Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system.
Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s.
When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?
It's important to account for selection bias here: feudalism generally leaves very obvious archaeological traces, both in terms of infrastructure and bureaucratic artifacts (which in turn tend to be designed for longevity.)
Feudalism might not be as common as we think of it; it's simply very visible in the historic record.
----
As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms: because we care.
Many forms of organising humans in the past and present have had specific mechanisms installed to prevent single people from getting too much power. (Including preventing them from converting wealth into power -- something we take for granted that one can just do today.)
As a case in point: I live in a condo association. We and all our neighbours collectively own and maintain this building. We vote on big issues and elect representatives for everyday duties. It would be very hard to consistently appropriate large amounts of resources over a longer time period, compared to, say, a small business owner.
We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out.
I strongly recommend reading Graeber's The Dawn of Everything to start out.
> As for why people would choose to live in more egalitarian forms
The question is not why would people choose to live under supposed egalitarianism, but why would that be the default system. It relies on non-betrayal behavior across multiple actors in whom power is vested, which depends on many non-intuitive cultural innovations in thinking about your peers and social responsibility. Feudalism is at least straightforwardly plausible as the point towards which high entropy systems descend. Conversely, it's very hard to see how democratic communalism would just spontaneously emerge and maintain itself without consistent effort and cooperation, both fragile dependencies.
More egaletarian societies usual win wars against more tyrannical societies, provided similar size/ conditions
Two reasons:
1 - More egalitarian societies are more efficiient - they produce more because exploited peasants are not peoductive
2 - Who wans to die to protect their tyrant?
Zero growth can also mean that it is not possible to be more or less efficient. If labor efficiency is not correlated with productivity - then there may not be any economic incentive to well organize labor.
As an example - historically agricultural productivity was not a question of labor organization, or labor efficiency. A farmer could only grow but so much food with the land aloted, available water, and crop/fertilizer technology of the time. This amount was relatively close to subsistence.
The sowing of crops could be made more efficient in terms of person hours. But, without a production surplus, and no additional land to cultivate - there wasn’t much else for the individuals to do with the surplus hours.
Similarly, in a modern society labor productivity can be decoupled with economic output. Google search will be the dominant search engine regardless if it’s engineering team is efficient or inefficient.
This is true of some key areas, such as farming. But industry and at least some service sectors tend to benefit a lot from scaling up. Walmart is incredibly efficient, and Amazon only more so.
People like [Sam Walton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton) born in poor farmer family or [Jeff Bezos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos) son of 17 year old high school student mother and 19 years old father would have very low chances to succeed in not egalitarian societies. More talented people get opportunity to use their abilities, more Walmart's will be created.
You are confusing apparent wealth of a plantation with efficiency - all the people that are forced to work there could have been doctors, blacksmiths, etc. and contributing much more to the economy.
Just because they are exploited profitably, does not mean thats their best contribution to the economy. Its just that their more efficiebt aopkication camkot be easilly privatised
You a missing the point, and bringing in a strawman.
The point was, these people COULD do more than move boxes from A to B, could have been more productive, and could contribute more to the economy, if they were provided training.
Why they didn't get training is irrelevant - you can debate all day if Wallmart or Obama is at fault. But you don't get any credit for making humans move boxes A to B like monkeys. If they took a bunch of homeless people and made them into engineers, then yes, that would be noteworthy.
As to your starman - you could find a homeless person and cruely exploit them, by offering them dangerous work or getting them into prostitution. It could make you a lot of money if done at scale, and most people would call you a terrible person.
You did not make them homeless to begin with, but I think most people would not buy that as something that vindicates you.
But suddenly if your name is Amazon then it has a veneer of a respectable business.
> The point was, these people COULD do more than move boxes from A to B, could have been more productive, and could contribute more to the economy, if they were provided training.
Yes, they could, but what does that have to do with Walmart or Amazon?
And, at least for now, boxes need moving.
You persist in your belief that offering someone an "opportunity" that you don't like is exploiting them. It isn't, no matter how bad that opportunity is.
As to people with no good alternatives, that's on you as much as it is Walmart and Amazon.
Democratic communalism can sustain itself perfectly fine at the scale of a small village, or a neighborhood in a small town, or a single condo/HOA in a big city or suburban area. The whole question is what to do beyond that scale.
We have evidence that communalism (or at least something similar to it) has worked at large scales in the past. In fact, it ought to be one of the easiest things to get to work, because you don't have to coerce anyone of anything.
I trust my two-year old to carry his glass to the table because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that.
I don't trust my two-year old to not fall down stairs because I've given him the opportunity to show me he can be trusted with that and he has failed to show it.
That's how it works in an egalitarian society too. You give people a chance to show they can be trusted. If they fail to show that, you stop trusting them.
Based on personal experience I don't see communal societies scaling. When you have a small homogeneous group of individuals trust isn't a issue because people are bound by blood, culture, ethnicity and everyone knows each other intimately but for larger groups instead of a big family you have multiple groups fighting for power and resources. So unless the society have mechanisms to deal with it it's fated to fail. Our present societies have many in place: private property, courts arbitration, elected representatives, etc.
Your contributions to this thread have the tone of a wishful, rosey, cherry-picking trip through history motivated by the desire to arrive at a predestined conclusion: that we all should be living in a Communist utopia today, because it's logically the easiest and most available organizing system for humans. Therefore, we don't live in that world today only because intense energy and effort is directed into maintaining a non-optimal status quo.
At least please provide some specific and tangible reasons why you believe this is so obviously true, instead of repeatedly alluding to these numerous, incontrovertible, imminently applicable examples. Your statements are, I imagine for most readers, directly opposed to what history has shown about human nature and the nature of power.
I'm sorry it comes off as cherry-picked and rosey. My only intention was to supply a perspective that I felt was missing, namely that of the anarchist. Had I felt another perspective been missing, I would have been more than happy to cherry pick the things I didn't need to bring up now.
Yes, I do honestly believe the wealth- and power-preservation interests of the few are one of the reasons we live in such undemocratic forms today.
Yes, I have experienced various forms of organisation in both the big and the small, along the authoritarianism--democracy axis, and the more democratic have consistently been the better, in almost all respects except that they make it hard to amass wealth and transform it into power over others.
If you want, I can refer to many more well-reasoned criticisms of capitalism than I can author. But it sounds like you'd be familiar with those already, so I'm not sure it would help you change your mind.
Let's assume that there's a consistent and coherent definition of socialism which could be applied to all of these civilizations, which there isn't. Rank these historical civilizations by technological progress, quality of life, territory held, and population. You won't find historical proto-socialism at the top end of that list. Why is that?
> You won't find historical proto-socialism at the top end of that list. Why is that?
Interesting thesis, now prove it!
First of all you're conflating two arguments, excessive governments and socialism.
Excessive government in the past was bad because bureaucracy was slow, meaning physically slow.
Proto-socialism or community driven government made it possible for people to form smaller communities inside larger settlements where they could offload some of the burden to others in a mutually supportive way.
People scared today of government intervention think they still live a thousand years ago. Like that country that wait 11 weeks between election and inauguration of a new president because the process was designed around stagecoaches that brought the votes to the capital.
Secondly: your question is frankly showing that you went straight to the comments without even reading what I wrote Socialism is what *bootstrapped* many ancient human communities, the answer is there.
We are talking about spontaneous and "default economic system" after all, not the best at something.
If you really think ranking historical civilizations means anything, well you'll agree that Egyptians were quite THE civilization, does that mean that the best way to run a country is having a semi-god Pharaoh that builds pyramids in the desert?
The US is a glitch in history compares to what ancient Egyptian or Romans or Chinese or Greek or Mongols have achieved, it's quite possible that how the US are run today is a glitch in history as well that do not depend by the way they are run but only by the position they found themselves in after WW2, inertia is a bitch, it took centuries for the roman empire to fall.
They are in fact challenged (and somewhat defeates) by China, which is [drum roll] a socialist country!
It's quite possible that if the US switched to the political system of France or Sweden they would be as rich as today.
Also, to counter your naive argument: the Minoans.
And do ancient Greek qualify?
scholars have extensively argued that Plato and Aristotle led the foundation of socialism in their philosophies (it is now accepts that Marx was influenced by his ancient Greek studies)
The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work-that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities. [1]
All work and no play, which is much more common in the US that here in Europe, makes Jack a dull boy.
Socialism and proto socialism have and will keep having a much longer history and importance than feudalism will never have and occur much more spontaneously and "by default" than many other systems, especially today that we should be more aware of our limited time on Earth and much less addicted to sacrifice for the benefit of the few (AKA the masters).
> We can only guess, but sometimes (at least from native American verbal history) this can happen because the people have experienced feudalist systems and realised how bad that turned out.
This seems like a pretty reasonable theory, but does indicate a little problem I think -- the people have experienced the feudal system will only be around for a couple generations after the change-over. So, at least to the extent that this is the cause, it would likely be a transitory configuration, right? (ignoring some unusual circumstances, like being neighbors to a particularly unpleasant feudal state and having them as a constant contrast). I wonder what that sort of configuration decays toward.
You'd be surprised how long oral history can live. There are people who tell the same cautionary tales for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. (We know among other things because they clearly reference landmarks that we today find geological traces of that help us date their existence.)
But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other.
'There are people who tell the same cautionary tales for thousands or even tens of thousands of years.'
The people retelling the story don't understand it - we have stories and kings and feudalism, go on the street and ask a random person any question about how feudalism works:
What rights did peasants have? What right does the lord have over his peasants? could peasants be sold and how are they different from slaves? Which 'levels' of nobility does what? Who pays taxes to whom?
If put theae people into a feudal society tomorrow, and just renamed 'baron' and 'lord' to something else, they would not know it. We could call it 'landlord' and 'investor'
> But yes, you're onto something with the neighbour hypothesis too -- egalitarian and hierarchical (or beaurocratic and violent) societies often come in pairs, right next to each other.
This is going to sound sarcastic or something, but I'm actually curious -- do they? I would tend to assume that they appear to come in pairs, but this is largely because we happened to find history books written by the self-professed egalitarian society, and not their rivals, to whom they allocate every vice.
Visible history is generally written by the beaurocratic/violent society, not their egalitarian neighbour. If you think further back in history, I'm sure you'll recall "the great periods" as we call them, marred with obvious artifacts from oppressive societies.
Their egalitarian neighbours where only just starting to discover. In part because their traces are less obvious, and in part because we've had a mental confirmation bias against finding them.
I refer back to The Dawn of Everything if you want more details!
I feel like many people don't use the term feudalism quite correctly... working for a powerful person describes many systems, not just feudalism. Manoralism is a key characteristic of feudalism, and is generally the consequence of failure of trade. Trade and strong "middle classes"/"cities" were the key to many less-feudal societies, from Rome to modern day.
I am also pretty sure ancient (pre-classical) world with its massive centralized
empires do not count as feudal, or otherwise the term becomes so broad as to be meaningless...
> When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum.
This is a bit of a fallacy since productivity and efficiency are just as important in a steady-state economy as a growing one, and perhaps more so. The inefficiency of large politically-enforced monopolies would merely turn zero into negative growth.
It's a fallacy, but one that many people perceive as true in a steady state economy. Or rather there's enough greedy people that tend to work their way into positions of power in order to extract for themselves. Bribery at every bureaucratic level is the norm in most third world countries.
Most third world countries are poor because of their low-quality institutions. To be sure, bribery used to be just as common in the pre-modern West; norms against bribery are a key part of what we think of as "modernity", "the Enlightenment" etc.
There is nothing inherent about wealth that grants the owner power over many other people. The owner, if very skilled in combat, might be able to physically defend their wealth against three? Five? Eight? Other people. Beyond that they have no chance.
In any system where wealth converts to power, it does because the majority of people implicitly agree with playing the game that way.
In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with all the furs decided one day to not share, then the people would stop sharing their food, tools, building skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts, etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.
Sure, and this is why the wealthy always use some of their wealth protecting themselves. In a society where physical violence is an immanent possibility they hire some kind of bodyguards; in a society like ours where the main threats are not physical in nature, they employ lawyers.
...but then why wouldn't the bodyguards just expropriate even greater quantities of that wealth than the wealthy would bestow on them?
Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy has some sort of moral right to their possessions. In other words, they have to play along in the game of wealth distribution.
I'm not sure I understand the situation you describe. If you hire 40 goons to guard your furs, those goons could physically overpower you and take your furs for themselves.
...unless you have convinced them of your moral right to those furs. That's literally the only way a large group of people can be "unable" to expropriate them.
I don’t believe the goons would be operating on the principle of your moral right to the furs, rather they would be taking the more practical approach of believing you can provide them with a better quality of life than the next guy (and that they don’t have the skills to acquire furs on their own)
That means they have to believe one person can single-handedly outperform the rest of society in caring for them. Sure, polymaths exist, but not to that extent.
I think we are talking about completely different situations since you bring up "higher rank".
I'm talking about an egalitarian society where one person suddenly tries to convince a band of friends that it's in their interest to close themselves off from the rest of society and try to extract value from it without contributing back.
There's no "rank" to be gained from refusing to join that band -- quite the opposite! You get to go back to a society that's free from rank.
"If you hire 40 goons to guard your furs, those goons could physically overpower you and take your furs for themselves."
^ At best they get to split the furs up among 40 people instead of 41.
(And if the 1 removed is actually doing any work, there's also more work to assign.)
There's little reason for any individual goon to think they're going to get a better deal this way. Let alone enough to compensate for the risk.
Removing the guy who takes "the lion's share" produces someone new to take the lion's share.
Unless they think they can do away with that entire structure. But then they have to believe they can change everyone's behavior all at once from collectively enforcing inequality to collectively enforcing equality.
The kind of social structure that makes this possible is the kind of social structure that the powerful person will make sure can't arise (by controlling information, removing potential leaders, etc.)
The premise of the question was "in an egalitarian society, what prevents someone from appropriating much of a resource and converting their possession to power?"
You seem to be approaching the question "in a hierarchical society, what makes it impossible for small bands of people to overpower the entire system all at once?" which is an interesting question, but a very different one.
Well, the premise is that there are 40 guards guarding one person's wealth -- which is a hierarchy. The guards are below, the wealthy person is above. And you were talking about what keeps them in their place rather than taking over from below.
I'm just saying that underling guards in general don't actually need to believe in the narrative the guarded elite uses as self-justification. Maybe they do believe it, maybe they feel obligated to pretend to believe, maybe it's all naked self-interest... regardless, what really keeps them in their position is the grid of power/interest.
> There is nothing inherent about wealth that grants the owner power over many other people. The owner, if very skilled in combat, might be able to physically defend their wealth
In order to even have a concept of "owning wealth" there must be a physical defense of wealth already set up.
It's "inherent" in that sense. Owning the thing means having some means of physical militaristic defense of the thing.
The underlying fact you're referencing here is simply that the means of defense is never an individual's physical power.
What it is instead, is their position in a social graph of interests. Other people in the society have their own lives structured so that it's in their interests to serve and protect power.
I don't want to disagree with your nuanced and well-reasoned reply in general.
However, ownership exists in egalitarian forms of organisation too. It's not the "exclusive right to prevent others from using the thing", but in any human arrangement people understand that some objects are needed by some people (crutch, broken leg), some objects are more actively used by some people (household hatchet, cutting wood every week), and some objects have sentimental value for some people (grandma's ashes.)
These things normally count as property, with no violence to enforce it.
Sure you can overpower me and steal everything I have - once. Or you can join me and I’ll provide you a better living than those others for the rest of your life.
Yeah, so then we're looking at a person who is so adept at everything that they single-handedly can outperform society in providing necessary functions for other people. If that sort of person exists, they're surely rare enough that it makes no sense to optimise society around them.
The individual in question needn’t outperform the rest of society, they merely need to be critical to the activities of the rest of society. Whether Their criticality is necessary, just, or effective doesn't matter. But it does mean that they can pay bodyguards better than everyone else, and there is no inherent reason to believe the body guards will beanle to step into that role.
Humans will suffer very bad leadership indeed. Not only does the leadership not need to be "the best" -- they can be very abusive and tyrannical for a very long time, before any kind of collective revolt is organized.
"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
> As a group expands in size, don’t the opportunities for an individual to amass wealth, and then translate that to power, also increase significantly?
Yes and no. Human societies in general have concepts of personal property (i.e. something you use, like your toothbrush).
Not all societies have concepts of private property that we have today i.e. something you never use but still control. This is a complex set of viewpoints with many conflicts. They changed a lot over time. Many are very modern.
E.g. you can become owner of land by adverse possession.
In many egalitarian societies a person hoarding excessive amounts of objects is seen as unhinged.
> Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system
and all the empires that lasted millenia before feudalism emerged
stretching its duration from inception to fall, feudalism lasted around 7 centuries, after the fall of the western roman empire
it's never been the default system throughout history
For comparison Egyptian civilization lived and prospered for more than 30 centuries, not accounting for ancient Egyptian settlements and the long tail of its complete demise.
surely the space of possible large-scale human social systems is so vast, and so pockmarked with local minima that its absurd to think there is a default, or two or three possible setups
Are humans simple, or is your mental model of them simple?
Trying to reduce human character and motivations to something simple is essentially what modern microeconomic theory tried to do and it ends up having to hand-wave away so much real life behaviour that it started to call itself "prescriptive rather than descriptive".
> Given the longevity and frequent re-evolution of Feudal systems throughout history it's worth considering whether Feudalism is the default economic system.
Why do we have laws that punish robbery and murder? Because it may be the easiest path to solve a perceived urgent need (and it comes at the expense of others). It takes much more self-control and effort to "pull oneself by the bootstraps".
So, at least some forms of advancing one's position while harming others' is codified in most laws. These laws protect what we, as a society, consider valuable. Like property, and not being murdered.
So, too, is Feudalism a quick and easy fix to maintain the status quo of leadership, but it comes in a way that harms society.
Given the longevity and frequent re-occurance of extinction events, it's worth considering whether being extict is the default state of a life-form in this universe.
With incredible amounts of wealth, and the control of workers, I'd argue we already had capitalist frudalism during the industrial revolution. And we only got rid of that by the 40-50s of the 19th century with the development of social safety nets.
If you actually read that Wikipedia article, you will see that many eminent historians do not apply the term "feudalism" outside of Europe at all, and of those that do, qualify that application heavily to emphasize the peculiarity of the social formations of Europe in the middle ages.
For a view of feudalism that treats it as distinctively European, below is a quote from Perry Anderson in "Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism" (p19). If you doubt the relevance of Anderson, consider that he is not just quoted in the article linked above, but that he edits the journal in which it was published.
> The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.
If we can talk about “Techno-Feudalism”, then we surely can talk about Chinese or Indian feudalism. And if you want to gatekeep the term “feudalism” for Middle Ages Europe, then surely you wouldn’t say that we live in a neo-feudal system. So that looks like a bad faith argument in the context of the post.
yes, but feudalism didn't exist before it started in Europe. So we use the name of the original one.
For example, what you call Chinese feudalism (Fēngjiàn)
As a result, Chinese history from the Zhou dynasty (1046 BC–256 BC) to the beginning of the Qin dynasty has been termed a feudal period by many Chinese historians, *due to the custom of enfeoffment of land similar to that in Medieval Europe*. But scholars have suggested that fengjian otherwise lacks some of the fundamental aspects of feudalism. This system is often conflated with Confucianism but also with Legalism.
The name was given post-facto, but it wasn't feudalism, it was Fēngjiàn.
Techno-feudalism is simply feudalism fuelled by the control of technology instead of the land.
We could call it thechno-fēngjiàn, if you prefer.
