#workerism

Workerism is a form of capitalist ideology that is endemic amongst self-defined revolutionaries.

It is an ideology that encourages the acceptance of, and propaganda for wage-labour, amongst individuals who have realised the exploitation and alienation that wage-labour entails. It is thus one of the highest forms of alienation.

Worship of the worker is found in various state ideologies, such as Stalinism and Nazism. Workers are honoured for their role as builders of the nation, the economy, capital.

US Presidents have lots of things they can do beyond signing or vetoing legislation. Their administrative agencies have broad powers that allow them to act without dragging Congress behind them.

For example, Jennifer Abruzzo, the ass-kicking superhero that Biden appointed as National Labor Relations Board General Counsel, has used her powers to establish a rule that companies that break labor law during union drives automatically lose, with the affected union gaining instant recognition.

For a followup, Abruzzo is using a case called Thrive Pet Care to impose a “duty to bargain” on companies. If a company won’t bargain in good faith for a union contract, Abruzzo’s NLRB will simply force them to adhere to the contractual terms established by rival companies that did bargain with their unions, until such time as a contract is signed.

But wait, what about the dastardly Supreme Court? What if those six dotards in robes use their stolen seats on the country’s highest court to block Biden’s administrators?

Well, Biden could do what his predecessors have done. Like Lincoln, Biden could simply ignore the court, embracing popular policies he was elected to enact, revealing the Supremes to be toothless, out-of-touch, undemocratic and illegitimate.

(Andrew Jackson was a monster, but when he ignored his own Supreme Court, he proved that the Supremes’ only leverage came from their legitimacy; recall the (likely apocryphal) quote, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”)

Like FDR, Biden could threaten to pack the court, creating a national debate about the court’s illegitimacy, which would add fuel to the court’s plummeting reputation amidst a string of bribery scandals.

-Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit: “I want to do it, now make me do it.”

Link to tweet

We are not concerned with the political problems of those who see unemployment as a danger to democracy and order. We do not feel any nostalgia for lost professionalism. We are even less interested in elaborating libertarian alternatives to grim factory work or intellectual labour, which are unwittingly doing nothing but toe the line of the advanced post-industrial project. Nor are we for the abolition of work or its reduction to the minimum required for a meaningful happy life. Behind all this there is always the hand of those who want to regulate our lives, think for us, or politely suggest that we think as they do.

Alfredo Bonanno, Let's Destroy Work, Let's Destroy The Economy

For Marxists, the term ‘feudalism’ refers, above all, to a mode of production. The concept thus defines an economic logic through which surplus produced by the peasants—the linchpin of the feudal economy—is appropriated by the landlords. Of course, viewing feudalism as a mode of production does not mean that political and cultural factors did not matter. Not all peasants, lands and landlords were alike; all sorts of multi-level hierarchies and intricate distinctions—rooted in provenance, tradition, status, force—shaped interactions not only between classes but also within them. Feudalism’s own conditions of possibility were as complex as those of the capitalist regimes that succeeded it. For example, the peculiar nature of sovereignty under feudalism—as Perry Anderson emphasized, it was ‘parcelized’ among landholders, rather than concentrated at the top—left a major imprint. However, for all these nuances, important strands within the Marxist tradition have concentrated their efforts on deciphering the economic logic of feudalism, as a key to elucidating that of its successor regime, capitalism.

In its simplest version, feudal economic logic went something like this. The peasants possessed their own means of production—tools and livestock; access to common land—and so enjoyed some autonomy from the landlords in producing their subsistence. The feudal lords, facing few incentives to raise the peasants’ productivity, didn’t intervene much in the production process. The surplus produced by the peasants was openly appropriated from them by the landlords, most commonly by appeal to tradition or to law, enforced by the lord through the threat—and often the application—of violence. There was no confusion about the nature of such surplus extraction: the peasants were under no illusion about their freedom. Their autonomy in matters of production may have been considerable; their autonomy in general, however, was strictly circumscribed.

