May 12, 2020 By Jodi Dean

IN CAPITAL IS DEAD, McKenzie Wark asks: What if we’re not in capitalism anymore but something worse? The question is provocative, sacrilegious, unsettling as it forces anti-capitalists to confront an unacknowledged attachment to capitalism. Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism? Left unquestioned, this assumption hinders political analysis. If we’ve rejected strict historical determinism, we should be able to consider the possibility that capitalism has mutated into something qualitatively different. Wark’s question invites a thought experiment: what tendencies in the present indicate that capitalism is transforming itself into something worse?

Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state. Drawing from libertarian economist Tyler Cowen’s emphasis on the permanence of extreme inequality in the global, automated economy, the conservative geographer Joel Kotkin envisions the US future as mass serfdom. A property-less underclass will survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et cetera. The only way to avoid this neofeudal nightmare is by subsidizing and deregulating the high-employment industries that make the American lifestyle of suburban home ownership and the open road possible — construction and real estate; oil, gas, and automobiles; and corporate agribusiness. Unlike the specter of serfdom haunting Friedrich Hayek’s attack on socialism, Kotkin locates the adversary within capitalism. High tech, finance, and globalization are creating “a new social order that in some ways more closely resembles feudal structure — with its often unassailable barriers to mobility — than the chaotic emergence of industrial capitalism.” In this libertarian/conservative imaginary, feudalism occupies the place of the enemy formerly held by communism. The threat of centralization and the threat to private property are the ideological elements that remain the same.

A number of technology commentators share the libertarian/conservative critique of technology’s role in contemporary feudalization even as they don’t embrace fossil fuels and suburbia. Already in 2010, in his influential book, You Are Not a Gadget, tech guru Jaron Lanier observed the emergence of peasants and lords of the internet. This theme has increased in prominence as a handful of tech companies have become ever richer and more extractive, turning their owners into billionaires on the basis of the cheap labor of their workers, the free labor of their users, and the tax breaks bestowed on them by cities desperate to attract jobs. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company name for Google) together are worth more than most every country in the world (except the United States, China, Germany, and Japan). The economic scale and impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern form of feudalism.”

Albert-László Barabási explained the processes underpinning such a neofeudalism in his analysis of the structure of complex networks, that is, networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. These are networks where people voluntarily make links or choices. The number of links per site grow over time, and people like things because others like them (the Netflix recommendation system, for instance, relies on this assumption). Link distribution in complex networks follows a power law where the most popular item generally has twice as many hits or links as the second most popular, which has twice as many as the third most and so on down to the insignificant differences between those in the long tail of the distribution curve. This winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most effect is the power law shape of the distribution. The one at the top has significantly more than the ones at the bottom. The shape the distribution takes is not a bell curve; it’s a long tail — a few billionaires, a billion precarious workers. The structure of complex networks invites inclusion: the more items in the network, the larger the rewards for those at the top. It also induces competition — for attention, resources, money, jobs — anything that is given a network form. And it leads to concentration. The result, then, of free choice, growth, and preferential attachment is hierarchy, power law distributions where those at the top have vastly more than those at the bottom.

Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional power to implement it. The neoliberal policies of the 20th century, however, strove to create conditions that would facilitate rather than thwart free choice, growth, and preferential attachment.

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism documents the neoliberal strategy of undermining the authority of the nation-state over its economy in the interest of advancing global trade. Threatened by the organized demands of the newly postcolonial nations of the Global South for reparations, sovereignty over their own natural resources, stabilized commodity prices, and the regulation of transnational corporations, neoliberals in the 1970s sought to “circumvent the authority of national governments.” They advocated a multilevel approach to regulation, a competitive federalism that would let capital discipline governments while itself remaining immunized from democratic control. In the words of Hans Willgerodt, one of the neoliberals Slobodian studies, the new competitive federalism required the state to “share its sovereignty downward with federal structures and bind itself upward within an international legal community.”

Rather than focusing on the origins of neoliberalism, Albena Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge demonstrates the ways neoliberalism in practice has led to a new precarity capitalism. Policies pushing deregulation and global free trade have had unexpected outcomes. The global market morphed from a system of “national economies integrated through trade agreements into transnational production networks.” Because of the unclear and uncertain contribution of these networks to national economies, maintaining the competitiveness of national economies has become “a top policy concern.” Competitiveness has replaced competition and growth as a state goal, leading states to prioritize not a level playing field and the dismantling of monopolies but “to aid specific economic actors — those who are best positioned to perform well in the global competition for profit.” Acknowledging how the private sector has always benefited from public funds, Azmanova emphasizes the novelty of a form of capitalism where “public authority handpicks the companies on which to bestow this privilege.” States don’t intervene to break up monopolies. They engender and award them.

Monopoly concentration, intensified inequality, and the subjection of the state to the market have transformed accumulation such that it now occurs as much through rent, debt, and force as it does through commodity production. Azmanova points out that the privatization of sectors of the economy relatively immunized from competition — energy, rail, broadband — gave owners “the privileged status of rentiers.” Globally, in the knowledge and technology industries, rental income accruing from intellectual property rights exceeds income from the production of goods. In the United States, financial services contribute more to GDP than manufactured goods contribute. Capital isn’t reinvested in production; it’s eaten up and redistributed as rents. Valorization processes have spread far beyond the factory, into complex, speculative, and unstable circuits increasingly dependent on surveillance, coercion, and violence.

Capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism.

II.

Neofeudalism does not imply that contemporary communicative or networked capitalism identically reproduces all the features of European feudalism. It doesn’t. In fact, as historians have successfully demonstrated, the very idea of a single European feudalism is a fiction. Different feudalisms developed across the continent in response to different pressures. Viewing contemporary capitalism in terms of its feudalizing tendencies illuminates a new socioeconomic structure with four interlocking features: parcellated sovereignty, new lords and peasants, hinterlandization, and catastrophism.