But I also do not think that techno-feudalism is actually feudalism.
Techno-aristocracy or techno-oligarchy are a better description IMO
For once, Google doesn't need to pay and feed an army to dominate the ADV market or build castles surrounded by walls, they simply need to maintain their dominant position crushing or buying the competition and strike a deal with those they can't buy or crush.
> For once, Google doesn't need to pay and feed an army to dominate the ADV market or build castles surrounded by walls,
They don't need to _yet_ that is. I always found the imagery in _The Diamond Age_ of New Atlantis to be a fun steam punk take of a future in an alternative-history. However I can't help but think of it when I read about Amazon's "Helix" and 'Amazonia' in Seattle, or Apple's "Spaceship" complex, Google's ... etc.
I am genuinely interested in the claim "Feudalism is the default economic system". To understand what that claim amounts to, I asked lumost to clarify what they understand by "feudalism".
I don't think calling out the argument as in bad faith is justified or particularly helpful.
This was an interesting discussion - allegations of bad faith ruin the discussion and make you look like you are unable to tolerate different interpretations of the facts.
Even "feudalism" in Europe is being re-evaluated. A bunch of scholars are arguing that the various systems are more diverse than what is implied by a single word and that the connections to the Roman slave system is strong enough that it shouldn't be overlooked.
Feudalism in Japan was similar to the European one in many ways (but not all) so it's used to describe a similar system, that lasted 6-7 centuries just like the European one.
But it started late in the 11th century, 6 centuries after what happened in Europe, hardly the "default economic system"
Sibling pointed out other societies which match a depiction of feudalism in scholarly work. Lacking a widely agreed upon definition of feudalism. I would personally define a feudal-like society as one with the following characteristics.
A stratified social-economic system where mobility between classes is a near impossibility. Economic interests are bestowed by grant or taken by force. The individuals who work for the economic interest are endentured to it.
"Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine, which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010"
Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed.
"3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin’s blog, Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal but too ‘woke’—too democratic."
Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.
I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might have made it harder to find for you.
The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building." His idea seems to have been that hierarchic—or "feudal"—arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of information indexing Google uses.
To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as particularly “feudal”. He is basically just describing what people do by appending “Reddit” to their Google searches. I think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and (2) the adversarial environment this creates.
I wasn’t particularly interested in entering the discussion (mainly providing the link and an explanation), but I used the word "feudal" because Yarvin himself used it, in the name as well as in the description of the system.
Yarvin was talking about Google Search in 2010 as a mutated but recognizable version of PageRank. That's correct, I think, but it was already heading in a different direction. By the end of the year the NYT was reporting on malicious manipulation of search results for profit¹ and Google responded quickly by changing their algorithm². Then, as the "don't be evil" era draws to a close, Google gets more and more aggressive about extracting user value and the 'democratic' PageRank (which Yarvin was by no means alone in identifying as such³) is totally subverted. In 2016 Trump wins and 'fake news' – successively renamed to 'false news', 'misinformation', and now 'disinformation' – becomes the issue, and Google responds to that, too⁴. So post-2016 there really is a kind of sociological health and safety factor in the algorithm, and it's only then that Morozov's 'woke' becomes applicable to Google Search.
Now if anyone was going to guess that something like that would happen, it'd be Yarvin – but none of that is in that 2010 blog. When he said 'democratic' he meant exactly what Wired did in the article linked below – the action of masses of people. It's Morozov that makes the association between 'woke' (i.e. P.C.) and 'democratic', which has all sorts of implications. A woke-democratic Google Search isn't one that is powered by democracy, but one which protects democracy – meaning, protects the masses from manipulation by exposure to sociologically harmful 'content'. Sensu Yarvin, that is neither feudal nor democratic. It is in fact oligarchic.
The final irony is that when Morozov fudged the name Feudle, wittingly or no, and omitted a link to the blog in question, it was entirely in accord with the idea of exercising democratic power by not giving UR any link juice, but the result of that when posted to HN – a site not lacking in markers of community reputation – is that two people find the link (thanks again) and a small discussion ensues which otherwise would not have happened.
> Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.
My understanding of that passage was that the author was paraphrasing Yarvin - who from my understanding is somewhat of a monarchist? I remember his moldbug persona from the blog-o-sphere back in the mid/late aughts as someone who would write long meandering posts in the comment section of pickup artist blog; which ironically is where much of this alt-right stuff started. Kind of (darkly) funny that lot of the intellectual scaffolding for this new authoritarian political philosophy is a at its root a visceral reaction to feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency in dating women.
Sorry, this is just completely wrong, at least regarding Moldbug.
> I remember his moldbug persona from the blog-o-sphere back in the mid/late aughts as someone who would write long meandering posts in the comment section of pickup artist blog
He got his start on the 2blowhards blog, which was not about pickup artistry at all. While I suppose it's possible he left comments on pickup artist blogs, he never wrote about pickup artistry on his own blog except to dunk on them (e.g. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/06/civil-liber...).
> the intellectual scaffolding for this new authoritarian political philosophy is a at its root a visceral reaction to feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency in dating women
During the entire time of "Unqualified reservations" existing he was happily married. Moldbug has never written about women's rights at all (neither for nor against). It's simply not a focus of his work. I challenge you to find one written sentence of his that indicates that he is a misogynist.
It’s where his audience was, and where the discussions took place.
I think saying that moldbug was responsible for the intellectual scaffolding of the alt-right overstates his role.
The intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right world view is more closely aligned with the stuff expressed on Roissy’s blog than anything moldbug wrote. Imo, moldbug was just a convenient associate who was tapped to lend the movement a thin veneer of intellectual rigor.
Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” does explore the common quality of low status/perception of failure in the personal development of German authoritarian leaders.
(Yes, yes - Godwin…)
Otherwise powerful people (or people capable of being powerful) can obviously have some kind of internalized “low status” beliefs, so it’s not much of a stretch to expect them to seek explanations/redefinitions that deny those self-perceived weaknesses.
This was an interesting read. I have to admit it mostly washed over me like a rainstorm given my lack of background on the subject.
That being said I think I understood enough to like to see more analysis of how the companies that depend on data extraction (Google,Facebook) themselves depend on actually productive companies. They are obligate parasites.
Google (for example) collects user data so it can sell targeted ads to companies that want to sell products to the users whose data was collected by Google. In the absence of these productive companies Google’s data is worthless. And similarly Google’s profit is directly tied to those upstream companies exploitation of their labor.
It seems like most analyses stop at the step where Google is making money from data and don’t really get into how that data is only valuable in the context of consumer goods, which are often produced by classically extractive or exploitative companies. The article’s “userism“ can’t exist in a vacuum.
