I don’t have the link anymore but there used to be a good effortpost here on how neofeudalism doesn’t actually have the same material base as feudalism and that what we’re really witnessing is the reproletarianization of the American working class. The slave labor is drying up. The stolen land is drying up. The capitalism-saving policies a la the New Deal which were feasible because they excluded various PoC and other minorities? They’re being gutted and will not be replaced. There are a lot of PMC folks and a lot of white folks and a lot of “middle class” folks who are starting to experience what others have experienced for decades: what’s it like to be a worker under capitalism.
I would love to read that post. I don’t think people are claiming feudalism has the same material base… I could be wrong… but my understanding is that neufeudalism is an expression of a highly financialized economy during reproletarianization. I think the point is just that what is developing during that process isn’t completely different in terms of changes in social economic relations, than like what it was like, say, when the commons was enclosed.
Like, the tendency of the rate of profit to fal, and the decreasing exploitability of the global majority, has pushed many of the imperial core’s precariat into new categories of jobs where their own belongings (like cars, homes, and phones… often acquired with debt) are essentially used as the overhead for “tech companies” that are actually rube-goldberg-like financial instrument that extracts value out of the belongings of working class people while forcing them to “rent” it: subscription services, planned obsolescence, debt service, or publicly financed asset-inflation (ex: quantitative easing). Does that seem like a change in the basis of relations? Maybe?
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
I don’t have the link anymore but there used to be a good effortpost here on how neofeudalism doesn’t actually have the same material base as feudalism and that what we’re really witnessing is the reproletarianization of the American working class. The slave labor is drying up. The stolen land is drying up. The capitalism-saving policies a la the New Deal which were feasible because they excluded various PoC and other minorities? They’re being gutted and will not be replaced. There are a lot of PMC folks and a lot of white folks and a lot of “middle class” folks who are starting to experience what others have experienced for decades: what’s it like to be a worker under capitalism.
I would love to read that post. I don’t think people are claiming feudalism has the same material base… I could be wrong… but my understanding is that neufeudalism is an expression of a highly financialized economy during reproletarianization. I think the point is just that what is developing during that process isn’t completely different in terms of changes in social economic relations, than like what it was like, say, when the commons was enclosed.
Like, the tendency of the rate of profit to fal, and the decreasing exploitability of the global majority, has pushed many of the imperial core’s precariat into new categories of jobs where their own belongings (like cars, homes, and phones… often acquired with debt) are essentially used as the overhead for “tech companies” that are actually rube-goldberg-like financial instrument that extracts value out of the belongings of working class people while forcing them to “rent” it: subscription services, planned obsolescence, debt service, or publicly financed asset-inflation (ex: quantitative easing). Does that seem like a change in the basis of relations? Maybe?
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I found the post, here’s the link https://hexbear.net/post/208134?scrollToComments=false
PSA: Hexbear has a pretty good search function, I just found this by searching “neofeudalism”
why the fuck am I awake
Because you must post
From Friedrich Engels’s 6th of January 1892 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge