nin.’s Reviews > Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle > Status Update
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“Neofeudalism helps account for why “class” fails to organize politics today, why left politics is so perpetually fragmented, and why the left has a hard time connecting to workers. In the so-called advanced economies, class no longer functions as a powerful political identity. The perspective of working people is not associated with an orientation to the future.“
contd. in the comments.
— May 30, 2025 01:13PM
contd. in the comments.
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nin.
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“Capitalism isn’t an alternative to neofeudalism. The drive to accumulate is transforming its own laws of motion from competition, investment, and improvement to hoarding, predation, and destruction. While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect.”
— May 30, 2025 01:08PM
nin.
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Capital isn’t dead. It is digging its own grave. Capitalist laws of motion are reflexively folding in on themselves and becoming something no longer recognizably capitalist. Processes long directed outward—through colonialism and imperialism—are turning inward in ways that undermine capitalist laws of motion and repeat accumulation strategies typical of feudalism: rent-seeking, plunder, and political control.
— May 29, 2025 06:33AM
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May 30, 2025 01:15PM
“The class that up through the middle of the twentieth century was able to improve its quality of life by forcing capital to make concessions has dwindled in presence and power, an effect of deindustrialization and financialization. Being a worker isn’t a source of strength and pride, it’s something to qualify—knowledge worker, cultural worker, tech worker—deny, or get beyond.” [2, contd.]
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“The wager behind the neofeudal hypothesis is that people have a hard time identifying as workers because they don’t see their work as driving social production and collective energy, as carrying a future they believe in. Instead, they recognize it—perhaps at an inchoate or subliminal level—as serving the consumption requirements of the ruling class, a marker of feudal political economy. We work to live, while the ruling class enjoys the benefits of our labor.” [3, contd.]
“This recognition helps explain the prominence of identification as consumers. People use consumption choices to signal that they are more than a job: they are unique individuals with taste and talent; they belong to groups with histories that command respect. We might not make much money, but we still have our values and can cling to our guns. […] And because consumption is a terrain of individual expression, building collective power becomes all the more difficult, which makes it easier for the ruling class to get away with domination, destruction, and plunder.” [4, end.]