Parcellated sovereignty

Historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood present the parcelization of sovereignty as a key feature of European feudalism. Feudal society emerged as the imperial administration of the Romans “gave way to a patchwork of jurisdictions in which state functions were vertically and horizontally fragmented.” Local arrangements taking a variety of forms, including contractual relations between lords and kings and lords and vassals, came to supplement regional administration. Arbitration replaced the rule of law. The line between legality and illegality weakened. Political authority and economic power blended together as feudal lords extracted a surplus from peasants through legal coercion, legal in part because the lords decided the law that applied to the peasants in their jurisdiction. Wood writes, “The effect was to combine the private exploitation of labour with the public role of administration, jurisdiction and enforcement.”

Under neofeudalism, the directly political character of society reasserts itself. Global financial institutions and digital technology platforms use debt to redistribute wealth from the world’s poorest to the richest. Nation-states promote and protect specific private corporations. Political power is exercised with and as economic power, not only taxes but fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses, patents, jurisdictions, and borders. At the same time, economic power shields those who wield it from the reach of state law. Ten percent of global wealth is hoarded in off-shore accounts to avoid taxation. Cities and states relate to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google/Alphabet as if these corporations were themselves sovereign states — negotiating with, trying to attract, and cooperating with them on their terms. Cash-strapped municipalities use elaborate systems of fines to expropriate money from people directly, impacting poor people the hardest. In Punishment Without Crime, Alexandra Natapoff documents the dramatic scope of misdemeanor law in the already enormous US carceral system. Poor people, disproportionately people of color, are arrested on bogus charges and convinced to plead guilty to avoid the jail time that they could incur should they contest the charges. Not only does the guilty plea go on their record, but they open themselves up to fines that set them up for even more fees and fines should they miss a payment. We got a brief look into this system of legal illegality and unjust administration of justice in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the murder of Michael Brown: “[T]he city’s municipal court and policing apparatus openly extracted millions of dollars from its low-income African American population.” Police were instructed “to make arrests and issue citations in order to raise revenue.” Like minions of feudal lords, they used force to expropriate value from the people.

New lords and peasantsFeudal relations are characterized by a fundamental inequality that enables the direct exploitation of peasants by lords. Perry Anderson describes the exploitative monopolies such as watermills that were controlled by the lord; peasants were obliged to have their grain ground at their lord’s mill, a service for which they had to pay. So not only did peasants occupy and till land that they did not own, but they dwelled under conditions where the feudal lord was, as Marx says, “the manager and master of the process of production and of the entire process of social life.” Unlike the capitalist whose profit rests on the surplus value generated by waged workers through the production of commodities, the lord extracts value through monopoly, coercion, and rent.

Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants. Technology companies employ a relatively small percentage of the workforce, but their effects have been tremendous, remaking entire industries around the acquisition, mining, and deployment of data. The smaller workforces are indicative of digital technology’s neofeudalizing tendency. Capital accumulation occurs less through commodity production and wage labor than through services, rents, licenses, fees, work done for free (often under the masquerade of participation), and data treated as a natural resource. Positioning themselves as intermediaries, platforms constitute grounds for user activities, conditions of possibility for interactions to occur. Google makes it possible to find information in an impossibly dense and changing information environment. Amazon lets us easily locate items, compare prices, and make purchases from established as well as unknown vendors. Uber enables strangers to share rides. Airbnb does the same for houses and apartments. All are enabled by an immense generation and circulation of data. Platforms don’t just rely on data, they produce more of it. The more people use platforms, the more effective, and powerful these platforms become, ultimately transforming the larger environment of which they are a part.

Platforms are doubly extractive. Unlike the water mill peasants had no choice but to use, platforms not only position themselves so that their use is basically necessary (like banks, credit cards, phones, and roads) but that their use generates data for their owners. Users not only pay for the service but the platform collects the data generated by the use of the service. The cloud platform extracts rents and data, like land squared. The most extreme examples are Uber and Airbnb, which extract rent without property by relying on an outsourced workforce responsible for its own maintenance, training, and means of work. One’s car isn’t for personal transport. It’s for making money. One’s apartment isn’t a place to live; it’s something to rent out. Items of consumption are reconfigured as means of accumulation as personal property becomes an instrument for the capital and data accumulation of the lords of platform, Uber and Airbnb. This tendency toward becoming-peasant, that is, to becoming one who owns means of production but whose labor increases the capital of the platform owner, is neofeudal.

The tech giants are extractive. Like so many tributary demands, their tax breaks take money from communities. Their presence drives up rents and real estate prices, driving out affordable apartments, small businesses, and low-income people. Shoshana Zuboff’s study of “surveillance capitalism” brings out a further dimension of tech feudalism — military service. Like lords to kings, Facebook and Google cooperate with powerful states, sharing information that these states are legally barred from gathering themselves. Overall, the extractive dimension of networked technologies is now pervasive, intrusive, and unavoidable. The present is not literally an era of peasants and lords. Nevertheless, the distance between rich and poor is increasing, aided by a differentiated legal architecture that protects corporations, owners, and landlords while it immiserates and incarcerates the working and lower class.

Hinterlandization A third feature of neofeudalism is the spatiality associated with feudalism, one of protected, often lively centers surrounded by agricultural and desolate hinterlands. We might also characterize this as a split between town and country, municipal and rural areas, urban communes and the surrounding countryside, or, more abstractly between an inside walled off from an outside, a division between what is secure and what is at risk, who is prosperous and who is desperate. Wood says that medieval cities were essentially oligarchies, “with dominant classes enriched by commerce and financial services for kings, emperors and popes. Collectively, they dominated the surrounding countryside […] extracting wealth from it in one way or another.” Outside the cities were the nomads and migrants who, facing unbearable conditions, sought new places to live and work yet all too often came up against the walls.

