Red Hot Take: Dialectics at the Dawn of Techno-Feudalism
Added 2025-02-04 18:03:49 +0000 UTC"When you love people, it hurts..."
Comments
I'm a new supporter so will start by saying that I enjoyed the episode as always and all of your passion. As a critical note, I honestly I can't figure out why people keep going with this "techno-feudalist" thing. Yanis Varoufakis has been talking about the dangers of techno-feudalism for a long time and I've always had an issue with it. To be clear, I'm from the UK but I 100% agree that from where I'm standing the US seems to be transforming into something very different from its originally liberal "democratic" form (emphasis on those scare quotes). We'll see where it goes quite soon, especially after the death of Trump (will the project halt in its tracks because the personally cult of Trump dies with him or will it successfully continue with Musk and the Republican Party?). But the techno-feudalist thing just seems like the completely wrong framing. There's no reason to think that what is coming is going to be *anything* like a feudalist mode of production. I can see no reason to believe that workers will devolve into anything like peasantry because I cannot see that wage labour will come to an end. And there will not be pockets of common lands as there was in feudal Europe. And I therefore cannot see that we will return to anything like feudal social relations of tight-knit, relatively isolated communities of workers or anything like that. The structure of the economy simply will not allow for this. Some have argued that as AI develops it *will* replace wage labour, meaning that people's income will have to be replaced by UBI. It's certainly true that AI is going to transform the labour market but the idea that it will eliminate wage labour is, as of right now, total speculation (and honestly imo just hype coming from the tech company CEOs). This is especially true in the global south where most people are not "white collar" workers meaning that large language models (currently the most advanced form of AI) are not suited to replace them as labourers. And even if the labour market is transformed *very* radically in the global north, dependence of imperialist core economies on the periphery will mean that continuation of wage labour in the global south remains an absolute necessity. I think that this "techno-feudalist" framing is also rhetorically problematic as it implies that what we'll have is something fundamentally distinct from capitalism, and that we might return to a more liberal and civilised form of capitalism in the future. This is similar to how right-wingers often try to distinguish between "corporatism" and "capitalism", claiming that corporatism is the problem, not capital. It seems much better to me to point out that what we're seeing really just is a natural development of capitalism in the era of late imperialism/monopoly. Perhaps comparisons to fascism are (or will become, I am undecided) apt, remembering that leftists and historians more generally have been insisted on seeing fascism as a *form of* capitalism. I could get behind language like "techno-monarchy" as this doesn't imply any fundamental change in the mode of production or any kind of "return" to feudal social relations. That's just my 2 cents on the matter. Perhaps I'm being overly pedantic though I think these distinctions are at least sometimes important.
Joe
2025-02-22 13:24:21 +0000 UTCI just listened to this episode. It fucking scary.
Shane Lees
2025-02-14 00:20:35 +0000 UTC