That is also separate from companies that produce digital products for consumption and then profit off the “rent” of the intellectual property rights to those products.
But products themselves are being dematerialised also. I.e. looking at my kids who constantly watch “gamers” and dream of getting the next battlepass. And games themselves are about data and IP etc.
It's rather amusing that a long-winded article stating that people shouldn't describe the current American economic system as 'feudalism' doesn't bother to include the concepts of 'the aristocratic class' or 'inherited wealth and power.'
For example, one characteristic of a society divided into aristocrats and serfs (and lacking anything like the 'American middle class' of the 1960s) is a segregated educational system, with fundamentally different approaches for the posh vs. the proles. The various attacks on public schooling (like the effort to remove higher mathematics from public schools in California) and the elimination of state subsidies for higher education are certainly a step in that direction.
Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street". Notably the latter is characterized by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a 'central committee' of Wall Street financiers; the former version of capitalism certainly has a much more distributed character in terms of wealth, power, land ownership etc.
Finally, this really is a 20th century argument that misses a fundamental characteristic of the 21st century: resource limitations. Regional water scarcity due to ongoing fossil-fueled global warming is a reality in many parts of the world, and this is more fundamental than ideological wrangling about societal structures. The resulting impacts on food production are physical and ecological in nature, not ideological - although the consequences could lead to things like the French Revolution, or the rise of authoritarian power to ensure food distribution (basically, that's China writ large).
I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
> Another feature of this article is the lumping of all things 'capitalist' together, ignoring the very real distinction between commericial and investment capitalism, colloquially described as "Main Street" vs "Wall Street".
My (extremely tentative!) thesis is that there’s been a shift in language over the last decade or so in left/liberal culture, and this is part of that. “Leftists” are often very down on “liberals” -- in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing -- yet what “The Left” believes is, by and large, pretty much what I believed as a “liberal” two decades ago. (I suspect a lot of this is generational, driven by disillusionment at perceived failures on the part of the Clinton/Obama establishment.)
Likewise, I think what’s seen as “capitalism” has made a linguistic shift. I’ve always thought of small business owners and solo entrepreneurs, from the little bookshop on Main Street down to freelance artists selling their prints at the dealers’ rooms in science fiction and comic conventions, as quintessentially capitalist, but at least on the left, that doesn’t really seem to be how it’s used anymore. The focus is squarely on the worst features of “big” capitalism, on the principle that exploitation and destruction is where capitalism always leads. Since a two-person indie software company doesn’t fit that narrative of capitalism, it’s…something other than capitalism? Frankly, I don’t think the logic fully holds up there.
Back in my day [waving cane], I would have distinguished between entrepreneurship and corporatism -- which is, more or less, that “Main Street” vs. “Wall Street” distinction. (I also think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some small businesses out there which, depending on the yardstick you’re measuring by, can be truly, truly dreadful.) But, this is a hill I don’t have a real interest in dying on. If someone wants to argue that a dealer’s room at a furry con full of freelance artists selling sexy catgirl pinups isn’t capitalism but “market socialism” or whatever, then godspeed.
As a unrelated note, re-reading your last sentence, though:
> I think the real split is going to be more about authoritarianism vs. libertarianism, and the libertarian track record on avoiding things like mass famine and consequent societal destabilization is perhaps not the best.
The authoritarian track record here does not seem to be sterling, either.
The liberalism / leftism divide is actually a return to traditional terminology that dates back to post-revolutionary French politics. Leftists essentially want answers to the 'social question' (welfare) while liberals essentially want to protect 'liberties', primarily economic liberties.
The weird hybrid between economic liberalism and light social democracy represented by the US Democratic party is basically an artefact of the electoral system, it's not actually a coherent politics. That's why there are such big divisions in the party itself.
Petite bourgeois vs. haute bourgeois is no new distinction.
(Also entrepreneurs are different from small businesses. Entrepreneurs make attempts at new big businesses, vie for new monopolies, etc.)
> in the telling of Left Twitter, liberals are basically centrists and centrists might as well be right-wing -- yet what “The Left” believes is, by and large, pretty much what I believed as a “liberal” two decades ago
I think probably you're not as aware of what leftists believe as you think.
Leftists are not using "liberal" in the American sense of the word at all, and "never were." (Like, maybe those specific people were, but "the left" wasn't.)
The shift in the use of "capitalism" to mean solely the capital class and not small business owners is a return to the actual meaning.
With any exploitative minority of people, it's in their best interests to convince large groups of people that they're all really part of the same club. It makes the exploited less likely to end the exploitation. Or end the exploiters.
And I don't just mean capitalists. Consider the way both ridiculous, unpopular mainstream political parties use wedge issues to scare people into following them even though they are both known to be corrupt machines full of greedy, self-seeking people. Etc.
You're interpreting this as a new meaning of capitalism but it seems to be a return to an older definition that came out of early socialist theory, where capitalism is defined by having an owner/investor class of capitalists and an (exploited) working class. I suspect the prevalence of this terminology is driven by the increasing perception that liberal (politicians) don't seem to care that large corporations have grown into monopolies, leading those concerned with this "corporatism" to turn to socialist theories as a way of conceptualizing the current system.
The more careful of (the critics), like Brenner, suggest that features of the current capitalist system—prolonged stagnation, politically driven upward redistribution of wealth, ostentatious consumption by the elites combined with increasing immiseration of the masses—recall aspects of its feudal predecessor, even if capitalism still very much rules the day.
That's a property of feudalism, but societies with those properties are not necessarily feudal.
Feudalism is rule by local armed strongmen. The lower classes get protection from other strongmen in exchange for a cut of their resources. The strongmen can be warlords, drug cartels, military, or cops. Feudalism tends to result in clashes between local strongmen, and, often, consolidation when someone wins. That's how nations are usually created.
Economic oppression is common in feudal societies, but not limited to it. Capitalism offers more efficient ways to achieve economic oppression.
The paper goes off into classical Marxist analysis. The trouble with Marx as a guide is that he wrote in an era of direct labor. Output was a result of the routine efforts of the proletariat. Wealth was the result of taking a cut of those efforts. The inputs from labor exceeded those of capital.
Today, you look at a balance sheet, and "cost of goods sold", which includes direct labor, is often a minor item. Marketing and G&A often exceed cost of goods sold. This turns the assumptions of Marxism upside down. In many industries, a majority of corporate expenditure is devoted to battling competition and changing things, rather than just making the product. This breaks not just Marxism but much of classical economics.
It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages.
Peter Thiel's "Zero to One" notes "Avoid competition as much as possible." That's the key idea here.
