[HN Gopher] Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason
___________________________________________________________________
Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason
Author : cribbles
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-05-07 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newleftreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (newleftreview.org)
| dopylitty wrote:
| This was an interesting read. I have to admit it mostly washed
| over me like a rainstorm given my lack of background on the
| subject.
|
| That being said I think I understood enough to like to see more
| analysis of how the companies that depend on data extraction
| (Google,Facebook) themselves depend on actually productive
| companies. They are obligate parasites.
|
| Google (for example) collects user data so it can sell targeted
| ads to companies that want to sell products to the users whose
| data was collected by Google. In the absence of these productive
| companies Google's data is worthless. And similarly Google's
| profit is directly tied to those upstream companies exploitation
| of their labor.
|
| It seems like most analyses stop at the step where Google is
| making money from data and don't really get into how that data is
| only valuable in the context of consumer goods, which are often
| produced by classically extractive or exploitative companies. The
| article's "userism" can't exist in a vacuum.
|
| That is also separate from companies that produce digital
| products for consumption and then profit off the "rent" of the
| intellectual property rights to those products.
| cgio wrote:
| But products themselves are being dematerialised also. I.e.
| looking at my kids who constantly watch "gamers" and dream of
| getting the next battlepass. And games themselves are about
| data and IP etc.
| topynate wrote:
| "Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine,
| which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010"
|
| Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in
| Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed.
|
| "3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin's blog,
| Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal
| but too 'woke'--too democratic."
|
| Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective)
| was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative
| connotation.
| [deleted]
| Jupe wrote:
| Maybe it was a typo? https://www.unqualified-
| reservations.org/2010/03/future-of-s...
| hellerve wrote:
| I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The
| proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might
| have made it harder to find for you.
|
| The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this
| choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out
| of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community.
| And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building."
| His idea seems to have been that hierarchic--or "feudal"--
| arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of
| information indexing Google uses.
|
| 1. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/future-
| of-s...
| topynate wrote:
| That must be it. Thank you for finding the link. Shame that
| the author couldn't be bothered to leave one...
| pfisherman wrote:
| To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as
| particularly "feudal". He is basically just describing what
| people do by appending "Reddit" to their Google searches. I
| think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but
| misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated
| from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and
| (2) the adversarial environment this creates.
| hellerve wrote:
| I wasn't particularly interested in entering the discussion
| (mainly providing the link and an explanation), but I used
| the word "feudal" because Yarvin himself used it, in the
| name as well as in the description of the system.
| topynate wrote:
| Yarvin was talking about Google Search in 2010 as a mutated
| but recognizable version of PageRank. That's correct, I
| think, but it was already heading in a different direction.
| By the end of the year the NYT was reporting on malicious
| manipulation of search results for profit1 and Google
| responded quickly by changing their algorithm2. Then, as
| the "don't be evil" era draws to a close, Google gets more
| and more aggressive about extracting user value and the
| 'democratic' PageRank (which Yarvin was by no means alone
| in identifying as such3) is totally subverted. In 2016
| Trump wins and 'fake news' - successively renamed to 'false
| news', 'misinformation', and now 'disinformation' - becomes
| the issue, and Google responds to that, too4. So post-2016
| there really is a kind of sociological health and safety
| factor in the algorithm, and it's only then that Morozov's
| 'woke' becomes applicable to Google Search.
|
| Now if anyone was going to guess that something like that
| would happen, it'd be Yarvin - but none of that is in that
| 2010 blog. When he said 'democratic' he meant exactly what
| Wired did in the article linked below - the action of
| masses of people. It's Morozov that makes the association
| between 'woke' (i.e. P.C.) and 'democratic', which has all
| sorts of implications. A woke-democratic Google Search
| isn't one that is powered by democracy, but one which
| protects democracy - meaning, protects the masses from
| manipulation by exposure to sociologically harmful
| 'content'. Sensu Yarvin, that is neither feudal nor
| democratic. It is in fact oligarchic.
|
| The final irony is that when Morozov fudged the name
| Feudle, wittingly or no, and omitted a link to the blog in
| question, it was entirely in accord with the idea of
| exercising democratic power by not giving UR any link
| juice, but the result of that when posted to HN - a site
| not lacking in markers of community reputation - is that
| two people find the link (thanks again) and a small
| discussion ensues which otherwise would not have happened.
|
| 1
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html,
| see also
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html 2 ht
| tps://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/02/goog.
| .. 3 https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-google-algorithm/ 4
| https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-
| search-...,
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/technology/google-
| algorit...
| pfisherman wrote:
| > Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an
| adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no
| negative connotation.
|
| My understanding of that passage was that the author was
| paraphrasing Yarvin - who from my understanding is somewhat of
| a monarchist? I remember his moldbug persona from the blog-o-
| sphere back in the mid/late aughts as someone who would write
| long meandering posts in the comment section of pickup artist
| blog; which ironically is where much of this alt-right stuff
| started. Kind of (darkly) funny that lot of the intellectual
| scaffolding for this new authoritarian political philosophy is
| a at its root a visceral reaction to feelings of powerlessness
| and lack of agency in dating women.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" does explore the common
| quality of low status/perception of failure in the personal
| development of German authoritarian leaders.
|
| (Yes, yes - Godwin...)
|
| Otherwise powerful people (or people capable of being
| powerful) can obviously have some kind of internalized "low
| status" beliefs, so it's not much of a stretch to expect them
| to seek explanations/redefinitions that deny those self-
| perceived weaknesses.
| _jal wrote:
| A lot of authoritarian types are insecure jerks reacting to
| perceived slights. Seems to be a relatively common, if
| unfortunate, pattern.
|
| The important part is making sure they don't get power over
| others.
| defen wrote:
| Sorry, this is just completely wrong, at least regarding
| Moldbug.
