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NO, IT’S NOT TECHNO-FEUDALISM. IT’S STILL CAPITALISM.

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04.23.2023
 * Capital
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NO, IT’S NOT TECHNO-FEUDALISM. IT’S STILL CAPITALISM.

An interview with Evgeny Morozov

Some thinkers are arguing that capitalism as Marx defined it is over, and we’re
entering something like digital neo-feudalism instead. Not true, argues Evgeny
Morozov. To understand how capitalism operates today, Marxists have to drop the
factory bias.



Depiction of an oath of allegiance to the king in the Book of Privileges of the
City of Barcelona, copy illuminated by Arnau Penna in 1380. (PHAS / Universal
Images Group via Getty Images)

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THE RED AND THE BLACK

Seth Ackerman
Interview by Daniel Denvir

The power of tech and finance, alongside the growing sense that the system is
ruled more by brazen predation than by good old-fashioned labor exploitation,
has thinkers from the Marxist left all the way to the neoliberal and even
neo-reactionary right convinced that we’ve left capitalism entirely and entered
an era of neo-feudalism. In his New Left Review essay “Critique of Techno-Feudal
Reason,” writer Evgeny Morozov argues that this bleak period that we’re living
through is in fact still a thoroughly capitalist one.

Some scholars argue that capitalism is no longer the competitive and innovative
force that secures surplus value through what appears in mystified form to be
voluntarily contracted labor exploitation. Instead, they contend, capitalists
increasingly rely on raw political power to coercively secure capital through
everything from rents to cheap government-provided capital — a means of
extracting the surplus that looks a lot more like feudalism. But Morozov argues
that forms of political dispossession and expropriation, as well as coercive
acts like rent terrorism, are central features of capitalism rather than
aberrations or departures from it. Ultimately, Morozov writes, it’s only an
overly narrow conception of what comprises capitalism and its rules of
reproduction that might lead us to the erroneous conclusion that we’re entering
something like neo-feudalism.

Evgeny Morozov has written several books and essays about technology and
politics. He holds a PhD in the history of science from Harvard and is the
founder of The Syllabus, a knowledge-curation service. His podcast The Santiago
Boys, about the radical history of computing and cybernetic planning in Latin
America, will launch later this year. Morozov sat down with Dan Denvir, host of
the Jacobin podcast the Dig, to talk about the “neo-feudal thesis” and the
endurance of capitalism. You can listen to the conversation here. It has been
edited for length and clarity.


MODES OF PRODUCTION, FEUDALIST AND CAPITALIST

Daniel Denvir

What about the rise of digital technology has caused so many thinkers to believe
that we’re exiting capitalism altogether? And where do other hallmarks of the
neoliberal era, namely financialization and globalization, fit into this
narrative?


Evgeny Morozov

There is this argument — on the Left mostly, but also on the Right — that says
that capitalism is no longer what it used to be. Nobody’s saying that capitalism
was perfect, but I think there’s been some agreement even among its critics,
Marx of course being the foremost of them, that capitalism did result in
innovation of some kind. By subjecting market participants to competition, it
forced them to produce new practices, engage in new techniques of production,
make new products, and to some extent move society forward — with some costs, of
course. Some Marxists would tell you that it would be impossible to move to the
next stage, socialism, without actually passing through capitalism first. We can
bracket out all of that, but the underlying understanding of capitalism has
traditionally been that this system fuels innovation.

Recently, a lot of people have been making this argument that maybe what we are
looking at right now is a system that’s stagnating, that is dominated by
rentiers, that has lost its innovative edge of some kind. They attribute that to
many different dimensions of the global economy, some of them having to do with
finance, and others with the fact that there is more and more money that has to
be paid for intellectual property of various kinds in patents, trademarks,
royalty fees, and so forth. Certain services like artificial intelligence have
become central to how many companies operate. Some point out the dominance of
the real estate sector. There are all sorts of trends and tendencies in the
contemporary system that result in something other than innovation.

That results in a couple of very powerful people using all sorts of
extra-economic means instead of traditional market competition, like relying on
the power of law or relying on the fact that they have monopolized access to
certain types of knowledges or data. They’re basically using that privileged
access to make money without necessarily investing anything new in this
innovative dynamic that has been associated with capitalism.

That’s the basic argument, but some people take it even further. They don’t say
that this is just some kind of stagnation within capitalism, or some kind of a
rentier turn within capitalism. They say it’s actually a return of feudalism.
This new regime, it’s not just feudal, it’s actually techno-feudal, in the sense
that technology plays a key role in enabling these new tendencies.

Daniel Denvir

This debate on whether we’re entering a new feudal period and leaving capitalism
behind rests in significant part on how we understand those two terms. And both
concepts have been intensively discussed and fiercely debated in Marxism,
particularly in the last sixty years or so.

So let’s start by defining feudalism and capitalism in Marxist terms, and also
what Marx and various Marxists have identified as the key differences between
these two modes of production.

Evgeny Morozov

Your question already contains an answer, because for Marxists, by and large,
both feudalism and capitalism are modes of production. It’s not just some kind
of a vague socioeconomic regime. It’s not something defined primarily by how
much political or social rights you enjoy, of what kind. For Marxists the
difference between feudalism and capitalism is primarily a difference in the
mode of production. That’s one of the epistemic breaks that Marx makes. He
basically theorizes this idea that social systems should be understood and
compared based on this concept of the mode of production.

