The Working Class vs. Neofeudalism (feat. Jodi Dean)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.พ. 2025
- I am joined by political theorist Jodi Dean to discuss her provocative new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Jodi Dean is one of the most vocal proponents of the "neofeudal thesis", the idea that capitalism has regressed to a neofeudal arrangement characterized by the delinking of capitalist accumulation from production, the end of competition, rent-seeking, predation and plunder. No longer can Marxists rely on a developmentalist theory of capitalism and a proletariat tied to productive labor as the means to abolishing capitalism. Dean argues that we must completely re-think the proletariat and that the global service sector points the way to a renewal of working class agitaiton and revolutionary activity.
Jodi Dean is a political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. Her books include The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging , Blog Theory and several others. Please check out Capital's Grave and order a copy here
www.penguinran...
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Would love a follow-up between you both. This was great.
Wow this conversation blew me away. I am now going to look into Jodi Dean's work, as well as that text by Bali ar. Thanks again
Thanks so much for this interesting discussion Pam and Daniel!
24:10 Jodi Dean "Globally, the majority of people work in 'services''.
I don't think we should forget the elementary fork in Marx's accounts (since so much has been so strongly empirically confirmed in the last 30 years), I would sketch it as such: This surplus-value (stolen from, say, the workers, the baristas) is produced individually, can then be aggregated, and this in turn forms the positivist basis for further development and discussion.
Because while this summation of surplus-value can be invoked for the whole, existing as an immaterial virtual entity so to speak, the crucial aspect is that what the individual money monad or the individual firm does is nothing more than tearing off a part of this whole, of this mass of surplus-value. Or, as Robert Kurz put it, "competition, the movement of which does not create value, but rather distributes it unevenly". Imao this is the 'negative socialization' happening in capitalism he (and many others) spoke about.
When we say that housework, care work, etc. are 'services', we run the risk of transhistorically positing this concept in a past that was very different. A second problem is the equation of service work, which has already been made into a marketable commodity, with those activies that resist this, e.g. childcare, attention, love, 'relationship work' as we say. This is, by the way, the extension of the Wertabspaltungstheorem developed by Roswitha Scholz on the basis of Robert Kurz.
Lively, invigorating and relevant. Unusual for pure theory but very welcome.
Capitalism doesn't become moribund or parasitic. It's always those things, i.e. since 1848.
Loving this convo
43:40 BADIOU: “It is essential to ask whether, in politics, we count the figure of the worker for something, or for nothing. To count it for nothing means that we count nothing but capital.”
Hi, where did Badiou say this work? I want to quote. Thanks
Never mind. Found it, from his Ethics
@@shortestshadow yep. It’s from an interview with Peter Hallward titled Politics and Philosophy.
Brilliant discussion, thank you.
Pre-ordered!
I am a simple Italian, I see "Il quarto stato", I click. And I was rewarded.
Something missed but relevant to the discussion about education, the public, and class consciousness (@ 120m) that remains materially relevant albeit in need of translation for our “service” times is the operation of the “shop floor,” the wellspring for the transformation of awareness into working-class consciousness.
Beautiful explanation.
-Re Morozov’s objections to Varoufakis’ technofeudalism, at least in the NLR he’s pushing a strongly empirical argument against Varoufakis that’s not particularly theoretical. The gist seemed to me to be that the Varoufakis overstresses the degree to which surplus exploitation of capitalists by the “cloudalists” who’re extracting rent based on their ownership of platforms. Contra Varoufakis, Morozov is stressing the degree to which the cloudalists are investing massively into their own platforms, so it’s not as passive an arrangement of surplus extraction as Varoufakis takes it to be, but rather there’s a return of investment that the cloudalists are receiving based on their investment into the platforms they’re owning. I think Varoufakis can integrate the critique by adding the epicycle that this QE funded investment by the cloudalists can be analogised to how the feudal baron himself had to offer protection from marauding steppe nomads and so had to make his own investments there as Annales historiography had got to.
Varoufakis is describing a process that has really just begun, his vision is a couple years away but it really depends on whether firms and business realize that they can leverage consumers to reach other consumers. As well as individuals using cloud apps to teach an algorithm to know themselves and their interests better than they themselves.
