The Working Class vs. Neofeudalism (feat. Jodi Dean)
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- I am joined by political theorist Jodi Dean to discuss her provocative new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Jodi Dean is one of the most vocal proponents of the "neofeudal thesis", the idea that capitalism has regressed to a neofeudal arrangement characterized by the delinking of capitalist accumulation from production, the end of competition, rent-seeking, predation and plunder. No longer can Marxists rely on a developmentalist theory of capitalism and a proletariat tied to productive labor as the means to abolishing capitalism. Dean argues that we must completely re-think the proletariat and that the global service sector points the way to a renewal of working class agitaiton and revolutionary activity.
Jodi Dean is a political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. Her books include The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging , Blog Theory and several others. Please check out Capital's Grave and order a copy here
www.penguinran...
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43:40 BADIOU: “It is essential to ask whether, in politics, we count the figure of the worker for something, or for nothing. To count it for nothing means that we count nothing but capital.”
Would love a follow-up between you both. This was great.
Capitalism doesn't become moribund or parasitic. It's always those things, i.e. since 1848.
Loving this convo
Great discussion. I was very gratified to hear Mackenzie Wark given some consideration, as I found her thesis to be most persuasive.
I find that adopting the perspective of Capital as Power (CasP) to be most helpful when considering these questions. In my own way I have, as Colin Drumm advised in his review of her book, packed up my (amateur) theoretical canons and redeployed. If Marxism does have the structure of a theology (I believe so), then heresy followed by self-excommunication is the only way forward.
Capital may not even be "capital" anymore, not as the Marxists conceive it. Maybe it never was...
Pre-ordered!
49:28 Shame is evicerated in and through Bukhari 7086 and is universal, and has to be universal to stay in the game.
Capitalism might be going through big changes but as Lacan says it produces goods that have no utility as well as requiring underdevelopment. The shift in capitalism has been firms no longer need to be explicitly competitive. Look at Walmart… they just purchased a mall. Look at all the businesses Amazon owns. Then look at Private Equity. These companies are able to make more money quicker by spreading themselves into other areas where no one else can compete at scale. Temu and SHEIN used a duty tax loophole. I’m worried about the focus on service workers, although service workers may get companies to offer better pay and things like that. Starbucks deals with unions and giving good benefits because they know they need a specific type of person to be a barista and at the end of the day this helps them make immense profit. Capitalism hits us harder than most want to believe.
48:01 thats not personal is political, thats clan as class
What an intro my word
-Re Morozov’s objections to Varoufakis’ technofeudalism, at least in the NLR he’s pushing a strongly empirical argument against Varoufakis that’s not particularly theoretical. The gist seemed to me to be that the Varoufakis overstresses the degree to which surplus exploitation of capitalists by the “cloudalists” who’re extracting rent based on their ownership of platforms. Contra Varoufakis, Morozov is stressing the degree to which the cloudalists are investing massively into their own platforms, so it’s not as passive an arrangement of surplus extraction as Varoufakis takes it to be, but rather there’s a return of investment that the cloudalists are receiving based on their investment into the platforms they’re owning. I think Varoufakis can integrate the critique by adding the epicycle that this QE funded investment by the cloudalists can be analogised to how the feudal baron himself had to offer protection from marauding steppe nomads and so had to make his own investments there as Annales historiography had got to.
Varoufakis is describing a process that has really just begun, his vision is a couple years away but it really depends on whether firms and business realize that they can leverage consumers to reach other consumers. As well as individuals using cloud apps to teach an algorithm to know themselves and their interests better than they themselves.
Fair enough. I think Prof. Dean was just committing somewhat of a category error in seeing Morozov’s current dissent against the neo-feudalism thesis as a theoretical intervention. Reading his NLR essay, it seemed more like an empirical challenge from one economist to the other. Varoufakis will probably just read that data differently or shift his interpretation slightly for now if he ever bothers with a response. He is much more deeply engaged with MERA and DiEM now
I agree with Morozov, that capitalism hasn’t changed. Varfoukis is speaking about one specific part of capitalism. Morozov is basically grasping the entire system, and that is exactly how it’s run. Just think if trump cut all non profit budgets these organizations would try to run with the thinnest of margins. Amazons success and values were predicated on spending as less as possible