So if you look at feudalism, essentially we are talking about the way in which
the system manages to generate and divide an economic surplus. And by and large,
that’s what a mode of production is. This is maybe not the most orthodox of
Marxist definitions, but we are essentially talking about the way in which
surpluses are produced and divided. And then additional reflections, of course,
could be made about how all of that relates to the broader philosophy of history
of some kind.

This is where the exciting part in Marxism and in Marx comes out. Marx makes
this argument that it’s possible that there are certain features within
capitalism that would not allow us to develop all the innovative dynamics that
germinate within it to the maximum, because of its social relations of
production. Certain classes control certain technologies, and it’s essential to
control certain means of production, as Marxists would put it. And because of
that control, you cannot achieve the degree of social progress that you would
expect of a given state of technology or of society. This is why socialism, and
communism eventually as the ultimate mode of production, would be necessary.

But if you were to go back to feudalism as one of the earlier modes of
production, you’re mostly talking about peasant economies in which peasants
either control or have access to their own means of subsistence. By and large,
we don’t even use the term means of production. We are talking mostly about
means of subsistence. Peasants might have a field or some kind of a garden or
other plot of land, and they work on that with some autonomy. Because of
political arrangements, somebody comes periodically once a month or once a year
and essentially expropriates or confiscates whatever surplus that the peasants
might be producing and can part ways with. That doesn’t happen through some kind
of backdoor, invisible arrangement. Nobody’s being tricked. It’s done by force.

There is, of course, a political system of power that shapes how that surplus is
appropriated. There are all sorts of gradations within that system, and we don’t
have to go into them, but essentially feudal lords, because of the political
power they enjoy, also enjoy a certain degree of protection. There is no
competition between them, and because of that they face very few incentives to
actually innovate, to cut costs, to introduce new technologies or laborsaving
techniques.

So from the Marxist point of view, very often the system results in some kind of
social and economic stagnation. We can argue and debate about how the transition
between feudalism and capitalism happens, but importantly for some theorists,
and especially Robert Brenner, whom I discuss at length in the texts I’ve
written, capitalism is marked by very different dynamics. It essentially pits
what used to be feudal lords in competition with one another. They can no longer
rely on confiscating surplus from the political subjects under their control.
They have to pay a salary or wage for the subjects’ labor.

Capitalism is marked by very different dynamics. It essentially pits what used
to be feudal lords in competition with one another.

This incentivizes them to cut costs by essentially automating as much of that
work as possible. So capitalism becomes this system that essentially
systematizes the production of innovation. And this is how we account for
immense advances in economic development over the past two centuries associated
with industrialization.

So that would be the major difference for certain schools of Marxist thinkers.
It’s really this emphasis on innovation as a structural feature of capitalist
competition that comes very strongly in capitalism as compared to the feudalist
system before.

Daniel Denvir

The theory you described portrays a really hard-and-fast distinction between
those two means of surplus extraction. How does that, in your view, lead some
astray in their analysis of the present political-economic order?

Evgeny Morozov

First of all, I’m not a historian of feudalism by any means. I’m drawing on
secondary literature. So all I know about the mechanisms and means of surplus
extraction under feudalism I know from the work of marvelous historians of
feudalism and capitalism. Maybe it’s easier to start with capitalism and then
draw the distinctions of feudalism.

So in a traditional Marxist account, it’s labor that we have to analyze. And
there is something very peculiar about labor as a commodity that accounts for
this immense production and circulation of surplus value under the capitalist
system. We probably don’t have to go and repeat everything that Marx says about
exploitation and the way in which surplus value is generated in the work
process. But essentially the takeaway from that Marxist analysis is that it
makes labor a commodity, and labor is not like any other commodity. It’s not
priced the way it should be priced.

If you look at the system structurally, you see that there are certain processes
built into it that result in labor being exploited, and value essentially
flowing from labor to capital, or from workers to those who own the means of
production. But that’s not happening explicitly. And nobody is forcing you.
Nobody is beating you up, at least under properly working capitalism. The ideal
type of capitalism is clean. That’s not to say it doesn’t have to rely on police
power, or it doesn’t have to rely on people starving. Even in completely
perfect, ideal conditions, the way the capitalist system works is that you go
and sell your labor and somehow still as a laborer you are being shortchanged.
The bottom line is that all of that happens invisibly, and it’s all legal. It’s
all clean.

In feudalism, it’s the opposite. The surplus extraction happens quite visibly,
so nobody is in denial about it. You would go and harvest and work in your
field, and then somebody would come at the end of the month or year and take
away whatever’s left that you have not consumed to reproduce yourself. And
again, that will happen in a much more violent, explicit, visible way. Of
course, it could be justified through all sorts of means, by religious
traditions, by appeals to ideology. There are all sorts of ways to justify why
that needs to happen, so it doesn’t have to be violent all the time. But what
backs it up is essentially force.

In capitalism exploitation is supposed to happen in a much cleaner way. The
workers are supposed to be convinced that they’re not being screwed.

Again, I’m not saying that capitalism functions without the state, where there
is no force making up the contract, but in capitalism it is supposed to happen
in a much cleaner way. The workers are supposed to be convinced that they’re not
being screwed.

Daniel Denvir

You argue that some Marxists believe that we’ve returned to feudalism because of
all this raw political power exercised in recent years and decades to
redistribute wealth to the capitalist class: in other words, brazen exercises of
expropriation rather than this ideal type of clean exploitation.

