Capitalism or a New Feudalism?

Today a debate is raging over the question of whether we now have a technofeudal economy of rentierism, pervasive anti-competitive practices, and stagnation or a dynamic and brutally competitive hypercapitalist system. To complicate matters, there are further disagreements amongst those who reject the “technofeudal hypothesis” and contend that existing theories of capitalism already adequately explain the phenomena we observe today.

Featuring prominently within these debates are, among many others, John Bellamy Foster, perhaps the most famous living proponent of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s monopoly capitalism framework, and economist Stephen Maher and political scientist Scott Aquanno, who oppose not only the technofeudal hypothesis, but also the ideas of monopoly capitalism and political capitalism. While these may appear to be niche debates between different Marxist schools, irrelevant to anyone but academic leftists, they confront some of the most important issues in politics and economics today.

Foster sees the state as bound by monopoly capital, now serving to hand out privileges and thus unearned rent streams. The state in this view is also a means through which surplus capital is absorbed (through, for example, spending on war and empire). He describes this as a form of political capitalism in which the state and capital are tightly connected, with the former bolstering the position of the latter as it becomes less competitive and more stagnant. Describing the findings of a study conducted by Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonnahe fifteen years ago, the editors of Monthly Review recently wrote, “Practically, every industry in the United States was controlled by a very few firms, and levels of concentration were rising. These firms were also multinational corporations dominating the world.”

For prominent monopoly capital theorists like Foster, record corporate profits and ballooning asset prices do not necessarily point to a thriving, dynamic economy generally or industrial base specifically. Quite the opposite. They are viewed as the consequences of today’s runaway financialization, an upshot of the fact that the economic surplus cannot any longer be absorbed by markets that are in fact stagnating. This is why we see speculative bubbles, stock buy-backs, and further debt-juiced accumulation, not expansion of the real sector. As within today’s markets, dominated by massive corporate oligopolies, prices are administered more than they are competitively set. There is therefore a tendency toward economic stagnation until it is addressed by intensive state intervention through bailouts, quantitative easing, war and empire, and massive-scale artificial waste. The state must constantly intervene to prop up capital in the face of chronically weak demand.

Maher and Aquanno contend that the monopoly capital school’s idea of competition is fundamentally flawed and outdated, too narrowly focused on the concentration of key sectors and the number of competing companies. They see investment booming, spending on research and development continuing to increase, technological innovation accelerating, and profits soaring to historical highs, and they conclude that there is no evidence of declining productivity or general economic malaise. Rather than seeing corporate consolidation, highly concentrated markets, and strong state intervention and integration as historically aberrant, and thus ushering in a new, anti-competitive form of monopoly capitalism or technofeudalism, they see these features of the present moment as deeply connected to and implicated in capitalism’s competitive dynamics.

To them, it doesn’t matter that most of the growth of the past several decades has been driven by the financial sector, nor does the more conspicuous and muscular role of the state in the economy necessarily mean a less competitive system. They draw on Anwar Shaikh’s formulation of “real competition” to contend that today’s concentrations of capital, financialization, and unabashed statism have in fact intensified competition. They see both capitalists and governments as participants in an extremely fast-paced and intense fight for investment, market position, and survival.

Maher and Aquanno believe that theories of technofeudalism, rentier capitalism, and monopoly capitalism alike entail an implicit argument in favor of an alliance between capital and workers. They see this as an analytical and strategic mistake for socialists. That is, by framing the fundamental problem as one of monopoly, of unearned rents through the corruption of competition, we end up in a shallow, reformist cycle of merely asking for a fairer or more competitive capitalism. This, they argue, forecloses a deeper analysis of the exploitation always present in capitalism and the capitalist accumulation process. They believe that workers fundamentally have no interest in a more competitive and decentralized economy, indeed, that “competition is the problem.” To Maher and Aquanno, the socialist left should focus on the appropriation of our actually quite efficient corporate institutions, administering them to serve socialist goals. In political and economic decentralization, Maher and Aquanno see the traps of reformism and pro-competition liberalism. They believe that socialists must instead take over and democratize the efficient, centralized administrative apparatus already constructed by contemporary financial and technological capitalism. But in setting forth their case, they give short shrift to the argument that democratization would, in practice, mean economic decentralization.