US hinterlands are sites of loss and dismantlement, places with fantasies of a flourishing capitalist past that for a while might have let some linger in the hope that their lives and their children’s lives might actually get better. Remnants of an industrial capitalism that’s left them behind for cheaper labor, the hinterlands are ripe for the new intensified exploitation of neofeudalism. No longer making things, people in the hinterlands persist through warehouses, call centers, Dollar Stores, and fast food. Phil A. Neel’s recent book, Hinterland, notes patterns between China, Egypt, Ukraine, and the United States. They are all places with desolate abandoned wastelands and cities on the brink of overload.

Politically, the desperation of the hinterlands manifests in the movements of those outside the cities, movements that are sometimes around environmental issues (fracking and pipeline struggles), sometimes around land (privatization and expropriation), sometimes around the reduction of services (hospital and school closings). In the United States, the politics of guns positions the hinterlands against the urban. We might also note the way the division between hinterlands and municipality gets reinscribed within cities themselves. This manifests in both the abandonment of poor areas and their eradication in capitalist gentrification land grabs. A city gets richer and more people become homeless — think San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles.

The increased attention to social reproduction responds to hinterlandization, that is, to the loss of a general capacity to reproduce the basic conditions of livable life. This appears in rising suicide rates, increase in anxiety and drug addiction, declining birth rates, lower rates of life expectancy, and in the United States, the psychotic societal self-destruction of mass shootings. It appears in the collapsed infrastructures, undrinkable water, and unbreathable air. The hinterlands are written on people’s bodies and on the land. With closures of hospitals and schools, and the diminution of basic services, life becomes more desperate and uncertain.

Catastrophism

Finally, neofeudalism brings with it the insecurity and anxiety of an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. There is good reason to feel insecure. The catastrophe of capitalist expropriation of the social surplus in the setting of a grossly unequal and warming planet is real.

A loose, mystical neofeudal ideology, one that knits together and amplifies apocalyptic insecurity, seems to be taking form in the new embrace of the occult, techno-pagan, and anti-modern. Examples include Jordan Peterson’s mystical Jungianism and Alexander Dugin’s mythical geopolitics of Atlantis and Hyperborea. We might also note the rise of tech sector neo-reactionaries like PayPal’s billionaire founder Peter Thiel, who argues that freedom is incompatible with democracy. In a lecture in 2012, Thiel explained the link between feudalism and tech start-ups: “No founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest the top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then blame them if and when things go wrong.” Along with other Silicon Valley capitalists, Thiel is concerned to protect his fortune from democratic impingement, and so advocates strategies of exodus and isolation such as living on the sea and space colonization, whatever it takes to save wealth from taxation. Extreme capitalism goes over into the radical decentralization of neofeudalism.

For those on the other side of the neofeudal divide, anxiety and insecurity are addressed less by ideology than they are by opioids, alcohol, and food, anything to dull the pain of hopeless, mindless, endless drudgery. Emily Guendelsberger describes the stress caused by constant technological surveillance on the job — the risk of being fired for being a few seconds late, for not meeting the quotas, for using the bathroom too many times. Repetitive, low-control, high-stress work like that associated with work that is technologically monitored correlates directly with “depression and anxiety.” Uncertain schedules, lauded as flexible, unreliable pay, because wage theft is ubiquitous, are stressful, deadening. Neofeudal catastrophism may be individual, familial, or local. Getting worked up about climate change is hard when you’ve lived catastrophe for a few generations.

III.

What’s the benefit of thinking of our present precarity capitalism as something post-capitalist, as neofeudal? For conservatives like Kotkin, the neofeudal hypothesis helps them identify what they want to defend — carbon capitalism and the American way of life — and against whom they need to fight — that segment of the capitalist elite that is enriching itself at the expense of the middle class, namely, green high-tech entrepreneurs and their allies in finance. Neofeudalism is part of a diagnosis aiming to enlist working-class support for a particular section of the capitalist class, namely, fossil fuels, real estate, and big agriculture.

For those on the left, neofeudalism lets us understand the primary political conflict as arising out of neoliberalism. The big confrontation today is not between democracy and fascism. Although popular with liberals, this formulation makes little sense given the power of oligarchs — financiers, media and real estate moguls, carbon and tech billionaires. Viewing our present in terms of democracies threatened by rising fascism deflects attention from the fundamental role of globally networked communicative capitalism in exacerbating popular anger and discontent. Underlying the politicization toward the right is economics: complex networks produce extremes of inequality, winner-take-all or winner-take-most distributions. The rightward shift responds to this intensification of inequality. When the left is weak, or blocked from political expression by mainstream media and capitalist political parties, popular anger gets expressed by others willing to attack the system. In the present, these others are the far right. Thinking in terms of neofeudalism thus forces us to confront the impact of extreme economic inequality on political society and institutions. It makes us reckon with the fact of billionaires hoarding trillions of dollars of assets and walling themselves into their own enclaves while millions become climate refugees and hundreds of millions encounter diminished life prospects, an intensifying struggle just to survive.

The neofeudalism wager also signals a change in labor relations. Social democracy was premised on a compromise between labor and capital. Organized labor in much of the Global North delivered a cooperative working class in exchange for a piece of the good life. Labor’s defeat and the subsequent dismantling of the welfare state should have demonstrated once and for all the bankruptcy of a strategy requiring compromise with capitalist exploitation. Yet some socialists continue to hope for a kinder, gentler capitalism — as if capitalists would capitulate just to be nice, as if they, too, weren’t subject to market logics that make stock buybacks more attractive than investment in production. The neofeudal hypothesis tells us that any labor struggle premised on the continuation of capitalism is dead in the water. Capitalism has already become something worse.

