Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
No Royal Road: The End of Techno-Feudalism? part 5
While the introduction music is that of Varn Vlog on this podcaster, this series will be simultaneously released on both the Varn Vlog podcast feed and the Regrettable Century podcast feed. This is a long-running series we are doing on understanding social technologies, relationships of production, and how we get here: i.e. what is the social and class history of the past.
In this episode, we finish our discussion of Evgeny Morozov's "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason." .Ever wondered how the state's role in the economy has shaped the modern business landscape and the rise of Silicon Valley? In this stimulating conversation, we embark on a journey through the complex web of capitalism, examining Marx's theories and the realm of techno-feudalism. From the intricate relationships between the tech industry and the security state, to the fascinating exploration of the state's role in protecting businesses from the necessity of monopsony power, this episode is ripe with insight and analysis.
As we navigate through the murky waters of the tech industry's evolution, we shed light on the risks taken in funding projects by the federal government and the private sector. We also delve into the changing dynamics post-Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism, connecting the dots to the ascension of the American tech industry. Focal points of discussion include the Defense Innovation Board, Palatier, Eric Schmidt's relationship with DARPA, and Mark Zuckerberg's stand on Facebook's break-up.
The episode concludes with a thoughtful debate on the final crisis of capitalism. Was Marx's prediction of the bourgeois revolution leading to the immediate end of capitalism accurate? Did he ever complete his theories and if not, what was lost? We dive into Morozov's perspective on the crisis and explore the concept of techno-feudalism for the future. This engaging discourse is sure to redefine your understanding of the capitalist system and its evolution. Buckle up for an enlightening exploration that promises to challenge your perspectives.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Welcome to VARM blog. Our aim is to give you the best in analysis and philosophy, political economy, history, art, culture and geopolitics from a left wing and socialist friendly perspective. We aim to bring you different perspectives from different walks of life and to have you educate yourself what to do with what you learned here. We do not aim to give you prefabricated and easy answers. Abandon all hope. You subscribe here, for you will learn and it will be your responsibility what you do. And with that we begin today's episode. Welcome to no Royal Road. The end of techno feudal reason, because both were ending this essay. Hopefully, and I think this is going to put the nail in the coffin Also, reality is kind of put the nail in the coffin on this I would scroll off a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:So we are in section seven. Enter the state, where we get into, I guess, what we're going to, what we should call hey Marxist. Let's be realistic. The state is actually an actor in the economy. We knew that 100 years ago. Now grow up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a pretty good. That's a pretty succinct way of putting it.
Speaker 2:That could be the title of the episode.
Speaker 3:It's just a big reminder of the role that the state has always played.
Speaker 2:It continues to play and will play.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just one of these things when I talk about the role of the state in capitalism. Because one thing I will say if you read capital volume one, you can get the idea that the state isn't that involved in the development of capital and Marxist and think that that's not true. There's pretty clear times when Marx talks about the enclosures where he's pretty clear on that. But even if he wasn't, I will say that's one of the things I'm sympathetic to people like Kolecki about. Like yeah, the state's always been involved, but it did become more involved in from 1890 to the beginning of the world wars and then it's become even more involved between Fordism and or social democracy depending on where in the globe you are and neoliberalism and whatever hell we're in right now.
Speaker 2:Right and the neoliberalism thing. I think we harp on this every time we talk about it that neoliberalism doesn't mean laissez-faire economics.
Speaker 1:Nope.
Speaker 1:And it's never meant that. It also hasn't actually meant a shrinking of the state at all either. In fact, the state's actually expanded its role Absolutely. But anyway, that's important for this, because I think a lot of the techno-neo feudalist will argue that rentier capitalism that became dominant during neoliberalism is the whole way that all this became this neo feudal new stage of post-neoliberalism. And every now and then there are even people who are friends of the show, like Stefan Hamlin, with where it would such ideas Like when he says that capitalism is already over. Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:That's one of my least favorite positions that a person who's genuinely very intelligent can have. It's because I can't understand it at all.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you need to get more intelligent than Jason.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 1:All right. So where Morozov begins is talking about Durant's techno-neo feudalisme, and we're going to skip Durant's critique of what he does. The Californian ideology makes much of the cyber-libertarian orientation of the Magna Carta of cyberspace as foundational text, but he neglects to mention that one of that documents for authors. The prominent investor Esther Dyson, spent years on the board of the National Endowment for theocracy, america's finest regime change outlet. Same for a few Kantarian accounts, among them Linda Vise's excellent America Inc innovation enterprise in the national security state. The role of the American state in the rise of Silicon Valley as a global techno-hegemonic has been greatly understated. I don't I agree with Morozov here. That's been greatly understated, but I've never understated it.
Speaker 3:Well, it's been greatly understated to the point where, like I, kind of barely have encountered it.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting to me because people will bring it up when they when they want to fight libertarians on the development of the internet in general, its relationship to DARPAnet, the fact that it was turned over to corporations also.
Speaker 1:Soviet stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like that's been used as an own for, like you know, the dumbass libertarian, I literally have had someone do this to me hold up my iPhone and like this is the victory of capitalism and go.