As a result, many Marxists—we can skip the internal disputes at this stage—held that, under feudalism, the means of surplus extraction are extra-economic, being largely political in nature; goods are expropriated under the threat of violence. Under capitalism, in contrast, the means of surplus extraction are entirely economic: nominally free agents are obliged to sell their labour power in order to survive in a cash economy, in which they no longer possess the means of subsistence—yet the highly exploitative nature of this ‘voluntary’ labour contract remains largely invisible. Thus, as we move from feudalism to capitalism, politically enabled expropriation gives way to economically enabled exploitation. The distinction between the extra-economic and the economic—one of many such dichotomies—suggests that, as a category in Marxist thought, ‘feudalism’ is intelligible only when examined through the prism of capitalism, commonly imagined as its more progressive, rational and innovation-friendly successor. And innovative it is: in relying solely on economic means of surplus extraction, it need not dirty its hands more than is strictly necessary; the ‘invisible Leviathan’ of the capitalist system does the rest.

For most non-Marxist historians, in contrast, feudalism was not a backward mode of production but a backward socio-political system, marked by bouts of arbitrary violence and the proliferation of personal dependencies and ties of allegiance, commonly justified on the most tenuous religious and cultural grounds. It was a system in which untamed private powers ruled supreme. As a result, it’s customary within this rather diverse intellectual tradition to contrast feudalism not to capitalism but to the law-respecting and law-enforcing bourgeois state. To be a feudal subject is to live a precarious life in fear of arbitrary private power; to tremble at rules that one had no role in creating and to have no possibility of appealing one’s guilty verdict. For Marxists, the opposite of the feudal subject, the peasant, is the fully proletarianized worker of the capitalist enterprise; for the non-Marxists, it’s the citizen of the modern bourgeois state, enjoying a plethora of guaranteed democratic rights.

Regardless of the paradigm, it should in theory be possible to identify the key features of the feudal system and examine whether they might be reoccurring today. For example, if we treat feudalism as an economic system, one such feature could be the parasitic existence of the ruling class, which gets to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle at the expense and misery of the class (or classes) it dominates. If we treat it as a socio-political system, it might be the privatization of power formerly vested in the state and its dispersion through opaque and non-accountable institutions. In other words, if we manage to associate feudalism with a certain dynamic, and if we can observe the recurrence of that dynamic in our own post-feudal present, we should at least be able to speak of the ‘re-feudalization’ of society, even if a full-blown ‘neo-feudalism’ is nowhere on the horizon. It’s a weaker claim, but it carries greater analytical clarity.

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3. ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’? ... In the past decade, there have been many intriguing attempts to advance the argument that exploitation and expropriation have been—and still are—mutually constitutive. Two stand out in particular: the German sociologist Klaus Dörre’s theorization of the capitalist ‘land grab’, drawing on Rosa Luxemburg’s Landnahme and Nancy Fraser’s related work on the deep-rooted structural connection between exploitation and expropriation, with the latter creating—and constantly recreating—conditions of possibility for the existence of the former. Many of the methodological discussions unfolding on the left today—about the best ways to narrate capitalism in relation to climate or race or colonialism—still reflect the unresolved issues of the Brenner–Wallerstein debate.

A lot of this recent work builds on David Harvey’s influential concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, introduced in his 2003 book The New Imperialism. Harvey coined this term as he was unsatisfied with the qualifier ‘primitive’; he, as many others before him, saw accumulation as ongoing. Summarizing some of the recent scholarship on the issue in The New Imperialism, Harvey noted that ‘primitive accumulation, in short, entails expropriation and co-optation of pre-existing cultural and social achievements as well as confrontation and supersession.’ This was hardly the Brennerian account of ‘primitive accumulation’ as the process of breaking up the feudal ‘merger’ between the factors of production; Brenner’s capitalists were not ‘co-opting’ anything—they were ridding themselves, with some systemic help, of unproductive social practices and relations.

Alas, Harvey’s account of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, while promising so much, delivered very little: in the end, it became even more ambiguous than Marx’s account of ‘primitive accumulation’. If Harvey’s initial formulation was to be believed, the poor capitalists of the early 2000s could barely make money at all without dispossessing someone of something: Ponzi schemes, the collapse of Enron, raiding pension funds, the rise of biopiracy, the commodification of nature, the privatization of state assets, the destruction of the welfare state, the exploitation of creativity by the music industry—these are just some of the examples used to illustrate the concept in The New Imperialism. Seeing it everywhere, Harvey unsurprisingly concluded that ‘accumulation by dispossession’ had become the ‘dominant’ form of accumulation in the new era. How could it be otherwise, when every activity that did not directly involve the exploitation of labour—and even some that did—seemed to be automatically included in this category?

