3 ms·

>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 disappoint

>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...
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  I went and read the article, and the big thing about it that actually surprised me was the focus on "networks" and "platforms" and tech companies, all of which would have seemed a lot more relevant maybe five years ago. I would have expected to see more reference to real-estate rentierism (including its manifestation as "magic money trees" for the middle class in some countries, and as politically fashionable NIMBYism in the major world urban centers), financial scams (they refer to tax dodging schemes but then pass it on by to talk about tech platforms some more), and the higher educational-industrial complex. Which is not to say I love tech companies and "platforms" so much, but as the COVID-19 shutdowns have shown us, stuff like AirBnB and Uber basically just make money off facilitating other people's transactions in economic sectors that are already heavily rentiered and concentrated. Taxis and real-estate aren't going to get any less rentiering just by getting rid of the apps.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Yes, I was a bit surprised by that too, but I think a lot of the attention on that is that it feels liked a newer problem than that of land, which is a well hashed topic over the centuries. The attention economy, or rather the limited amount of attention that consumers have to find new information/retail/entertainment outlets, has existed ever since we had wide distribution of periodicals through mail. Anybody could become a Sears in 1920 in the same sense that anybody could build an Amazon today. But the scale of the internet has really amplified this, and it feels much newer since we have oligarchs in SV now with far more publicity than typical US oligarchs. They get media attention because they have threatened the media. They tyranny of NIMBY-driven land use is not a (new) threat to traditional media, and those who uphold that system are the same people who typically prop up local media, and media is controlled by those that own property in the same way. If you want to be a YouTube star or a Hollywood star, you had more avenues to success in Hollywood but it was still a very limited number of power brokers that gate keeped access. Now, organic growth of a YouTube star is possible, but that star is share cropping just as the Hollywood star is sharecropping a system with tightly controlled distribution; YouTube is a single agent and there's just a handful of Hollywood studios. Personally, I think that real estate rentierism is a far bigger problem than platforms. But addressing that offends a far broader audience, and lacks novelty, even if the scale of rentierism is affecting higher income quantiles than in anybody's memory.
bediger4000 6y ago
Maybe the "neo" is to disassociate the "feudalism" part from subsistence agriculture. Subsistence gig-work might substitute for subsistence agriculture. Make every job into a temporary gig, with a smartphone app where serfs bid on some piece-work, and you've got a neofeudal system. Unfortunately this view falls apart because you need a strong-ish state to enforce money, and penalize contract non-performance, which seems to me to be the achilles' heel of libertarian do-everything-by-contract as well. And I should add that "strong-ish" means a state that's not corrupt, strong enough politically to enforce its own rules via police action, and ethical enough to attract popular support. I don't think these things can be quantified, so people corrupting the system, or gaming the laws can always argue about whether or not the state is "strong-ish" enough.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  >And I should add that "strong-ish" means a state that's not corrupt, strong enough politically to enforce its own rules via police action, and ethical enough to attract popular support. I don't think these things can be quantified, so people corrupting the system, or gaming the laws can always argue about whether or not the state is "strong-ish" enough. Yeah, I was really surprised to see this piece was published in May 2020 without any notes of the major shifts in partisan politics of the past few years. For instance, one wouldn't critique the Left today for being too decentralized or libertarian-municipalist. One would critique the Left today for being, essentially, the interests of the neo-feudal "center" wrapped up in moral language, with a social base that tilts far more educated, metropolitan, and white-collar than the rest of the population. And then, of course, there's ignoring the elephants in the room: Trumpian right-wing nationalist populism, and COVID-19. Both have pushed official politics in a direction of greater "state capacity", and the former is explicitly rooted in the identity and interests of the neo-feudal "hinterland" being asserted against those of the "center". Like Marx pointing out the falling rate of profit, I think you've hit on the contradiction in this "neo-feudalism": the networked metropole of "global cities" has to be maintained, militarily and infrastructurally, by nation-states that give people in the "hinterlands" a vote, often a vote that "weighs more" than that of the people in the "centers". Insofar as a company like Facebook or Google props up the San Francisco real-estate industry, that's great, and they can even worm their way around paying California taxes by various clever means. But an electoral revolt from the "hinterlands" so severe that both major parties now put up candidates and platforms centered around telling the "centers" (ie: San Francisco) that they're a bunch of loony extremists who need to be brought to heel? That's a political problem for neo-feudalism.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Hmm. Then gangs that charge protection money are basically neofeudalist. That seems both plausible and interesting.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Early feudal systems were basically just a protection racket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_by_itineration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_by_itineration
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  The mafia has often been described as a feudal structure within a capitalist society, criminalized by the system that replaced it.
mr_toad 6y ago
> 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 I think you're overlooking the role of military technology in unseating the feudal power base. Mounted knights were no match for pike squares, and cannons rendered castles obsolete. Centralised standing armies of cheap soldiers proved more effective than the much more expensive mounted and armoured knight. Unless something undermines the military and security apparatus of the modern nation-state it's not going away.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  I specifically said "military relevance of the landed nobility". A major part of the transition, and the formation of the modern nation-state, came from the increasing military superiority of, as you put it, "centralized standing armies of cheap soldiers" and the commodification of war.
mindslight 6y ago
> The nasty question in this whole thing would be: what so strangled capitalism that feudalism was able to make a comeback I think you're assuming that the feudalism is referring to replacing the current system, rather than building a new system on top of it and describing the new structure within. I don't think the article's neo-feudalism directly predicts that people in the hinterlands will be extracted from physically. But rather just in the scope of their digital activity - they want to communicate with friends, use Facebook, and Facebook grows richer off of their labor. But I do think the article hops around between the narrow digital context and the larger world to lend more gravity to its point. Talking about the entire real world, and making things easy by assuming some basic income - what keeps people in the hinterlands from just sitting around? The article critiques the lack of a coherent description of work, which I am perpetuating. But the article also leans on Facebook moderators of an example of new-style work, even though it is fundamentally unnecessary. To the extent that we go down this path, we could also just not have an economy - the people in the hinterlands could very well just end up homesteading, physically and digitally. Food and shelter enabled by cheap technology, setting up DIY servers for themselves and their friends, and scavenging digital devices that are cast off by the more centralized economy for lack of software updates. I kind of already feel this way running libreboot/me_cleaned coreboot/microg for my main devices, and keeping as much stuff out of the cloud as possible. News about the latest gadgets just doesn't excite me much.
visarga 6y ago
> Are we somehow so de-industrialized that we're switching back to subsistence agriculture? As capital grows it tends to become concentrated and inflexible, oriented more towards protecting itself than innovating. Capitalism is an unstable system, it tends to evolve in the direction of monopolies and hyper-rich 0.1%.