Speaker 1:You mean, every bit of this is government technology, either funded by the Soviets or the military, but yeah, but I've also paid attention to the investment in, like the state investment and the techno feudalism, what we call techno feudalism, not just because of stuff like the California ideology, but also because it was state contracts that shielded a lot of these businesses that we now consider a feudal overlord from having to be profitable enough to get monopsony power Right. Yeah, like Amazon couldn't have taken over the world with its you know the way it has if it wasn't shielded by government policy, actually effectively for 20 years, and between that and you know, rentier capitalists looking for cheap but risky investment on capital investment, which is a lot of this. Those are the two ways that these businesses came to dominate, because they couldn't have dominated in a classical libertarian economy. They would have never developed, which I think people know, but somehow, when you talk about techno-neo feudalism, that part of their brain turns off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like there's. There are two tracks of thought and they don't converge for people like at all, right.
Speaker 2:I think that, like it's because I won't say for all, for all, like genuinely, for all Marxists who are genuinely trying to deal with the subject matter, this doesn't fit. But for everyone who just agrees with the idea that there is some sort of neo feudalism, without really thinking too much about it, it's because the left has a tendency to go for, like, the most bombastic sounding word to describe the thing that they don't like, which is why everybody's a fucking fascist and which is why, like I, really really dislike the way capitalism is right now. So it must be something worse, it must be feudalism, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or you'll hear that like and I see this all the time fascism is the American capitalist. You know true ideology and I'm like no, it isn't.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah really, really not.
Speaker 3:You know like America tends toward fascism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's all the time. A lot of MLs and Maoists would say that would use that regularly to talk about the United States.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of anarchists do, although you know that we could have a whole separate conversation on like how many anarchists and how many MLs and Maoists actually have the same talking points. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Without, we're all red fascists, according to, like most internet anarchists that I've met.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no.
Speaker 2:Because we believe in some concept of the state.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, ultimately I don't, but in the interim I do.
Speaker 2:I'm an anarchist too. I just a very, I'm a very slow anarchist. Yeah Right, you're going to get there eventually.
Speaker 1:When it comes to the state, I might be a reformist, but You're a reformist anarchist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a reformist, anarchist exactly.
Speaker 1:I used to. When Eric issued to get up at me about that. I used to actually say that to them. I'm just slower than you on this. But now, in all seriousness, I think I think I do hear parts of this conversation, but I agree with Moran's off that somehow it never connects for people Like people will start. I know a lot of people talk about the California ideology, like the Alphabonga Gang will also talk about, well, how the left loves the state, but yet they don't connect the two together, like the cyber libertarian relationship to the state and the left's relationship to the state. Because and I actually know why they don't, I think one because it actually hurts their argument that somehow there's a sharp divide between the state and civil society, which I don't think is actually that true.
Speaker 3:So yeah, Right. I think this all it really comes down to is just that if both of these tracks were ever to merge, the end result would be a different overall ideology. Right.
Speaker 1:All right, so this may be the case for weaker European or Latin American countries, but all the colonized by American firms in recent years? We can, oh, this may be the case. Excuse me, I need to read the first part of it. All the recent tech-wash hysteria about the power of technology companies as giants, robert Barron's the one megalithic big tech block has been entrenched. The notion of the rise of digital platforms has come at the cost of the state's disempowerment. Yeah, that's so stupid Like I don't actually think I would say this argument has actually declined since this was written. Yeah, that might be. That might be, because I don't hear it as much anymore. All right, this may be the case for weaker European or Latin American countries all but colonized by American firms in recent years, except for poor Britain, who would love to be colonized by American firms. But the same can be said for the United States itself.
Speaker 1:Question mark With a long-standing yeah, I just think this is one of the, actually one of the pushbacks when people are like, well, dhs is taking over the tech industry. And I'm like they've always been interrelated, both the tech industry's relationship on DARPA and there's literally from the beginning been kind of an open back and forth between tech CEOs and board members and parts of the literally not just the state but the security state in specific, and it's also not new that it goes back to the 1910s, it goes back to World War I.
Speaker 2:But specifically with. I mean you mentioned the example of the iPhone, but ever since the invention of the concept of the internet, all the way until the late 1990s, it was almost exclusively a government project. Through the Department of Defense, used to connect CIA and FBI offices, you know I mean yeah, and everything else about this.
Speaker 1:Gps was actually developed for missile guidance and the military picks which firms get access to it or not.
Speaker 2:And on top of that most other technological innovation, especially technological innovation that happens in the university system, is working through grants directly from the federal government.
Speaker 1:Right, which is why, like when we talk to MLs or whatever, or even our mutual friend of me, doug Lane, they always go off about. Well, you know, there's this, and I'm like I can't think of an NGO that does not take government funding somewhere and thus has ties to, and some oversight from, the federal government. Right, the fact they're an NGO actually means that they have that.
Speaker 2:But I will say at this point that since the end of the Cold War the amount of risks that are willing to be taken by the federal government in funding projects has declined drastically. Dramatic, and so has it at the corporate level as well, the private level.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, that's actually an interesting thing, and I don't know if that's convergent or not, and Morozov, I don't think, talks about it, but let's go into it just for a second. Neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War converge. They're not directly related Because, let's be honest, by the end of the 1960s definitely by the Sino-Soviet split, no one's really scared of the Soviet Union anymore.
Speaker 2:Which. I think is part of the reason that neoliberalism was given free reign is because they weren't scared.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I mean, but the reason why neoliberalism developed was not the lack of power of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2:It was the proper.
Speaker 3:Soviet crisis.