This is not feudalism. It's oligopoly. In some ways it's worse. In a feudal culture, the strongmen have some obligation to provide protection for their peasants. Oligopolists have no such obligation.
>It's what drives industries towards monopoly today. It's not about having the biggest, most productive steel mill. It's about establishing market dominance so you don't have to compete on price. Or on wages.
Might one call it, perhaps, "the highest stage of capitalism" ;-)?
Beyond the joke, I do often find myself thinking that the oligopoly and rentier tendencies described by terms like "neo-feudalism" are pretty much just the things designated by the old Marxist usage of "imperialism". But then the problem is that "imperialism" has been watered down into "everything your local sectarian Marxist group doesn't like."
Only about a quarter of the way through this so far but am enjoying it.
From the article:
"Some sixty years ago, Habermas did pioneering work in this field in The Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). On his—not undisputed—account, the early-bourgeois public sphere could be seen in London’s coffee houses, important locales for the development of emancipatory discourse. Tamed by capitalists, its imperatives were then tied to those of the culture industry and its advertising complex. As a result, pre-modern, private power structures and hierarchies reemerged in what he termed the ‘re-feudalization of the public sphere’, indicating the zigzag dynamics of modernity. While Habermas eventually distanced himself from the concept of ‘refeudalization’, preferring ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ instead, some in Germany have recently recovered it."
The acceptance of individual consciousness represented by the emergence of the bourgeois class as it manifested in the 19th and 20th centuries was quickly coopted, in particular, after WWII by the Cold War dialectic.
In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism. The results of that one confusion are readily apparent in the political dialogue of our times.
> In order to prove you weren't a Communist, you had to be the most Capitalistic, which made it very easy to hide the difference between the Main Street capitalism of small and medium businesses and multinational, monopolistic, crony-Capitalism.
This point is dreadfully under appreciated, and heavily exploited for political and business purposes.
The US Chamber of Commerce does not have the interest of small businesses at heart and, despite the name is nothing at all like your local town’s chamber of commerce. Yet when someone says “business” the local restaurant and Exxon are considered the same.
What is the point of this article? I don't have anything to do before the grocery store opens, so I gave it a full chance, and after the end I'm still really struggling to identify what the author is trying to do here. Is this an extended argument that people should avoid calling things "feudal" as a rhetorical strategy?
There are some of us who are interested in this type of subject, for example I do happen to have read books written by several of the authors mentioned in this article during the past year or so (in my case that's true for Mazzucato, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein and I did try to put my hands on Brenner's Merchants and Revolution [1] but I was too lazy). The transition from feudalism to capitalism is a very interesting subject, even the discussion itself of said transition makes for an exciting piece of late 20th century (in fact the 1970s-1980s, to be fair) intellectual history.
Back to the article itself (which, I admit, I hadn't finished reading until checking the comments in here), I would have personally also added a quick mention about the Asiatic mode of production [2], but seeing as I'm not a specialist on this maybe I'm talking bs. More generally speaking I fully admit that this type of discussions can be quite boring for those with no prior interest in them.
I'm pretty far to the left and have never heard of this publication. I get the feeling it's suffering the same phenomenon as movie reviews where professional critics are increasingly distant from people who watch movies for fun. People can now get their movie recs and political advocacy from people they mesh with across the world without consulting the cathedral.
I mean, the New Left Review is an academic journal. The author is probably an academic rooted in the Marxist/Marxian strain of western philosophy and thus communicating through the appropriate vernacular of the discipline.
If I had to guess, I'd say they're trying to point out that, yes, technology-powered late-stage capitalism may well share some features with pre-capitalist modes of production but this does not equate to a full return to a feudalist mode, and that processes already inherent to capitalism itself-- such as capital concentration and centralization driven by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall-- are still very relevant. It's hard to say because the whole distinction is pretty artificial.
While reading the introductory paragraphs, I experienced a pleasing uncertainty: is this an homage to Borges, to Nabokov? Are the familiar names -- Thiel, Weyl, Posner -- merely there to provide substance to a New Yorker piece? But, this is the New Left Review, so ...
I think for this kind of niche, academic topic (even though the discutants are quite well known) 100k views per week after publication is nothing scoff at.
Context is that it was a popular meme on Twitter/Reddit, not just popular for an academic topic:
> Plus, it makes a good meme. The hungry crowds on Reddit and Twitter love it: a YouTube video of a discussion on techno-feudalism by Varoufakis and Slavoj Žižek garnered over 300,000 views in just three weeks.
You are propably right, even though my experience with explicitly socialist (using the European meaning of the word here) topics nd discussions like this one is, that it does not get much traction outside of already quite leftist circles.
I for example didn't know of the discussion they had until I read the article.
> Key to Supiot’s legal philosophy is the distinction between government by men—typical of the feudal period, with its personal allegiances and ties of dependence—and government by law
I would frame this using "government by men" speaking words at each other in contrast with "government by laws" i.e. men writing legally between them... i.e. orality vs literacy
This is important because of the relation between literacy and computability
> Bosses may have had a role under Fordism, but modern cognitive workers need them no more
in summary your boss was a man, then it became a written document (laws), and now it's become a computer run algorithm
> 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 are more difficult to understand (I paraphrase):
innovation rents, which refers to valuable data sets that are the exclusive property of these firms
the technological capabilities to make this non-exclusive is here
and intangibles-differential rents refers to the ability of firms inside a single value chain to scale up their operations
If I understand correctly, this is possible because internet infrastructure is already non-exclusive
At the root of the issue, pretending that "intangibles"" are commodities and thus to enforce that they are treated as exclusive physical artifacts (merchandise) is to waste the potential of the internet (or, more cynically, to make a play to capture it privately)
This issue is even more complicated due to the distinction (or lack of) between "exploiting" and "harvesting" (with the assumption that one harvests what one has sown) digital assets; specifically "co-created" (i.e. aggregated) data of the like that gives facebook and google such a strong position in the "competitive market".
Why should "big tech" be allowed to keep their vast data troves private?
On one hand, there's no real technological limitation to the exclusivity of their intangible data-troves.
On the other hand, there's something to notice about how such exclusive concentration of data/knowledge generates a great amount of social and political power.
IMO, this is the strongest reason behind the drive to keep intangibles as exclusive; the power generated by their exclusivity and the use of such power to capture (privatize) energy and resources.
this is why sometimes I think that all of culture (specially contemporary academic culture) is but an elaborate ploy to rationalize away the grim realities of extractive post-imperialistic societies (states)
Finally, I argue my position that it's now crucial to deeply question old historical positions around the nature of property (and ownership); and hence, of markets and society, based on the magnitude of what the computer revolution truly entails. In my mind (biased by me being a millennial), computers are an innovation on the scale of writing (and thus, of law). The only other innovation I can think of in an even larger scale is that of ownership over land (which I consider as civilization itself).
