that these opportunities will be pursued. Just ordinary corruption at work, "lots of small conspiracies" that are extremely hard to police effectively, and thus go unpoliced.
RangerScience 6y ago
What do you see as being the strongest similarities / least different aspects between these two?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dang 6y ago
Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. Edit: I read a few bits of the article and I don't think "far-left intellectual garbage" is a fair descriptor, even if you're coming from an opposing ideology. It seems like an interesting survey of a bunch of recent related works. Perhaps I missed the garbage parts?
- HeavenBanned 6y ago
  I think what they mean to say is, "Communist Critical Theory = Garbage."
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

sand_castles 6y ago

Neofeudalism is only possible in an agrarian society, or if your income is digging stuff out of the ground. Industrialized societies quickly tear themselves apart when you need an educated workforce, and intelligent consumers. A society of serfs will only consume the bare minimum, stagnating technological progress, ask the chinese about gunpowder and naval force projection. Unlikely for the US to enter Neofeudalism when we are entering an age of great power competition. You only get to keep your power if you "bribe" your workers enough to help you.

ianleeclark 6y ago
> You only get to keep your power if you "bribe" your workers enough to help you. This is largely a misunderstanding of historical systems of discipline. When the enclosures started to happen, serfs were booted from their land, and were coerced into working for early capitalists at threat of subjective violence (branding, beating, &c., if caught begging) or objective violence (starvation). It's understood that the states armed bodies of men, under feudalism and neofeudalism, don't care about you. So what is to stop a reversion to the level of subjugation seen by English serfs many centuries ago? You're free to go look up cops wearing, "I CAN breathe," t-shirts and take from that what you will. These bribes you mention, although an accurate retelling of American history through westward expansion and imperial expansion, are directly threatened by the faltering american hegemony.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  These systems of discipline were indeed quite real, but they were strongly associated with the mercantile system which was pre industrial revolution. ISTM that parent comment is still correct wrt. industrial and even more so wrt. post-industrial (service-based, contemporary) economies.
  - ianleeclark 6y ago
    > These systems of discipline were indeed quite real, but they were strongly associated with the mercantile system which was pre industrial revolution. Okay, so post industrial revolution domination is what you want: Blair Mountain. Even more relevant? Literally today as America shovels an underpaid mass of it's citizens into the jaws of a pandemic so that a labor aristocracy can resume their bloomin' onions, onto the beach, and back into movie theatres.

dustingetz 6y ago

> Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it. This sentence is busted for me. Power laws are inevitable and acknowledging this is the starting point to finding a solution. You can't fix it from within.

Robotbeat 6y ago
Lay social science, even if common among techies, is hardly what I’d call “inevitable,” just because it might have “law” in the term. EDITed to address regionalism.
- dang 6y ago
  Please keep regional swipes out of your posts here. It's needlessly provocative. HN's community is distributed all over the world; only 10% of it is in SV last I checked. The odds are higher that you're talking to someone who's geographically closer to you than either of you is to SV.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    SV has become not just a place, but a way of thinking endemic in software engineers and/or tech entrepreneurs. See the Californian Ideology for a similar related phenomenon.
    - dang 6y ago
      Well, if you want to go that route, HN has a great many members who don't subscribe to that ideology, including many who are on the cutting edge of critiquing it (or at least closely follow those who are), including many who are physically in SV. It's complicated.
buzzkillington 6y ago
It wasn't too long ago that there was a power law in owning people. Somehow that inevitability is no longer with us. It's almost like once we broke the political will of the slave owning class we removed the need for slaves too.

sacks2k 6y ago

"owners into billionaires on the basis of the cheap labor of their workers, the free labor of their users, and the tax breaks bestowed on them by cities desperate to attract jobs. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company name for Google) together are worth more than most every country in the world (except the United States, China, Germany, and Japan). The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.”" How are any of these companies making money on the 'cheap' labor of their workers? Amazon pays all warehouse employees a minimum of $15/hour. This is well above the minimum wage in most areas of the US and outside the US, is a very good wage for doing repetitive tasks that don't even require a high school education. This article doesn't even touch on the censorship aspects of companies like Google and Facebook becoming more and more a reality every day. They both regularly censor opposing view points and are definitely influencing our elections. "Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants" Not quite. Anyone can still start a website and sell a product without a digital overlord. In fact, there are less barriers to entry than there were a decade ago. Most people choose to give control to companies like Amazon because it's easier and more convenient.