Speaker 1:So these things happen to use a term that I think may have been ruined by altisarians, but actually in the strictest sense applies here. It was over determined that there's too many different inputs going into this For us to completely attribute one singular one with the causal chain here. But what that does lead to is we see dramatically less investment by the time you get the iPhone. I mean people talk about how much technology there is. The only major technological innovation we've seen so far is software development, and that is in the LLM world, and even that is impressive as it is is actually based off of different things that have been going on for 30 years and only seem to have been really pushed out because of the strength of coding labor.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, we talked about this a lot on the last episode. All of our seemingly just grand technological innovations that have happened within the past 10, 15, probably 20 years have just been rearranging coding languages.
Speaker 1:Yep, all right, so let's go into this next part of the section. So Morales-Offmico talks about Eric Schmidt and literally the Defense Innovation Board and the way that Google has direct relationship with DARPA in both directions. He mentions Palatier, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel but is definitely integrated with the US surveillance state. He mentioned Zuckerberg trying to make the argument that breaking up Facebook would embolden Chinese technological giants and lead to this backdoor competition, which we saw almost come to the head and stuff like the risk act. But interesting, like everything these days with the US government, even from the right, that seemed to have been a 20-second panic that even got me involved and then disappeared.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, like immediately too yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been a. You know it's had some weird downstream things with states trying to enact laws that probably are in breach of the Commerce Clause, but that's about all we've seen from that actually in the last few months.
Speaker 3:So anyway, but yeah, the hysteria has just died down entirely, right so?
Speaker 1:Could this lack of attention I'm going to read it in greener now, because the lack of attention to the constitution, role played by the state and the consolidation of American tech industry be the result of the analytical, brinarian framework of capitalism that seeks to deduce its laws of motion by observing it in action? Is it impossible to graph the ascendancy of American tech industry if one brackets out the Cold War and the War on Terror, which, as a side note, that seems weird that a political Marxist would do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it seems like an abandonment of what political Marxism even is.
Speaker 1:Right, like I could see you throwing this at like classical Marxist versus altisterians or something. But they don't, weirdly, bracket out the war on terror and Cold War the way that the brinarian analysis is, even when they kind of try to break it up in like Brin or Seven Thesis, I think his political capital thesis, like Backdoor, tries to walk some of this back and a little bit talk about the Cold War, but then he like brackets out what counts as working class politics in ways that, like the civil rights counts as working class politics but the Workers' Movement of the 30s doesn't. And interestingly I think he might have a point on the Workers' Movement of the 30s. But I don't understand the Civil Rights Movement by that claim. Like it's just.
Speaker 1:But beyond that it does seem like the war on terror and the Cold War just like not mentioned at all in that framework. Like like, oh, political capitalism is new, but the Fordism itself is totally dependent on all these state interventions during the Cold War and it being done instead of through explicit social democracy, through tax codes and encouraging public-private partnerships. But it did the same thing and it was definitely at the behest of the military that a lot of that happened. Yeah, anyway, yep, so. So if one brackets out the Cold War and the War on Terror, skip this part as extreme. Well, with their spending and surveillance technologies, as well as the Global Network of America, military bases are even just. As a side note that even Morozov doesn't mention the fact that we had backdoor military Keynesianism through the spreading of bases in the poorer parts of the country until the last 15 years, and one of the reasons why the heartland has been abandoned is the military Keynesianism went away.
Speaker 2:Exactly Right. It was what Tony Cliff called the. Was it the permanent arms economy? Right.
Speaker 1:We still have the permanent arms and economy, but it's no longer spread out the kind of buoy up yeah, the south and the Midwest and the West, like, like, and I come from an area where it was literally supported by, like its entire economy was basically dependent on, not from being soldiers but from servicing things that were servicing the military base.
Speaker 3:Yeah, where we're from is the largest naval air station in the United States, so it's yeah, it's like one of two significant, like long term employers, and the other one is the oil industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like you. Basically, if you want a good paying job, you either go work and our civilian you either go work at the Army Depot fixing helicopters, which is on the Navy base, interestingly enough or you go work in the in the oil fields not oil fields the refineries.
Speaker 1:But, like in Georgia, what you know, what are the central and southern parts of Georgia? You don't even. There's no refineries, there's no extractive economy really. So all you had was the military base. Our industrial production that was tied to that are to the cigarette industry, and the cigarette industry went away so well in the 70s. There were people and paper and textile mills, the lowest forms of industrial capitalism, but like they went away to, to India, probably so, or to Bangladesh.
Speaker 1:So I think I think, like okay, we're not, you know, not even talking about the global network of military bases, but we're not even doing an analysis of, like the 70s and 80s in this relationship to military, to the, the militarization of the militarization of American society as part of an economic project to offset private semi privatization, like and which is abandoned over time increasingly with survey says, the end of the Cold War right. So like not not seeing that and talking about techno neofutilism tells me that you had a very subtle understanding of what the American capitalist economy was, which really makes me doubt that a lot of these people had any any understanding of it in the first place, which also makes me think that maybe academic Marxism was a mistake. However, then I see non academic Marxism today, and then I start feeling good about academic Marxism, because that's even worse.
Speaker 2:But I wouldn't go so far as to say Marxism was a mistake. I think Marxists are the I think they're the people that dissolve the people, and I like to new one.
Speaker 3:Yes, kind of like Pantera. I like Pantera, but I don't like fans.
Speaker 1:you know Marxism was a mistake, but I do think that, like, as much as I complain about academic Marxist dealing with the Marxist groups that have developed in the lieu of the sectarian left and post DSA, including anti DSA, as in response to them, I think it's just illustrated to me that, like, however bad I thought it could get, it seems to always be able to get dumber.