And you write that this approach and these theorists who increasingly focus on
political expropriation see

> the capitalist system as driven solely by its internal dynamics of competition
> and exploitation, with political expropriation lying firmly outside its
> boundaries. On this reading, capital accumulation is driven solely by ‘clean’,
> economic means of surplus extraction. The existence of extraneous,
> expropriation-enabling processes — violence, racism, dispossession,
> carbonization — is not denied, but they should be analytically bracketed out
> as non-capitalist extras; they may have abetted particular capitalists in
> their individual efforts to appropriate surplus value, but they stand outside
> the process of capitalist accumulation as such.

What particular currents of Marxist thought have historically advanced this
analysis that you just summarized? And what are the examples of political
expropriation that they have in mind? And then finally, how does that tradition,
in your view, leave Marxists unprepared to comprehend the changes that we’re
currently seeing in the political economic order today?

Evgeny Morozov

This was and remains the dominant strand and the dominant interpretation within
Marxism. So if you really look at orthodox Marxists — people who really go and
study Capital and treat it as their primary text, meaning they don’t do
deviations into the Eighteenth Brumaire or into the Grundrisse or into all of
the many other supplementary texts by Marx and Engels — they would still hold on
to this position that essentially capitalism is a system that works through and
expands through competition, and that essentially everything else that happens
does so in order for capitalism to exploit labor more efficiently and
effectively, and get more of the labor surplus.

A lot of Marxists that are heterodox would also tacitly subscribe to that, even
though they would deepen the analysis a little bit. For example, we’ve seen a
lot of emphasis in the last few decades on the importance of social
reproduction. But for many of those theorists, social reproduction itself is
almost the central part of capitalism. They analyze what happens outside of the
proverbial factory, but with the view of explaining how all this other stuff
like women’s work and the family essentially makes capital and capitalism in the
factory — in the actual sphere of production — a little bit more productive and
effective.

So I would say this was and remains the mainstream view for Marxists. Anybody
who challenges that view will be probably excommunicated and treated as a
post-Marxist at best, as a neo-Marxist potentially, and as a non-Marxist also
quite likely.

Some people I cite in the piece, like Nancy Fraser for example, have tried to
show how one can stay within the Marxist tradition and still be faithful to this
dialectical process, an interaction between exploitation — which is the primary
dynamic of capitalism, the way orthodox Marxists see it — and appropriation,
which for most Marxists functions purely to enable exploitation. But we don’t
really know what it would mean for Marxists to accept both of those dynamics as
playing an equally important role in the constitution of capitalism, as opposed
to appropriation being secondary to the exploitation of labor, which they would
see as the still the primary dynamic.


PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION, THE GLOBAL SOUTH, AND DISPOSSESSION

Daniel Denvir

You write,

> The other option, analytically messier but more intuitively convincing, is to
> acknowledge that capitalism — at least the historical capitalism that we know,
> not the purist capitalism of abstract models — is unthinkable without all
> those extraneous processes. One doesn’t have to deny the centrality of
> exploitation to the capitalist system to see how racism or patriarchy has
> helped to create the conditions of its possibility. Would the capitalist
> system in the Global North have developed as it did if cheap resources had not
> been methodically expropriated from the Global South?

This analysis has historically been one made by many, but above all by
world-systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein. What do such theorists
contribute to Marxism? And why has it been their study of capitalism as a
geographically uneven historical and global process that led them to these
particular insights?


Evgeny Morozov

It depends on the vantage point from which this analysis is written. For a lot
of world-systems theorists, when they were doing that analysis in the late 1960s
or early 1970s, they saw themselves as affiliated to some extent with the
efforts of the nonaligned movement, made up of countries in Latin America,
Africa, Asia — countries that in one way or another were on the periphery of the
world system and not at its core, which is where most of the analysis of Marx
and subsequent Marxists had focused before.

Most of this theorization of capitalism happened in the United Kingdom. This is
what Marx analyzes. He analyzes the industrialization process there and how
capitalism develops, and he draws a lot of insights. But the problem is that
those insights of nineteenth-century and eighteenth-century Britain, they’re
very hard to apply to twentieth-century Brazil or Chile or Vietnam.

This is where people like Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi
start to point out that there are huge gaps in the account that traditional
Marxism gives you. They try to think about capitalist development from the
perspective of the periphery and not the core. They are not just making this
analysis because they participate in academic debates (though of course many of
them do), but also because they are involved with many socialist and
left-leaning governments in those countries, which was still possible before the
neoliberal era.

They are trying to think about it from a very practical perspective: Who are
your allies? If you really need to think about some kind of alternative to
capitalist development, would it be the bourgeoisie locally and nationally,
because you need to first have a capitalist revolution in your country before
you can have a socialist one? Or are the bourgeoisie already fully integrated
into the world capitalist system, with their own way of getting by, and so to be
essentially discarded as some kind of a revolutionary force?

So a lot of these questions and critiques of traditional Marxism and its
understanding of feudalism and capitalism come from very practical concerns.
These concerns are not necessarily raised by the workers’ movement in England or
France or Germany or for that matter the United States, which is where the
Marxist thinkers in the core of the capitalist system have traditionally
generated the ideas from.

For ten or fifteen years, from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, all these
countries were told, including by the US government, that they have to
industrialize and they have to build their own industry. Of course they tried to
do that, but then they discovered that just industrializing doesn’t mean
anything if you don’t have your own industry to build capital goods. If you have
to import all your capital goods from abroad, if you have to pay for patents, if
you have to pay for royalty fees, if you have to pay for capital and for many
other things, you essentially end up in a dependent relationship. And because of
this dependent relationship, money keeps on flowing to those who own capital —
and not just to owners. Of course the dominant groups in the center in North
America and in Western Europe profit from these underdeveloped countries, but it
even goes to labor.