DangitBobby 6y ago
> Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants Do you have anything to say about this when it comes to, say, AirBnB, Google (play store), Apple (App Store), Amazon (the web marketplace, not AWS) and Uber?
- sacks2k 6y ago
  "AirBnB" You can make good money renting out your place and listing it on Airbnb. Don't like it? You can always use Craigslist or advertise yourself. It's not like airBnb provides nothing. They provide a built-in stream of potential customers, which could take a lot more money and time to obtain on your own. "Google (play store)" "Apple (App Store)" People are only willing to pay a few dollars at most for an app, unless it's very specialized. I have always seen apps as a feature/benefit to a main business, which Google and Apple can't control. "Amazon (the web marketplace, not AWS)" Most businesses on Amazon have a storefront/website and use Amazon to get more business. Amazon may control the marketplace, but they don't have to control your business. This is a choice with many alternatives. "and Uber" Again, this is a choice. Uber was never meant to provide a full-time income for anyone. It's meant as a way to make some extra money on the side. When we have many choices and alternatives, the argument that these companies are the 'new lords' becomes very weak.

Barrin92 6y ago

There's only one aspect in the entire piece that I think is somewhat accurate, which is the division of society into hinterlands and centres. That really is happening, however not only between the property owning class and everyone else, but with much more nuance in between. Everything else however is I think pretty far off the mark, comparing this era to feudalism doesn't make much sense. The article posits extraction of resources from the poor to the rich, including globally, and this is just wrong. We've seen a great convergence in global equity which one can see with their own eyes if they travel to China or Poland. Lack of property or wealth also doesn't imply 'serfdom'. In today's age property isn't really a guarantor of personal autonomy any more, in fact if anything the opposite is true, the biggest benefits today fall on people who can move. Owning a house doesn't really do most people any good any more, in particular not if it's in a place that has its economy turned upside down.

cft 6y ago
In the hinterland there are many (relatively poor) owners (of small businesses, farms, shops). In the centers, there are salaried employees that are often richer than the hinterland's owners and very rich mega-owners, that are few. The divisions of interest of these classes are roughly represented in the blue/red map of the US.
- wwweston 6y ago
  > The divisions of interest of these classes are roughly represented in the blue/red map of the US. Real interests, or perceived affiliative values? Example: for several things "hinterland" areas are generally underserved by markets alone (hospital/medicine, broadband, delivery). Currently, the party generally stronger in those areas, though, seems more interested in eroding public solutions to those problems rather than building them out...
  - cft 6y ago
    I think it's condescending to point out to people what their real interests are. People have agency.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago

Bruce Schneier partially agrees with it. * Feudal Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht... > Perhaps instead of hoping that our Internet-era lords will be sufficiently clever and benevolent -- or putting our faith in the Robin Hoods who block phone surveillance and circumvent DRM systems -- it's time we step in in our role as governments (both national and international) to create the regulatory environments that protect us vassals (and the lords as well). Otherwise, we really are just serfs.

627467 6y ago

Doesn't feudalism arise out of weak (practically non existent) centralized power structures? Despite the rethoric of late (particularly in Trump America) I think most of the world (including the US) is heading towards stronger Nation States not weaker... And not because the State is claiming that power, but because society seems in line with it. The speed with which many western democracies allowed/tolerated extreme measures to be taken during the covid pandemic in a syncronized manner just shows how people rely on the State when push comes to shove.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
The state has not become weaker but its power is usually used in different ways than before. Remember, the age old debate of whether the state should let the free market operate, or regulate away market failure, with bitter debate on this for over a century. Neoliberalism breaks out of this framework altogether. It says that the job of the state is to actively force an unregulated market everywhere. This active roles means discouraging unions, being part of international free trade agreements, bailing out businesses, encouraging allowing monopolies, etc. This is what the power of the state is used for today. Of course, the power is not unlimited, so in times of great need like today, we do get a temporary halt to economic activity. See for instance, http://cult320sp15.onmason.com/files/2015/01/Harvey.NeoliberalismAsCreativeDestruction.pdf http://cult320sp15.onmason.com/files/2015/01/Harvey.Neoliber...
mindslight 6y ago
The direct pandemic response was delayed by at least a month, and basically consisted of telling everyone to stay home and not much else. Now we're getting bored of it, so it's ending. That doesn't seem so powerful to me. Meanwhile the financial response of cutting interest rates started two weeks earlier, which certainly seems like the state trying to appease capital.
- 627467 6y ago
  Agreed on the description on how the State wielded the power (not very effectively I'd argue) yet I'm not claiming that the State knows what to do with power (specially in such pandemic situation), I'm merely describing that the people seem to have accepted very quickly and with little resistance whatever the State decided (late or not)