In the service-dominated economies of the Global North, majorities work in service sectors. Some find that their phones, bikes, cars, and homes have lost their character as personal property and been transformed into means of production or means for the extraction of rent. Tethered to platforms owned by others, consumer items and means of life are now means for the platform owners’ accumulation. Most of us constitute a property-less underclass only able to survive by servicing the needs of high earners. A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that over the next 10 years the occupation that will add the most jobs is personal care aides, not health workers but aides who bathe and clean people. The dependence of the ruling class on the vast sector of servants — cleaners, cooks, grocers, cashiers, delivery persons, warehouse personnel, et cetera — suggests new sites of struggle, points of weakness where workers can exert power. Strikes of nurses, Amazon workers, and others target the neediness of the wealthy by blocking their access to the means of survival. If labor struggles under capitalism prioritized the point of production, under neofeudalism they occur at the point of service.

Finally, neofeudalism is an idea that lets us identify a primary weakness of the contemporary left: those left ideas with the most currency are the ones that affirm rather than contest neofeudalism. Localism encourages parcelization. Tech and platform approaches reinforce hierarchy and inequality. Municipalism affirms the urban-rural divide associated with hinterlandization. Emphases on subsistence and survival proceed as if peasant economies were plausible not only for that half of the planet that lives in cities (including 82 percent of North Americans and 74 percent of Europeans) but also for the millions displaced by climate change, war, and commercial land theft. Many who dwell in the hinterlands face political, cultural, economic, and climatic conditions that make it so that they can’t survive through agricultural work. Universal Basic Income is an untenable survivalist approach. It promises just enough to keep those in the hinterlands going and barely enough for urban renters to handover to their landlords. Catastrophism becomes that hip negativity denigrating hope and effort, as if the next hundred years or so just don’t matter.

Taken together these current left ideas suggest a future of small groups engaged in subsistence farming and the production of artisanal cheese, perhaps on the edges of cities where survivalist enclaves and drone-wielding tech workers alike experiment with urban gardens. Such groupings reproduce their lives in common, yet the commons they reproduce is necessarily small, local, and in some sense exclusive and elite, exclusive insofar as their numbers are necessarily limited, elite because the aspirations are culturally specific rather than widespread.

Far from a vision anchored in the emancipation of a multinational working class engaged in a wide array of paid, underpaid, and unpaid labor, popular left recapitulations of neofeudalism can’t see a working class. When work is imagined — and some on the left think that we should adopt a “postwork imaginary” — it looks like either romantic risk-free farming or tech-work, “immaterial labor.” By now, the exposés on the drudgery of call center work, not to mention the trauma-inducing labor of monitoring sites like Facebook for disturbing, illicit content, have made the inadequacy of the idea of “immaterial labor” undeniable. It should be similarly apparent that the postwork imaginary likewise erases the production and maintenance of infrastructure, the wide array of labor necessary for social reproduction, and the underlying state structure.

The neofeudal hypothesis thus lets us see both the appeal and the weakness of popular left ideas. They appeal because they resonate with a dominant sense. They are weak because this dominant sense is an expression of tendencies to neofeudalism.

Just as feudal relations persisted under capitalism so do capitalist relations of production and exploitation continue under neofeudalism. The difference is that non-capitalist dimensions of production — expropriation, domination, and force — have become stronger to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors meeting in the labor market even as a governing fiction. It means that rent and debt feature as or more heavily in accumulation than profit, and that work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. What happens when capitalism is global? It turns in on itself, generating, enclosing, and mining features of human life through digital networks and mass personalized media. This self-cannibalization produces new lords and serfs, vast fortunes and extreme inequality, and the parcellated sovereignties that secure this inequality while the many wander and languish in the hinterlands.

Jodi Dean teaches political, feminist, and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited 13 books, including The Communist Horizon and Crowds and Party, both published by Verso.

resource: Los Angeles Review of Books

新封建主义——资本主义变形记

译：龚思量

编按：对于意识到资本主义为人们带来了巨大伤害的左翼知识分子而言，他们相信资本主义终将迎来终结，而共产主义将会成为取代资本主义的主流意识形态。然而，西方社会在这信息爆炸的十年间，目睹了垄断性科技企业的崛起，这些企业对于内陆地区以经济权力行使政治权力、以领主式的方式剥削用户和工人、并让工作者和生活在贫困地区的人们失去希望。对于作者Jodi Dean而言，资本主义正在不断恶化，并不断显示出新封建主义的特征，而国家政府能否通过强力的干预使人们摆脱“领主们”的控制仍尚未可知。

一

在《资本已死》（CAPITAL IS DEAD）一书中，麦肯锡·沃克问道：如果我们不再处于资本主义中，而是陷入更糟糕的境地，那会怎么样？这个问题是挑衅的、“亵渎神明的”且令人深深感到不安，因为它迫使反资本主义者去直面他们对于资本主义的一种未被承认的依恋。共产主义本应紧随资本主义到来，但现在却尚未实现，这是否意味着我们仍处在资本主义中？这一未经质疑的假设阻碍了进一步的政治分析。如果我们拒绝严格的历史决定论，那么我们应该能够思考资本主义异化出不同性质的可能性。沃克的问题引发了一个思维实验：目前哪些倾向表明了资本主义正在变为更加糟糕的存在？