In 2006, Brenner wrote a mixed review of The New Imperialism, chiding Harvey for his ‘extraordinarily expansive (and counterproductive) definition of accumulation by dispossession’, inflating the concept to an extent where it was no longer useful. He confessed that he found Harvey’s conclusion about the dominance of dispossession over capitalist accumulation ‘incomprehensible’. But was it? It would indeed be ‘incomprehensible’ if one assumed that we were still living in capitalism, which, at least to the Brenner of 2006, seemed unquestionable. But, if capitalism really was over and some other feudalism-like system was upon us, that statement would make more sense.

In later works, Harvey muddied the waters some more, making ‘accumulation by dispossession’ the main driver of neoliberalism, which he defined as a political project, redistributive rather than generative in outlook, that aimed to transfer wealth and income from the rest of the population to the upper classes within nations or from the poor countries to richer ones internationally. Here, there was no space for the Brenner-friendly interpretation of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as something aimed at creating conditions for innovation—hence production and generation—at all. Without stating so explicitly, Harvey quietly joined the other side of the debate, while adding a host of other mechanisms of surplus transfer—rent extraction around intellectual property, for example—to those initially described by Wallerstein. Anyone steeped in the orthodox, Brennerian take on ‘primitive accumulation’ would immediately take issue with Harvey’s basic chronology of events; even for Wallerstein and his followers, trade-based primitive accumulation preceded and accompanied capitalist accumulation, it did not replace or overtake it.

Since Harvey’s initial formulation of the concept in the early 2000s, ‘accumulation by dispossession’ has been embraced by many scholars, not least those in the Global South, who use it to theorize new forms of rentier extractivism whereby corporations flex their political muscles to acquire land and mineral resources. There’s a certain logic to all of this: first dispossession, via extra-economic means; then rentierization, by leveraging property rights—including those over intellectual products—which shifts the operation back into the economic realm. Being in that realm, however, is no guarantee that we are in normal capitalism. Save for mining and agriculture, where some productive or at least extractive activities do need to be organized, the capitalist class appears to be simply reaping rents and enjoying a life of luxury, much like the landlords of the feudal era. ‘If everyone tries to live off rents and nobody invests in making anything,’ wrote Harvey in 2014, ‘then plainly capitalism is headed towards a crisis.’ But what kind of crisis? Harvey himself doesn’t flirt with neo-feudalist imagery—at least he hasn’t yet—but his analysis of contemporary capitalism makes it easy to draw the obvious conclusion: this is capitalism in name only; its actual economic logic is much closer to the feudal one. What other lesson could one draw from Harvey’s claim, as early as 2003, that redistributive dispossession had overtaken generative exploitation?

Cognitive multitudes A similar message could be found in the work of those Italian and French theorists who prophesize the emergence of ‘cognitive capitalism’—yet another capitalism in name only. Inspired by the work of Toni Negri and other Italian operaistas, these thinkers—Carlo Vercellone and Yann Moulier-Boutang are among the best known—insist that the multitude, the successor to the working class, armed with the latest information technologies, is finally capable of autonomous existence. On this account, capital can’t—and doesn’t want to—control production, much of which now happens in a highly intellectualized manner beyond the gates of the Taylorist factory, which itself is no more (at least in Italy and France). Today’s capitalists simply establish control over intellectual property rights, while trying to limit what the unruly multitude can do with its newfound communicative freedoms. These are not the innovation-obsessed capitalists of the Fordist era; these are lazy rentiers, entirely parasitic on the creativity of the masses. Working from these premises, it’s easy to think that some kind of techno-feudalism is already upon us: if the members of the multitude are truly the ones doing all the work and are even using their own means of production, in the sense of computers and open-source software, then to speak of capitalism seems like a cruel joke.

One aspect of the ‘cognitive capitalism’ perspective has a particular bearing on contemporary debates about the logic—feudal or capitalist?—of today’s digital economy. Drawing on the Italian workerist tradition, Vercellone and his co-thinkers have hypothesized the obsolescence of the managerial class, supposedly defeated by the creativity of the multitude. Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive workers need them no more. This is taken as a sign that the move from formal to real subsumption—i.e. from the mere incorporation of labour into capitalist relations to its structural transformation according to capitalist imperatives—has now been reversed, with capitalism moving backwards. Feudalism becomes visible, even if these theorists hope that communism will arrive first.