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

>Did anyone ever figure out what "neofeudalism" means and why it's here now? I'm gonna write out a notion before I actually read the article and get disappointed. Feudalism was a mode of production in which value was chiefly produced from arable land via agriculture and mainly extracted in the form of rent or tax by force, with the ruling class being the most effective military force. Merchants, traders, artisans, engineers, and bureaucrats weren't really major players under feudalism, and their rise from tolerated skilled servants to a class for themselves, the asset-owning class of capitalism, was a major historical transition. If, hypothetically, we were transitioning into a form of "neo-feudalism", it would be a mode of production in which efficiently producing valuable goods for market trade is no longer more valuable than the ability to just force other people to pay you not to plunder them by force. It would indicate that society's productive potential was either actively degrading, or being held hostage by a ruling class of rent-seekers on the limiting factors of production. For instance, a society run largely by real-estate or oil tycoons who twist the law to bully their competitors and extract rents/ransoms from anyone needing land or oil could (again, hypothetically) qualify. The nasty question in this whole thing would be: what so strangled capitalism that feudalism was able to make a comeback? The feudal-to-capitalist transition happened in the first place because the ruling class of capitalism was able to so steadily erode the economic, social, and even military relevance of the landed nobility that by the time of the French Revolution they could be executed en masse without anyone else complaining much, and the nobles of many other countries like England and Germany had to marry into industrial enterprises to keep their wealth! Are we somehow so de-industrialized that we're switching back to subsistence agriculture?

epistasis 6y ago
Well I think you nailed it. Too bad this comment is hidden underneath a flagged comment!
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216113 (the flagged comment) so it can float higher if such is its fate. Usually we detach things for the opposite reason...

Proven 6y ago

Both companies and individuals are being subsidized or bailed out by central banks and governments. Governments spend 35-45 percent of GDP. That is fascism. Coven is a statist. While he calls himself a libertarian, his recommendations usually don't involve les# government - very unlibertarian.

mempko 6y ago

Capitalism IS neofeudalism. Even the word 'Capitalism' was a joke making fun of the fact that it was a new form of feudalism. There is a long long history of this criticism going back all the way to the French Revolution.

trynumber9 6y ago

It sounds like box-standard capitalism to me. Maybe it'll be neo-feudalism when they force the peons to use their lord's platforms, like China with the Great Firewall. But that could also simply be described as state capitalism and protectionism.

0x262d 6y ago
Yeah, this doesn’t seem to have any definition up front of capitalism. If I defined it it would involve mostly wage labor by people who don’t own enough property to support themselves, as well as predominantly private investment of capital for profit by employing more wage laborers. Which makes clear that we’re still right in it. Seems like a spurious thesis based on a lack of examination of previously existing thought about this.
HeavenBanned 6y ago
Interestingly enough, Chomsky asserts that what we have now is State-Sponsored Capitalism in the US. I think that's more accurate than neo-feudalism, personally.

snidane 6y ago

This of the converse - Capitalism: the the weird case in the history of Feudalism. Feudalism seems to be a natural order. Look at corporations - they are all feudal hierarchies internally. So what is capitalism among the natural order of feudalism? Technology of industrial revolution allowed new generation of aristocracy (refer to as capitalists) to replace old generation of aristocracy (landed gentry). It's more likely that we have regressed back to natural feudal order than that we are experiencing some funky next stage of capitalism, since there were no major wars or societal conflicts recently.

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

As long as generational money exists capitalism never ends.

js8 6y ago

I don't think we can call the current system something different until the ideology of the middle class changes. (I think in society, the power of upper class over middle class is maintained by ideology, while power over lower class is maintained by force). There is still by and large belief in meritocracy and American dream. Contrast that with feudalism, people in the middle class had the ideology of the divine, unchanged order. So I think the future is still open because it will crucially depend on what ideology will be taken by middle classes. They might as well adopt a social democratic ideology again, as the did in the reaction to late 19th century capitalism in the Europe and U.S.

