Wake Up and Smell the Serfdom
“We will never be royals. It don’t run in our blood. That kind of luxe just ain’t for us. We crave a different kind of buzz”. Lorde
“The history of the modern democratic state can be understood as a story of shifting authority and lawmaking, first from private potentates to sovereign monarchs, and then to publicly accountable democracies. Today, this centuries-long democratizing trend is rapidly being reversed. Western democracies are not simply embracing neoliberalism in the sense of deregulating the economy. Elites are pursuing something aptly described as a new form of feudalism, in which entire realms of public law, public property, due process, and citizen rights revert to unaccountable control by private business”. Robert Kuttner
“When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again”. Anthony Rendon
“In Democracy it’s your vote that counts; in Feudalism it’s your count that votes”. Morgan Jallberg
“This system we call the transnational world order is just feudalism, a set of rules that is anti-ecologic, it does not give back but rather enriches a floating international elite while impoverishing everything else, disengaged from real human work and therefore from real human accomplishment, parasitical in the most precise sense, and yet powerful too”. Stanley Kim Robinson
In the wake of our mounting cataclysms (e.g., unresolved financial crises, ecological disasters, and full-frontal fascism), many scholars, pundits, and policy brokers are bemoaning the pending demise of Democratic Capitalism. Yet, even some ardent critics of capitalism are a bit circumspect about the fact “that Elvis has already left the building”. Worse yet, several of those who hastened this exit are still concealing their preference for a new feudal system. The hue and cry of neofeudalism, however, is no longer reserved for the looney left, the self-righteous right are also evoking its specter, without acknowledging their complicity in its processes and products. A substantial level of subterfuge is still practiced (invoking mythical past glories, identifying hapless scapegoats, as well as blaming bureaucrats). Nonetheless, it may not be long before they openly praise to the skies their weird amalgam of 1984 and Brave New World. Yet, it is not too late for the 99% to realize and begin to reverse neofeudalism. In the meantime “don’t Bogart that (Soma) my friend”, and don’t abandon your friends at your first Winston Moment.
For the past 30 years I have been trying to explain how our dominant economic theories (and their destructive policies) morphed from the confusing monikers like neoclassicalism (apolitical and ahistorical, marginal utility notions) and neoliberalism (market fundamentalism and globalism) toward neofeudalism (re-rigging of systems supporting elites). Latent elements and allegiances to precapitalist institutions and outcomes have, of course, ebbed and flowed for centuries. Classical serfdom was not outlawed in parts of Europe until the 20th Century, and slavery of various sorts remain today. Modern mainstream economics remains relatively clandestine about its anti-social proclivities (merely excluding authentic human concerns form tidy mathematical models). Of late however, they have been far less opaque about their oligarchic objectives. This agenda was fed by hyper-financialization and the corrupt creation of a new generation of Robber Barons via the monopolistic tech platforms and the radical revival of the rentier class.
Needless-to-say, my expression of these concerns was far from fashionable for most of my career. In the my book SERFS UP (https://www.amazon.com/SERFS-FInance-Feudalism-Fascism-Ruminations/dp/1796405728), I sought to explain my own and the discipline’s evolution via the analogy of the movie Forrest Gump and the Lord of the Rings Saga. Having been present at critical turning points, as well as meeting key actors, I failed to fully appreciate the gravity of ideas and events at the time. Hence, I sought to explain my own befuddlement, as well as sound the alarm. I priced the result of ten years of research and twenty years of ruminations at ten bucks in the hope of getting out it a wider audience; Not much luck (so far), plus Amazon marketing sucks. I understand that most folks don’t want to see themselves as Hobbits (halflings with lives-half-lived), despite their amazing heroics. Some might rather see themselves as fierce Uruk-hai. However, in our world, they are represented by investment bankers, and the white hand face paint is probably cocaine dust. Or perhaps they were put off by my overly ambitious connection of often dull and self-exclusionary institutions of finance, feudalism, and fascism. But this was the entire point of this exercise, to make these cultural and socio-economic pathologies and their relationships more readily apparent.
However, I mostly expect that despite the notion of neofeudalism becoming fairly ubiquitous, a majority of folks still view the basic notion as ancient history and thus irrelevant. Many might be hung up on the archaic and romanticized versions of the concept. When millions of Americans watched Downton Abbey they related mostly to the Lords and Ladies, and hardly imagined that the folks downstairs and the tenants were rarely treated like family. Beyond our delusional beliefs about our own regal prospects, Americans have little concept of how a long-gone era has actually returned. And they are even more oblivious as to how the embedded cult like beliefs of mainstream economists could create this mother of all is/ought problems. By presenting their utopia pipe dreams as inexorable natural processes (greatly pleasing their plutocratic patrons), they engendered, amplified, and apologized for our viciously dystopian world.
Ideology as Reality
In my book I sought to explain how all this voodoo actually came to extol the virtues and ignore the vices of re-emerging feudalism, but maybe the message got lost in the telling. Who knows. Fortunately, since my book arrived and remained in premature obscurity, a few more penetrating (and better marketed) books hits the ground running (well maybe a brisque walk). They are: McKenzie Wark’s tech smart and nearly ethnographic exploration, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/887-capital-is-dead); Joel Kotkin’s statistically as well as anecdotally rich clarification of our an on-going cultural catastrophe, The Coming Neofeudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/coming-neo-feudalism/); and, Quinn Slobodian’s epic ideological as well as practical discussion, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250753892/crackupcapitalism). First and foremost, these authors buttress my primary contention that neofeudalism has arrived, and that it was NO accident. Their further contribution, moreover, is a rich and vast array of concrete and easily relatable examples of our dramatically altered political economy.