在过去十年间，“新封建主义”已经出现，它与极端的不平等、普遍的不稳定、垄断权力的巨头以及国家层面的变化等趋势息息相关。保守派地理学家乔尔·科特金（Joel Kotkin）借鉴自由主义经济学家泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）的全球自动化经济会带来永久的极端不平等这一观点，设想了美国发展出大规模农奴制度的未来。没有财产的下层阶级将通过从事诸如私人助理、培训师、儿童保育员、厨师、清洁工等职业，满足高收入者的需求而生存下来。避免这种新封建主义噩梦的唯一方法是开放补贴和解除对高就业率行业的管制——正是建筑业、房地产业；石油、天然气和汽车；和综合农业企业的影响让劳动者拥有郊区的房子和开放的道路。不同于农奴制的幽灵干扰着弗里德里希·哈耶克（Friedrich Hayek）对社会主义的攻击，科特金将敌人置于资本主义内部。高科技、金融业和全球化正在创造“一种新的社会秩序，相较于混乱的工业资本主义，它在某些方面更类似于封建结构，对流动性造成了无法消除的障碍。”在这个自由意志主义者兼保守主义者的想象中，封建主义占据了原先由共产主义占据的敌人位置。对于中央集中化和私有财产的威胁是不变的意识形态要素。

尽管并不认同自由主义及保守主义者对于化石燃料和郊区生活的喜爱，许多技术批评家也同样对技术在当代封建化中起到的作用表示警惕。早在2010年，科技大师杰伦·拉尼尔（Jaron Lanier）就在他颇具影响力的著作《你不是个玩意儿》（You Are Not a Gadget）中观察到了农民和互联网霸主的出现。随着少数高科技公司变得更加富有和具有剥削性，这一情况日益突出：互联网公司所有者利用工人的廉价劳动力和用户的免费劳动，成为了亿万富翁；同时，城市通过给予公司减税来吸引大量的劳动力。苹果、Facebook、微软、亚马逊和Alphabet（Google的母公司名称）加起来的价值超过了世界上大多数国家（除美国，中国，德国和日本外）。这些科技巨头的经济规模和影响力超过了大多数的主权国家，叶夫根尼·莫洛佐夫（Evgeny Morozov）将他们的统治地位描述为“封建主义的超现代形式”。

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi在他对复杂网络结构的分析中解释了建立新封建主义的过程，即以自由选择、成长和优先依附为特征的网络世界。在这些网络中，人们自愿做出联系或选择。网站的链接数量会随着时间的推移而增长，人们喜欢某样东西是因为其他人喜欢它（例如，网飞Netflix的推荐系统就依赖于这个假设）。复杂网络中的链接分配遵循幂定律，最受欢迎的项目的点击通常是第二受欢迎的项目的两倍，后者的点击是第三受欢迎的项目的两倍；依此类推，直到两者之间几乎没有差异，分布在曲线的尾部。这种“赢者通吃”的效应分布体现了幂律形状，头部和尾部的差异极其之大，其分布的形状不是钟形曲线，而是一条长尾——好比一些亿万富翁以及十亿岌岌可危的工人。复杂网络的结构吸引了人们的参与：网络中的项目越多，高层的回报就越大。复杂网络同时引发了对注意力、资源、金钱、工作——任何给定的网络形式的竞争，并让你专注在其中。而自由选择、成长和优先依附的结果就是等级制度和权力法则，即顶层的人比底层的人拥有多得多的财富。

幂律分布并非不可避免的，但这需要政治意愿和制度力量来实施干预。然而，20世纪的新自由主义政策努力创造有利于自由选择、增长和优惠的条件。奎因·斯洛波迪安（Quinn Slobodian）的《全球主义者：帝国的终结和新自由主义的诞生》（Globalists：The End of Empire and The Birth of Neoliberalism）记录了为促进全球贸易而削弱民族国家对经济控制权的新自由主义战略。

由于全球新近殖民的南方国家有组织地要求赔偿、夺回对自然资源的主权、建立稳定的商品价格和对跨国公司实施管制，新自由主义者曾在1970年代试图“绕过国家政府的权威”建立新的规则。他们主张采用多层次的监管方式和竞争性的联邦制,让政府受到资本而非民主的控制。新自由主义研究者汉斯·威尔格罗特表示：新的竞争性联邦制要求国家“在联邦结构中向下分享主权，并在一个国际法律共同体中向上约束自己。”

阿尔贝娜·阿兹曼诺娃（Albena Azmanova）的《边缘的资本主义》（Capitalism on Edge）并没有关注新自由主义的起源，而是展示了新自由主义如何导致了一种新的、不稳定的资本主义。推动宽松管制和全球自由贸易的政策产生了意想不到的结果，全球市场从“国家经济通过贸易协定整合到跨国生产网络”的体系演变而来。但由于这些网络对国民经济的贡献是不明确的，保持国民经济的竞争力已成为一个“首要政策问题”。竞争力已经取代竞争和增长成为国家的目标，导致各国优先考虑的不是公平的竞争环境和打破垄断，而是“帮助特定的经济行为者，即那些在全球竞争中表现出色的人”。在承认私人部门一直受益于公共资金后，阿兹马诺娃强调了一种新颖的资本主义形式，在这种形式下，“公共机构会精心挑选能够被赋予这种特权的公司。”国家不会干预或打破垄断这些公司，反而鼓励这些公司的出现并积极奖励他们。

垄断集中化、不平等加剧以及国家对市场的屈服，已经转变了财富积累，现在的财富积累，如同商品生产一样，通过租金、债务和强制执行在发生着。阿兹马诺娃指出，经济中一些相对不受竞争影响的部门（能源、铁路、宽带）的私有化赋予了所有者“获利者的特权地位”。从全球市场来看，在知识和技术行业，知识产权带来的租金收入超过了生产商品带来的收入。在美国，金融服务业对GDP的贡献超过了制造业。资本没有再投资于生产；它被吃掉并重新分配为租金。稳定的过程已经远远超出了工厂的范围，进入了复杂的、投机的、不稳定的回路中，这些回路越来越依赖于监视、胁迫和暴力。资本主义正在变成新封建主义。