One of the arguments that a lot of these thinkers in Latin America made at the
time was that because trade unions are so much stronger in the Global North,
every time there is a crisis and a downturn, the labor movement in the North
doesn’t abandon its gains, but rather holds onto them. And the workers in the
Global South see their wages decline and suffer. So for them, even the workers
in the Global North would be part of some kind of rentier class, which wasn’t
really a huge issue. They were not trying to sow some kind of a discord between
the Global North labor movement and workers in the Global South. The point is
that they understood rentierism as a dynamic that was already built into the
global capitalist system.

From a traditional or classical Marxist point of view, proponents of
structuralism and dependency theory in Latin America were not properly Marxist,
because they were talking about countries exploiting each other. There were all
kinds of intricate arguments, but ultimately, it was said that this is not a
Marxist theory, if by a Marxist theory we mean a theory that puts the
exploitation of labor at its core. You cannot start with the exploitation of
labor as such and arrive directly at the theory of international exploitation of
one country by another, which is precisely what dependency theory and
structuralism were arguing.

People on the Marxist side of this debate are to some extent justified in saying
that whatever Wallerstein or Gunder Frank say about Marxism is not valid within
the proper Marxist theoretical edifice. But what they fail to notice is that
these people are not trying to reflect on Marxism. They’re trying to reflect on
the alternative paths of development for Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia,
Africa, and so forth. And Marxism was one of the instruments they used. But the
point was not to produce the most definitive account of what Marxists should
think like.

Meanwhile orthodox corners tend to police their territory and essentially say,
“No, we don’t want that in the history books. Don’t pollute our analytical
frameworks, because if you do, we’ll lose sight of what makes capitalism tick.
And if we lose sight of what makes capitalism tick, we’ll never build the
socialism we want, with even better dynamics that produce innovation.”

Daniel Denvir

This brings us to the conversation over how capitalism operates today, and
particularly these two historical debates over the transition from feudalism to
capitalism. First is the Dobb-Sweezy debate, which began in the 1940s, and
second is the Brenner debate of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Both debates were in part, you write, about “the centrality of ‘primitive
accumulation’ to the origins, as well as subsequent developments, of
capitalism.” First, what is primitive accumulation? And then, what was at stake
in these debates over determining its role in capitalism, both historically and
in an ongoing manner?

Evgeny Morozov

Again, it’s a very contentious subject among Marxist and near-Marxists or the
Marxist-family theorists. Some of that has to do with inconsistency that one
finds in Marx’s own texts about what primitive accumulation is and what role it
had played. That’s a debate that continues to this day, with close readings of
Marx and debates over footnotes and secondary sources. I don’t see myself as a
Marxologist of any kind. I ventured into that debate mostly because I thought I
needed to contextualize the current discussion.

My understanding, having spent some time in that universe as a tourist as
opposed to a full-time resident, is that essentially the debate is as follows.
You have some people reading Marx to be saying that before capitalism acquires
this innovative dynamic whereby competition forces capitalists to cut costs and
invent new things, capitalists have to engage in a certain initial, much
messier, and more violent process of capital accumulation. That required a very
different set of tools, techniques, and means, if you will. And that was kind of
like feudalism. You wouldn’t even recognize it from feudalism if it did not lead
to this much cleaner, systematic, innovative dynamic that doesn’t need to be
violent.

Essentially a miracle happens. I mean, of course, there are ways in which
Marxists will tell you how exactly that happens, but it’s essentially a story of
a miracle where the traditional bloody, violent feudal dynamics eventually give
rise to this proper, non-primitive, much more sophisticated accumulation.

So you can think about enclosures of land and property. That is initially very
violent, and there are a lot of people who are unhappy about it. But eventually
everybody accepts that. And you start having, in some cases, market players
trade the rights to land, to means of production, to ideas, and everything
becomes a commodity of some kind. And we know that commodities are traded in the
market, and it’s so very clean and proper.

I must say that of course Marx wrote about these things in German, and often
when he was referring to concepts like primitive accumulation, it was actually
discussing the work of other people, including Adam Smith. Occasionally you’ll
see terms like “so-called” attached to the term primitive accumulation. So there
is also some debate as to whether Marx actually gave that much primacy and
importance to this term to begin with.

But the alternative reading of primitive accumulation would be to say that Marx
did not actually mean to delineate it as some kind of a historical stage, after
which capitalism was supposed to work frictionless and perfectly in a clean way
without recourse to violence. And that this secondary dynamic, where you have to
rely on force and on expropriation or appropriation of some kind, is ongoing. So
it did not end centuries ago, it’s still with us. Maybe it’s less visible. Maybe
we don’t recognize it as capitalism proper. But it’s there and essentially made
the central counterpart, if you will, to the widely recognizable,
exploitation-driven dynamic of accumulation.

Daniel Denvir

I’ll point out the two Marx quotes that, while not necessarily contradictory,
point in different interpretive directions. On the one hand he wrote:

> The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
> entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
> conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
> for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era
> of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of
> primitive accumulation.