As George Caffentzis has pointed out in a perceptive critique, the possible irrelevance of managers to the organization of the productive process is in itself no proof that the revenues booked by capitalist enterprises come in the form of rent, rather than profit. After all, there are plenty of capitalist firms that are almost fully automated, with neither managers nor workers. Should they therefore be seen as rentiers? The answer of the cognitive-capitalism theorists seems to be ‘yes’: such firms must be parasitic on something, perhaps squeezing a patent portfolio, a real-estate holding or the General Intellect of humanity as such. Take, for example, an automated car wash. Is there a reason to believe that it is not capitalist simply because it does not employ anyone, and thus generates no surplus value? Or because, in order to automate the car wash, a few algorithms—undoubtedly using dead labour and congealed knowledge of previous generations, and maybe even a patent or two—were used?

Probably not. In line with Marx’s own writings on the equalization of profits across differently automated firms and industries, the car wash is simply absorbing the surplus value generated elsewhere in the economy. To present these automated firms as ‘rentiers’ rather than as proper capitalists is to strip Marx’s account of capitalist competition of its substance; it is precisely the constant drive to automate—to cut costs and boost profitability—which accounts for the constant flow of capital towards more productive firms. Workerism, the intellectual cornerstone of the cognitive-capitalism theory, remains trapped in the epistemology of the human worker: if no workers are present, the Italian theorists assume that no capitalist production takes place and that rentierism rules the day. In such accounts, ‘capitalism’ may live on as a label, but we are already somewhere in the No Man’s Land between feudalism and the putting-out system (Vercellone himself has noted the similarity).

4. Digital Fortunes Theorists of techno-feudalism share the cognitive-capitalism assumption that something in the nature of information and data networks pushes the digital economy in the direction of the feudal logic of rent and dispossession, rather than the capitalist logic of profit and exploitation. What is it? An obvious explanation points to the tremendous growth of intellectual-property rights and the peculiar power relations that they institute. As early as 1995, Peter Drahos, an Australian legal scholar, warned about the looming ‘information feudalism’. Imagining the world of 2015 in the first half of his article—he got virtually everything right—Drahos argued in the second half that extending patents to abstract objects, such as algorithms, would result in the proliferation of private and arbitrary power. (Similarly Supiot’s critique of feudalization claims that intellectual-property rights allowed for the formal separation of the ownership of objects from their control—a throwback to the past.)

Another feature of the digital economy that seems to chime with feudal models—especially the Marxian, mode-of-production variety—is the strange, almost surreptitious way in which users of digital services are made to part with their data. As we all know, the use of digital artefacts produces data traces, some of which are then aggregated—potentially yielding insights than can help to refine existing services, finetune machine-learning models and train artificial intelligence, or be used to analyse and predict our behaviour, fuelling the online market for behavioural advertising. Humans are key to activating the data-gathering processes that envelop these digital objects. Without us, many of the initial data traces would never be produced. These days, we are creating them constantly—not just when we open our browsers, use gaming apps or search online, but in myriad ways in our workplaces, cars, homes— even our smart toilets.

What exactly is going on here, capitalism-wise? One could argue, with the cognitive-capitalism theorists, that users are actually workers, with technology platforms living off our ‘free digital labour’; without our interaction with all these digital objects, there wouldn’t be much digital advertising to sell and the making of artificial-intelligence products would become more expensive. Another view, of which Shoshana Zuboff is the leading exponent, compares users’ lives to the pristine lands of a faraway, non-capitalist country, threatened by the extractivist operations of the digital giants. Condemned to ‘digital dispossession’, as she puts it in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), ‘we are the native peoples whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.’ For clarity of exposition, this is not exactly Marx’s c-m-c. But the sentiment is clear.

Zuboff distances herself from theories of ‘digital labour’—in fact, from consideration of labour tout court. Accordingly, she doesn’t have much to say about exploitation; surveillance capitalists, it seems, don’t do much of this. Instead, she draws on Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’, presenting it as an ongoing process. Zuboff discusses at length Google’s elaborate procedures for the extraction and expropriation of user data. The term ‘dispossession’ appears almost a hundred times in the book, often in original combinations with other terms—‘dispossession cycle’, ‘behavioural dispossession’, ‘dispossession of human experience’, the ‘dispossession industry’ and ‘unilateral surplus dispossession’. For all its high-pitched language about users as ‘native peoples’, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism leaves little doubt that ‘dispossession’ is accomplished through modern technology and on an industrial scale—which supposedly makes it look capitalist. For Zuboff, however, ‘capitalism’ is something that companies ‘commit’, like a faux pas or a crime. If the formulation sounds strange, it is an accurate rendering of how she understands this particular -ism: by and large, ‘capitalism’ is what happens to humans when companies do stuff.