二

新封建主义并不意味着当代的交集或网络资本主义复制了欧洲封建主义的所有特征。事实上，历史学家已经成功地证明，单一欧洲封建主义的想法本身就是一种虚构。在不同的压力下，各式封建主义在大陆上发展起来。以封建的角度来审视当代资本主义，我们可以看到一种新的社会经济结构，它具有四个环环相连的特征：割据的主权、新的领主和农民、内陆化以及灾难主义。

分割主权

历史学家佩里·安德森（Perry Anderson）和艾伦·梅金斯·伍德（Ellen Meiksins Wood）提出，主权分割是欧洲封建制度的主要特征。封建社会的出现，是由于罗马帝国的行政管理“让位于国家职能在纵向和横向分散的管辖”。地方管理采取各种形式，包括领主与国王、领主与封臣之间的契约关系，作为行政的补充。仲裁取代了法治、合法性和非法性之间的界限被弱化了。政治权威和经济实力融合在一起，当封建领主通过法律强制从农民手中提取盈余时，这在一定程度上是合法的，因为领主决定了适用于其管辖范围内农民的法律。伍德写道：“其作用是将对劳工的剥削与行政，管辖权和执法的公共角色结合起来。”

在新封建主义下，社会最直接的政治特性再次彰显出来。全球金融机构和数字技术平台利用债务将财富从世界上最贫穷的人重新分配给最富有的人。民族国家鼓励和保护特定的私营公司，通过包括税收、罚款、行使留置权、资产扣押、许可证、专利、司法管辖区和边境等手段，以经济权力的形式行使政治权力。与此同时，经济权力保护那些行使权力的人不受国家法律的约束。为避免征税，10％的全球财富被存储在离岸账户中。城市与苹果、亚马逊、微软、Facebook和谷歌（Alphabet）的关系就好像这些公司本身就是主权国家一样——城市与它们谈判，试图吸引它们，并按照它们的条件与它们合作。资金短缺的市政当局使用精心制定的罚款制度，直接从人们手中没收资金，这对穷人的影响最大。在《无罪的惩罚》一书中，亚历山德拉·纳塔波夫记录了在美国庞大的刑事体系中，轻罪法的范围之广。穷人，尤其是有色人种会因虚假指控而被捕并被说服认罪。以避免因对指控提出异议而面临牢狱之苦。他们的认罪不仅会被记录在案，而且还会被处以罚款；如果他们错过付款，他们将被处以更高费用的罚款。在密苏里州弗格森（Ferguson）发生暴动、迈克尔·布朗（Michael Brown）被谋杀之后，我们对这种不合法的法律制度和不公正的司法制度进行了简短的调查：“该市市政法院和警务人员公开从数百万低收入的非裔美国人手中收取罚款，”警察被指示“为了增加收入而进行逮捕和发布传票。”就像封建领主的奴才一样，他们使用武力直接从人民手中夺取价值。

新领主和农民

封建制度关系的基本特征是不平等，这种不平等使农民受到地主的直接剥削。佩里·安德森（Perry Anderson）描述了由领主控制的水磨坊等剥削性垄断企业; 农民必须在领主的磨坊里磨自己的谷物，并为劳动付钱。因此，农民不仅占有、耕种着不属于自己的土地，领主则作为他们“整个生产过程和社会生活的管理者和主人”。资本家的利润来自于工人通过生产商品所产生的剩余价值；而与资本家不同，领主通过垄断、胁迫和地租来获取价值。

数字平台是新的“水磨坊”，它的亿万富翁老板是新的领主，数千工人和数十亿用户就是新的农民。科技公司只雇佣了较少的劳动力，但却拥有巨大的影响力，它将整个行业围绕数据采集、挖掘和部署进行了重塑。劳动力的减少表明了数字技术的新封建化倾向，资本积累很少通过商品生产和雇佣劳动实现，而是通过服务、租金、许可证、费用、免费工作（通常以参与为幌子）以及被视为自然资源的数据实现的。平台作为中介构成了用户活动的基础，为他们的互动提供了可能。谷歌让人们在一个不可思议的、密集变化的信息环境中寻找信息成为可能。亚马逊让我们轻松地找到商品、比较价格，并从知名的或未知的供应商处进行购买。优步让陌生人可以拼车；Airbnb让人们可以“合租”房屋和公寓。而这一切都是由巨大的数据生成和流通实现的，平台不仅依赖数据，同时也会产生更多数据。使用平台的人越多，这些平台就会变得越有效、越强大，最终会改变它们所在的大环境。

平台的另一大特征是它的双重信息提取。与农民别无选择只能使用水磨坊不同，平台不仅通过自我定位让使用平台成为人民的基本需要（例如银行，信用卡，电话和道路），并且进一步为平台所有者生成数据。用户不仅要为这项服务付费，平台还会收集使用这项服务所产生的数据。同时，云平台会像按土地面积征费那样来提取租金和数据——最极端的例子是优步和Airbnb，它们依靠自行负责维护、培训和规范工作方式的途径来雇佣外包员工，在没有任何房产的情况下收取租金。员工的汽车不再是私人交通工具，而成为了赚钱工具；一个人的公寓不再是居住的地方，而是用来被出租的。消费项目被重置为积累财富的手段，个人财产成为了优步和Airbnb领主用来进行资本和数据积累的工具。用户成为农民，即拥有生产资料的人，但他们的劳动反而增加了平台主的资本——这一切都是新封建主义式的。

