Neo-feudalism is Idealist: We are Witnessing the Re-proletarianization of the Labor Aristocracy Under Neocolonial Fascist Rule

There has been some amount of buzz about the idea of neofeudalism being what is happening to western economies under the rule of neoliberal capital. Feudalism was characterized by a relationship between serf and lord. The lord “protected” some region of land, and some peasants that worked that land for subsistence paid some amount of their food production to the lord as a rent. However, the feudal economy of Europe also depended on a class of artisans and traders that moved outside of this hierarchical feudal relationship to agricultural production of raw materials. The innovation of the bourgeois class was the ascription of a magical relationship between a person and some piece of property. Under this belief enclosures were enacted that directly led into the development of industrial capital. While we maintain this magical relationship in our laws and our relationships to each other, we will not be in a feudal economic arrangement. The rights of the renters are curtailed by the rights of the property owner in a way that they were not in the feudal economic arrangement.

Instead, we are witnessing something much more structurally complex than simply the reification of western commoners as renters. In particular in the us, the majority of workers never engaged in the kind of industrial capitalism that Marx observed in England and Germany. No more than 30% of the us workforce was ever employed in industrial roles. Instead, the most major change in us work has been a transition from agricultural work to various kinds of service and technical work. The capitalists have effectively transitioned these labor aristocratic roles into more proletarian service work that is poorer paying and more degrading. The majority of technical roles have transitioned from being industrially oriented towards being technologically oriented. What that means is that the superprofits of neocolonial exploitation of industrial and agricultural labor in the Global South are filtered down to many workers first into the myriad bullshit roles in marketing, advertising, and the almost infinite amount of technical support and infrastructure required to keep the capitalist internet structure chugging. The state largely exists to facilitate the barest amount of infrastructure required to keep the exploitation going. Thus, we see everyone in power always agree to the military budget while claiming that even the smallest amount of support for the least oppressed americans is unthinkable. that military budget is filtered outward in surprising ways: it goes to all the aerospace corporations, it goes to all the big tech companies, it goes to the science and engineering departments of major universities to develop new technologies that could potentially advantage military development, and it filters out from their to a huge web of industrial suppliers of technical components developed and manufactured throughout the first world by advanced fabrication plants.

The neoliberal solution to the capitalist crisis of western industrialism becoming unprofitable as Europe, the USSR, and China approached parity in industrial power was the guided de-industrialization of the imperial core into newly proletarian service class and an increasingly separate class of technical workers. The question is how well the people are going to accommodate these increasingly absurd and literally painful contradictions. Anyone watching for the fascist nature of this movement and its reactionary front that attempts to smooth the process via political violence and the increased exploitation of enslaved Black people, indigenous peoples, women, and now especially trans people. We are watching the material class contradictions spill out along other class lines that are deemed acceptable by the state. It’s alright for the Proud Boys to square off against Antifa over whether white women should be treated as a natural resource, but what isn’t acceptable is for the leftist group to fight the state on any front. It’s certainly amusing that fascist thugs are being weighed as an acceptable political group to back in your war to reimpose the older class orders of gender and race to their pre-neoliberal state - they certainly don’t have the same extreme mental traumas as a WWI veteran of the Somme, nor any of the seriousness. What isn’t so funny is the distinctly colonial character of how this is all being carried out. Everyone is jostling over who gets to perform violence along the lines other than economic class because economic control is felt to be so deeply removed from accessibility. And perhaps that notion is true; the american state from its very beginning has never hesitated to assert itself over any organized attempt to oppose its economic hegemony, and the three-letter organizations largely exist for those ends to this day. Capitalist state-of-the-art criminal intelligence is about maintaining stability and ensuring the validity of private property rights, little more. The terminal crisis is almost certainly the difference between how China and the us react to some particularly catastrophic upwards fluctuation in climate related events. I don’t think it’s possible to predict how these contradictions will resolve themselves. The differences between different people in different regions from different backgrounds is so disparate, it’s difficult to predict how these things resolve themselves when a terminal crisis presents itself.

It is important when we organize to understand that we are not living through neofeudalism. If we were, it might make sense to attempt to organize a peasant-petit bourgeois coalition to revolt over the contemporary equivalent to the Ancien regime. Recent protest movements have shown time and again that such a coalition has no teeth, there is no real material support pressing for such changes. Control over agricultural production and logistics seems particularly important in a us that is so deeply dependent on importing goods from the Global South. Even the technological production in the core is dependent on hugely expensive fabrication plants that are almost entirely located in Taiwan, South Korea, and China, and mining operations in the most deeply exploited parts of the global south. Remember that much of what is counted as production in the us is fundamentally an illusory production. People cannot continue to be petit bourgeois sympathisers and meaningfully oppose the rise of fascism. I’m not sure where else to go with this, but I don’t think that neofeudalism is a good word for what’s happening. It exaggerates the nature of the changes in a way that is meant to be inclusive of the professional classes that produce medicine and research and lawyering and technology along with the exploitation of the increasingly proletarianized service classes. These people do not have the same class interests and it is the major source of division between liberals and a nascent socialist movement. There are certainly empathizers on both sides, but for the most part, petit bourgeois sympathy is still very much the norm, and it’s a problem.