Wark, an Australian born critical theorist and technology and society scholar, illustrates that neofeudalism is the culmination of the centuries long battle between Capitalism and Democracy. Moreover, she explains how it is a direct outgrowth of neoliberalism’s long-standing defense of a highly stratified society. Kotkin, an arch conservative economic geographer, actually draws upon anarcho-capitalist’s arguments for extreme inequality (opportunity as well as result) to explicate the contradictions of neofeudalism. Slobodian, A Canadian born international historian, details the long march of oligarchy hidden in the micro-machinations of empire.
The Battle for Middle (class) Earth
In our epic saga it is the survival of the middle class that is at stake, however, we have already lost most of the paths of upward mobility. The not-so-grand-canyon separating virtually all of us from our neofeudal overlords is so wide that even our upper-middle (white collar and skilled craftsmen) cannot see the other side. Plus, with the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence), many of those will fall into the bottomless pit of serfdom. Our authors reference empirical studies demonstrating that if you are not born to a wealthy family in a few isolated zip codes, the die of your life is already cast. The fortified insulation and isolation of the 1% is nearly complete, but many of us still want our extremely thin chance at an Olympic level long jump.
Beyond its periodic defaults to totalitarianism, what is so damnable about neofeudalism is that it carries none of mutual obligations of nobility that were at least provided paid lip service in historical vassalage. As we substituted capital accumulation and rent extraction for the “divine right of kings” in our secularized religion, and we lost as sense of commonwealth. We’ve given the rights of citizenship to corporations that we have denied ourselves, while allowing them to avoid responsibilities by undermining the very nature of nation states. While we are becoming aware that, despite constitutional obligations, the state is seldom our knight in shining armor, we should be very careful before we dismantle all of its potential for protecting us from predatory pluto/kleptocrats. As flawed and battered as our democratic institutions are they still stand as our only arsenal.
Kotkin suggests we need a new Magna Carta for this age of digital displacement. But in this case, global bankers and multinational CEOs are the sovereigns. Rights might be granted to lessor lords, but serfs would be forced to accept binding arbitration. Furthermore, he prescribes further intensified deregulation to allow the new Master(bator)s of the Universe to more fully exercise their noblese oblige. If this sounds like the “Great Reset”, that is pretty much what it is (note: https://medium.com/@daneke/the-great-reset-is-neither-be2ce1ccf911). However, Kotkin lets the anarcho-capitalist double whammy out of the bag. They both created this Frankenstein monster, and now as seek to use it as a replacement for tattered scarecrow of socialism. Essentially, it is a good old gangster protection racket.
Additional ideological sleight-of-hand is even more terrifying. Take for example the forced degradation of the government on one hand and the support dictatorial demagogues on the other. More puzzling perhaps, if we serfs only owe allegiance to new detached regional commercial networks, then who will conventional states get to provide cannon fodder for their various wars of choice (with mercenaries and robots remaining prohibitively expensive)? Ergo the curiosity of libertarian nationalism, with its patriotic propaganda (not to mention their bankrolling religious and cultural acrimony to keep the serfs battling among themselves).
The Subtle Indenture and Muffled Maces
All this ideological legerdemain is well and good, but I suspect what serfs really want to know is how this effects day-to-day life. This is where the ample rubber of our fearless trio meets the road to serfdom. The seemingly unrelated crazy quilt of arrogance and ignorance (from “school choice” and private prisons to “too big to fail/jail” b(w)ankers and the reverse Robin Hood of the galactic debt industry) suddenly exhibit clearer patterns in the light of the capricious, arbitrary, and inordinate privileges emerging from our full-blown caste system. Meanwhile the increasingly foggy status of law becomes intelligible in the context of our fragmented authority and complex corporate contracts. In short, we have allowed the replacement of public law with private contracts.
A couple of these writers include many of the gory details of dispossession right down to the privatization of municipalities and basic their public services (where the poor pay mightily for their own oppression). These muffled maces of our new feudal lords might go unnoticed unless you have gone to jail for failure to pay a ticket, had your car held hostage by a private parking cartel, or paid compound interest far in excess of the original fine to a privatized collection agency. A few denizens of the American hinterlands experienced the complete loss of certain basic public services (particularly medical, water/sewage, and security).
Slobodian devotes a good deal of print to what I call the take my ball and go home syndrome. The new landed gentry have expanded their gated communities to nearly sovereign states (from special economic zones an innovation hubs to free ports and from tax havens to special districts, and seasteads to doomsday compounds). Who needs secession (albeit it increasingly popular option) when you can have your own personal apartheid. Lords can merely purchase their own feudal realms, lawyers, and private armies to make them peasant proof. Slobodian explains the odd outcome of globalism producing partition by illustrating how fragmentation of authority used to further protect immense wealth and power from the introduction of societal expectations (not to mention enabling special accommodations). Are we really prepared to accept this fundamental perversion of political economy?