But on the other hand he wrote: “The veiled slavery of the wage workers in
Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.” This
suggests a more permanent relationship between expropriation in the periphery
and exploitation in the core. And you could make that not only a matter of
global core versus periphery, but you could map that onto various levels and
scales of core and periphery, you know, both from within a nation to within a
metropolitan area.

Evgeny Morozov

Some thinkers like David Harvey introduce yet another actor into the scene, so
to speak. And they point to neoliberalism, which they then define as something
that is marked by the rise of “accumulation by dispossession.” For Harvey, to
some extent, it’s an elegant and radical way of saying that a primitive
accumulation is ongoing. But having read his Marx really well, he grasps that
the primary dynamic of capitalism is that of innovation. Whatever its costs are,
innovation is there, and most Marxists will recognize it as such.

Neoliberalism is a rather ill-defined concept that you never encounter in Marx’s
works. As such, it comes to perform this very interesting function, which allows
many academics and followers of Harvey to essentially recognize that there is
this redistributive dynamic inside the capitalist system that results in the
poor having their money or resources or income channeled to the rich, but not
through exploitation. It happens through other means. It happens through rent,
austerity, intellectual property. If you go through some of Harvey’s early
books, he gives you very long lists of every single technique of making money in
the world at the time, many of which do not rely on classical exploitation of
labor and the conditions of wage labor in some factory.

I think it allows a lot of academics to operate and talk about capitalism and
some of the perverse dynamics that they see in it — mostly from the perspective
of the Global North, because the Global South has its own way to account for it
through dependency theory and similar frameworks. So there are certain strands
of leftist Marxist and neo-Marxist academia in the Global North that essentially
account for this without having to bring in a term like neo-feudalism or
techno-feudalism, because neoliberalism performs that function.

You can essentially blame all the lack of dynamism and innovation that you would
normally associate with a capitalist system on neoliberalism. It’s a bizarre
argument, but it’s also not bizarre because ultimately it does what Marx does in
his own work: it pays hidden compliments to capitalism as this extremely dynamic
system that revolutionizes social relations and generates innovation but can’t
take it to the next level, which requires a different mode of production, namely
socialism.

You are subscribing to a relatively charitable view of capitalism as a
progressive, innovative social system that just runs into certain limits because
of class relations.

By putting all this blame on neoliberalism, it kind of gives this illusion that
once we move into a post-neoliberal era of some kind, maybe we’ll recover
capitalism, and maybe from there also move to socialism. I don’t think that a
lot of people who use it in relation to dispossession see these implications
necessarily. But if you want to be theoretically and logically coherent, I think
you must see that essentially you are subscribing to a relatively charitable
view of capitalism as a progressive, innovative social system that just runs
into certain limits because of class relations.

Daniel Denvir

This emphasis on what is new about capitalism has sort of overshadowed what’s
the same about capitalism. And so we hear neoliberalism a lot more than we just
hear plain old capitalism.

Evgeny Morozov

I think it’s just so useful to be thinking about this issue while keeping the
Global South and this prehistory of dependency theory and structuralism in mind.
Because if you really put them on your intellectual map, then the account of
neoliberalism that Harvey gives — starting in New York in the 1970s with the
fiscal crisis and then Chile and everything else — is very hard to actually
reconcile with the fact that Latin American economists would already tell you
that the global capitalist system has rentier-like redistributive dispossession
dynamics in the 1950s and 1960s, way before the Chicago Boys arrive in Chile and
neoliberalism begins.

The reason why they have to arrive in Chile is because Salvador Allende wants to
get Chile away from the path it’s on. But it’s on the capitalist path, not the
neoliberal path. And it’s within capitalism itself, from the perspective of the
Global South, that you have these very bizarre, peculiar dynamics that you
cannot describe if you just use Marxist philosophy of history and modes of
production and nothing else.

Daniel Denvir

You argue that when scholars don’t account for the insights of, say,
world-systems theorists, and don’t leave enough room for primitive accumulation
or expropriation in their definition of capitalism, that that leaves these
analysts vulnerable — in the face of brazen uses of state power after the 2008
financial crisis, or again during the pandemic to redistribute wealth to a
capitalist class and stabilize the system — to believing that we no longer live
under capitalism at all.

And you argue that in doing so, Brenner has ironically converged with Harvey’s
analysis of accumulation by dispossession having become the dominant form of
capitalist accumulation. That’s ironic, you write, because Brenner was initially
a staunch critic of Harvey, precisely on the grounds that Harvey overemphasized
expropriation over exploitation as the means for securing the surplus under
capitalism.

Evgeny Morozov

Brenner wrote a very critical review of one of Harvey’s books on imperialism, in
which he said that a concept like accumulation by dispossession makes very
little sense. But faced with the evidence that Brenner himself has been looking
at with regards to the US economy, it’s very hard for him to reach a conclusion
other than that this dynamic of innovation is not to be seen to the same extent
that you would see in, I don’t know, seventeenth-century England. But again, a
lot of it comes from having a very partial view of the market, and a very
partial view of what constitutes innovation and what role the technology
companies and big tech and digital platforms play in all of this.

You can look at absolute investment figures. There are ways in which you can
measure how much capital is being invested in capital goods, and how much of it
is just consumed in luxury goods. And there are all sorts of ways in which you
can get an estimate of what capitalists think about the future and how likely
they are to remain capitalists. So you can make certain guesses and projections
from that. But I argue that this debate, as it has been carried out in the
Global North, has lost sight of technology, which wasn’t at all the case with
dependency theory and with structuralism.