The Meaning of Competition and Socialism

Certainly the number of firms within the field of economic play must have some impact on the overall degree of competitiveness. It would seem that much of this disagreement cannot be solved by pointing to empirical facts, because it is largely, if not entirely, an argument about what we mean normatively when we invoke “competition.” If, on the one hand, we see economic competition as necessarily or definitionally excluding the coercive political means (much as thinkers as diverse as Charles Dunoyer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, and Franz Oppenheimer did), then it is clearly correct to draw a sharp distinction between capitalism and an actual competitive market economy. And it is notable that the theorists of monopoly capital themselves admit that such a truly competitive market system is always introduced as a point of critical departure or hypothetical thought experiment. Foster, for example, recently wrote that “no Marxist economic theorist would ever accept the neoclassical concepts of perfect and pure competition as anything but a fiction.”

Maher and Aquanno maintain a strict Marxist distinction between profit and rent; for them, profit requires an active participation in the cycle of capital accumulation, whereas rent relies on the suspension of that cycle. They argue that it “strains the imagination to say…that any income from ownership is rent.” Yet many historical socialists have held to a version of just this claim and, accordingly, did not hew so closely to Maher and Aquanno’s distinction between profit and rent. Many socialists have regarded rent, interest, and profits as alike, forms of extraction based in the structural inequalities of the capitalist system. Nor does this mean somehow abandoning the labor theory of value. Socialists have in fact long argued that monopoly ownership and special privilege are the mechanisms through which the labor of the worker is stolen. This debate is perhaps best understood not as one between reformist liberalism and socialism, but as yet another iteration of the old debate between Marx and Bakunin, between competing visions of socialism.

The ultimate problem for the Maher and Aquanno view—and indeed for the orthodox position of all statist Marxists—is that their goal of a supposedly rational, democratic, ex ante form of economic planning, to replace the chaos of the marketplace, can only ultimately result in the creation of one giant capitalist firm. Is it never made clear why or how this integrated conglomerate under the direction of state power would be any less exploitative or environmentally destructive than competition. Maher and Aquanno deeply misunderstand the practical, historical relationship between political domination and economic exploitation. The state is not a neutral tool that can be seized from the capitalists and then inverted and democratized, placed in the hands of the working class.

The Marxists’ own historical and material analyses reveal the state, in its structural DNA, as a coercive apparatus that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a specialized minority. This argument was among Bakunin’s key contributions, and what allowed him to predict the emergence of a “red bureaucracy” (or the “new class”) and through it the reemergence of so many of capitalism’s core features and mechanisms. In erecting a highly centralized and powerful administrative hierarchy in which the very few give the orders and the masses do the work, Marxists can and have reproduced exactly the forms of domination, alienation, and extraction that they set out to abolish. These relations existed long before capitalist forms of property and markets, and changing the names does not change the relationships, at least not on its own. We find competitive dynamics and pressures in all human systems. Even in an economic system in which the state owns everything and employs everyone, there will be competition between workers within the state equivalents of companies and business units, as well as reconstituted competitive class struggles between the managing bureaucrats and the workers.

Liberty or Authority?

The old practical question remains: how do we make the economic system democratic and non-exploitative? How do we get to a system where labor is compensated with its full product? It doesn’t seem that centralizing power even further will accomplish what orthodox Marxists believe it will, given our experience with centralized power. To accomplish the normative goal identified by Marx himself, a social world without domination, a world in which human beings are free and not alienated, requires the rejection of hierarchy in all its forms. The tension here is, once again, the one that split the socialist movement between authoritarians led by Marx and libertarians led by Bakunin. Recent years have witnessed renewed interest in the republican reading of Marx (for example, William Clare Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno and Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx). In the republican tradition, freedom is a condition of non-domination, the freedom from being subjected arbitrarily to the will of another. Reading Marx in this way, capitalism is just one of many ways that an individual can be so subjected. The real horizon of the socialist is the end of domination—which would have to include the abolition of the state. And while Marxists have often insisted that their doctrine is defined historically and materially, as opposed to normatively, Marx himself clearly set out normative claims and goals.