Thorentis 6y ago

Emphasis on NEO-feudalism. What this article fails to acknowledge or discuss, is that feudalism was actually BETTER for workers than the current arrangement. Workers were entitled to earn a living from the land they lived on, their lords had obligations to them to provide for their welfare. There was a hierarchy, but the workers themselves were empowered by the value they added to their lord's land. Serfs were only serfs of they lacked the skills to be free men or craftsmen. The craft and trade economy was far more self regulating and less exploitive. What we have now is a Servile State, not a feudal one.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
With few modifications, your praise of serfdom/feudalism could also be applied to the chattel slave system. I don't think anyone in today's world would trade their lot for that of a slave or serf.
p2t2p 6y ago
You very conveniently forget about corvée. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e
ashtonkem 6y ago
There’s 2 parts here that I think you’re tying together. They happened together, I don’t believe they’re causally linked. First: feudalism was a system that came into existence in response to circumstances after the Roman Empire fell. In exchange for binding themselves to lords, serfs were promised physical protection in a world that was getting more dangerous. The negative sides of this arrangement became intolerable once serfs no longer needed to depend on lords for physical safety. The other half is that serfs worked less than modern workers. But that’s not because they’re serfs, it’s because that in a world without refrigeration, you have a limited ability to over work, since your primary product (food) will spoil if you over produce it. Serfs didn’t work less because they were serfs, they worked less because once enough food had been collected then there was no more work to be done.
toasterlovin 6y ago
FWIW, your take on whether feudalism was a good arrangement for serfs goes counter to basically every historian I've ever come across. The second sentence of the Wikipedia page on Serfdom describes it as "a condition of debt bondage or indentured servitude". Then it goes on to describe that serfs "could be bought, sold, or traded", but mostly only along with the land they were tied to. Further on, it describes that a free person become a serf "usually through force or necessity".

lbarrow 6y ago

>Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company name for Google) together are worth more than most every country in the world (except the United States, China, Germany, and Japan). Did the author just compare market capitalizations with GDP? What? It's hard to take some of this stuff seriously.

nickpinkston 6y ago
I got interested and did a more apples to apples comparison: REVENUES (2019): Apple: $260B Facebook: $70.7B Microsoft: $126B Amazon: $233B Alphabet: $162B TOTAL: $852B _____________________________ GDPs in 1000's (copy paste from Wikipedia): 1 United States 21,439,453 — European Union 18,705,132 2 China 14,140,163 3 Japan 5,154,475 4 Germany 3,863,344 5 India 2,935,570 6 United Kingdom 2,743,586 7 France 2,707,074 8 Italy 1,988,636 9 Brazil 1,847,020 10 Canada 1,730,914 11 Russia 1,637,892 12 Korea, South 1,629,532 13 Spain 1,397,870 14 Australia 1,376,255 15 Mexico 1,274,175 16 Indonesia 1,111,713 17 Netherlands 902,355 18 Saudi Arabia 779,289 19 Turkey 743,708 20 Switzerland 715,360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
- callmekit 6y ago
  The Wikipedia article you linked lists GDP in millions, not in 1000's.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    By my rekoning then, there are 17 countries that have larger GDP than the combined tech companies.
  - nickpinkston 6y ago
    Yea, by the time I'm reading your comment, it won't let me change. More used to corporate numbers where everything is in 1000's haha.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I’ve begun to suspect that we’re not in a capitalist society for a while. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber argues that a surprisingly large percentage (~34%) of workers don’t believe their job even helps the company turn a profit. In a capitalist society this is something that shouldn’t happen at scale; market efficiencies should theoretically eliminate all jobs that don’t help companies turn a profit. I’ve had a suspicion that we’re trending towards a feudal structure, with managers as minor lords, companies as countries, and CEO as a modern king. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it does explain why our culture doesn’t seem to be doing things that a capitalist society should do.

TFYS 6y ago
Oh we're in a capitalist society alright. This is exactly where capitalism leads to, and it has been foreseen a long time ago by forgotten and hated economists. This is just an attempt to clear capitalism's name by calling the negative effects of capitalism something else than capitalism.
scollet 6y ago
Hm, but profit is not a meaningful goal to begin with.

roody15 6y ago

We are entering the world of shadowrun. Not good.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

There is no capitalism. First it is an old idea before pubic goods like knowledge and IT comes dominant. Second it is agenda setting as even then and now we have mix economy - market, gov, community (people actually know each other), social (people mostly don’t) and cyber (the link is partial both community and social. That is a reason why you have sometimes very similar act by total different regime. Third each life has both most important strategy at that time at that place for that person. All politics are local and you alone (even though it is about you and the world or your group with the world). There is no ...