- The pandemic was initially propagated by consumers of the global air travel industry, and likely would have been a localized epidemic otherwise.
- The police largely exist to protect the assets of the wealthy and preserve the societal structure that enables them to make and store wealth.
I don't necessarily agree with much of what this article is saying, but it's good to stretch the mind and read a variety of viewpoints. (otherwise you're only reading things that agree with your biases, which, of course, has issues)
Is there any world in which global air travel doesn’t arise but where people are better off overall? I feel like regardless of your method of allocation of resources, people are going to want to go experience other places. If a society isn’t doing any of that, it seems unlikely that it’s because they’re too busy doing other things that are so amazingly compelling that no one desires to travel. The desire for adventure and novelty is not a capitalistic desire, but rather a human one.
I can’t therefore conclude that global air travel is “capitalism’s fault” and, as contagious as SARS-COV2 is, a pandemic was virtually assured.
On a high-gravity world with a thin atmosphere it'd be harder to float, fly, or orbit. So high-speed rail and automobiles would be the pinnacle of land transportation with ships being the only way to cross the oceans separating continents. On such a world, a global internet could easily arise before flight.
As to whether those inhabitants would be better off than us, I believe that's much more to do with their socio-econo-political systems than their available modes of transportation. Slower vehicles means germs and goods travel slower, and culture too until said internet is built.
I think one of the problems of global air travel is that it has several externalities that are really not felt by its users. This is often tied to capitalism in the sense that it takes a capitalist system for the wealthy to be able to say "I don't care about these externalities and by my possessions I have a right to not care."
Not that I think it makes much difference in terms of a pandemic, but maybe if travel patterns had been different the pandemic would have played out differently in turn.
Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to uphold it's monopoly for violence. This monopoly in turn is (in the current situation) neccessary to uphold the expolitation of labour and the functioning of the state itself.
Of course this is not exlusive to the capitalist system. The expropriation of serfs in feudalist societies through the armed forces of nobility serves a similiar purpose under a different economic and political system.
Just the same as capitalism has a tangible effect on how the pandemic is dealt with. Where I live for example there were multiple cases of industrial workers (often migrants working for a few month and then returning to their home country) contracting the virus en masse, which in turn had a lot to do with overcrowded houses and flats where they were forced to live.
> Police brutality is the direct effect of a state trying to uphold it's monopoly for violence.
The only alternative to a monopoly on violence is an open turf war among crime gangs, quite probably involving far more brutality. There are plenty of nation states outside the U.S. with better run police and no gang wars, implying that they do manage to successfully regulate (i.e. "monopolize") the initiation of force. These things have basically nothing to do with each other.
The prevailance of gang violence has it's root in social and economic imbalance, too.
I do not disagree, police violence is different and not as "brutal" (can't find a better word) where I live, but of course I look onto the US as an outsider.
I also do not think that letting society splinter into rackets would be preferable to the status quo, but I do think the status quo leaves a lot do be desired for the majority of people.
EDIT: This shows itself e.g. in the organisation of precarised people in gangs.
That police brutality and the state upholding it's monopoly for violence have nothing to do with each other seems far-fetched though. The police is the instution that guarantees this monopoly within the borders of every Nation state, it's quite literally their raison d'etre.
Whenever someone only offers me one alternative, I get suspicious.
Street gangs as they currently exist in the US were created by the prison system, an arm of the state violence apparatus. Conveniently, they're also an excuse to increase police budgets. More policing, in turn, puts more people into prison.
I don't think that alternative is actually even an alternative.
Capitalism isn't the cause of all police brutality, but the upper class deliberately divides working people against each other, which creates the racism and classism (middle vs. lower) that makes it commonplace and which make brutal, racist police officers (who are probably not the majority) nearly invulnerable. You'd still have a few incompetent cops in any economic system, but it's because of capitalism's doing that there are so many bad apples on forces.
As for the pandemic, that's a trickier one--obviously, capitalism didn't create SARS-CoV-2--because, while capitalism exacerbated the harm, especially the economic harm, it's impossible to make a convincing case that COVID-19 would have been substantially worse in a socialist system: it kicked the shit out of every country it touched, and while that is true in a world where every country (even China) is capitalist, this nevertheless proves nothing about what would have happened in a world where, instead, socialism had won at the end of the 20th century.
Whether a socialist world could have contained COVID-19 depends on what kind of socialism we would have. Taking example from nuclear meltdowns, we have seen that, while preventable and minor so far, they can happen both in socialist societies (USSR/Chernobyl) and capitalist ones (TMI, Fukushima). Corner cutting and hierarchical mendacities are clearly not limited to one economic system (and I say this as a leftist who wants to abolish capitalism). A socialist society would likely have had less disinformation and ostensibly bizarre vaccine hesitancy--those are clearly artifacts of capitalist society and the market it creates for disinformation--but COVID-19 still would have been a disaster.
In a socialist world, we'd probably have seen a total death rate of 500-600 per million, comparable to Norway, for a total of about 4 million instead of the 10-15 we've had. That's still a really fucking awful number, because plagues are terrible and socialism is not some magic fairy dust that solves everything, but it's substantially less awful than what we got. Moreover, a socialist world would be able to recover from COVID-19, which our capitalist (so long as capitalism remains in force) one never will: people who are disabled by long COVID, transiently or permanently, have lost their careers and will never get them back.
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.
To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..."
Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
I think the sentence is just sloppy and the author himself doesn't quite know if he's talking about characteristics of late capitalism or just current events which happen to be occurring in the context of late capitalism.
COVAX had nothing to do with an "open source" model, it was about better distribution of the existing vaccine supplies. There were early concerns that IP rights enforcement might make it harder to develop and supply SARS-CoV2 vaccines, but a patent waiver was ultimately agreed upon. It made very little difference in the end because effective vaccines (such as those based on mRNA) are not like other drugs, and there are inherent constraints to expanding supply or making a "generic" version.
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.
Climate change: The Soviet Union was a horrible polluter, and this was well-documented.[0] When adjusted for GDP, the USSR emitted 1.5x the pollution of the US. It was worse when adjusted per capita. The CCP has also been a horrible polluter, though has made some improvements after adopting market-oriented reforms. Capitalist liberal governments have balked at treating CO2 like a pollutant, but their economies have also done far more to advance technology like electric vehicles or alternative energy than their socialist counterparts.
Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism. Though left-wing governments that adopt market reforms see inequality as well. Inequality seems likely correlated with discretionary bureaucracy (particularly "clientelism"), a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance.[1]
Police brutality: Police brutality hasn't increased since 2015.[2] Even police violence (including incidents where officers were clearly justified in using force) is flat.