Speaker 3:Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so much so that often and I will say this to talk intelligently about certain topics on Marxism I have to go to non Marxist to do it. Oh, yeah, for sure I make a mistake today, when the quote rise of China and climate catastrophe are coming to occupy the system orienting role once played by the Cold War. If so, can we also forget that, comprehending the rise of what have been dubbed asset manager capitalism, which seeks to delegate the state's task of fighting climate change to the likes of Blackwater Vanguard and in State Street from the Brunarian vantage point, any systemic intervention by the state into the ongoing operations of capital Maybe may appear as an example of political capitalism, which is his big category. And that seven thesis is it's so fucking dumb, but it really is. Like I read that again and I read it more sympathetically after our first discussion of it, and I was like, oh my God, it's even vaguer and dumber than I thought. It's actually bad in ways that I didn't foresee it being bad. So it's a properly functioning economic capitalism driven by its own laws of motion.
Speaker 1:For, for Brenner himself, the long term stand nation of the US economy in conditions of global manufacturing over capacity has led power for elements of the American class to abandon their interest in productive investment and turn instead to the upward redistribution of wealth by political means.
Speaker 1:This and, strangely, left and right appear to converge. After all, detecting the corrosive effects of political capitalism everywhere is more typical of the liberal and neoliberal economics, concerned as they are with rent-sinking by public officials in the resurgence of personalistic networks intervening the operations of capital. It was the kind of concern about political rather than economic capitalism that gave rise to public choice in the fetishization of anti-corruption by Chicago economics such as Luigi Zingales. Durant himself repeatedly engages with Amoradad Vahabi, a public choice scholar, citing him favorably on predation. I also saw this in the analytical Marxist picking up a whole lot of this framework themselves in trying to mix vapor in with their view of class, which does a lot of this too, because it actually adds public choice theory and cartelization and corruption into their analysis. And I'm not saying that you don't have to deal with cartelization and corruption, but I think the way they do it actually makes it makes more concessions to the liberal side of things than they even realize.
Speaker 3:I don't think I know enough about public choice theory. I don't think I would even be able to recognize it if it was not explicitly stated.
Speaker 1:Right. Perhaps it is now time to ask whether the Brenner-Wallis-Tien debate is in for some definitive resolution. Arguably, the un-absorbed ambiguities of the debate have created an analytical and electoral opening through which the techno-neo feudalist thesis can now be plausible to create young Marxists, marxian economists like Durant. After all, it is only the outgoing expropriation. The political power that proposes. It cannot easily be reconciled with exploitation-driven accounts of capitalist development. One needs extraneous concepts like Harmi's accumulation by disposition, velvins' predation, velikoni's cognitive rent or even Zuboff's extraction of behavioral surplus. I don't know what the fuck that means.
Speaker 3:I get the impression that when he says perhaps it's time to ask if the debate is in for some resolution, if what he really means is like, for fuck's sake, it's time, right, I also think one of the things I can say is there are elements of the Wallerstein side of this that I'd not actually a sympathetic towards.
Speaker 1:The idea that decoupling would be inherently progressive and stuff like that I think we can argue about that.
Speaker 1:I also think Wallerstein and Eriege have some problems themselves and how they actually view what's going on within nations, although Wallerstein is a little better on it than a lot of people presuppose. Anyway, currently the only way to fit exploitation and expropriation into a single model is to argue that we need more of an expansive concept of capitalism itself, as Nancy Fraser has done with some success. Their Fraser's account, which is still being elaborated, will succeed in accounting for the broader geopolitical and military considerations remains to be seen. The thrust of the argument seems correct. While in the 1970s it may have been possible to analyze unfree labor, racial and gender domination and the unpriced use of energy, as well as unequal terms of trade that resulted from the course life-hitting off cheap commodities from the periphery, such as external to the exploitation capitalist system, this is no easy task today to disaggregate that I mean. Such arguments would have increasingly been put into question by some stellar empirical work by historians of gender, climate, colonialism, consumption of slavery. Uh-oh, I'm seeing Morazov sneak in some stuff.
Speaker 3:You look very worried With each word. Do you look a little bit more concerned?
Speaker 1:Because he's not actually citing which historians of X he's citing, with just saying that there is stellar empirical work done, but I'm not going to tell you which ones. Expropriation was given in due, signifying complicating the analytical purity which capital's laws of motion could be formulated. Jason Moore, a student of Wallerstein, and Giovanni Auregi, has formulated a new consensus when he wrote Capitalism thrives on islands of commodity production. In exchange, it's appropriates, oceans of potentially cheap natures, outside the circle of capital but essential to its operation. This holds, of course, not only for cheap natures. There are many activities in process to appropriates, but also these oceans are broader than more Suggest. Oh, thank God. Okay, one major concession that political Marxism would probably have to make is to abandon its concept of capital as a system marked by fundamental separation between the economic and political that the economic needs supplies, the immediate compulsion compelling the workers to transfer surplus labor to the capitalist, in contrast with their fusion under feudalism. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:Again, it's like when he says one concession that political Marxism would probably have to make. It's like what he wants to say is, for fuck's sake, one concession that they have to make.
Speaker 1:Right. There were certainly good reasons to point out that the advance of democracy stopped at the factory gates and that the rights guaranteed in political arena do not necessarily eliminate despotism in the economic sphere. Of course, much in this presumed separation was fictitious. As Elif Milkenwood's argued in her seminal article on the issue, it was bourgeois economic theory that abstracted the economy from its social and political content. Capitalism itself did have driven the wedge, separating its essential political issues. This is what I don't get. Political Marxism under Wood actually doesn't do what Morozov is accusing it of, but apparently it does now. That's weird.