|
| > I remember his moldbug persona from the blog-o-sphere back
| in the mid/late aughts as someone who would write long
| meandering posts in the comment section of pickup artist blog
|
| He got his start on the 2blowhards blog, which was not about
| pickup artistry at all. While I suppose it's possible he left
| comments on pickup artist blogs, he _never_ wrote about
| pickup artistry on his own blog except to dunk on them (e.g.
| https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/06/civil-
| liber...).
|
| > the intellectual scaffolding for this new authoritarian
| political philosophy is a at its root a visceral reaction to
| feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency in dating women
|
| During the entire time of "Unqualified reservations" existing
| he was happily married. Moldbug has never written about
| women's rights at all (neither for nor against). It's simply
| not a focus of his work. I challenge you to find one written
| sentence of his that indicates that he is a misogynist.
| pfisherman wrote:
| It's where his audience was, and where the discussions took
| place.
|
| I think saying that moldbug was responsible for the
| intellectual scaffolding of the alt-right overstates his
| role.
|
| The intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right world view
| is more closely aligned with the stuff expressed on
| Roissy's blog than anything moldbug wrote. Imo, moldbug was
| just a convenient associate who was tapped to lend the
| movement a thin veneer of intellectual rigor.
| Animats wrote:
| _The more careful of (the critics), like Brenner, suggest that
| features of the current capitalist system--prolonged stagnation,
| politically driven upward redistribution of wealth, ostentatious
| consumption by the elites combined with increasing immiseration
| of the masses--recall aspects of its feudal predecessor, even if
| capitalism still very much rules the day._
|
| That's a property of feudalism, but societies with those
| properties are not necessarily feudal.
|
| Feudalism is rule by local armed strongmen. The lower classes get
| protection from other strongmen in exchange for a cut of their
| resources. The strongmen can be warlords, drug cartels, military,
| or cops. Feudalism tends to result in clashes between local
| strongmen, and, often, consolidation when someone wins. That's
| how nations are usually created.
|
| Economic oppression is common in feudal societies, but not
| limited to it. Capitalism offers more efficient ways to achieve
| economic oppression.
|
| The paper goes off into classical Marxist analysis. The trouble
| with Marx as a guide is that he wrote in an era of direct labor.
| Output was a result of the routine efforts of the proletariat.
| Wealth was the result of taking a cut of those efforts. The
| inputs from labor exceeded those of capital.
|
| Today, you look at a balance sheet, and "cost of goods sold",
| which includes direct labor, is often a minor item. Marketing and
| G&A often exceed cost of goods sold. This turns the assumptions
| of Marxism upside down. In many industries, a majority of
| corporate expenditure is devoted to battling competition and
| changing things, rather than just making the product. This breaks
| not just Marxism but much of classical economics.
|
| It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not
| about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about
| establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on
| price. Or on wages.
|
| Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" notes "Avoid competition as much as
| possible." That's the key idea here.
|
| This is not feudalism. It's oligopoly. In some ways it's worse.
| In a feudal culture, the strongmen have some obligation to
| provide protection for their peasants. Oligopolists have no such
| obligation.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| >It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not
| about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's
| about establishing market dominance so you don't have to
| compete on price. Or on wages.
|
| Might one call it, perhaps, "the highest stage of capitalism"
| ;-)?
|
| Beyond the joke, I do often find myself thinking that the
| oligopoly and rentier tendencies described by terms like "neo-
| feudalism" are pretty much just the things designated by the
| old Marxist usage of "imperialism". But then the problem is
| that "imperialism" has been watered down into "everything your
| local sectarian Marxist group doesn't like."
| drewcoo wrote:
| > But then the problem is that "imperialism" has been watered
| down into "everything your local sectarian Marxist group
| doesn't like."
|
| That's a very Leninist view of Marxism. [1] If you're hearing
| that, it's likely from tankies. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-
| hsc/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
| mberning wrote:
| Capitalism is somehow responsible for police brutality and a
| pandemic. That was my cue to stop reading.
| _alxk wrote:
| That's not what I understood from this passage:
|
| > Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive
| cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and
| the deadly pandemic.
|
| To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're
| dealing with a cocktail of ..."
|
| Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me
| to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-
| feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling
| class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you
| are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of
| police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Your reading seems to omit the possessive intent of "its".
| civilized wrote:
| I think the sentence is just sloppy and the author himself
| doesn't quite know if he's talking about characteristics of
| late capitalism or just current events which happen to be
| occurring in the context of late capitalism.
| drewcoo wrote:
| It's not sloppy. It's quite easy to understand. Let's
| substitute some metasyntactic variables . . .
|
| > Foo is bar, with its baz.
|
| Clearly baz is an example of how foo is bar.
|
| https://www.grammar-
| monster.com/glossary/subordinate_clause....
| [deleted]
| nonstickcoating wrote:
| Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to
| uphold it's monopoly for violence. This monopoly in turn is (in
| the current situation) neccessary to uphold the expolitation of
| labour and the functioning of the state itself. Of course this
| is not exlusive to the capitalist system. The expropriation of
| serfs in feudalist societies through the armed forces of
| nobility serves a similiar purpose under a different economic
| and political system. Just the same as capitalism has a
| tangible effect on how the pandemic is dealt with. Where I live
| for example there were multiple cases of industrial workers
| (often migrants working for a few month and then returning to
| their home country) contracting the virus en masse, which in
| turn had a lot to do with overcrowded houses and flats where
| they were forced to live.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to
| uphold it's monopoly for violence.
|
| The only alternative to a monopoly on violence is an open
| turf war among crime gangs, quite probably involving far more
| brutality. There are plenty of nation states outside the U.S.
| with better run police and no gang wars, implying that they
| do manage to successfully regulate (i.e. "monopolize") the
| initiation of force. These things have basically nothing to
| do with each other.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Whenever someone only offers me one alternative, I get
| suspicious.
|
| Street gangs as they currently exist in the US were created
| by the prison system, an arm of the state violence
| apparatus. Conveniently, they're also an excuse to increase
| police budgets. More policing, in turn, puts more people
| into prison.
|
| I don't think that alternative is actually even an
| alternative.
