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Yeah, no. It’s not compliance through propaganda; it’s compliance through direct threat of homelessness and starving to death.
Houses sit empty and food exists on shelves in massive quantities. Those threats become null when you organize with your community to take back the resources that are right there in front of you.
It is compliance through propaganda when the majority of people support the capitalist system and think it’s the best option.
Bubblegum deserves the guillotine big time.
The whole “feudalist” thing never really made sense to me. Isn’t it just capitalism/imperialism?
Feudalism is first and foremost about occupation of land. What makes feudalism feudalism is that X authority grants Y person Z relationship with land, right? Like…lords don’t interfere with peasants occupying land in exchange for either grain (or labor on the lord’s own fields). Kings don’t interfere with lords occupying land in exchange for things like levies of coin or soldiers or stuff, or for security services, or for administrative services. It’s a decentralization of empire, granting autonomy to local agents with military and economic relationships towards the core, instead of direct control by a central authority.
I think the relationships we have now are simply capitalist ones (except between residential landlords and their tenants which, though important, are not in any way as impactful as the relationships between feudal lords and their tenants! Employers need to employ workers, who need a place to sleep. The abuse of tenants by landlords is inherently limited by the needs of employers.). They don’t look anything like feudalism in any sense except “there’s a big discrepancy between the least powerful and the most powerful” but honestly that’s WAY more true now under capitalist imperialism than it ever was under feudalism!
I think that’s why this label never seems to stick. It doesn’t strike people as “right” or fitting, because I think it’s not really.
Yanis Varoufakis has a fantastic book on the subject, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. really great read and definately does go through the points you brought up.
I haven’t read the book, but I’ve seen that argument before, and heard him speak about it on a podcast. I’ll have a look though, it was an interesting discussion.
Based on my recollection though, isn’t it largely about people’s like…recreational time, dispoable income, etc.? I can definitely see the argument that subscription models, enshittification, etc. have replaced consumerism with something new and worse. But like…the sale of our labor is not subject to those forces. Maybe you could say that of freelance workers who pay for their own tools…or uber drivers or something…but I don’t see any reason to think that style of relationship is likely to take over the economy. Employment relationships work better for the employer in most types of work! As an employer, you generally want your workers to develop skills they can’t use without you, and you don’t want them to have access to the means of production without you. Uber drivers can and do drive for Lyft! They can’t increase the value they provide to Uber.
I also don’t think if that model was coming for the economy generally, that feudalism would be the right analogy. Uber still pays drivers for their labor. Capitalist relationships of prodcution let the employer pay a worker less than the value of the worker’s output. In feudal relationships lords don’t “pay” peasants, they just let peasants get on with their lives and demand taxes in kind. If the idea is that land, in the feudal system is replaced with like…computing power or internet access or whatever…does that mean people would be working for tech companies in exchange for access? What about their actual necessities of life (food, shelter, etc.)? People need those in order to work. And if all that’s so…how do the tech companies increase the value of their outlays? Feudal relationships did not allow people with wealth to accelerate the growth of their wealth. Some feudal lords got in on the ground floor of capitalism, kicking peasants off the land, grazing sheep, and employing the now illegally dispossessed peasants in workshops…but those are capitalist relationships, not feudal ones!
If the idea is that the economy will simply allow vast numbers of people to perish because their labor cannot be exploited, I think that’s a bit fantastical. It’s very hard to imagine a world in which human labor has no exploitable value, given that its value is how well it satisfies people’s needs, and people like stuff made by people (even when the product is otherwise indistinguishable).