科技巨头有极强的榨取性。由于许多“辅助”的需求，它们享受的税收减免实际上是从社区中抽取了许多资金。科技巨头的出现推高了房屋租金和房地产价格，赶走了价格适中的公寓、小企业和低收入人群。Shoshana Zuboff对“监视资本主义”的研究指出了技术封建主义的另一个方面——兵役。像国王手下的领主一样，Facebook和Google与强大的州政府合作，共享那些名义上被禁止收集的信息。总的来说，现在网络技术的“提取”是普遍的、侵入式的和不可避免的。现在并不是农民和领主的时代，但是贫富之间的差距正在扩大，这要归功于差异化的法律架构，该架构保护公司、所有者和房东，同时使工人和下层阶级遭受监禁和苦难。

“腹地化”（Hinterlandization）

新封建主义的第三个特征是与封建主义相关的空间性。即受保护的，通常是热闹的中心，而周围是农业用地和荒凉的腹地。我们也可以将其描述为城乡之间的分割,城市和农村、中心社区和周围的村落；或者，更抽象地来看，是围墙外部和内部的区别, 是安全与危险的、繁荣与绝望的分界。伍德说，中世纪城市的本质是寡头政治，“统治阶级通过为国王、皇帝和教皇提供商业和金融服务而富裕起来。他们集体控制着周围的乡村[……]，以这样或那样的方式从那里攫取财富。”城市之外的游牧民族和移民面对着难以忍受的环境，寻找新的地方生活和工作，但却经常处处碰壁。

美国的内陆地区是充满失落和拆迁的地方，充斥着关于过去繁荣的资本主义的幻想，这在一段时间内可能让一些人徘徊在希望中，期望他们和他们孩子的生活会变得更好。作为工业资本主义遗留下来的廉价劳动力，这些“腹地”为新封建主义的强化剥削提供了条件。内陆地区的人们不再制造东西，而是坚持在仓库、呼叫中心、一元店和快餐店工作。菲尔·尼尔（Phil A. Neel）的最新著作《腹地》（Hinterland）指出了埃及，乌克兰和美国的格局——到处都是荒芜的荒地和城市。

政治上，内陆地区的绝望表现在城市以外地区的运动中，这些运动有时围绕着环境问题（水力压裂和管道铺设的斗争），有时围绕着土地（私有化和征用），有时围绕着服务的减少（医院和学校的关闭）。在美国，枪支政治使内陆地区与城市对立。我们可能还会注意到，“腹地与中心”在城市内部重新得到划分。这体现在对贫困地区的抛弃，也体现在资本主义中产阶级化过程中对于贫困地区的“根除”。在一个城市变得富裕的同时，更多的人变得无家可归——想想旧金山、西雅图、纽约、洛杉矶吧。

对社会再生产的日益重视是对腹地化，即对丧失了再现宜居的生活条件能力的情况所作出的反应。这体现在自杀率的上升、焦虑症和吸毒成瘾的增加、出生率的下降、预期寿命的降低以及精神病性社会大规模枪击中的自我毁灭上。它出现在崩溃的基础设施、不可饮用的水和无法呼吸的空气中。腹地化的痕迹写在人的身上和这片土地上。随着医院和学校的关闭以及基本服务的减少，生活变得更加绝望和不确定。

灾变说

最后，新封建主义带来了巨大的灾难感。在一个严重不平等和变暖的地球上，人们有充分的理由感到不安全，资本主义征用社会盈余所带来的灾难是真实存在的。

一种松散的、神秘的新封建意识形态，编织在一起并扩大了末日的不安全感，并且似乎正在逐渐被神秘主义、技术异教徒和反现代主义者所接受。例如乔丹·彼得森（Jordan Peterson）的神秘的荣格主义（Jungianism）和亚历山大·杜金（Alexander Dugin）的亚特兰蒂斯（Atlantis）和Hyperborea的神话地缘政治也逐渐显现出来。也许我们还会注意到，科技行业内的“新反动派”正在崛起，像PayPal的亿万富翁创始人彼得·泰尔（Peter Thiel）就认为自由与民主是不相容的。在2012年的一次演讲中，泰尔解释了封建制度与科技初创企业之间的联系：“没有创始人或首席执行官拥有绝对权力。它更像是古老的封建结构。人们授予高层领导各种力量和能力，然后在事情出问题时责备他们。”和其他硅谷资本家一样，泰尔关心的是如何保护自己的财富不受民主主义的侵害，因此他提倡“出走”和“孤立”的策略，比如在海上和太空殖民，不惜一切代价来避免财富被征税。极端资本主义演变成了新封建主义的彻底分权。

对于那些处于新封建主义鸿沟另一端的人来说，相较于意识形态，阿片类药物、酒精、食物以及其他可以减轻绝望、愚蠢、无休止的苦差事带来的痛苦的存在才是解决焦虑和不安全感的良方。Emily Guendelsberger描述了工作中的科技监控所带来的压力——迟到几秒钟、没有完成任务、上厕所太多次都会为员工带来被解雇的风险。被技术监控的、重复的、低控制度的、高压力的工作会直接导致“抑郁和焦虑”。无处不在的工资盗窃带来了不稳定的薪资，而不确定的工作时间表被誉为“灵活”，这一切都让人倍感压力、令人沮丧。新封建主义的灾变论可能是个人的、家族的或地方性的。当你经历了几代人的灾难之后，对诸如气候变化等问题作出回应就变得异常困难。

三

把处在不稳定阶段的资本主义看作后资本主义和新封建主义对我们有什么好处? 科特金等保守派认为，新封建主义的假设帮助他们识别出需要保护的对象——即“碳”资本主义和美国化的生活方式；同时，他们也意识到了需要与之斗争的敌人：通过牺牲中产阶级来致富的资本主义精英，即绿色科技企业家和他们在金融业的盟友。新封建主义是他们“诊断”中的一部分，目的是争取工人阶级来支持特定的资产阶级产业，即化石燃料、房地产和大农业。