Deadly pandemic: Pandemics have been deadly throughout the history of civilization, long before the last couple hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time; many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.[3] Scientific experts, the would-be rulers under progressivism, had an abysmal record at predictions & decision-making during the pandemic.[4]
None of these is a slam dunk the author thinks it is.
>> "Capitalism produced the vaccine in record time"
No.
mRNA vaccines are the result of decades of research with support of and collaboration with government and academia. Even the covid vaccine only happened as fast as it did because Chinese researchers sequenced and released the DNA of the virus for free online.
Researchers sequence SARS-CoV2 variants all the time, all over the world - it's a pandemic after all. The Chinese did some great work, but had they not done it first others would have.
Sorry, I forget this detail is not widely known. They were the first working on it from samples at ground zero, before it was a pandemic. Back when nobody knew anything.
The free and public release gave the world a head start on what was then a very localized thing with little if any spread. Remember: my comment was in response to an attempt to credit capitalism with the speedy development of a vaccine. Capitalism helped, but wasn't what did it.
The CCP was pretty obviously against the release of this gene sequence. Thank God Zhang Youngzhen followed liberal norms of the scientific community and shared it with the world. [0]
Science's triumph began in in liberal societies, and both fed on and accelerated the advance of capitalism. The industrial revolution was essentially a virtuous cycle (maybe a vicious cycle depending on your perspective) of capitalism and scientific knowledge (thermodynamics & mechanics mostly). Sure, the research was going on for decades in universities funded by governments, but once a profitable use for that research presented itself, an effective good utilizing it went into production rapidly.
Yes. So you agree with me that capitalism is a symbiosis with the public systems it depends on and not solely responsible as your comment seemed to indicate. Moderna wouldn't have produced so much so quickly without a government ready to buy up their supply. Many more people would have died, and possibly from more variants, had it not been freely available.
The US would be a breeding ground for variants if most of the population weren't vaccinated, and it wouldn't be if they weren't free in this one exceptional case. Almost 80% of the US has at least one dose compared to the usual ~50% with the flu vaccine. The second dose is ticking up toward 70%.
> many of the excess deaths were associated with central planning.
This is pretty obviously bad logic, you seem to be removing agency from Trump/Biden/Cuomo/Fauci. All of them in varying degrees made terrible decisions, waited too long to bother reacting, etc., and these were things the average person could easily guess would happen while good ideas were often left delayed or unexecuted.
Your rhetoric is nothing more than an attack on the concept of planning at all, which many countries did better just by having half a plan and going through with at least half the plan.
Planning is not a supernatural force that compelled our leaders to act poorly. They had agency and chose poorly.
> Inequality: Yep, this one seems like a consequence of capitalism.
It's not like feudal societies were perfectly equal. There is a genuine question as to whether capitalism tends towards increased inequality over time, perhaps merely as a side effect of its faster rate of innovation, but if you want a reasonable level of "equality" you'll need to look either to pre-modern societies or to ones where redistribution is explicitly practiced.
I saw some research when I was in college that before Deng's reforms in Communist China, the level of income inequality was pretty low. Once the market reforms were enacted, inequality went through the roof.
Markets disproportionately reward those who produce things other people want. That is inherent inequality. The ethical question is how much of that reward could be distributed to others who may actually have a bad lot in life (though my own bias is to doubt the extent to which, barring obvious physical or mental disability, a person is incapable of making her own luck).
The paper you linked about inequality and discretionary bureaucracy seems very specific to the conditions of Indonesia: a highly bureaucratic non-democratic country transitioning to democracy but not “transform[ing] detrimental institutions nor replac[ing] the existing official position of the previous bureaucracy.” It’s making a claim that the “persistence of bureaucratic clientelism” needs to be understood better when studying democracies, but doesn’t seem to be making a claim that clientelism is a driving factor of inequality in all democracies — rather, it’s claiming that it perpetuates inequality in countries that already have clientelist institutions before they become democratic. (Also, “a hallmark of socialist and progressive governance” seems to be your editorializing; the paper suggests a correlation between poor institutional quality and income development, but makes no claim that socialists and progressives automatically make poor institutions. I would posit that “clientelistic political parties in democracies” will wear whatever fig leaf is most likely to get them into strategic political offices: if the country loves socialists, they’ll be socialist, but in a country that loves right-wing populism, they’ll be right-wing populists.)
At least going by the experience we’ve had in America and other Western countries, inequality seems to be an outcome of specifically deregulated capitalism. The whole push toward communism that we saw in the early 20th century was largely a reaction to the capitalism of The Jungle and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and of course, the soaring inequality before the Great Depression. I think big business capitalists don’t give the New Deal the credit it deserves for cutting the American communist movement off at the pass -- changes in regulatory and tax policy shaped a highly-regulated market economy that at least partially flattened the inequality curve. Once we started deregulating all the things in the 1980s, inequality started growing again.
Climate change: Your point is whataboutism. It does not address the issue.
Inequality: Capitalism vs "left wing governments" is apples to oranges. And I don't think the point is that inequality exists so much as rate of growth in inequality.
Police brutality: If it's a problem, and it is, then not getting worse by some measure still doesn't mean it's no longer a problem. The "defund the police" party here in the US has responded to police brutality mostly by increasing police budgets.
Deadly pandemic: That's redundant. We don't have merely annoying pandemics. Many countries independently created vaccines - look up Cuba.
Try to take my arguments charitably. My point about climate change is that the anti-capitalist governments had horrible environmental records during the Cold War (for another instance, see Lake Baikal), and continue do to so today. Liberal societies with capitalist governments were able to eliminate most pollution through increases in efficiency, and the rest was handled by things like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Those leftist anti-capitalist governments were such a failure that most of them don't exist today, so we can't assess them on climate change, but we can extrapolate. If the claim is that climate change is worse because of capitalism, and that we instead need a progressive/socialist turn to get rid of it, then it's fair to ask the record of those systems. That isn't "whataboutism."
A "growth rate of inequality?" Show me the numbers.
My point about police brutality is that it is not increasing, contradicting the original claim.
Russia and China also were quite early to market with their vaccines. Would you trust them?
This appears to be one of the core tenets of the article:
> Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion.
* downvoters - im sorry you dont like what the authors have to say.
Seemingly the only times we haven't had feudal societies coincided with extreme disruption of the economic system such as occurred during the industrial revolution, the expansion of agricultural land in North America, or the rise of corporations in the 1600-1700s.
When economic growth falls to zero the economy becomes zero-sum. Why wouldn't individuals secure sinecures in the form of monopolies or mega corporations ownership?