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...
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
I went and read the article, and the big thing about it that actually surprised me was the focus on "networks" and "platforms" and tech companies, all of which would have seemed a lot more relevant maybe five years ago. I would have expected to see more reference to real-estate rentierism (including its manifestation as "magic money trees" for the middle class in some countries, and as politically fashionable NIMBYism in the major world urban centers), financial scams (they refer to tax dodging schemes but then pass it on by to talk about tech platforms some more), and the higher educational-industrial complex. Which is not to say I love tech companies and "platforms" so much, but as the COVID-19 shutdowns have shown us, stuff like AirBnB and Uber basically just make money off facilitating other people's transactions in economic sectors that are already heavily rentiered and concentrated. Taxis and real-estate aren't going to get any less rentiering just by getting rid of the apps.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Yes, I was a bit surprised by that too, but I think a lot of the attention on that is that it feels liked a newer problem than that of land, which is a well hashed topic over the centuries. The attention economy, or rather the limited amount of attention that consumers have to find new information/retail/entertainment outlets, has existed ever since we had wide distribution of periodicals through mail. Anybody could become a Sears in 1920 in the same sense that anybody could build an Amazon today. But the scale of the internet has really amplified this, and it feels much newer since we have oligarchs in SV now with far more publicity than typical US oligarchs. They get media attention because they have threatened the media. They tyranny of NIMBY-driven land use is not a (new) threat to traditional media, and those who uphold that system are the same people who typically prop up local media, and media is controlled by those that own property in the same way. If you want to be a YouTube star or a Hollywood star, you had more avenues to success in Hollywood but it was still a very limited number of power brokers that gate keeped access. Now, organic growth of a YouTube star is possible, but that star is share cropping just as the Hollywood star is sharecropping a system with tightly controlled distribution; YouTube is a single agent and there's just a handful of Hollywood studios. Personally, I think that real estate rentierism is a far bigger problem than platforms. But addressing that offends a far broader audience, and lacks novelty, even if the scale of rentierism is affecting higher income quantiles than in anybody's memory.