Reading Zuboff’s vivid descriptions of the symbolic and emotional violence, deception and expropriation that propel the Google-driven digital economy, one might wonder why she dubs it ‘surveillance capitalism’, rather than ‘surveillance feudalism’. On the very first page of the book she writes of ‘a parasitic economic logic’—not that far from Lenin’s famous analysis of the rentier profits underpinning ‘imperialist parasitism’. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism flirts with the ‘feudalist’ formulation in a couple of places, without ever fully embracing it. On closer examination, however, the economic system she describes is neither capitalism nor feudalism. It is what one might call, for lack of a better term, user-ism—in direct analogy to Italian workerism. The Italians could not imagine how non-rentier, labour-light capitalist firms could make capitalist profits merely by attracting surplus value produced elsewhere; as a result, they ended up introducing strained concepts like ‘free digital labour’. Zuboff, in turn, cannot imagine that human experience, congealed in data that is appropriated from the user at the point of contact with digital artefacts, is not the principal driver behind Google’s exorbitant profits.

User-ism posits that, from Google to Facebook, the bulk of the profits of these firms derives from their expropriation of user data. But does it? Could there be other explanations? If they exist, Zuboff doesn’t consider them, marshalling only evidence that will confirm her existing thesis: users give Google data; Google uses the data to personalize advertising and build data-intensive cloud services (an important part of Google’s business, of which Zuboff says very little). Therefore, it must be the user-data-advertising connection that accounts for Google’s windfall profits. What else could it be, given that she discusses no other aspects of Google’s operations?

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5. Capitalism, Still?

Until recently, most of the serious literature on neo- and techno-feudalism from the left approached it—like Neckel and Supiot—as a socio-political rather than an economic system. The publication of Techno-féodalisme by the French economist Cédric Durand represents the most sustained attempt so far at a serious consideration of the economic logics involved. Durand earned his name with Fictitious Capital (2014), an insightful analysis of modern finance. Contrary to assumptions by some on the left, Durand argued, financial activities do not have to be ‘predatory’: in a well-functioning system, they could help to advance capitalist production by facilitating advance financing, for example. However, from the 1970s onwards, this accumulation-friendly feature of modern finance—Durand dubs it simply, ‘innovation’—was overtaken by two more sinister dynamics. The first, rooted in the logic of dispossession as theorized by Harvey, involved powerful financial institutions leveraging their connections to the state to redirect more public money towards themselves; here we are back to the ‘extra-economic’ means of extracting or, more accurately, redistributing value, backed by the close links between Wall Street and Washington. The second dynamic, rooted in the logic of parasitism theorized by Lenin in his analysis of imperialism, referred to the various payments—interest, dividends, management fees—that non-financial corporations have to render to financial firms, which stand completely outside the production process.

On Durand’s telling, the bailout measures following the 2008 financial crisis turbocharged the dynamics of dispossession and parasitism, suppressing those of innovation. ‘Is this still capitalism?’, he wondered, in the closing pages of Fictitious Capital. ‘This system’s death-agony has been heralded a thousand times. But now it may well have begun—almost as if by accident.’ This would not be the first ‘almost accidental’ transition to a new economic regime; Brenner once described the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England as ‘the unintended consequence of feudal actors pursuing feudal goals in feudal ways.’ So the idea that financiers, by taking the easy way out—dedicating themselves solely to politically organized upward redistribution and rent-supported parasitism—could accelerate the transition to a post-capitalist regime was not only highly intriguing but also theoretically plausible.