Havoc 6y ago

I find the lack of consensus about anything in the comment here quite interesting too. Clearly nobody is on the same page let alone the right page whatever that may be.

fzeroracer 6y ago

This seems like a really good companion article to the other top story on HN right now talking about Doordash [1]. Specifically, we're living in an era where companies are so flush with capital that the intent isn't even to make money. It's to corner a market so that they can have monopolistic behavior over it. In a capitalistic economy companies like Doordash, Grubhub or Ubereats simply should not exist because the way they operate is contrary to how capitalism is supposed to perform. So if companies like that can thrive, the only answer is that capitalism is broken. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216852

dsego 6y ago
On the contrary, it's a classic capitalist move, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates. The so called tollbooth strategy. Create a choke point and extract revenue. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-billionaire-strategy-tollbooth-rockefeller-warren-buffet-2019-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-billionaire-strat...

JSavageOne 6y ago

Corporatocracy is probably the more accurate term, but the term neofeudalism isn't exactly a huge stretch. The only real difference today is that at least in theory a serf can become a lord, but the same power dynamic remains. When chattel slavery ended many of the freed slaves became sharecroppers, bound to the land by eternal debts that could never be repaid. Although they were no longer legally bound to their "masters", for many their lives were not really any better. Although in principle the monopolies and the government are separate institutions, we all know that the reality is that our politicians are bought out by the corporations, and the regulators are staffed by ex-employees of the very companies they are supposed to be regulating. We used to bust monopolies, but since the 70s or so the regulators have become very lax, and practically every industry has become more consolidated than it's ever been (finance, advertising, airlines, utilities, telecom, agriculture, healthcare, etc). What's interesting to me is that whenever Google/Facebook does something authoritarian that would seem to violate some principle of liberty we deem sacred (eg. censorship, violating freedom of speech), many if not most of the comments seem to rationalize the corporation's decision as exercising their own free speech. But when you're Reddit with 430M monthly active users, your userbase is the population equivalent of the world's 3rd largest country, and so you're effectively the equivalent of a nation-state. When you're Amazon with 750k employees, then your employees could fill up a city. Does the principle of democracy only apply to country's governments, or does it also extend to corporate monopolies?

pmiller2 6y ago
> Corporatocracy.... I think it's usually referred to as "corporatism," but, yes. Specifically, I think our current form of government in the US is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I think it's usually referred to as "corporatism" No, corporatism is a completely different thing; it comes from the same root (“corpora” = “body”) as does “corporation”, but it doesn't come from or refer to corporations but rather to the whole of society with institutions in different domains being a singular whole body working together. It was a pretty big idea on Catholic social/political theory for a few centuries, before getting radically reworked into a central part of the basis for Italian Fascism. Rule by the capitalist class through the entities creates by the State to advance the interests of capital (of which corporations are the foremost) is called “capitalism”, a name coined for that system by it's socialist critics who were quite concerned by what it did to everyone else.

bergstromm466 6y ago

“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed. Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.” “ They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created…. How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others? Far from trying to stop these negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that allow and encourage them. That is what this book is about.”

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

I don't agree with the main idea of the article, communism never worked, we always have had capitalism and always will be. Unless some socialism happens or something in the near future nothing will change. Also people think technology is good, I don't think that. But imho I can't survive in the woods alone

tayistay 6y ago

It's as if the author hasn't ever really encountered scientific precision. Take this for example: "Most of us constitute a property-less underclass only able to survive by servicing the needs of high earners." Who is "us"? In the USA, over 60% of housing units are owner-occupied. Hardly property-less. Hyperbole much? But then to presumably provide support for this, the author goes and cherry-picks something: "A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that over the next 10 years the occupation that will add the most jobs is personal care aides, not health workers but aides who bathe and clean people. The dependence of the ruling class on the vast sector of servants..." Could this BLS statistic be because the boomers, a large cohort, are getting old? The author makes the caregivers seem like servants to the "ruling class", not people taking care of the elderly who really do need the help. Another example: "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." Let's just dismiss UBI, a complex topic, with two sentences! Why prove anything when you can simply assert plausible-sounding things? And then you have stuff like: "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." Huh? Am I just too dumb to understand? I could probably find more examples. There might be some interesting ideas in the article, but it's just obscured by all the BS.

mamon 6y ago
>> In the USA, over 60% of housing units are owner-occupied Does that include houses with mortgages? Because in my opinion if you're not really the owner until you've paid off your mortgage fully.
- tayistay 6y ago
  I'm sure it does. Your ownership is in proportion to equity. It's not as if your life situation suddenly changes when you make that last mortgage payment. Your point makes me wonder if mortgages just had the effect of transferring rents from landlords over to banks.