Fair enough. I think Prof. Dean was just committing somewhat of a category error in seeing Morozov’s current dissent against the neo-feudalism thesis as a theoretical intervention. Reading his NLR essay, it seemed more like an empirical challenge from one economist to the other. Varoufakis will probably just read that data differently or shift his interpretation slightly for now if he ever bothers with a response. He is much more deeply engaged with MERA and DiEM now
I agree with Morozov, that capitalism hasn’t changed. Varfoukis is speaking about one specific part of capitalism. Morozov is basically grasping the entire system, and that is exactly how it’s run. Just think if trump cut all non profit budgets these organizations would try to run with the thinnest of margins. Amazons success and values were predicated on spending as less as possible
@@mfig15Maybe, but I think Varoufakis has the correct take on the power relations. He's ahead of the curve in that sense.
As for profitability, he says of Amazon "profit becomes optional".
I think profit itself is the wrong place to look. What matters is differential accumulation. Relative market power.
Great discussion. I wouldn't bet on service workers to be the future of organizing. Most don't like their work and would do something else if they could. Their identity is elsewhere. As far as shame is concerned, it works best with cultures that have well defined traditions, rituals, and expectations. There must also be real consequences for breaking taboos: legal, political, economic etc... Nothing is better at giving shame real teeth than the prospect of punishment.
49:28 Shame is evicerated in and through Bukhari 7086 and is universal, and has to be universal to stay in the game.
Liber8: As Gorge Calin said, " Obedient works and consumers" its crazy how the majority of what is produced in the world are thing we don't need.
With all due respect, Jodi doesn't take into account the productive forces in the transition to cleaner energy, which requires new infrastructure to replace the old one, meaning that many workers,.from the service sector and others, will probably be employed in more manual labor. One of the present-day Marxist scholars who addresses this issue, is computer scientist and econofysicist Paul Cockshott.
Amazing talk
~36:00 Nursing's a tricky one. I'm of the view that there's no good reason to not help old people be in good health until they drop dead when they're hundred (or older if we can figure that out one day). A lot of services are really just there to carry water for the failings of the system.
~39:00 services may be at the core but also we will 5x global energy consumption in a 100 years sustainably and also due to that but also due to how much quasi make-work service work is today, services of the future will look radically different in the future so the question is how you work with a class that is to abolish itself at least in the form that it exists today.
❤Great conversation
48:01 thats not personal is political, thats clan as class
At a moment you talk about arms. People should bear arms
I agree with you
But strangely enough, this is also the classical liberal and libertarian position
Maybe we can say that neoliberalism is closer to fascism, than to classical liberalism ?
What an intro my word
Great discussion. I was very gratified to hear Mackenzie Wark given some consideration, as I found her thesis to be most persuasive.
I find that adopting the perspective of Capital as Power (CasP) to be most helpful when considering these questions. In my own way I have, as Colin Drumm advised in his review of her book, packed up my (amateur) theoretical canons and redeployed. If Marxism does have the structure of a theology (I believe so), then heresy followed by self-excommunication is the only way forward.
Capital may not even be "capital" anymore, not as the Marxists conceive it. Maybe it never was...
Not sure that capitalism as such was ever defined or determined itself as a such and as a whole teleologically speaking by an overdetermined interest or core focus lets say in giving back to produce a "productive economy" as JD suggests here at 9 min 35 secs in. The assumption JD here seems to rest on is a kind of idea of a natural tendency for capitalism as such and as a whole return to or seek a kind of good, balanced way that would primarily over all be guided by or regualted in a sense by idea and interest in continuing and producing a "productive economy" .