| nonstickcoating wrote:
| The prevailance of gang violence has it's root in social
| and economic imbalance, too. I do not disagree, police
| violence is different and not as "brutal" (can't find a
| better word) where I live, but of course I look onto the US
| as an outsider. I also do not think that letting society
| splinter into rackets would be preferable to the status
| quo, but I do think the status quo leaves a lot do be
| desired for the majority of people. EDIT: This shows itself
| e.g. in the organisation of precarised people in gangs.
| That police brutality and the state upholding it's monopoly
| for violence have nothing to do with each other seems far-
| fetched though. The police is the instution that guarantees
| this monopoly within the borders of every Nation state,
| it's quite literally their raison d'etre.
| 21723 wrote:
| Capitalism isn't the cause of all police brutality, but the
| upper class deliberately divides working people against each
| other, which creates the racism and classism (middle vs. lower)
| that makes it commonplace and which make brutal, racist police
| officers (who are probably not the majority) nearly
| invulnerable. You'd still have a few incompetent cops in any
| economic system, but it's because of capitalism's doing that
| there are so many bad apples on forces.
|
| As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously,
| capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism
| exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's
| impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have
| been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the
| shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in
| a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this
| nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a
| world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th
| century.
|
| Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends
| on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from
| nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and
| minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies
| (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner
| cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to
| one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to
| abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had
| less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--
| those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the
| market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would
| have been a disaster.
|
| In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death
| rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total
| of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still
| a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and
| socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything,
| but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a
| socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which
| our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one
| never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently
| or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them
| back.
| goodpoint wrote:
| There has been two serious attempts at developing Covid
| vaccines with a cooperative "open source" model or at least
| with a more egalitarian model.
|
| One was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVAX
|
| From the wiki: """The continued shortage of COVID-19 vaccines
| delivered through COVAX is blamed on "vaccine nationalism" by
| richer nations ... """
|
| The efforts were thwarted by investors prioritizing corporate
| profit.
|
| People might like or dislike it, but this is 100% due to
| capitalism.
|
| Regarding police brutality, its correlation with poverty is
| extensively documented by social scientists.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| COVAX had nothing to do with an "open source" model, it was
| about better distribution of the existing vaccine supplies.
| There were early concerns that IP rights enforcement might
| make it harder to develop and supply SARS-CoV2 vaccines, but
| a patent waiver _was_ ultimately agreed upon. It made very
| little difference in the end because effective vaccines (such
| as those based on mRNA) are not like other drugs, and there
| are inherent constraints to expanding supply or making a
| "generic" version.
| goodpoint wrote:
| That is why I wrote "... or at least ...".
|
| The other proposal (whose name I don't remember) was to
| share the IP.
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Just playing devil's advocate for a little:
|
| - The pandemic was initially propagated by consumers of the
| global air travel industry, and likely would have been a
| localized epidemic otherwise.
|
| - The police largely exist to protect the assets of the wealthy
| and preserve the societal structure that enables them to make
| and store wealth.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with much of what this article is
| saying, but it's good to stretch the mind and read a variety of
| viewpoints. (otherwise you're only reading things that agree
| with your biases, which, of course, has issues)
| sokoloff wrote:
| Is there any world in which global air travel doesn't arise
| but where people are better off overall? I feel like
| regardless of your method of allocation of resources, people
| are going to want to go experience other places. If a society
| isn't doing any of that, it seems unlikely that it's because
| they're too busy doing other things that are so amazingly
| compelling that no one desires to travel. The desire for
| adventure and novelty is not a capitalistic desire, but
| rather a human one.
|
| I can't therefore conclude that global air travel is
| "capitalism's fault" and, as contagious as SARS-COV2 is, a
| pandemic was virtually assured.
| mLuby wrote:
| On a high-gravity world with a thin atmosphere it'd be
| harder to float, fly, or orbit. So high-speed rail and
| automobiles would be the pinnacle of land transportation
| with ships being the only way to cross the oceans
| separating continents. On such a world, a global internet
| could easily arise before flight.
|
| As to whether those inhabitants would be _better off_ than
| us, I believe that 's much more to do with their socio-
| econo-political systems than their available modes of
| transportation. Slower vehicles means germs and goods
| travel slower, and culture too until said internet is
| built.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Ah. I kept thinking "as Costner showed us, things weren't
| so good in Water World." You bring up good points.
| kqr wrote:
| I think one of the problems of global air travel is that it
| has several externalities that are really not felt by its
| users. This is often tied to capitalism in the sense that
| it takes a capitalist system for the wealthy to be able to
| say "I don't care about these externalities and by my
| possessions I have a right to not care."
|
| Not that I think it makes much difference in terms of a
| pandemic, but maybe if travel patterns had been different
| the pandemic would have played out differently in turn.
| bsedlm wrote:
| > _Key to Supiot's legal philosophy is the distinction between
| government by men--typical of the feudal period, with its
| personal allegiances and ties of dependence--and government by
| law_
|
| I would frame this using "government by men" speaking words at
| each other in contrast with "government by laws" i.e. men writing
| legally between them... i.e. orality vs literacy
|
| This is important because of the relation between literacy and
| computability
|
| > _Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive
| workers need them no more_
|
| in summary your boss was a man, then it became a written document
| (laws), and now it's become a computer run algorithm
|
| > _Techno-feodalisme argues that the rise of intangibles, usually
| concentrated at the most profitable points of the global value
| chain, led to the emergence of four new types of rent_
|
| two of them are more difficult to understand (I paraphrase):
|
| _innovation rents, which refers to valuable data sets that are
| the exclusive property of these firms_
|
| the technological capabilities to make this non-exclusive is here
|
| _and intangibles-differential rents refers to the ability of
| firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations_
|
| If I understand correctly, this is possible because internet
| infrastructure is already non-exclusive
|
| At the root of the issue, pretending that " _intangibles_ "" are
| commodities and thus to enforce that they are treated as
| exclusive physical artifacts (merchandise) is to waste the
| potential of the internet (or, more cynically, to make a play to
| capture it privately)
|
| This issue is even more complicated due to the distinction (or
| lack of) between "exploiting" and "harvesting" (with the
| assumption that one harvests what one has sown) digital assets;
| specifically "co-created" (i.e. aggregated) data of the like that
| gives facebook and google such a strong position in the
| "competitive market".