bediger4000 6y ago

Maybe the "neo" is to disassociate the "feudalism" part from subsistence agriculture. Subsistence gig-work might substitute for subsistence agriculture. Make every job into a temporary gig, with a smartphone app where serfs bid on some piece-work, and you've got a neofeudal system. Unfortunately this view falls apart because you need a strong-ish state to enforce money, and penalize contract non-performance, which seems to me to be the achilles' heel of libertarian do-everything-by-contract as well. And I should add that "strong-ish" means a state that's not corrupt, strong enough politically to enforce its own rules via police action, and ethical enough to attract popular support. I don't think these things can be quantified, so people corrupting the system, or gaming the laws can always argue about whether or not the state is "strong-ish" enough.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
>And I should add that "strong-ish" means a state that's not corrupt, strong enough politically to enforce its own rules via police action, and ethical enough to attract popular support. I don't think these things can be quantified, so people corrupting the system, or gaming the laws can always argue about whether or not the state is "strong-ish" enough. Yeah, I was really surprised to see this piece was published in May 2020 without any notes of the major shifts in partisan politics of the past few years. For instance, one wouldn't critique the Left today for being too decentralized or libertarian-municipalist. One would critique the Left today for being, essentially, the interests of the neo-feudal "center" wrapped up in moral language, with a social base that tilts far more educated, metropolitan, and white-collar than the rest of the population. And then, of course, there's ignoring the elephants in the room: Trumpian right-wing nationalist populism, and COVID-19. Both have pushed official politics in a direction of greater "state capacity", and the former is explicitly rooted in the identity and interests of the neo-feudal "hinterland" being asserted against those of the "center". Like Marx pointing out the falling rate of profit, I think you've hit on the contradiction in this "neo-feudalism": the networked metropole of "global cities" has to be maintained, militarily and infrastructurally, by nation-states that give people in the "hinterlands" a vote, often a vote that "weighs more" than that of the people in the "centers". Insofar as a company like Facebook or Google props up the San Francisco real-estate industry, that's great, and they can even worm their way around paying California taxes by various clever means. But an electoral revolt from the "hinterlands" so severe that both major parties now put up candidates and platforms centered around telling the "centers" (ie: San Francisco) that they're a bunch of loony extremists who need to be brought to heel? That's a political problem for neo-feudalism.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Hmm. Then gangs that charge protection money are basically neofeudalist. That seems both plausible and interesting.

mr_toad 6y ago
Early feudal systems were basically just a protection racket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_by_itineration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_by_itineration
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
The mafia has often been described as a feudal structure within a capitalist society, criminalized by the system that replaced it.

mr_toad 6y ago

> 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 I think you're overlooking the role of military technology in unseating the feudal power base. Mounted knights were no match for pike squares, and cannons rendered castles obsolete. Centralised standing armies of cheap soldiers proved more effective than the much more expensive mounted and armoured knight. Unless something undermines the military and security apparatus of the modern nation-state it's not going away.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
I specifically said "military relevance of the landed nobility". A major part of the transition, and the formation of the modern nation-state, came from the increasing military superiority of, as you put it, "centralized standing armies of cheap soldiers" and the commodification of war.

mindslight 6y ago

> The nasty question in this whole thing would be: what so strangled capitalism that feudalism was able to make a comeback I think you're assuming that the feudalism is referring to replacing the current system, rather than building a new system on top of it and describing the new structure within. I don't think the article's neo-feudalism directly predicts that people in the hinterlands will be extracted from physically. But rather just in the scope of their digital activity - they want to communicate with friends, use Facebook, and Facebook grows richer off of their labor. But I do think the article hops around between the narrow digital context and the larger world to lend more gravity to its point. Talking about the entire real world, and making things easy by assuming some basic income - what keeps people in the hinterlands from just sitting around? The article critiques the lack of a coherent description of work, which I am perpetuating. But the article also leans on Facebook moderators of an example of new-style work, even though it is fundamentally unnecessary. To the extent that we go down this path, we could also just not have an economy - the people in the hinterlands could very well just end up homesteading, physically and digitally. Food and shelter enabled by cheap technology, setting up DIY servers for themselves and their friends, and scavenging digital devices that are cast off by the more centralized economy for lack of software updates. I kind of already feel this way running libreboot/me_cleaned coreboot/microg for my main devices, and keeping as much stuff out of the cloud as possible. News about the latest gadgets just doesn't excite me much.

visarga 6y ago

> Are we somehow so de-industrialized that we're switching back to subsistence agriculture? As capital grows it tends to become concentrated and inflexible, oriented more towards protecting itself than innovating. Capitalism is an unstable system, it tends to evolve in the direction of monopolies and hyper-rich 0.1%.