If Marxists like Maher and Aquanno insist that massive, centralized, hierarchical forms of organization are a necessity of modern economic production, then the anarchist replies that they must be made unnecessary. This is in no way a merely liberal or reformist approach. Bakunin’s position is arguably more radical and ultimately more anti-capitalist than Maher and Aquanno’s in that it takes on the forms of hierarchy and centralized power that actually give rise to the theft of surplus value. Leaving the state untouched leaves the fundamental problem unresolved. The forms of technology and industrial organization we have today are not inevitable. There are local, decentralized, commons-based alternatives that have existed and still can.

Within our current political economy, it is not clear how diminished inter-company competition would actually have to be before Maher and Aquanno would admit that power itself is the ultimate driver of the dynamics we observe. That is, if we reduce the meaning of competition to the mere presence of coercive dynamics, rivalry between organizations, or constraints that compel agents to optimize their performance, then competition is a universal quality of human activity and organization. It is not unique to capitalism or to market economies generally. We will find competition regardless of the label on a system and regardless of its actual structure. Government bureaucrats will struggle and compete amongst themselves for broader administrative powers. The old aristocratic lords constantly competed for land and power. Corporate managers vie for allocations of capital. The anarchists understood that we must structure these historically durable competitive forces horizontally and cooperatively. We can distinguish between competition through domination and theft, and competition within a framework that respects freedom and equality.

Maintaining a normative distinction between the economic means and the political means helps to draw our attention to what is elided when competition is defined as Maher and Aquanno define it, without further analysis or qualification. Theories of rentier capitalism or technofeudalism are, at bottom, attempts to point out and diagnose the expanding role of the political means within contemporary political-economic systems. If we follow Maher and Aquanno in insisting that we must not use these labels because we’re still looking at plain old capitalism, then it isn’t at all clear why they think it’s acceptable to use other labels such as fascism, which also contains competition under their definition. Historical fascism was not just a state form. Not only explicitly but materially, it was also a specific economic system. They must grant that fascism left the capitalist mode of production intact; private property, the wage relationship, and competition between firms all remain under fascism. Large firms and industrial conglomerates were in very active competition for customers, state contracts, and dominance within sectors and markets. If it is only the presence of such competition and of profit-seeking that requires the retention of capitalism as the preferred label, then Maher and Aquanno’s reasoning would seem to require the rejection of “fascism” as a new or distinct category.

They are no less selective and arbitrary in the way they define the productive reinvestment that supposedly distinguishes today’s tech giants from feudalism. Their narrow definition obscures many of the ways political-economic power reproduced itself for centuries under that system. In arguing that today’s tech companies are unlike the old lords, Maher and Aquanno claim that the lords produced unproductively, in order to consume. It is true as far as it goes: they did not produce for the market as we understand it today. Yet this argument facilely ignores the myriad strategies feudal lords used to deploy and reinvest their resources toward consolidating their power and strengthening their ability to dominate and extract more. As a matter of historical fact, feudal lords frequently reinvested in the infrastructure projects that both secured and expanded their extractive capacities, building fortified structures, mills, and roadways; funding large-scale agricultural development; and buying military equipment and arming their retainers. In making productive reinvestment their test, Maher and Aquanno obscure the underlying historical continuity between the various systems of political economy, for example, the feudal, mercantile, and capitalist systems. Dominant ruling classes through time have always applied portions of accumulated surplus toward the architectures (physical, technological, social, legal, and otherwise) necessary for power preservation and continuing extraction. This is a feature of all coercive, hierarchical systems, not just capitalism.

Today’s global corporate monopolies are not competitive in the normal sense in which either classical or neoclassical economists would have used that term. Capitalism is a “market economy” only in an incredibly misleading sense. The federalized, non-capitalist forms of markets outlined by anarchists like Proudhon and Tucker were also called liberal, reformist, and bourgeois in their time. We need new ways to talk about these questions. Perhaps ironically, today’s intra-Marxist debates make the structural necessity of centralized power to capitalism especially salient. Centralized, hierarchical power inherently produces class stratification, domination, and exploitation, regardless of what the system is called or who is in charge. Indeed, we might go further: it is not just that such power produces these results, but that it represents them or constitutes them in and of itself.

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