Speaker 1:I would actually need to study Brenner's development post the 1990s to see where that changes. Woods is where I got the whole idea that the bourgeois economic separation between the economy and its social and political content was largely fake. She's one of the people who says that the base superstructure stuff is a feedback loop and was always a metaphor and you can't use it analytically, such as power to control production and appropriation and allocation of social labor from the political arena, displacing them to the sphere of the economic. True socialist emancipation would require full awareness that the separation between the two is artificial, absolutely. I guess I'm just arguing that, like I guess this was my pushback on political capitalism, because I thought political Marxism already did that, but apparently I just misunderstood Brenner.
Speaker 3:I mean I got the impression when I read that Brenner, that one essay with the seven points or whatever, that he was fundamentally reorienting and just not admitting it Because really, like it seems as though, like you said, it's like this was already covered before.
Speaker 1:Let's get to Morozov's critique of Woods In his overall account, painting a picture of coercion of the capital. That was too simplistic. This is him quoting Woods the integration of production and appropriation and the capitalism, she wrote, represents the ultimate privatization of politics, to the extent the functions formally associated with coercive political power, centralized and parcelized, are now formally lodged in the private economic sphere as functions of private appropriating class related to obligations to fulfill larger social purposes". On this view, the scope of the purely political with regards to the purely economic was quite limited. It consisted primarily of safeguarding property rights that the political is always instrumental in securing cheap supplies of energy and food, of unfree labor and minerals, of knowledge and perhaps even eventually of data. This very condition of the possibility it made the expanded conception of economic possible was left unsaid for obvious reasons. None of these things had direct bearing on exploitation. True, yeah, I think Morazov is an anti-Marxist, actually, guys.
Speaker 3:But he's like very secret or like very sly about it, like it's not overt, it's barely offensive, right.
Speaker 1:However, if the political is so instrumental to the constitution of the economic, one might as well ask what is gained by presenting capitalism as a system that keeps the political and economic apart. That capitalist and their ideologues talk this way as one thing, to the extent in which there is an accurate description of the actually occurring of the capitalism, the thesis of what's article is another. Here is one reminder that Bruno LeTorre's quip about modernity speaks of the Fort Tongue. It says that science and society are pulls apart, but its strategic confusion is precisely what allows it to hybridize them so productively. Right, it may be that the story of the political and the economic and the capitalism is very similar, and this I guess.
Speaker 1:I guess you could accuse Brenner for sure, and maybe woods, of actually Naturalizing the very and and and some classical Marxist to, frankly, of naturalizing the very thing they were critiquing. Oh yeah, and In this respect it is easy to see why Brenner was never impressed by Harvey's coinage of accumulation by dispossession, and so much as the concept referred to redistribution Accomplished by markets and violence alike, rather than production. It could not graduate from primitive to regular capitalist accumulation, at least in Brenner's understanding of the term. However, given all historical evidence that piled up in the past 40 years, especially during the 2008 crisis in the COVID pandemic Pandemic. It has become harder even for Brenner to bracket out redistribution as something extraneous to actually exist in capitalism.
Speaker 3:This amount is kind of impossible really right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah this amount, but it always has been right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this amounts the amounts involved. Many trillions of dollars are just too struggling. I'm gonna just add in this, though some of that's not redistribution, some of that's literally just currency creation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like the amounts involved many trillions of dollars are just too staggering. He became to write in, in the escalating plunder, his 2020 text on the COVID bailouts. What we have had for a long epoch is the worsening of economic decline made by an intensive intensifying a political predation the word political, I hint that for Brenner, the normal process of capital accumulation is failing. It makes a frequent appearance in that essay. Lacking the framework for for for bridging redistribution and exploitation with some broader account of capitalist accumulation, brenner has one move left the positive capitalist dependence on the state driven upward-reach production of wealth is moving capitalism away from itself Towards an economic form apparently shares with the central feature with feudalism. This would retain the purity of the original model, the honorary title of capitalism which could be reserved for one of its impressive regimes, in which the accumulation can occur through innovation rather than predation or dispossession, but only at the expense of unleashing all sorts of secondary analytical and political problems. The weaknesses of Durand's arguments are, to some extent, the product of the un, the unresolved tensions and the Brenner wall is seem to be the ultimate irony. Here is the best evidence that accumulation via innovation is like capitalism itself still very much alive Can be found in the same technology sector to derot rights office, fuel us and rentiest when we see. We see as much when we abandon the over determined micro narratives of these frameworks. But be it Harvey's neoliberalism as a political project, which it wasn't, thank you, our Velika are there. There's the low knees, cognitive capitalism, thinking of technology firms the way Marx would have likely thought about them, that is, as capitalist producers. Surely there's better results.