|
| Why should "big tech" be allowed to keep their vast data troves
| private?
|
| On one hand, there's no real technological limitation to the
| exclusivity of their intangible data-troves.
|
| On the other hand, there's something to notice about how such
| exclusive concentration of data/knowledge generates a great
| amount of social and political power.
|
| IMO, this is the strongest reason behind the drive to keep
| intangibles as exclusive; the power generated by their
| exclusivity and the use of such power to capture (privatize)
| energy and resources.
|
| this is why sometimes I think that all of culture (specially
| contemporary academic culture) is but an elaborate ploy to
| rationalize away the grim realities of extractive post-
| imperialistic societies (states)
|
| Finally, I argue my position that it's now crucial to deeply
| question old historical positions around the nature of property
| (and ownership); and hence, of markets and society, based on the
| magnitude of what the computer revolution truly entails. In my
| mind (biased by me being a millennial), computers are an
| innovation on the scale of writing (and thus, of law). The only
| other innovation I can think of in an even larger scale is that
| of ownership over land (which I consider as civilization itself).
| platz wrote:
| This appears to be one of the core tenets of the article:
|
| > Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a
| testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness.
| It is as if the left's theoretical framework can no longer make
| sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of
| corruption and perversion.
|
| * downvoters - im sorry you dont like what the authors have to
| say.
| bsedlm wrote:
| this is a shallow read of a really in-depth article. your
| comment does it no justice
| platz wrote:
| I maintain that it's possible to identify and extract key
| points of an article without having to restate the entire
| article.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I counter-maintain that to force such an in-depth article
| down into one key point means pretending it doesn't make
| another handful of key points.
|
| maybe imagine this article is not one long twitter thread,
| but at least 8 or 9 topically related long twitter threads.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| What is the point of this article? I don't have anything to do
| before the grocery store opens, so I gave it a full chance, and
| after the end I'm still really struggling to identify what the
| author is trying to do here. Is this an extended argument that
| people should avoid calling things "feudal" as a rhetorical
| strategy?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If I had to guess, I'd say they're trying to point out that,
| yes, technology-powered late-stage capitalism may well share
| some features with pre-capitalist modes of production but this
| does not equate to a full return to a feudalist mode, and that
| processes already inherent to capitalism itself-- such as
| capital concentration and centralization driven by the tendency
| of the rate of profit to fall-- are still very relevant. It's
| hard to say because the whole distinction is pretty artificial.
| paganel wrote:
| There are some of us who are interested in this type of
| subject, for example I do happen to have read books written by
| several of the authors mentioned in this article during the
| past year or so (in my case that's true for Mazzucato, Perry
| Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and I did try to put my hands on
| Brenner's _Merchants and Revolution_ [1] but I was too lazy).
| The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a very
| interesting subject, even the discussion itself of said
| transition makes for an exciting piece of late 20th century (in
| fact the 1970s-1980s, to be fair) intellectual history.
|
| Back to the article itself (which, I admit, I hadn't finished
| reading until checking the comments in here), I would have
| personally also added a quick mention about the _Asiatic mode
| of production_ [2], but seeing as I 'm not a specialist on this
| maybe I'm talking bs. More generally speaking I fully admit
| that this type of discussions can be quite boring for those
| with no prior interest in them.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Revolution-Commercial-
| Polit...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_mode_of_production
| starkd wrote:
| It's almost like the writer exists in a very restricted echo
| chamber. I have trouble relating to it.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I mean, the New Left Review is an academic journal. The
| author is probably an academic rooted in the Marxist/Marxian
| strain of western philosophy and thus communicating through
| the appropriate vernacular of the discipline.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I'm pretty far to the left and have never heard of this
| publication. I get the feeling it's suffering the same
| phenomenon as movie reviews where professional critics are
| increasingly distant from people who watch movies for fun.
| People can now get their movie recs and political advocacy
| from people they mesh with across the world without
| consulting the cathedral.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Article thinks 300k views after three weeks makes a YouTube video
| popular.
| nonstickcoating wrote:
| I think for this kind of niche, academic topic (even though the
| discutants are quite well known) 100k views per week after
| publication is nothing scoff at.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Context is that it was a popular meme on Twitter/Reddit, not
| just popular for an academic topic:
|
| > Plus, it makes a good meme. The hungry crowds on Reddit and
| Twitter love it: a YouTube video of a discussion on techno-
| feudalism by Varoufakis and Slavoj Zizek garnered over
| 300,000 views in just three weeks.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am
| enjoying it.
|
| From the article:
|
| "Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field
| in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his--not
| undisputed--account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be
| seen in London's coffee houses, important locales for the
| development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its
| imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and
| its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power
| structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the 're-
| feudalization of the public sphere', indicating the zigzag
| dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced
| himself from the concept of 'refeudalization', preferring
| 'colonization of the lifeworld' instead, some in Germany have
| recently recovered it."
|
| The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the
| emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and
| 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by
| the Cold War dialectic.
|
| In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most
| Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference
| between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses
| and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of
| that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue
| of our times.
| gumby wrote:
| > In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the
| most Capitalistic, _which made it very easy to hide the
| difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and
| medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-
| Capitalism._
|
| This point is dreadfully under appreciated, and heavily
| exploited for political and business purposes.
|
| The US Chamber of Commerce does not have the interest of small
| businesses at heart and, despite the name is nothing at all
| like your local town's chamber of commerce. Yet when someone
| says "business" the local restaurant and Exxon are considered
| the same.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is exactly right.
