From the Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020:
Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
IN CAPITAL IS DEAD, McKenzie Wark asks: What if we’re not in
capitalism anymore but something worse? The question is provocative,
sacrilegious, unsettling as it forces anti-capitalists to confront an
unacknowledged attachment to capitalism. Communism was supposed to come
after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in
capitalism? Left unquestioned, this assumption hinders political
analysis. If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism, we should be
able to consider the possibility that capitalism has mutated into
something qualitatively different. Wark’s question invites a thought
experiment: what tendencies in the present indicate that capitalism is
transforming itself into something worse?
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. Drawing from libertarian
economist Tyler Cowen’s emphasis on the permanence of extreme inequality
in the global, automated economy, the conservative geographer Joel
Kotkin envisions the US future as mass serfdom. A property-less
underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as
personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et
cetera. The only way to avoid this neofeudal nightmare is by subsidizing
and deregulating the high-employment industries that make the American
lifestyle of suburban home ownership and the open road possible —
construction and real estate; oil, gas, and automobiles; and corporate
agribusiness. Unlike the specter of serfdom haunting Friedrich Hayek’s
attack on socialism, Kotkin locates the adversary within capitalism.
High tech, finance, and globalization are creating “a new social order
that in some ways more closely resembles feudal structure — with its
often unassailable barriers to mobility — than the chaotic emergence of
industrial capitalism.” In this libertarian/conservative imaginary,
feudalism occupies the place of the enemy formerly held by communism.
The threat of centralization and the threat to private property are the
ideological elements that remain the same.
A number of technology commentators share the
libertarian/conservative critique of technology’s role in contemporary
feudalization even as they don’t embrace fossil fuels and suburbia.
Already in 2010, in his influential book, You Are Not a Gadget,
tech guru Jaron Lanier observed the emergence of peasants and lords of
the internet. This theme has increased in prominence as a handful of
tech companies have become ever richer and more extractive, turning
their 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.”
Albert-László Barabási explained the processes underpinning such a
neofeudalism in his analysis of the structure of complex networks, that
is, networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential
attachment. These are networks where people voluntarily make links or
choices. The number of links per site grow over time, and people like
things because others like them (the Netflix recommendation system, for
instance, relies on this assumption). Link distribution in complex
networks follows a power law where the most popular item generally has
twice as many hits or links as the second most popular, which has twice
as many as the third most and so on down to the insignificant
differences between those in the long tail of the distribution curve.
This winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most effect is the power law shape
of the distribution. The one at the top has significantly more than the
ones at the bottom. The shape the distribution takes is not a bell
curve; it’s a long tail — a few billionaires, a billion precarious
workers. The structure of complex networks invites inclusion: the more
items in the network, the larger the rewards for those at the top. It
also induces competition — for attention, resources, money, jobs —
anything that is given a network form. And it leads to concentration.
The 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.
Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But
that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it.
The neoliberal policies of the 20th century, however, strove to create
conditions that would facilitate rather than thwart free choice, growth,
and preferential attachment.
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.
Threatened by the organized demands of the newly postcolonial nations
of the Global South for reparations, sovereignty over their own natural
resources, stabilized commodity prices, and the regulation of
transnational corporations, neoliberals in the 1970s sought to
“circumvent the authority of national governments.” They advocated a
multilevel approach to regulation, a competitive federalism that would
let capital discipline governments while itself remaining immunized from
democratic control. In the words of Hans Willgerodt, one of the
neoliberals Slobodian studies, the new competitive federalism required
the state to “share its sovereignty downward with federal structures and
bind itself upward within an international legal community.”
Rather than focusing on the origins of neoliberalism, Albena Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge
demonstrates the ways neoliberalism in practice has led to a new
precarity capitalism. Policies pushing deregulation and global free
trade have had unexpected outcomes. The global market morphed from a
system of “national economies integrated through trade agreements into
transnational production networks.” Because of the unclear and uncertain
contribution of these networks to national economies, maintaining the
competitiveness of national economies has become “a top policy concern.”
Competitiveness has replaced competition and growth as a state goal,
leading states to prioritize not a level playing field and the
dismantling of monopolies but “to aid specific economic actors — those
who are best positioned to perform well in the global competition for
profit.” Acknowledging how the private sector has always benefited from
public funds, Azmanova emphasizes the novelty of a form of capitalism
where “public authority handpicks the companies on which to bestow this
privilege.” States don’t intervene to break up monopolies. They engender
and award them....
....MUCH MORE