Speaker 1:And I'm gonna actually talk about this for a second, because there's something that I realized from a from a follower on Twitter of mine, actually that Real commodities and abstract commodities are Hard on. The second, it's hard to detangle rents Because under English common law, you can sell and trade patents and copyrights as commodities, which means that under English law in specific, there is a way that in which what is normally Related purely to domination, aka patent enforcement, monopoly right, can be bought and sold as a commodity on the free market. Hmm, and that is different from European law, particularly in places like Spain, which all of a sudden makes a lot of stuff Like when a win is something a rent and when is something commodity. Well, when you're not dealing with real, aka physical, tangible commodities, but things like IP commodities, our service commodities or whatever, that the rules are different because it has a dual form, both as a commodity and as a rent Simultaneously, depending on how you're looking at it from the standpoint of law.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that seems to really trouble people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it seems like like even in morose off, I didn't see that brought up and I'm like that. I mean he kind of brings it up but he doesn't talk about that legal Capacity for it and that marks realize that Like so. So, for example, just like a teacher can be a productive Worker and productive here means productive to capital surplus when they're working for a private school but a deduction from social surplus I mean for general surplus, capital surplus when they're working for a public school and be the same person, the the same relation, like whether it's a rent, a commodity, depends on what you're doing with it at the time, and and I think that really fucks with people Because it means that easily labeling these things as one thing or the other in a clear analytic isn't always possible, depending on how you're looking at what it's doing at a particular instance at a particular time.
Speaker 3:Well, right, it's not only not always possible, but it's like it seems like it's never helpful, like it doesn't clarify anything, although it does make things much less clear, right?
Speaker 1:So in the meantime, marxist would do rail to acknowledge that this possession and expropriation have always been accumulation of it, have always been consistent with accumulations through a history.
Speaker 3:Yeah, don't we know, or is that? Well, very few actually do.
Speaker 1:That's the problem. Oh, perhaps the luxury of employing only the economic means of value extraction and Properly capitalist core was always due to extensive use of inter economic means of value extraction on the non-capitalist Periphery. Yep, what non-capitalist periphery.
Speaker 3:I mean Rosa Luxemburg. Rosa wrote about this like a lot, but it was also like it was a disappearing part of the world, so it hasn't existed for a very long time. But that's when a part of her, like a I don't remember the essay, whatever her, whatever essay it is, that that's like a central argument. And one thing I'll give Wallerstein is.
Speaker 1:Wallerstein would not say it was a non-capitalist periphery. He would say it was a was a periphery. And I will also get Wallerstein this other credit. Unlike many of his fans, he does not think the primary division is national, because he also talks about cores and periphery within the core. So, for example, there's periphery areas of the United States right like like Mississippi relative to Detroit, alabama, michigan, actually now the upper Midwest Etc and one sense Brunndahl's one-time description of capitalism is infinitely adaptable is not the worst perspective to adopt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, this is my answer. This is why I'm not a final crisis theorist. Well, yeah, is I think. I think there is a tendency to the rate of profit the fall, and also, capitalism is really good and brutal. Adopting to it, yeah, and while it seems to adopt to it like with less than a hundred percent of the capitalists, and while it seems to adopt to it like with less gains, every time that it's still figured out a way to shift its its political management or let me raise that capitalist not capitalism have figured out a way, by co-opting with the state, to shift its political management in ways that makes it very, very hard to defeat. Now, no, brunndahl is not a Marxist and Thus he's like the the world systems theorist the people are most uncomfortable with, but I've always find him to be them in some ways. I find him the most useful of them.
Speaker 3:Well, right, like we've been talking about late-stage capitalism for a good almost 200 years and the and the final crisis of capitalism since the First World War, and Actually I mean Marx wrote about the final crisis of capitalism in 1850. Oh yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, since, since capitalism began in the northern Italian city-states in the, you know, high middle ages, yeah sure, this is the late stage of capitalism. It's like comparison.
Speaker 1:So one thing I'm gonna bring in here and then I'll finish this last thing. I think Morozov doesn't that. I think Marx himself is ambivalent on this, because he saw that prediction fail on, you know, under his emissoration logic, in the 1850s. And then that's when he really kicks up the revision of the political and economic manuscripts the creations of capital, capital volume two and three, the revision of capital, volume one, which he actually does finish, etc. Like, like it really does seem to be partly in response to him being Wrong about the final crisis of capitalism in the 1850s, because I think he thought Initially that basically the bourgeois revolutions in 1848 would win.
Speaker 1:And then you go immediately into oh right, in a ration situation and then immediately into the end of capitalism. Yeah, and I don't think he thinks that by the time of the first international, because it doesn't make his actions make any sense in the first International. But there's also not like any all too serene clean break where I can say that there was a clear shift, because he didn't fucking finish writing anything.
Speaker 3:Well, and it wasn't. It wasn't like a break, it wasn't like he woke up one morning with this new realization. Like it's a break in the sense that like he changed his mind about some things, but it plays out over like the rest of his life right.
Speaker 1:But I mean, I think that's where this like the relationship of the state to capital In mark is weird, because it's actually weird in Marx too, like I'm willing to say that it's like unclear in Marx. I Mean, I'm always, I've always been kicking my ass that like he gave up on. You know, originally Capital is supposed to be like five volumes and eventually it was actually supposed to cover capital estate development and Marx just kind of gave that up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's really too bad.
Speaker 1:How draper talks about that in his mark Karl Marxist theory of revolution, that originally they were supposed to be a Theory of state, and all this and we don't get it like.
Speaker 2:Oh, we bullshit.
Speaker 1:Great detriment to like yeah yeah, I mean, that's kind of that it does lead to. Like you know, we have hints of it and it's like arguments with anarchists and stuff. That the click that he and I guess and this way I actually will go against our cosmonaut friends and say that this is why state and revolution is important and why linen was right in it, because linen actually does pick up on some things from Marx that I think are pretty clear about his, his notion of like you can't have Unclassed law, you can't have unclassed state, you can't have an unclass standing army, like right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, but it is not okay. But it does not Adapt continuously and when it does, it is not given to uppers. Retribution tendencies went out over productive ones. It may be well be all. This is exactly how how much of today's digital economy operates.