What if capitalism as auch and at any given era as a whole and aggregate is not determined or regualted by a kind of reflex to be contrubiting to a "productive economy"
Rather capitalism as auch was and is primarily determined and regulated by aggregate efforts to produce surplus value for owners in any given enterprise, and that is it. No particular concern with "productive economy" overall. Unless system(s) of surplus value can be put into action. So its surplus value that detemines capitalism not interest or concern with "productive economy"
a few thoughts:
the notion of the middle class as a separate class comes mostly through EO Wright and the Ehrenreichs. it's not classic Marxism
Lenin was a classic Marxist in seeing domestic work in particular as unproductive, which is why he wanted women to join the industrial workforce. if it's a fantasy that the family was headed by the man, it's not just a fantasy but for Engels an epochal feature of the rise of private property. later, however, it becomes a bourgeois feminist fantasy, as far as people like Lenin, Luxemburg and Zetkin are concerned, which is why for working women the struggle for emancipation is a class rather than a gender struggle
see Richard Barbook's "the class of the new" on the long history of "new class" designations, usually related to new modes of production and attendant functions
for the postwar history of how the neocons and new right sought to divide the middle class politically and draw in the "middle american majority," see Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling. i developed c.2018 and earlier the notion that this struggle is now taking place among the two factions of the PB: the activist wing and the technocratic/creative class wing. both are steeped in petty-bourgeois ideology
social democrat economists like Jim Stanford see service work as the solution to the destructive aspects of capitalist overproduction, but without solving the political relation problem in terms of wage labour, state power and property regimes
getting away from autonomist theory is important for countless reasons but we should not ignore entirely the notion of semiocapitalism and the reality of the capitalization of human existence. the problem with the autonomists is that they're the most vulgar and mechanistic of Marxists. in Lacanese, for an autonomist $ = a, as opposed to $ a. this does not however get rid of the question of formal and real subsumption. the problem with the autonomist notion of real subsumption is that it is a kind of petty-bourgeois defeatism or determinism
shame today is being ignored (online or otherwise) while at the same time having your activity mined for profit or acclaim by someone else. Wendy Brown likes to reproach people for being concerned about the biocapitalist attention economy, just as in an earlier era hipsters would shame people for consumerism. Boris Vian's "Je cracherai sur vos tombes" ( I Spit on Your Graves ) is one of the first postwar works of petty-bourgeois culture - a stunt imitation of a cheesy novel, written in a few days, that became, as he anticipated, more successful than his serious work. this is partly why so much activity has moved online
what Dean here discusses in terms of the weakening of the symbolic order is anticipated by Negt and Kluge in Public Sphere and Experience, but for them political parties are another instance of production public sphere capture in a decaying bourgeois public sphere Frankfurt School type of logic. Warner took the idea of counter-publics from Negt & Kluge, but without giving credit to them because he wanted to avoid class analysis and promote identity politics instead. the notion that it's the Party that makes you valid is for N&K part of the dilemma. this is one reason why i think the Lacanian approach to Party is helpful. but the concept of counter-public is undialectical, non-universalist and gets you away from historical materialism - more Foucauldian or agonistic, maybe even anti-normative, than Marxist
there is strange aspect to this neo-feudal idea, which is that the PMC could lead the working class once again in another ( bourgeois ) revolution, as though socialism never happened. Radhika Desai rejects the idea that we're neo-feudal because feudalism involved social relations of paternalism that no longer exist and because we have citizens rights that serfs never had
the question of whether or not Lacan is useful for the left ignores the theoretical orientation of Marxism, which is open to all forms of human knowledge. it's not even a matter of "risk," as Jodi puts it, since all legitimate forms of knowledge have simply has been part of Marxism all along - evolutionary science, ethnography, history, philosophy, etc. as Badiou would put it, if it's scientifically valid it has universal import. that's why RFK Jr for example could never be a Marxist
if DT smoked cigars he would look even more like Orson Welles
please like or heart this comment - i will come back and check in a few hours
Capitalism might be going through big changes but as Lacan says it produces goods that have no utility as well as requiring underdevelopment. The shift in capitalism has been firms no longer need to be explicitly competitive. Look at Walmart… they just purchased a mall. Look at all the businesses Amazon owns. Then look at Private Equity. These companies are able to make more money quicker by spreading themselves into other areas where no one else can compete at scale. Temu and SHEIN used a duty tax loophole. I’m worried about the focus on service workers, although service workers may get companies to offer better pay and things like that. Starbucks deals with unions and giving good benefits because they know they need a specific type of person to be a barista and at the end of the day this helps them make immense profit. Capitalism hits us harder than most want to believe.
Good points…but PE is tricky. The “owners” will get their management and other fees irrespective of how the portfolio company does…
48:00 neofuedalism and pop culture