welcome back company towns ๐๐๐๐
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Wait.
is techno-feudalism better for the peasants than capitalism under a compromised democracy?
I feel weird.
Feudal lords are aware that they need to keep the peasants happy to maintain power. Modern capitalists are just giddy with excitement to liquidate as many people as possible to fuel their machine because they live behind 6 layers of abstraction.
You can't really abstract yourself from the problems as a Lord or King, you're the sole representative of the law (outside the church).
It's easy to organize against a Lord because they're obvious, it's harder to organize against an abstract body of capitalists because they aren't human.
As Marx said 'the limits to the exploitation of the feudal serf were determined by the walls of the stomach of the feudal lord' or as Rosa Luxemburg expands on this Marx quote in a passage I really need to find, most feudal exploitation was driven by a rational material need, food for the lord and his retainers, materials to build castles, maintenance of weapons and horses, etc which in turn are used to protect and seize more resources. Where as modern capitalists accumulate for the sake of accumulation, often unstably and at the expense of company/workers/resources, having cycles of boom and bust. This isn't a moral statement or recommendation on feudalism though.
You theory readers are the fucking backbone of this site. Thank you.
Accumulation unburdened by the yoke of reality
All that is solid melts into air
Oh yeah, really good point.
I wonder if these costco-communes would be particularly ripe for tenant union organising efforts a short way down the line.
Backdoor the corpos and give em more fronts to worry about.
edit: regardless we'll probably see some #OccupyCostco within 3 years after some bad eviction stories.
They'll be ripe for organization, and giving the tenants a unified target will be easier, but just because it's easier to organize against a real entity that isn't totally abstracted and obfuscated, doesn't mean it's easier to actually accomplish anything.
Feudalism lasted for millennia with over a thousand years of stories about peasants rising up against kings before capitalism finally killed it. Even then, he kings just turned into C-Suite zombies.
I feel individual landlords are more a vestigial form of feudalism rather than big companies taking over being a new form of techno-feudalism (a concept I don't know I necessarily agree with), I think it's more the way capitalism tends to monopolize and drive the petit bourgeois out and into the proletarian class with time.
Individual landlords are random, they could be benevolent and kind, but they are more often capricious, self-serving and generally Hitlerite. Large rental corporations are still bad, but they are often risk-adverse from a liability standpoint and have an economy of scale to allow them to manage problems. Costco is not going to sexually harass you or kill you in a fire because they did the wiring themselves.
Also bigger rental corporations could hypothetically be easier to reign in by the government (not that it will likely happen soon) or be expropriated more easily in any revolution (inshallah).
Yeah that was definitely a very loose use of the term in my post in hindsight. Not a useful way to look at the thing, good call.
VERY good point. Also the creation of the rent-seeking "middle class" via the spread of private renting is a useful tool to maintain class stratification. If the corporations take that away from the petite bourgeoisie a lot of people are going to find themselves in the working class. Might take a couple of generations, but yeah, interesting to think about.
I still can't shake the feeling that anything approaching critical support of this is in very close proximity to straight up accelerationism though. I guess that's why my brain spat out "techno-feudalism" in my post, on reflection.
We'll see.