Speaker 1:This, of course, there's no reason to believe that techno capitalism is somehow nicer, cozy or more progressive regime. The techno feudalism, by vainly invoking the at the the ladder, we was right washing the for the former, bam, but do it uh, but, uh, uh, um, which which does? Thus ends this essay, but I actually think. I actually think it's interesting. Okay, on one hand, I actually do think early capitalism was progressive For Europe. For Europe in certain ways.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm not one of these people who thinks that even current capitalism has no benefits. On the other hand, I'm one of those people. On the other hand, I do think that clearly, partitioning the current techno feudalism is kind of a way to avoid a decadence theory. Yes, oh, yeah, definitely, and I think people don't want to. Ironically, they're more willing to pick up techno feudalism, which is also something, as Morozov points out, like by the right, because they want to avoid decadence theory, because it's also like by elements of the right. So it's like many things, and I don't think Morozov's just as willing to come out because he's very careful of this really come out and say this. But so much of this is driven by just responding to your political enemies in ways so that you don't have to admit something. I think there's a whole lot of that going on. I hate this thing that so much of Marx's theory is that petty. But I actually do think a lot of Marx's theory is that petty.
Speaker 2:Well definitely. Well, especially in adherence to theories, because I think a lot of adherence to people's pet theories is petty.
Speaker 1:So let's reframe, even though I vaguely accuse Morozov of being slightly anti-Marxist, and I do think one of the things that I find interesting is he seems to be asserting that political Marxists are actually classical Marxists and they're not. So that's one thing I do want to point out. If you ask Neil Davidson if political Marxists are part of the classical Marxist canon, he would say no. Yeah, he would definitely say no, that they are kind of a response to analytical Marxism and Maoism and stuff like that. So what do we make of this, ultimately? I mean, other than we all agree that technonial feudalism is not a thing and the capitalism is still around. But what do we make of all this? I mean, particularly now that these debt markets have fallen through since this was written and we've watched these people pivot into a completely different direction on how they're trying to be profitable.
Speaker 3:I think. So there are a few things. The first thing is that I would definitely recommend this article to anybody who's engaging in this discourse and I guess that would mean everybody, because everybody should be engaging in this discourse. But also I like what you said a little while ago about the necessity of the way that if you just reject really any of these conclusions, then you have to then go into decadence theories as well. So I would say, read this and then also start reading decadence theories, and there's multiple decadence theories, and most of them are incredibly teleological in their outlook.
Speaker 2:They contain an element of inevitability. Most Marxist decadence theories are ones that deal with the inevitable collapse of capitalism, and I think that one of the things that we decided whenever we did our dive into decadence theory is that we agreed with elements of all these different theories, from the trotts to the Luxembourgists, to the Council of Communists. They all had good elements within them, but we reject that inevitability portion.
Speaker 3:I still think that Samir Amin is probably the single best, but not the only one that you should read. Maybe you should start with the revolution or decadence, published in monthly review, like four years ago.
Speaker 2:Part of that, though, is used to justify his third worldest view. That is the portion of it that I reject. There's no one good place to look for a holistic, 100% correct decadence theory. I think that at some point, someone should write something about this, but yeah.
Speaker 1:I do like Brett Christopher's rentier capitalism a little more, even though I don't entirely agree with it, because it makes it like, also like Michael Hudson, it makes it sound like rentier capitalism comes outside of industrial capitalism and I don't think it does. I think it is one of the signs of decadence, actually within capitalism writ large, is that industrial capitalism starts hitting real commodity problems and other things have to emerge and those other things are parasitic on other parts of the economy and that they don't necessarily lead to reinvestment. But as I guess, while I'm not a Malice third worldest at all, I guess we do have to deal with the over exploitation of the periphery. And the reason why I say that's more viable than, say, malice third worldism is one of the things that I've always said is like well, labor as aristocracy makes no sense from a national perspective. But there are labor aristocratic sectors of capital, but even those are exploited. They're just exploited less because they have more bargaining power because of wherever they are in the economy at one particular time or another.
Speaker 1:It's not that they're not exploited. If they were not exploited, they would not be profitable.
Speaker 2:I don't wholly reject the idea of a labor aristocracy. What I reject is that the finality that is generally included within that, that the idea that these elements of the working class are, from now and through all eternity, not able to be radicalized and are not revolutionary and cannot be revolutionary.
Speaker 3:It seems to be kind of a theme you know, rejecting the finality of any simple solution and simple analysis. Yeah, it's almost as though the theory is like an evergreen, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so on that note, we can talk about that. I guess the one thing we can all come down on is, despite the fact I'm willing to listen to severe crisis you know Grossmanite Marxist and I have a close to Grossmanite opinion on the profitability problem where I differ from Grossman and I've said this for years is that I think Grossman actually underestimates the fact that not just that they're, you know, counter tendencies, but that capitalists find you counter tendencies that we don't see all the fucking time. And so whenever we try to like predict the final end of capitalism, we get blindsided by something, be it war, be it capitalist reorganization in response to a pandemic and a systemic shutdown, be it because I do think COVID actually stalled off a recession.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, oh absolutely.
Speaker 2:And if you talk to some conservatives, they'll say that that's why there was such a panic over it.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I you know, In order to do so.
Speaker 1:One of the weird things is, every now and then, conservatives might have a kernel of a point, but for like stupid reasons yeah, exactly, it's a lot of them.
Speaker 2:To conservatives. The Democrats allowed for the release of a virus and then overplayed how bad it was going to be in order to trick people into whatever you know.