This debate, as it has been carried out in the Global North, has lost sight of
technology, which wasn’t at all the case with dependency theory and with
structuralism.

Because of their own peculiar industrialization needs, they knew that if you are
buying some advanced tractor or some advanced mining equipment from the United
States, you will have to pay fees for using it. You won’t be able to just build
it in-house, because then you’ll need to pay royalty fees and pay for
trademarks. So technology was very present in the minds of the people theorizing
these issues from the Global South. But not in the Global North, which makes it
very hard to make sense of what Google, Facebook, and Amazon are doing.


TECHNOLOGY, CAPITALISM, AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

Daniel Denvir

A lot of the literature in the debate about capitalism today and the role of
technology focuses specifically on the rents extracted by new tech
conglomerates. But technology companies spend a lot of money on research and
development, too — classic forms of investment that would indicate that they’re
behaving like a typical capitalist firm. You write that if the tech giants

> really are lazy rentiers who are ripping everyone off by exploiting
> intellectual-property rights and network effects — why do they invest so much
> money in what can only be described as production of some kind? What kind of
> rentiers do that? Alphabet’s R&D spending in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 was
> $16.6 billion, $21.4 billion, $26 billion and $27.5 billion respectively. Does
> that not count as ‘lifting a finger’?

And then you also note that Amazon alone employs more people than the entire US
residential construction industry. You observe that Google, Amazon, and Facebook
require a vast physical infrastructure. How does all that good old-fashioned
materiality get mystified? Why is it important to understand Google not merely,
or even primarily, as a landlord and more as a traditional capitalist firm? And
why, when theorists of neo-feudalism look at some of these R&D budgets or vast
physical infrastructure, are they so unmoved?


Evgeny Morozov

I don’t think that there is a very strong account of the firm or the corporation
in traditional Marxist theory. I mean, Marxism is not supposed to be a theory of
the firm, and it doesn’t really give you a set of criteria for differentiating
some firms that are capitalist from other actors that are feudal. For Marx and
Marxism, of course, it’s the unit of analysis, it’s capital, it’s a social
relation. It’s not necessarily this firm or that firm. So even to speak of firms
as being feudal or capitalist in the orthodox tradition is a bit strange.

Most of the attribution that happens now flows first from identifying the
dominant mode of production, which would be the capitalist or feudalist. And
then from there you make the attribution and say that the main actors in this
mode of production have no choice but to be either feudal, if they are talking
about feudalism, or capitalist, in the case of capitalism. If you start from a
very vulgar, banal characterization of the current era as techno-feudal, then of
course you have to assume that its main voices or its main actors or enablers
must themselves be somehow feudal.

And what are the conclusions that can be draw from that? That some people and
companies have managed to grab some important chunk of the general intellect for
themselves. They have managed to enact some kind of information enclosure around
it, which is behaving the way a monopoly would behave. And they’re just resting
on their laurels. They’re not investing into anything. They just there for the
rents.

If you look at the technology sector, it just doesn’t conform to the stereotype
that you would expect from the main representatives of this new feudal economy.

One of the things I try to do in my essay is show the numbers and the behavior
of the firms as firms. If you look at the technology sector, it just doesn’t
conform to the stereotype that you would expect from the main representatives of
this new feudal economy. They look much more like representatives of capitalism.

There is, of course, a less vulgar version of the techno-feudalist argument: the
version of Cédric Durand, the French Marxist economist and thinker, who has a
more nuanced take on it. He doesn’t subscribe to this vulgar kind of equation
between a mode of production and firms. He almost arrives at this middle ground
where the firms can be kind of capitalist and invest and expand and have all
sorts of behaviors you would associate with the typical capitalist firm — but at
the same time, the net result of the activities on the economy is to some extent
equivalent to what you would expect from feudal actors or from it being a feudal
economy. So essentially it’s a huge tax on innovation, and overall the dynamic
is not favorable to the kind of accumulation sort of innovation that theorists
like Brenner associated with capitalism.

Daniel Denvir

Why do people see rentierism everywhere and then contend that this is the end of
capitalism? Why is monopolization leading to a decline or in some cases the
elimination of competition deemed to be something new about capitalism?
Monopoly, of course, has a very long history in capitalism. Lenin and others
famously identified monopoly capital as leading to World War I.

Evgeny Morozov

I don’t think that necessarily their argument is that it’s novel. But I think
the reason why the argument is so popular has to do with the fact that at the
end of the day, it’s a moral critique. Interestingly it’s one we would normally
expect from the Right rather than from the Left, in that it basically tells
these former capitalists that they need to work harder, that they need to stop
resting on their laurels and become the good old capitalists they used to be.

I understand this critique coming from the neoliberal right and from the people
who do love capitalism, but it’s a very strange position for the Left to take.
And my hunch is that a lot of it masks the inability to actually make sense of
contemporary capitalism and to make any kind of propositions in terms of what
the actual agenda of the Left should be for a different system, for a different
mode of production, for different societies.

So we end up essentially saying that we can maybe rebuild some kind of welfare
capitalism that we once had, and we just need to make sure that capitalists go
back to being the responsible actors that they once were. And maybe once we get
that going, we will actually return to the good old days.

Daniel Denvir

The left neo-feudalist argument that you take the most seriously, as you
mentioned earlier, is that put forward by Durand. Do you disagree with Durand
that capitalism has changed in important ways over the past half century of
neoliberalism and financialization? Or do you simply disagree with his argument
that these changes mean that we’re no longer living under capitalism?