In his new book, Techno-féodalisme, Durand retains his focus on the looming end of capitalism but assigns the task of burying it to the tech firms. Fictitious Capital had already examined the so-called profit-investment puzzle: when capitalism is functioning well, higher profits should mean higher investments; the whole point of being a capitalist is to never stand still. And yet, from roughly the mid-1990s on, there was no such link: profits increased in the advanced-capitalist economies—with ups and downs—but investment stagnated or declined. Plenty of explanations have been adduced to explain this, including the maximization of shareholder value, growing monopolization or the toxic effects of ever-accelerating financialization. Durand did not come up with new causal factors. Instead, he chose to argue that ‘the enigma of profits without accumulation is, at least in part, an artificial one’—a statistical illusion, created by our inability to grasp the effects of globalization.

On the one hand, some firms had found ways of making more money without additional investment. Globalization and digitization allowed top firms in the Global North—think Walmart—to leverage their positions at the apex of global commodity chains in order to extract lower prices for final or intermediate goods from the actors lower down the chain. On the other hand, when capitalists from the Global North were making investments, these increasingly went to the Global South. Thus, looking at profit-investment dynamics through the lens of individual countries of the Global North—the us, for example—doesn’t tell us much. One needed a global view to see how exactly profits map onto investments.

With Techno-féodalisme, Durand joins the growing chorus who explain the profit-investment puzzle by emphasizing the role of intellectual-property rights and intangibles—including data holdings—in allowing the giant us firms to squeeze tremendous profits from their supply chains by focusing on those aspects that have the highest margins. To an extent, it’s an elaboration of Durand’s argument from 2014, but with much greater attention paid to the actual operations of global supply chains and the role that intellectual-property rights play in the distribution of power within them. For some of the firms he examines, the enigma of profits without investment is no longer artificial, as it was in Fictitious Capital: they really don’t invest much, at home or abroad, regardless of their profit levels. They either hand back their earnings to shareholders in dividends or buy back their own stock; some, like Apple, do both.

Techno-féodalisme 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—legal intellectual-property rents and natural-monopoly rents—look familiar: the first refers to the rents derived from patents, copyrights and trademarks; the second to rents derived from the ability of Walmart-like firms to integrate the whole chain and to furnish infrastructures needed within it. The other two—dynamic-innovation rents and intangibles-differential rents—sound more complex. But they, too, capture relatively clear and distinct phenomena: the former refers to valuable data sets that are the exclusive property of these firms, while the latter refers to the ability of firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations (firms that own predominantly intangible assets can do this faster and more cheaply).

Durand’s taxonomy is elegant. Armed with these categories, he begins to see rentiers everywhere—not unlike the theorists of cognitive capitalism whom he chided, mildly, in Fictitious Capital—and capitalists nowhere. ‘The ascent of the digital’, he concludes, ‘feeds a giant economy of rent’, because ‘the control of information and knowledge, that is, intellectual monopolization, has become the most powerful means of capturing value.’ With a nod to McKenzie Wark’s recent speculations on the subject, Durand returns to the question he asked in 2014: is this still capitalism? It was the imperative to invest in order to improve productivity, cut costs and raise profits that ensured the dynamism of the capitalist system. That imperative was due to capitalists operating under the pressures of market competition, with the fungibility of commodities, labour and technology—the result, as Brenner argued, of breaking up the ‘merger’ of these three factors under feudalism.

The rise of intangibles—but especially of data—reverses the capitalist break-up of that merger, Durand argues: if digital assets are indissociable from the users that produce them and from the platforms wherein they are made, then we can read the digital economy as once again ‘merging’ the main factors of production, so that their mobility is impeded. In simpler terms, we are stuck inside the walled gardens of the tech companies, our data—carefully extracted, catalogued and monetized—tying us to them forever. This weakens the productivity-inducing effects of market competition, giving those who control the intangibles an impressive ability to appropriate value without ever having to engage in production. ‘In this configuration,’ writes Durand, ‘investment is no longer oriented towards the development of the productive forces, but to the forces of predation.’

Parasitism and dispossession may no longer be part of Durand’s vocabulary in Techno-féodalisme—they are replaced by ‘predation’, as Harvey and Lenin are dismissed in favour of Thorstein Veblen, and finance gives way to the technology industry—but the logic is not so different from that of Fictitious Capital. What gives the digital economy its peculiar neo- and techno-feudal flavour is that, while workers are still being exploited in all the old capitalist ways, it is the new digital giants, armed with sophisticated means of predation, who benefit most. Analogously to the feudal lords, they manage to appropriate huge chunks of the global mass of surplus value without ever being directly involved in labour exploitation or the productive process. Durand draws on Zuboff’s work to show the hidden domination exercised by the ‘Big Other’ of Big Data, arguing as she does that the secret of Google’s success lies in its ability to extract, assemble and profit from a variety of data sets. It enjoys an effective monopoly due to network effects and impressive economies of scale: it will benefit more from any new data sets than a start-up could, making competition much harder.