Speaker 1:And despite the fact that, like the Chinese government, wasn't cooperating with the US government and their guy was in power when it started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like all American conservatives, are real, real, real, dumb.
Speaker 1:We should. You know I have a non-Marxist theory about hegemony that I will bring up to you guys that hegemony itself is decadent and because that kind of power of it bestowed upon a nation leads to all kinds of provincial insularity, including not learning other languages, because there's just no incentive to that, it actually makes the kind of the Hoy-Pollow-A status of people in a hegemon dumber than they would be otherwise. Like it's not because they're stupid Americans, you know, american conservatives aren't stupid because the American working class is stupid or Americans are stupid. Americans are still occurrences are stupid because they're provincial and they're provincial because of the power attributed to a hegemon. And I say that because I think about, like the end of the Roman Empire. You go back and relate Roman intellectuals. They're fucking dumb yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean, look at the British Empire during its decline as well. It's the same exact thing, Right? French.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, and to me, this is one of the times where I'm like yes, I think most laws of history are justified by their modes of production. Some, however, are structural, deeper than that, and hegemon, leading to a slightly dumber populace, is one of them. Like, I don't think that's just another one that I think is controversial, that I think Bonapartism is particularly capitalism, but caesarism is not. And caesarism emerges when things get complex and, like your oligarchs get too uppity, yeah, and. And that happens in capital, and that's manifest in a capitalist form, and Bonapartism and its various evolutions or devolutions in the forms of fascism. Fdr is you know canzianism.
Speaker 2:All the different ways you want to dress up corporatism. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which were, which were a way to deal with the declining profit rate Right? Claire Maté's book is really good on this, actually. So is Putin a caesarist?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think he's a figure?
Speaker 1:I do think he's. I actually do think that, like I don't think Bonapartism is just dominant in the US, I think it's dominant everywhere and it actually hit the US a little late. Yeah, this time around Right, because we started seeing Trump like figures in the aughts in Europe.
Speaker 2:Right, everyone's scony. Like everyone's scony.
Speaker 1:Bola scony.
Speaker 2:Orban he's, he predates Orban Erdogan.
Speaker 1:Erdogan. Yeah, yeah, there is an attempt at it, and in Greece to, just you know, the Greece political establishment is so fucking weak, you know but? And there's also Le Pen, you know, yeah, yeah For sure Also Macron himself, yeah, is a Bonapartist figure, like almost quite literally what Um? Sarkozy was kind of a Bonapartist figure.
Speaker 3:Well, actually French politics has been pretty solidly framed by Bonapartism for at least 20 years.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, like well, I mean I'm going back to the wrong, or maybe even to the gauntlet, like maybe modern French politics has only been that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, actually it has only been that.
Speaker 1:Why Leon?
Speaker 3:Bloom Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean they kind of invented the fucking category.
Speaker 3:Yep, yeah, um uh. Bonapartism just gets more and more silly, but it's still the same thing, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, this is one of the things that there's two trends and Marxism that annoy me. One is like a state absolutism, I think kind of the Althusserian school, which I think comes out of French notions of politics as well, as you know, basically Stalinism, um, but I also think the American notion, which is the other, the American, british notion, to completely believe that the bourgeois actually succeeded in separating the political and economic is kind of our mistake. But the French mistake is. But what's weird is, in, like American and Canadian left academia, people hold both views simultaneously.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, the socialist movement around the world is still basically divided between three camps. There's still just the, the Los Allian's and whatever the, whatever the various kind of like utopian strands were, and then also Marxist, and Marxists are by far the smallest of the three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually pointing out to someone that like that, like I, actually miss real reformism these days because most people don't even they can't even tell the difference between reformism and tailism.
Speaker 2:Um much less. Our reformists are just tailists, and we don't have reformists in the United States.
Speaker 1:The most we have. Yeah, we have. We have a couple of individual reformists, but they come off as like super fucking radical because reformism is so degenerated here.
Speaker 3:It's just like.
Speaker 1:Wouldn't it be nice if Americans had trade union consciousness?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I mean even, just even, like Bernstein, that revisionism would be such an improvement over over the current contemporary American socialist project right now, because at least Bernstein, like, was a critic of Marx, which means he had to understand Marx, yeah right.
Speaker 2:You don't even have Marxist that understand Marx.
Speaker 1:I mean it feels like when I talk to Marxists now they want to talk about everything but that yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it's like. It's like I think I mentioned this in the last episode is that Marxists and you and you? You countered I said Marxists are primarily just liberals and he said if they're not, they're actually like worse conservatives who are just dumber main or liberals, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that is kind of where we're at, or they're are there like some kind of weird post liberal hybridist? It's kind of. Anyway, on that note of optimism, because no world, there's nothing but optimistic is bringing together our two strands of forward looking optimism.
Speaker 1:We will. We will end. Thank you for supporting Varm blog. If you would like more, you can find our stream on YouTube under my name, see Derek Barron. You can also find us on Patreon, where you can subscribe for early audio access, additional shows, unexpared audios, q and A's with me on video and other perks such as access to our archives, et cetera. There are three levels of support. One level you can get you on Patreon shows. Occasionally. Here you will hear shows done without creators. I hope you enjoy them. We'd like to thank our producer, paul Channel Strip and Bitter Lake and Jason Miles for making our intro and exit music, and thank you for all you do. If you can't support us financially, you can support us by leaving a review on iTunes or your pod catcher choice. Have a great evening.