| bsedlm wrote:
| because it's exposing a scheme (for the lack of a better
| word) actively being used to keep (and increase)
| power/wealth concentration
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lumost wrote:
| Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems
| throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is
| the _default_ economic system.
|
| Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies
| coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as
| occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of
| agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations
| in the 1600-1700s.
|
| When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum.
| Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of
| monopolies or mega corporations ownership?
| bwestergard wrote:
| Which non-European societies were feudal, in your view?
| lumost wrote:
| Sibling pointed out other societies which match a depiction
| of feudalism in scholarly work. Lacking a widely agreed upon
| definition of feudalism. I would personally define a feudal-
| like society as one with the following characteristics.
|
| A stratified social-economic system where mobility between
| classes is a near impossibility. Economic interests are
| bestowed by grant or taken by force. The individuals who work
| for the economic interest are endentured to it.
| miltondts wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism#See_also
|
| Indian feudalism
|
| Feudal Japan
|
| Feudalism in Pakistan
|
| Fengjian (Chinese)
|
| Etc
|
| This is so easy to find that I can't understand how people on
| the internet make these kind of questions and even add the
| "in your view".
| bwestergard wrote:
| If you actually read that Wikipedia article, you will see
| that many eminent historians do not apply the term
| "feudalism" outside of Europe at all, and of those that do,
| qualify that application heavily to emphasize the
| peculiarity of the social formations of Europe in the
| middle ages.
|
| For a view of feudalism that treats it as distinctively
| European, below is a quote from Perry Anderson in "Passages
| from Antiquity to Feudalism" (p19). If you doubt the
| relevance of Anderson, consider that he is not just quoted
| in the article linked above, but that he edits the journal
| in which it was published.
|
| > The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production
| were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production
| on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the
| Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended
| and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic
| invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the
| barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds
| had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping
| interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| If we can talk about "Techno-Feudalism", then we surely
| can talk about Chinese or Indian feudalism. And if you
| want to gatekeep the term "feudalism" for Middle Ages
| Europe, then surely you wouldn't say that we live in a
| neo-feudal system. So that looks like a bad faith
| argument in the context of the post.
| biorach wrote:
| I don't think calling out the argument as in bad faith is
| justified or particularly helpful.
|
| This was an interesting discussion - allegations of bad
| faith ruin the discussion and make you look like you are
| unable to tolerate different interpretations of the
| facts.
| bwestergard wrote:
| I am genuinely interested in the claim "Feudalism is the
| default economic system". To understand what that claim
| amounts to, I asked lumost to clarify what they
| understand by "feudalism".
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Given the longevity and frequent re-occurance of extinction
| events, it's worth considering whether being extict is the
| default state of a life-form in this universe.
| goodpoint wrote:
| If we go by longevity, food gatherers living communally without
| money is the default economic system.
| MithrilTuxedo wrote:
| While some of us might try to gain power within our groups,
| the rest of the group is responsible for making sure they
| don't have too much power.
|
| It's when those checks against individual power fail that
| those ways of organizing ourselves fail.
|
| Elinor Ostrom got an economics Nobel in what I think is the
| economic side of this.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| As a group expands in size, don't the opportunities for an
| individual to amass wealth, and then translate that to
| power, also increase significantly?
| kqr wrote:
| There is nothing inherent about wealth that grants the
| owner power over many other people. The owner, if very
| skilled in combat, might be able to physically defend
| their wealth against three? Five? Eight? Other people.
| Beyond that they have no chance.
|
| In any system where wealth converts to power, it does
| because the majority of people implicitly agree with
| playing the game that way.
|
| In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with
| all the furs decided one day to not share, then the
| people would stop sharing their food, tools, building
| skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts,
| etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but
| to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.
| cnelsenmilt wrote:
| Sure, and this is why the wealthy always use some of
| their wealth protecting themselves. In a society where
| physical violence is an immanent possibility they hire
| some kind of bodyguards; in a society like ours where the
| main threats are not physical in nature, they employ
| lawyers.
| kqr wrote:
| ...but then why wouldn't the bodyguards just expropriate
| even greater quantities of that wealth than the wealthy
| would bestow on them?
|
| Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy
| has some sort of moral right to their possessions. In
| other words, they have to play along in the game of
| wealth distribution.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| If the bodyguards had the ability to expropriate greater
| quantities of wealth, they wouldn't be bodyguards.
| kqr wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the situation you describe. If
| you hire 40 goons to guard your furs, those goons could
| physically overpower you and take your furs for
| themselves.
|
| ...unless you have convinced them of your moral right to
| those furs. That's literally the only way a large group
| of people can be "unable" to expropriate them.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| I don't believe the goons would be operating on the
| principle of your moral right to the furs, rather they
| would be taking the more practical approach of believing
| you can provide them with a better quality of life than
| the next guy (and that they don't have the skills to
| acquire furs on their own)
| kqr wrote:
| That means they have to believe one person can single-
| handedly outperform the rest of society in caring for
| them. Sure, polymaths exist, but not to that extent.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| Sure you can overpower me and steal everything I have -
| once. Or you can join me and I'll provide you a better
| living than those others for the rest of your life.
| kqr wrote:
| Yeah, so then we're looking at a person who is so adept
| at everything that they single-handedly can outperform
| society in providing necessary functions for other
| people. If that sort of person exists, they're surely
| rare enough that it makes no sense to optimise society
| around them.
| lumost wrote:
| The individual in question needn't outperform the rest of
| society, they merely need to be critical to the
| activities of the rest of society. Whether Their
| criticality is necessary, just, or effective doesn't
| matter. But it does mean that they can pay bodyguards
| better than everyone else, and there is no inherent
| reason to believe the body guards will beanle to step
| into that role.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If you _really_ go by longevity, bacteria metabolizing sulfur
| compounds from hydrothermal vents is the default economic
| system.
| kqr wrote:
| It's important to account for selection bias here: feudalism
| generally leaves very obvious archaeological traces, both in
| terms of infrastructure and bureaucratic artifacts (which in
| turn tend to be designed for longevity.)