There is much wisdom, as well as basic common sense, in such conclusions. But the overall tenor of the argument veers too much towards user-ism, as Durand, like Zuboff, ignores the crucial role played by indexing in Google’s overall operation. It is harder to invoke concepts like ‘intellectual monopolization’ here, for the third-party pages to which Google links to produce its search-result commodity remain the property of their publishers; Google doesn’t own the results that it indexes. In theory, any other well-capitalized firm could build the web-crawling technology for indexing them. It might be extremely expensive, but one shouldn’t confuse such barriers for a rent-like situation: what is expensive for a Berlin start-up might be relatively affordable for Japan’s SoftBank, with its $100 billion Vision Fund. Google’s extensive data holdings are a different matter; they do merit a discussion of rent. But one cannot pretend that its business is all about these data holdings, as if Google were a mere rentier—and not also a standard capitalist firm.

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In the past twenty years, a new approach to political economy known as Capital as Power (CasP), has emerged to do just that, introducing the concept of ‘differential accumulation’ to describe such dynamics. Its adherents, concentrated mostly at York University in Canada, have criticized both Marxist and neoclassical economics—using some solid and convincing arguments—for overlooking these ‘sabotage’ dynamics and ignoring the constitutive role of power in capitalism as a whole. This approach has informed some interesting recent research on the technology industry, including empirically rich work on techno-scientific rent and assetization, with insights from Science & Technology studies.

The difficulty of fitting Marx and Veblen into a single analytical framework here—something Durand also attempts in a recent essay—is that Marx saw predation and sabotage as part and parcel of feudalism, not capitalism. For Veblen, these are instincts present in all capitalists, even if those with control over intangible assets may be better positioned to act upon them. Marx, however, ultimately saw capitalists as productive; if one could speak of sabotage, this would only be possible at the systemic level of capitalism as a whole and not at the level of individual capitalists. Durand clearly wants to stay with Marx rather than Veblen. However, that would require spelling out just what exactly these ‘forces of predation’ are and how they relate to accumulation and all the thorny debates on ‘primitive accumulation’—a theoretical challenge that Durand, having engaged with ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in Fictitious Capital, knows all too well. Otherwise, it’s not clear why Marxist theory would need this highly ambiguous theoretical carapace of ‘predation’, when its own categories—of profit and capitalist production, as well as rent and rentierism—suffice to explain Google’s success.

Marx himself was unequivocal about the fact that fully automated capitalist firms not only appropriate surplus value derived elsewhere—on this, both Foley and Durand agree—but that they do so as profits, not rent. These automated firms are as capitalist as the firms that exploit wage labour directly. As Marx writes in Volume 3:

A capitalist who employed no variable capital at all in his sphere of production, hence not a single worker (in fact an exaggerated assumption), would have just as much an interest in the exploitation of the working class by capital and would just as much derive his profit from unpaid surplus labour as would a capitalist who employed only variable capital (again an exaggerated assumption) and therefore laid out his entire capital on wages.

The techno-feudal thesis stems not from the advance of contemporary Marxist theory, but from its apparent inability to make sense of the digital economy—of what, exactly, is produced in it and how. If one accepts that Google is in the business of producing search-result commodities—a process that does require massive capital investment—there is no great difficulty in treating it as a regular capitalist firm, engaged in normal capitalist production. This is not to say that the digital giants do not engage in all sorts of other tactics to consolidate their power, leverage their patent portfolios, lock in their users and obstruct any possible competition, often by buying challenger start-ups, in addition to the fortunes spent on winning the support of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

Capitalist competition is a nasty business and it may be even nastier when digital products are involved. But this is no reason to fall into the analytical swamps of cognitive capitalism, user-ism or techno-feudalism. Both Veblen and Marx may be needed if we want to understand the tactics of individual firms and the systemic consequences of their actions; in that sense, there’s much that Marxists can learn from the ‘Capital as Power’ school. But for either approach to make great strides forward, one needs to be at least clear about the business models of the firms in question. Fixating on aspects of them—simply because one detects an excess of intellectual-property rights, or signs of financialization, or some other disturbing process—is not going to provide a comprehensive view of those models.