Evgeny Morozov

Before I start, let me try to offer my critique of this more orthodox Marxist
obsession with production and making sure that production happens at all costs
by channeling finance, technology, and everything else into it. I do think that
Marxism, as a body of thought, has a certain factory bias, and this has to do
with the conditions under which Marxism was generated.

It was generated in a certain setting in England and under certain conditions.
And there is this assumption when you think about capitalism as accumulation via
innovation, as Brenner calls it, that the only place where you can have
innovation at scale is inside the traditional production process of a factory.
It’s the default assumption that Marxists make. And then the entire question
becomes about whether our factories and capitalist enterprises are really
producing and innovating, whether our technology system is supporting them by
making it easier to invest into capital goods or make capital goods, and whether
our financial system is there to serve the needs of expanding production and of
buying new capital goods.

I do think that Marxism, as a body of thought, has a certain factory bias, and
this has to do with the conditions under which Marxism was generated.

It’s coherent, but only if you think that there is no other possible way for
large-scale transformative innovation to occur in society. That was, in fact,
the case in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Is it the case in the
twenty-first century? I’m not so sure. And this is where I think even the
Italian autonomists got way ahead of most orthodox Marxists by pointing out that
a lot of truly transformative learning processes, innovative processes, and
discovery processes that have happened in society have come from the bottom up,
from collaboration. There is more to life than just producing things in a
factory.

If you want to build a theory about how to make airplanes or how to cure COVID,
clearly you’re not going to say, “By talking to my neighborhood buddies, I’m
going to invent a COVID vaccine.” So Marx has a point for certain types of
inventions and innovations. But I think it shouldn’t completely blind us to the
fact that technology is there, artificial intelligence is there, cloud computing
is there, quantum computing is there. How would our process of creation,
innovation, and discovery look if we actually assumed that there is more to
generating new knowledge than just inventing them in factory settings, whether
the factory is a communist, socialist, or capitalist one?

With some notable exceptions, very few Marxist theorists have consistently
thought about this problem. They’ve ignored it, because it doesn’t have to do
with production. It doesn’t have to do with conveyor belts, making cars. You
read Brenner and that’s what it’s all about. It’s about cars, and it’s about
cars because historically it’s been about cars. This is what happens to Japan.
This is what happens to Germany. That’s what happens to South Korea. And we
basically want to make sure that we can have this twenty-first-century socialism
built with the 1950s car industry in mind. I just find it so regressive. I don’t
want to say reactionary, but to me it’s a lost opportunity. Clearly the
resources are there, it’s just that there are no Marxists thinking about how to
use them for something other than making cars in a 1950s factory.

So when I criticize somebody like Durand, I approach it from this perspective,
even though I don’t make it explicit in the essay. I approach it partly from
this critique that maybe our theory of socialism as a kind of sustained effort
of generating innovation differently is already so biased by capitalist dynamics
that we are looking in the wrong places.

Now, if we put that aside, then I do agree with Durand, by and large, that there
are certain changes that have occurred in the global economy over the last
thirty or forty years that may have resulted in certain stagnating tendencies —
partly because of the shift of power to the financial sector, partly because of
the fact that the financial sector is not as incentivized to engage in the kind
of innovation-friendly accumulation that a theory of industrial capitalism
suggests. I am very much on board with all of that.

The reason why I thought it was worth bringing Durand’s account of the global
financial industry, and the global economy from the financial perspective, into
the picture is because his account of the digital industry and of Silicon Valley
essentially seems to be an extension and replication of the neo-feudalist
argument, only now he is looking at digital platforms and not financial ones.
And there is very little that he sees in terms of this redeeming
innovation-friendly dynamic. But he did kind of acknowledge what’s possible in
the financial sphere when we shift to technology. By and large, the situation is
grim. It’s really full-blown feudalism of some kind.

Daniel Denvir

Where does Brenner’s view fit in here, that the “long-term stagnation of the US
economy in conditions of global manufacturing over-capacity has led powerful
elements of the American ruling class to abandon their interest in productive
investment and turn instead to the upward redistribution of wealth by political
means.”

You mentioned that you were sympathetic to Durand’s argument around stagnation.
Do you agree that the root of that stagnation is in part in some sort of global
manufacturing overcapacity?

Evgeny Morozov

I think these accounts are not mutually exclusive. So you have the Brennerian
account emphasizing overcapacity and all of the crisis that happens because of
the structural dynamics built into the global economy. There is always a new
challenger, which then comes in and makes your investments in productive
capacity obsolete because it can produce cheaper. This is an internal feature of
the capitalist economy for Brenner.

You can reconcile it with a more historical account of the last thirty, forty,
or fifty years and argue it’s a historical feature of the capitalist system, and
thinkers like Joanna Regier would argue precisely that. It’s just that we move
in long cycles, and it takes three hundred years for that stage of
financialization to settle. And it’s inevitable, just like it’s inevitable that
your car manufacturing capacity will become obsolete once your neighbor develops
it with better and cheaper technologies.

So you can reconcile the two. In defense of Brenner and people who follow his
approach, you can see that ultimately he’s trying to explain the laws of motion,
as he would put it, of the capitalist system. And it’s all correct to some
extent. Some people actually argue that it doesn’t account enough for labor, and
the way that labor contests all this and moves across borders to produce cheaper
and faster and more efficiently. But that’s not the problem I identify in my
account.