|
| Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply
| very visible in the historic record.
|
| ----
|
| As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian
| forms: because we care.
|
| Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have
| had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from
| getting too much power. (Including preventing them from
| converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted
| that one can just do today.)
|
| As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all
| our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We
| vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday
| duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large
| amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to,
| say, a small business owner.
|
| We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American
| verbal history) this can happen because the people have
| experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned
| out.
|
| I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything
| to start out.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native
| American verbal history) this can happen because the people
| have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that
| turned out.
|
| This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate
| a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the
| feudal system will only be around for a couple generations
| after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this
| is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration,
| right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being
| neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and
| having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort
| of configuration decays toward.
| kqr wrote:
| You'd be surprised how long oral history can live. There
| are people who tell the same cautionary tales for thousands
| or even tens of thousands of years. (We know among other
| things because they clearly reference landmarks that we
| today find geological traces of that help us date their
| existence.)
|
| But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour
| hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or
| beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs,
| right next to each other.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour
| hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or
| beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs,
| right next to each other.
|
| This is going to sound sarcastic or something, but I'm
| actually curious -- do they? I would tend to assume that
| they appear to come in pairs, but this is largely because
| we happened to find history books written by the self-
| professed egalitarian society, and not their rivals, to
| whom they allocate every vice.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'There are people who tell the same cautionary tales for
| thousands or even tens of thousands of years.'
|
| The people retelling the story don't understand it - we
| have stories and kings and feudalism, go on the street
| and ask a random person any question about how feudalism
| works:
|
| What rights did peasants have? What right does the lord
| have over his peasants? could peasants be sold and how
| are they different from slaves? Which 'levels' of
| nobility does what? Who pays taxes to whom?
|
| If put theae people into a feudal society tomorrow, and
| just renamed 'baron' and 'lord' to something else, they
| would not know it. We could call it 'landlord' and
| 'investor'
| paisawalla wrote:
| > As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian
| forms
|
| The question is not _why_ would people choose to live under
| supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default
| system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple
| actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-
| intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers
| and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least
| straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high
| entropy systems descend. Conversely, it 's very hard to see
| how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge
| and maintain itself without consistent effort and
| cooperation, both fragile dependencies.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Democratic communalism can sustain itself perfectly fine at
| the scale of a small village, or a neighborhood in a small
| town, or a single condo/HOA in a big city or suburban area.
| The whole question is what to do _beyond_ that scale.
| kqr wrote:
| We have evidence that communalism (or at least something
| similar to it) has worked at large scales in the past. In
| fact, it ought to be one of the easiest things to get to
| work, because you don't have to coerce anyone of
| anything.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Like if trust wasn't an issue.
| kqr wrote:
| Trust is one of the most important issues!
|
| I trust my two-year old to carry his glass to the table
| because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can
| be trusted with that.
|
| I don't trust my two-year old to not fall down stairs
| because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can
| be trusted with that and he has failed to show it.
|
| That's how it works in an egalitarian society too. You
| give people a chance to show they can be trusted. If they
| fail to show that, you stop trusting them.
| paisawalla wrote:
| Your contributions to this thread have the tone of a
| wishful, rosey, cherry-picking trip through history
| motivated by the desire to arrive at a predestined
| conclusion: that we all should be living in a Communist
| utopia today, because it's logically the easiest and most
| available organizing system for humans. Therefore, we
| don't live in that world today only because intense
| energy and effort is directed into maintaining a non-
| optimal status quo.
|
| At least please provide some specific and tangible
| reasons why you believe this is so obviously true,
| instead of repeatedly alluding to these numerous,
| incontrovertible, imminently applicable examples. Your
| statements are, I imagine for most readers, directly
| opposed to what history has shown about human nature and
| the nature of power.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| More egaletarian societies usual win wars against more
| tyrannical societies, provided similar size/ conditions
|
| Two reasons:
|
| 1 - More egalitarian societies are more efficiient - they
| produce more because exploited peasants are not peoductive
| 2 - Who wans to die to protect their tyrant?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > More egalitarian societies are more efficiient
|
| This is true of some key areas, such as farming. But
| industry and at least some service sectors tend to
| benefit a lot from scaling up. Walmart is incredibly
| efficient, and Amazon only more so.
| nooorofe wrote:
| People like [Sam
| Walton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton) born in
| poor farmer family or [Jeff
| Bezos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos) son of
| 17 year old high school student mother and 19 years old
| father would have very low chances to succeed in not
| egalitarian societies. More talented people get
| opportunity to use their abilities, more Walmart's will
| be created.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You are confusing apparent wealth of a plantation with
| efficiency - all the people that are forced to work there
| could have been doctors, blacksmiths, etc. and
| contributing much more to the economy.
|
| Just because they are exploited profitably, does not mean
| thats their best contribution to the economy. Its just
| that their more efficiebt aopkication camkot be easilly
| privatised
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies
| coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system
|
| and all the empires that lasted millenia before feudalism
| emerged
|
| stretching its duration from inception to fall, feudalism
| lasted around 7 centuries, after the fall of the western roman
| empire
|
| it's never been the default system throughout history
|
| For comparison Egyptian civilization lived and prospered for
| more than 30 centuries, not accounting for ancient Egyptian
| settlements and the long tail of its complete Denise.
| convolvatron wrote:
| surely the space of possible large-scale human social systems
| is so vast, and so pockmarked with local minima that its absurd
| to think there is a default, or two or three possible setups
| kqr wrote:
| You'd be surprised how limited people's political horizons
| are.
| faangiq wrote:
| It's likely not that vast. Human character and motivations
| are pretty simple.
| kqr wrote:
| Are humans simple, or is your mental model of them simple?
|
| Trying to reduce human character and motivations to
| something simple is essentially what modern microeconomic
| theory tried to do and it ends up having to hand-wave away
| so much real life behaviour that it started to call itself
| "prescriptive rather than descriptive".