7. Enter the State

As well as lack of analytical clarity, another major problem with the techno-feudalist framework is that it risks taking the state out of the picture. Durand’s Techno-féodalisme has very little discussion of the driving role of the American state in the rise of Alphabet, Facebook or Amazon; the same goes for many other shorter texts on techno-feudalism. Durand’s critique of what he dubs the Californian Ideology makes much of the cyber-libertarian orientation of the ‘Magna Carta of Cyberspace’, its foundational text. But he neglects to mention that one of that document’s four authors, the prominent investor Esther Dyson, also spent years on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, America’s finest regime-change outlet. 

Save for a few contrarian accounts—among them, Linda Weiss’s excellent America Inc.? Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (2014)—the role of the American state in the rise of Silicon Valley as a global techno-economic hegemon has been greatly understated. Reading these developments through the lens of techno-feudalism—which assumes that states are weak, with sovereignty ‘parcelized’ among many techno-lords—can only obfuscate this further. All the recent techlash hysteria about the power of technology companies—as ‘giants’ or ‘robber barons’, or just one monolithic ‘Big Tech’ bloc—has entrenched the notion that the rise of digital platforms has come at the cost of the state’s disempowerment.

This may be the case for weaker European or Latin American countries, all but colonized by American firms in recent years. But can the same be said for the United States itself? What of the longstanding links between Silicon Valley and Washington, with Google’s former ceo, Eric Schmidt, leading the Defense Innovation Board, an advisory body to the Pentagon itself? What about Palantir, the company co-founded by Thiel which provides essential links between the us surveillance state and American tech? Or Zuckerberg’s argument—apparently effective so far—that breaking up Facebook would embolden the Chinese technology giants and weaken America’s standing in the world? Geopolitics is barely visible within the techno-feudalist perspective: Durand’s few mentions of China are mostly to scold its Social Credit system, an instrument of algorithmic governmentality.

Could this lack of attention to the constitutive role played by the state in the consolidation of the American tech industry be the result of the analytical, Brennerian framings of capitalism that seek to deduce its ‘laws of motion’ by observing it in action? It is impossible to grasp the ascendancy of the American tech industry if one brackets out the Cold War and the War on Terror—with their military spending and surveillance technologies, as well as the global network of American military bases—as extraneous, non-capitalist factors, of little importance to understanding what ‘capital’ wants and what it does. Could one make the same mistake today, when the ‘rise of China’ and climate catastrophe are coming to occupy the system-orienting role once played by the Cold War? If so, we can also forget about comprehending the rise of what some have dubbed ‘asset-manager capitalism’, which seeks to delegate the state’s task of fighting climate change to the likes of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street.

From the Brennerian vantage point, any systemic intervention by the state into the ongoing operations of capital might appear as an example of ‘political capitalism’—rather than properly functioning ‘economic’ capitalism, driven by its own laws of motion. For Brenner himself, the long-term stagnation of the us economy in conditions of global manufacturing over-capacity has led powerful elements of the American ruling class to abandon their interest in productive investment and turn instead to the upward redistribution of wealth by political means. In this, strangely, left and right appear to converge. After all, detecting the corrosive effects of ‘political capitalism’ everywhere is much more typical of liberal and neoliberal economics, concerned as they are with rent-seeking by public officials and the resurgence of personalistic networks intervening in the operations of capital. It was this kind of concern about ‘political’ rather than ‘economic’ capitalism that gave rise to Public Choice and the fetishization of anti-corruption by Chicago economists such as Luigi Zingales. Durand himself repeatedly engages with Mehrdad Vahabi, a Public Choice scholar, citing him favourably on predation.

Perhaps it is now time to ask whether the Brenner–Wallerstein debate is in for some definitive resolution. Arguably, the unresolved ambiguities of that debate have created the analytical and intellectual openings through which the techno-feudalist thesis now appears plausible to creative young Marxian economists like Durand. After all, it is only because ongoing expropriation, and the political power that it presupposes, cannot be easily reconciled with the exploitation-driven account of capitalist development that one needs extraneous concepts like Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossesion’, Veblen’s ‘predation’, Vercellone’s ‘cognitive rent’, or even Zuboff’s ‘extraction of behavioural surplus’.”