对于左派来说，新封建主义让我们了解到主要的政治冲突是由新自由主义引起的。今天的主要对抗并非发生在民主制度和法西斯主义之间。尽管这种说法在左派自由主义者中很流行，但考虑到金融家、媒体、房地产大亨、碳产业大亨和科技亿万富翁等寡头的力量，这种说法变得几乎毫无意义。而从“民主受到法西斯主义崛起的威胁”这一角度来看我们的现状，会使得人们不再注意全球联网下的交互式资本主义是如何加剧民众愤怒和不满的。向右极化的背后是经济学：复杂的网络产生了极端的不平等和赢家通吃的分布模式，而人们的右倾是对这种加剧的不平等的反应。当左翼力量薄弱，或被主流媒体和资本主义政党阻止政治表达时，民众的愤怒就会被其他愿意攻击制度的人所代表。在当下，极右派就成为了人们的代表。因此，从新封建主义的角度思考会迫使我们正视极端的经济不平等对政治社会和制度的影响——亿万富翁们囤积了数万亿美元的资产，把他们围在自己的飞地里，而数百万人成为了气候难民，数亿人的生活前景黯淡，为生存而苦苦挣扎。

新封建主义的赌注也标志着劳动关系的变化。社会民主是以劳资双方的妥协为前提的。在全球北方大部分地区，有组织的劳工造就了一个以合作换取美好生活的工人阶级形象。工党的失败以及福利国家的解体本应一劳永逸地证明，需要向资本主义剥削作出妥协的战略已经宣告破产。然而，一些社会主义者仍然希望出现一个更友善、更温和的资本主义——仿佛资本家会友善地屈服，仿佛他们不会受到股票回购比生产投资更有吸引力这一市场逻辑的约束。新封建主义的假设告诉我们，任何以延续资本主义为前提的劳动斗争都必将死去。同时，资本主义已经变得更糟了。

在以服务业为主的北半球中，大多数人在服务业工作。部分人发现，他们的手机、自行车、汽车和房屋失去了作为个人财产的性质，转而变成了生产资料或收取租金的手段。消费品和生活方式与平台被捆绑在一起，成为平台所有者积累财富的手段。我们大多数人构成了一个没有财产的下层阶级，只有满足高收入者的需要才得以生存下去。美国劳工统计局的一份报告称，在未来10年里个人护理助理将成为增量最大的职业，这些劳工不是卫生工作者，而是为人们洗澡和清洁的助理。统治阶级需要庞大的佣人部门——清洁工、厨师、杂货商、收银员、送货员、仓库人员等等。这些部门提供了新的斗争场所、成为了工人发挥力量的对象。因此，护士和亚马逊员工的罢工针对的是富人的需求，即阻止富人们获得生存手段。如果在资本主义下，劳动斗争会爆发在生产点；而在新封建主义下，劳动斗争则会在服务点产生。

最后，新封建主义让我们认识到当代左派的一个主要弱点：那些最流行的左派思想是肯定而不是反对新封建主义的。地方主义鼓励了对用户和劳动者的捆绑、技术和平台方法强化了层级不平等、市政主义肯定了城乡划分。对地球上一半的城市居民（包括82%的北美人和74%的欧洲人）来说，依赖于农民经济来获取好的生活是可行的；而对因气候变化、战争和商业土地盗窃而流离失所的数百万人来说，这样的做法也是可行的。事实上，许多居住在内陆地区的人面临着政治、文化、经济和气候的问题，他们无法通过农业工作生存下来。全民基本收入是一种站不住脚的生存主义做法，它所承诺的仅够让那些住在内地的人继续生存下去，勉强够让城市的租房者给房东上缴租金。现在，灾难论成了一种时髦的消极态度，它诋毁希望和努力，好像接下来的几百年都不重要似的。

综合目前这些左派的观点，我们可以看到一个从事自给农业和手工奶酪生产的小群体的未来：也许他们会在城市边缘生活，在那里有生存主义者的飞地和操纵无人机的技术工人制造的城市花园。这样的群体以共同的方式重现生活，但他们必然是小规模和地方性的，并且在某种意义上也是排他性的和精英的。它的排他性体现在人数的限制上；在文化上的特定性和去广泛性则代表了这种生活精英主义的一面。

与解放从事多种有偿、低薪和无偿劳动的跨国工人阶级的愿景不同，当下的左派在重述新封建主义时并没有看到工人阶级。当想象工作时（有些左派认为我们应该采用“后工作想象”），工作要么是浪漫的、无风险的农业工作；要么是技术工作，即“非物质劳动”。 到目前为止，对呼叫中心繁重工作的曝光，更不用说Facebook等网站因令人不安的非法内容而引发的劳动“创伤”，已经让“非物质劳动”这一概念存在严重问题成为不可否认的事实。同样显而易见的是，后工作的假想消除了基础设施的生产和维护，也使社会再生产所需的大量劳动以及底层的国家结构消失不见。因此，新封建主义的假说让我们看到了流行左派思想的吸引力和弱点。它们之所以具有吸引力，是因为它们具有主导感；他们之所以软弱，是因为这种主导有着新封建主义倾向的表现。

正如资本主义下的封建关系一样，资本主义的生产和剥削关系在新封建主义下仍然存在。但不同之处在于，非资本主义的生产维度——征用、支配和武力——已经变得更加强大，以至于假设劳动者和资本家在劳动力市场上平等而自由地相遇（即使作为一种管理上的假设）已经不再有意义。这意味着租金和债务在财富积累上比利润更重要，工作本身越来越超过工资关系。当资本主义全球化之后，它利用自我转化，通过数字网络和大量的个性化媒体生成，来封闭或挖掘人类生活的特征。这种自我蚕食带来了新的领主和农奴、为平台拥有者创造了巨大的财富、造成了社会的极端不平等，并通过迫使许多人在内陆滞留和挣扎，以确保这种不平等的分裂主权得以延续。

来源：澎湃新闻