| hef19898 wrote:
| With incredible amounts of wealth, and the control of workers,
| I'd argue we already had capitalist frudalism during the
| industrial revolution. And we only got rid of that by the
| 40-50s of the 19th century with the development of social
| safety nets.
| sershe wrote:
| I feel like many people don't use the term feudalism quite
| correctly... working for a powerful person describes many
| systems, not just feudalism. Manoralism is a key characteristic
| of feudalism, and is generally the consequence of failure of
| trade. Trade and strong "middle classes"/"cities" were the key
| to many less-feudal societies, from Rome to modern day.
|
| I am also pretty sure ancient (pre-classical) world with its
| massive centralized empires do not count as feudal, or
| otherwise the term becomes so broad as to be meaningless...
| frazbin wrote:
| This surprises no one. It's the whole reason statecraft is
| worthwhile (cause feudalism and being beholden to the local
| boss sucks).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-
| sum.
|
| This is a bit of a fallacy since productivity and efficiency
| are just as important in a steady-state economy as a growing
| one, and perhaps more so. The inefficiency of large
| politically-enforced monopolies would merely turn zero into
| negative growth.
| elcritch wrote:
| It's a fallacy, but one that many people perceive as true in
| a steady state economy. Or rather there's enough greedy
| people that tend to work their way into positions of power in
| order to extract for themselves. Bribery at every
| bureaucratic level is the norm in most third world countries.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Most third world countries are poor _because_ of their low-
| quality institutions. To be sure, bribery used to be just
| as common in the pre-modern West; norms against bribery are
| a key part of what we think of as "modernity", "the
| Enlightenment" etc.
| [deleted]
| tlholaday wrote:
| While reading the introductory paragraphs, I experienced a
| pleasing uncertainty: is this an homage to Borges, to Nabokov?
| Are the familiar names -- Thiel, Weyl, Posner -- merely there to
| provide substance to a New Yorker piece? But, this is the New
| Left Review, so ...
| baryphonic wrote:
| > Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive
| cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the
| deadly pandemic.
|
| Climate change: The Soviet Union was a horrible polluter, and
| this was well-documented.[0] When adjusted for GDP, the USSR
| emitted 1.5x the pollution of the US. It was worse when adjusted
| per capita. The CCP has also been a horrible polluter, though has
| made some improvements after adopting market-oriented reforms.
| Capitalist liberal governments have balked at treating CO2 like a
| pollutant, but their economies have also done far more to advance
| technology like electric vehicles or alternative energy than
| their socialist counterparts.
|
| Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism.
| Though left-wing governments that adopt market reforms see
| inequality as well. Inequality seems likely correlated with
| discretionary bureaucracy (particularly "clientelism"), a
| hallmark of socialist and progressive governance.[1]
|
| Police brutality: Police brutality hasn't increased since
| 2015.[2] Even police violence (including incidents where officers
| were clearly justified in using force) is flat.
|
| Deadly pandemic: Pandemics have been deadly throughout the
| history of civilization, long before the last couple hundred
| years of capitalism. Capitalism produced the vaccine in record
| time; many of the excess deaths were associated with central
| planning.[3] Scientific experts, the would-be rulers under
| progressivism, had an abysmal record at predictions & decision-
| making during the pandemic.[4]
|
| None of these is a slam dunk the author thinks it is.
|
| [0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/095937..
| .
|
| [1]https://www.edgs.northwestern.edu/documents/working-
| papers/h...
|
| [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic..
| .
|
| [3]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56091682
|
| [4]https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/pandemic-social-
| science...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of
| capitalism.
|
| It's not like feudal societies were perfectly equal. There is a
| genuine question as to whether capitalism tends towards
| increased inequality over time, perhaps merely as a side effect
| of its faster rate of innovation, but if you want a reasonable
| level of "equality" you'll need to look either to pre-modern
| societies or to ones where redistribution is explicitly
| practiced.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| >> " _Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time_ "
|
| No.
|
| mRNA vaccines are the result of decades of research with
| support of and collaboration with government and academia. Even
| the covid vaccine only happened as fast as it did because
| Chinese researchers sequenced and released the DNA of the virus
| for free online.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Researchers sequence SARS-CoV2 variants all the time, all
| over the world - it's a pandemic after all. The Chinese did
| some great work, but had they not done it first others would
| have.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Sorry, I forget this detail is not widely known. They were
| the first working on it from samples at ground zero, before
| it was a pandemic. Back when nobody knew anything.
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-
| researchers-...
|
| The free and public release gave the world a head start on
| what was then a very localized thing with little if any
| spread. Remember: my comment was in response to an attempt
| to credit capitalism with the speedy development of a
| vaccine. Capitalism helped, but wasn't what did it.
| antifa wrote:
| > many of the excess deaths were associated with central
| planning.
|
| This is pretty obviously bad logic, you seem to be removing
| agency from Trump/Biden/Cuomo/Fauci. All of them in varying
| degrees made terrible decisions, waited too long to bother
| reacting, etc., and these were things the average person could
| easily guess would happen while good ideas were often left
| delayed or unexecuted.
|
| Your rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on the concept of
| planning at all, which many countries did better just by having
| half a plan and going through with at least half the plan.
|
| Planning is not a supernatural force that compelled our leaders
| to act poorly. They had agency and chose poorly.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Climate change: Your point is whataboutism. It does not address
| the issue.
|
| Inequality: Capitalism vs "left wing governments" is apples to
| oranges. And I don't think the point is that inequality exists
| so much as rate of growth in inequality.
|
| Police brutality: If it's a problem, and it is, then not
| getting worse by some measure still doesn't mean it's no longer
| a problem. The "defund the police" party here in the US has
| responded to police brutality mostly by increasing police
| budgets.