082349872349872 6y ago

"The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", by a bloke named Goldstein, may have something to say about "neofeudalism", but I haven't been able to find more a few fragmented chapters...

darawk 6y ago

> A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et cetera. People have been predicting this since Marx, and they've been wrong every single time. It's a better time to be a peasant today than at any time history, and it keeps getting better. The chattering class sure does love to chatter about this though.

enraged_camel 6y ago
>> It's a better time to be a peasant today than at any time history, and it keeps getting better. This is quite literally the “99% of ‘poor’ people have refrigerators” argument popularized by Fox News. You should find better sources of information.
- darawk 6y ago
  > This is quite literally the “99% of ‘poor’ people have refrigerators” argument popularized by Fox News. > You should find better sources of information. The factual claim I made is true. My sources of information are just fine, so you must be objecting to something else.

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nickik 6y ago

Books like this combine bad history with analysis what is happening now. This amounts to a badly researched opinion piece at most. > Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism? Ah, no sorry. That is not correct. That Communism was supposed to come after Capitalism was a believe held by guess who, COMMUNISTS. And that believe was based on a bunch books by a German philosopher who neither had the correct view of history, and then he drew even wronger conclusions from it. Basically making up Communism as a Utopian so he had a reason to criticism Capitalism, as Capitalism was clearly better then anything else to have an alternative he had to invent a utopia. That worked out great for everybody. > If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism How about were reject historical determinism itself? > The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.” Except that tech giants and other big companies don't have global armies that enact genocide on other nations. Or care what you do with your life, what religion you are and so on. Or force you in any way to use their service of the alternative produce from another service, or the open source version. Or are in any way even close to as powerful as a nation state. So except for all the things that really matter, its the same. > he result, then, of free choice, growth, and preferential attachment is hierarchy, power law distributions where those at the top have vastly more than those at the bottom. And those on Top then get replaced by something else when a new fade happens comes by. IBM will dominate everything. Microsoft will dominate everything. Netflix will dominate everything. MySpace will dominate everything. Basic Market Process Theory. These structures are only there as long as people want them and they are continually reshaped. And they are continuously and dynamically reshaped because people have free choice and the providers have no real powerful way to enforce them. The only power they have is to say 'use this service completely or not at all'. Will governments had the power to say, use this service or we kill your children. > Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it. So we need government centralization against the peoples will to create rules to stop people from voluntary centralization around what they want. > Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism documents the neoliberal strategy of undermining the authority of the nation-state over its economy in the interest of advancing global trade. How horrible, they power is taken away from dictators and government burocrates who have done such a brilliant job organizing their economics. We should make it as easy as possible for dictators to systematically exploit their people and natural resources and put all power in the government. That is much preferable to people being 'controlled' by the evils of global trade. > maintaining the competitiveness of national economies has become “a top policy concern.” What, being efficient has become a 'top policy concern' for governments, how horrifying. We need to stop this and restore systematic inefficiency. > Competitiveness has replaced competition and growth as a state goal ... the dismantling of monopolies but “to aid specific economic actors — those who are best positioned to perform well in the global competition for profit.” This is just a false. States sometimes push some industries, but mostly because of geo-strategy, not for profits. In actuality those industries most heavily pushed are often not those that produce those profits. Its the opposite, those that produce profits, finance those that geo-strategy things your country should have. And honestly, if your great fear is 'the state bureaucracy' will perfectly figure out what companies can be the most profitable and smartly invest in those, you are ignorant of all history. > “public authority handpicks the companies on which to bestow this privilege.” This is the same old fear that people had in the 70s about Japan. Find a new slant, this one is old and clearly wrong. Ignoring that pretty much all of these problems have existed for a long time and the solutions actually do exist already and have been discussed since the 1800s. Those states that do a good job implementing those solutions are still doing well, and others don't. > Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants. I really do feel like peasant who was not allowed to leave his village under threat of death because Google provides free Gmail. This is so incredibly stupid and ignorant it actually blows my mind.

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