My problem with that account is that you can be a fantastic analyst of all these
decisions to reallocate capital across borders, seeking more efficient and more
profitable investment opportunities, and it still wouldn’t give you any good
idea what another system and another mode of production should be like other
than just saying, Well, we’ll now run our global car industry under socialism in
a more efficient and rational manner. Because for a lot of socialists and
Marxists, that’s what you want. You want to make sure that you run everything in
a way that is less turbulent, and you make sure that there is less turbulence by
planning for a rational deployment of resources.

I am not saying that that’s all that follows from Brenner. But as a horizon,
that just seems very little to me, and maybe it’s not really even what we should
be insisting on. It’s great as an analysis of the contemporary conjuncture. I’m
not denying that at all. But it just fails to excite, and it fails to excite
precisely because it has no use for more information technology other than just
this supporting role for making cars or flying cars or whatever the next cool
thing will be then.

I’m still not entirely convinced that making sure that our socialist car
production is more efficient than under capitalism is necessarily a good
deployment of our cognitive and political resources.

As long as you cannot imagine a way of generating creativity, innovation, and
discovery out of the stuff of everyday life and not just of working in the
factory, I think you are not doing Marxism and socialism properly. I know a lot
of Marxists would disagree with me, and they would say that this is just all
frivolous thinking about castles in the air. But alas, I guess I’m still not
entirely convinced that making sure that our socialist car production is more
efficient than under capitalism is necessarily a good deployment of our
cognitive and political resources.

Daniel Denvir

You write that we finally need to resolve the Brenner debate, and that to do so
we need to theorize capitalism so that forms of dispossession, expropriation,
and rent figure not just as things that are exceptional to capitalism, but
rather as central to its real historical operation.

You write that Fraser has among the best resolutions on offer, and also that
Jason Moore, a student of Wallerstein and Arrighi,

> may have formulated the new consensus when he wrote that ‘capitalism thrives
> when islands of commodity production and exchange can appropriate oceans of
> potentially Cheap Natures — outside the circuit of capital but essential to
> its operation.’ This holds, of course, not only for Cheap Natures — there are
> many other activities and processes to appropriate — so these ‘oceans’ are
> broader than Moore suggests.

Why is it that analyzing the relationship between capitalism and nature, in
particular, provides such a powerful tool to understand the system as a whole
and to figure out what to do about it?


Evgeny Morozov

Here ultimately is the battle for defining what capitalism is, and how extensive
and historical and massive the definition is allowed to be. And as a byproduct
of this mission, we also have to start asking questions like: Why are we even
doing this exercise? Is it because we expect some concrete, specific change and
intervention to come forward? Maybe new configurations of social actors, maybe
new interpretations of innovation? Or do we want this so that we can deploy the
older blocks and forces and theories in a more effective manner, but against new
targets?

I think this is an unresolved tension inside Marxism or leftism generally.
Ultimately, given the struggles by various social movements and the fact of
climate catastrophe, we are paying more attention to intellectual voices coming
from the Global South. We are beginning to understand that maybe their problems
need to be understood with frameworks that go beyond and transcend the
conventional Marxist frameworks without abandoning them, but maybe mixing them
with something else.

The Global South’s problems need to be understood with frameworks that go beyond
and transcend the conventional Marxist frameworks without abandoning them, but
maybe mixing them with something else.

The aggregation of all of these factors, I think, has made the more orthodox
Brennerian position very hard to defend. Because it basically prevents you from
seeking the kind of alliances that are necessary, and from understanding what is
going on in parts of the world that you have not thought about integrating in
your struggles previously. It prevents you from doing that, and it prevents you
from new sorts of claims about social injustice and dispossession. It prevents
you from having an actually proper historical account of how capitalism
developed differently in different parts of the world, and how those differences
and the exploitation of these differences was actually constitutive of the
current world system.

Without having this more enriched view of the world system and of the global
economy, how are we supposed to have a proper evaluation of the progressive or
reactionary force of tech entrepreneurs? Are they the harbingers of progress or
are they the harbingers of reaction? Who are these people? You cannot answer
these questions within just the national context. You need the international
historical context for that, and you need to understand all the interconnections
to the digital sector, to energy, to raw materials, to extractivism of all sorts
of foodstuffs and whatnot.

This is where I just think it’s clear that we’re not going to resolve the
Brenner debate in a way that would give us a framework that will be as clean and
as analytically efficient as the Brenner one. Clearly, that’s not what
Wallerstein and others were aiming at, and that’s why they define their own
system as historical capitalism, whether or not the traditional Brennerian
objections against that view hold. Brenner, just to remind the listeners who may
not have read those exchanges of the 1970s, accused Wallerstein of engaging in
neo-Smithian perversions.

At the end of the day, should it matter to people who are generally concerned
with the emancipation of the Global South, with social movements of reversing
extractivism, whether or not we are leaning on frameworks that give us an
accurate understanding of what’s going on — or whether we remain pure and
faithful to one that doesn’t? I’m not convinced that winning theoretical debates
through purity counts much.

The fact that we keep enforcing strict borders about what counts as leftist, to
say nothing of what counts as Marxism, I just find a bit unproductive. Naturally
and logically, it seems to me that we should let these thousand flowers bloom.
The question is whether to derive a single theory from it. And I hate to sound
too pessimistic, but I’m not sure that one new theory is going to resolve our
issues.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Evgeny Morozov is an American writer, researcher, and intellectual from Belarus.

Daniel Denvir is the author of All-American Nativism and the host of The Dig on
Jacobin Radio.

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