|
| Deadly pandemic: That's redundant. We don't have merely
| annoying pandemics. Many countries independently created
| vaccines - look up Cuba.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The paper you linked about inequality and discretionary
| bureaucracy seems very specific to the conditions of Indonesia:
| a highly bureaucratic _non-democratic_ country transitioning to
| democracy but not "transform[ing] detrimental institutions nor
| replac[ing] the existing official position of the previous
| bureaucracy." It's making a claim that the "persistence of
| bureaucratic clientelism" needs to be understood better when
| studying democracies, but doesn't seem to be making a claim
| that clientelism is a driving factor of inequality in all
| democracies -- rather, it's claiming that it _perpetuates_
| inequality in countries that already have clientelist
| institutions before they become democratic. (Also, "a hallmark
| of socialist and progressive governance" seems to be your
| editorializing; the paper suggests a correlation between poor
| institutional quality and income development, but makes no
| claim that socialists and progressives automatically make poor
| institutions. I would posit that "clientelistic political
| parties in democracies" will wear whatever fig leaf is most
| likely to get them into strategic political offices: if the
| country loves socialists, they'll be socialist, but in a
| country that loves right-wing populism, they'll be right-wing
| populists.)
|
| At least going by the experience we've had in America and other
| Western countries, inequality seems to be an outcome of
| specifically _deregulated_ capitalism. The whole push toward
| communism that we saw in the early 20th century was largely a
| reaction to the capitalism of _The Jungle_ and the Triangle
| Shirtwaist Fire, and of course, the soaring inequality before
| the Great Depression. I think big business capitalists don't
| give the New Deal the credit it deserves for cutting the
| American communist movement off at the pass -- changes in
| regulatory and tax policy shaped a highly-regulated market
| economy that at least partially flattened the inequality curve.
| Once we started deregulating all the things in the 1980s,
| inequality started growing again.
| [deleted]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's rather amusing that a long-winded article stating that
| people shouldn't describe the current American economic system as
| 'feudalism' doesn't bother to include the concepts of 'the
| aristocratic class' or 'inherited wealth and power.'
|
| For example, one characteristic of a society divided into
| aristocrats and serfs (and lacking anything like the 'American
| middle class' of the 1960s) is a segregated educational system,
| with fundamentally different approaches for the posh vs. the
| proles. The various attacks on public schooling (like the effort
| to remove higher mathematics from public schools in California)
| and the elimination of state subsidies for higher education are
| certainly a step in that direction.
|
| Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things
| 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between
| commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as
| "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". Notably the latter is
| characterized by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the
| hands of a 'central committee' of Wall Street financiers; the
| former version of capitalism certainly has a much more
| distributed character in terms of wealth, power, land ownership
| etc.
|
| Finally, this really is a 20th century argument that misses a
| fundamental characteristic of the 21st century: resource
| limitations. Regional water scarcity due to ongoing fossil-fueled
| global warming is a reality in many parts of the world, and this
| is more fundamental than ideological wrangling about societal
| structures. The resulting impacts on food production are physical
| and ecological in nature, not ideological - although the
| consequences could lead to things like the French Revolution, or
| the rise of authoritarian power to ensure food distribution
| (basically, that's China writ large).
|
| I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism
| vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding
| things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization
| is perhaps not the best.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things
| 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction
| between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially
| described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street".
|
| My (extremely tentative!) thesis is that there's been a shift
| in language over the last decade or so in left/liberal culture,
| and this is part of that. "Leftists" are often very down on
| "liberals" -- in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are
| basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing
| -- yet what "The Left" believes is, by and large, pretty much
| what I believed as a "liberal" two decades ago. (I suspect a
| lot of this is generational, driven by disillusionment at
| perceived failures on the part of the Clinton/Obama
| establishment.)
|
| Likewise, I think what's seen as "capitalism" has made a
| linguistic shift. I've always thought of small business owners
| and solo entrepreneurs, from the little bookshop on Main Street
| down to freelance artists selling their prints at the dealers'
| rooms in science fiction and comic conventions, as
| quintessentially capitalist, but at least on the left, that
| doesn't really seem to be how it's used anymore. The focus is
| squarely on the worst features of "big" capitalism, on the
| principle that exploitation and destruction is where capitalism
| always leads. Since a two-person indie software company doesn't
| fit that narrative of capitalism, it's...something other than
| capitalism? Frankly, I don't think the logic fully holds up
| there.
|
| Back in my day [waving cane], I would have distinguished
| between entrepreneurship and corporatism -- which is, more or
| less, that "Main Street" vs. "Wall Street" distinction. (I also
| think it's worth acknowledging that there are some small
| businesses out there which, depending on the yardstick you're
| measuring by, can be truly, truly dreadful.) But, this is a
| hill I don't have a real interest in dying on. If someone wants
| to argue that a dealer's room at a furry con full of freelance
| artists selling sexy catgirl pinups isn't capitalism but
| "market socialism" or whatever, then godspeed.
|
| As a unrelated note, re-reading your last sentence, though:
|
| > I think the real split is going to be more about
| authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track
| record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent
| societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
|
| The authoritarian track record here does not seem to be
| sterling, either.
| Sprocklem wrote:
| You're interpreting this as a new meaning of capitalism but
| it seems to be a return to an older definition that came out
| of early socialist theory, where capitalism is defined by
| having an owner/investor class of capitalists and an
| (exploited) working class. I suspect the prevalence of this
| terminology is driven by the increasing perception that
| liberal (politicians) don't seem to care that large
| corporations have grown into monopolies, leading those
| concerned with this "corporatism" to turn to socialist
| theories as a way of conceptualizing the current system.
| drewcoo wrote:
| The shift in the use of "capitalism" to mean solely the
| capital class and not small business owners is a return to
| the actual meaning.
|
| With any exploitative minority of people, it's in their best
| interests to convince large groups of people that they're all
| really part of the same club. It makes the exploited less
| likely to end the exploitation. Or end the exploiters.
|
| And I don't just mean capitalists. Consider the way both
| ridiculous, unpopular mainstream political parties use wedge
| issues to scare people into following them even though they
| are both known to be corrupt machines full of greedy, self-
| seeking people. Etc.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-07 23:01 UTC)