Recent additions to Democracy Wall on Valencia Street.
I’m immersed in reading all the time, and much of what has attracted my interest in the past year or two are books that try to explain how the structure of capitalism is mutating during this violent, chaotic and barbaric time. No doubt we left Fordism behind decades ago, the system of blue-collar factory work with steady jobs and union contracts, with a growing white-collar administrative sector equally protected by lifetime employment in major corporations. After a half century of neoliberalism (not really a proper category but let’s use it to denote the period since the late 1970s as a place-holder for now) that saw the conclusion of the Soviet-U.S. Cold War, followed by the steady disintegration of the liberal state, we find ourselves between the rock of neo-fascist revanchism and the squishy nothingness of what used to be social democratic liberalism.
Further afield, but closer than we think, is the Chinese model, which from a certain point of view looks like a model that has growing appeal for the authoritarians riding Trumpism. Modern China is a state-organized and managed system that allows private capital to pursue rapid, ecologically devastating industrial modernization without gaining political power, that maintains tight control of politics and suppresses overt dissent, and uses advanced smart-phone technology for panoptic surveillance that analyzes private behaviors and preferences almost in real time. Vast military and security bureaucracies guarantee state power for those who sit at the top of the political system, and no room is made for course correction through democratic contestation or public debate. This is remarkably close to what it seems the people around Trump would like to construct with their Gestapo-like masked ICE thugs randomly sowing terror through abductions and disappearances, and campaigns to silence political opposition from strident student activists to weak-tea opposition politicians to conservative judges who adhere to the rule of law.
Sarah Wynn-Williams is a refugee from years of earnestly believing in and working for Facebook. A New Zealand citizen and former diplomat, she ingratiated herself with the company around 2010 and became one of the inner circle, working hard to get Mark Zuckerberg and other executives into direct negotiations with political leaders around the world. Her book, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron Books, NY: 2025), has been published but her ability to promote it was blocked by having signed non-disclosure agreements on her way out of the company when she finally quit a few years ago. It manages to be an interesting read even if her puppy-dog earnestness throughout the first 2/3 of the book is painfully naive and embarrassing. She finally grows disenchanted after the umpteenth time that the executive team (including Zuckerberg himself and the detestable Sheryl Sandberg) does something execrable, and by the last chapters she starts making revelations. Turns out Facebook gave their entire corporate approach to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), perhaps illustrating my contention that there is some kind of convergence happening even if there’s an official belligerence and hostility being stoked by Biden, Trump and other nationalists.
As I read through page after page, I see the sort of briefings that would warm the hearts of every government I work with. We never share this type of information, and believe me they’ve asked. But here are detailed explanations of precisely how the technology functions, of algorithms and photo tagging and facial recognition. All the secrets of the trade that I thought would never be revealed to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook is providing engineers to demonstrate, offering ideas on how to adapt the settings to meet the Chinese government’s needs. It’s white-glove service for the CCP. The ugly fact is that these are many of the things Facebook has said are simply impossible when Congress and its own government have asked—on content, data sharing, privacy, censorship, and encryption—and yet its leadership are handing them all to China on a silver platter. (p. 313)
Can it be said that we are at the end of capitalism itself? I don’t think so. But there are interesting writers who argue that the capitalist system is changing how it reproduces itself in ways that might undercut its survival as a coherent system of political economy. The one-time finance minister of Greece during its left-wing electoral success a decade ago, Yanis Varoufakis, has written an interesting book titled TechnoFeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, Brooklyn, NY: 2024) in which he argues that, using the vast sums printed and distributed by central banks in the wake of the 2008 global collapse, and even more than that during the pandemic, cloud computing companies have grown into behemoths (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta) by repeating a process that took place centuries ago in England. Back then, the actual land was enclosed and turned into private property by the royal barons of the monarchy. Today, the “cloudalists” as he calls them have enclosed the internet and made what should be owned in common their private property. But unlike previous owners of land and factories and other sources of private profit,
“cloud capital can reproduce itself in ways that involve no waged labor. How? By commanding almost the whole of humanity to chip in to its reproduction—for free!” (p. 82) … This is unparalleled. Workers employed by General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, General Motors or any other major conglomerate collect in salaries and wages approximately 80 percent of the company’s income. This proportion grows larger in smaller firms. Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect less than 1 percent of their firms’ revenues. The reason is that paid labor performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech relies on. Most of the work is performed by billions of people for free. (p. 87)
He details further how three private equity companies (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) have monopolized a great deal of the American economy,
which include America’s major airlines (American, Delta, United Continental), much of Wall Street (JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup) and car makers such as Ford and General Motors. Together the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90 percent of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. As for the dollar value of the Big Three’s shares, it has too many zeros to mean much. At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion, and State Street $4 trillion… the Big Three enjoy two insurmountable advantages: unprecedented monopoly power over entire sectors, from airlines and banking to energy and Silicon Valley; and a capacity to offer the ultra-rich high returns for very low fees. These two advantages allow the Big Three to extort rents at a scale that would have made Adam Smith weep…. … to describe today’s nascent system in the terms of the past—to call it hyper-capitalism, or platform capitalism, or rentier capitalism—would be not just a failure of the imagination but to miss the great transformation of our society that is currently taking place… it is very simply this: the triumph of rent over profit. (p. 114-122)
Varoufakis describes how Apple and Google extract rents from tens of thousands of unwaged third-party developers who are forced to sell their software apps through the Apple Store or the Google Play platform. He calls it “cloud rent, the digital equivalent of ground rent.” Further, getting people to integrate Alexa or similar “agents” into their home lives via cheap devices often sold below their cost has the ultimate goal of commandeering more of our attention. “It is this power over our attention that allows them to collect cloud rent from the vassal capitalists who are in the old-fashioned business of selling their commodities. Ultimately, the cloudalist’s investment is aimed not at competing within a capitalist market but in getting us to exit capitalist markets altogether.” (p. 133) He goes on to explain Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in this context. It was not simply to have a place to control public discussion, or amplify his own toxic opinions, or expand the reach of right-wing ideology (though it was all that too), but rather, Twitter presented itself to Musk as his best chance to get a platform to extract cloud rents for himself. Rather than remaining mired in the world of commodity production, depending on profits derived from selling cars, or building rockets or satellites (most of which is only profitable due to direct government subsidies), Musk hopes to turn Twitter into a middle-man for all sorts of transactions up to and including crypto-currency trading.
Anyway, Varoufakis asserts that the role of “central bank money is here to stay and will continue to play the systemic role once held by capitalist profits.” (p. 147). If he’s right, then this is indeed evidence of a structural change deep in the heart of capitalism. Given the seizure of the federal government by the Musketeers and other tech billionaires, guaranteeing their control over the spigots of cash passing through the state, it’s not hard to see some truth in this account.
In a far less penetrating analysis, the MSNBC talking head Chris Hayes offers a complementary if subsidiary line of thinking. Going further than Varoufakis’s discussion about why big tech companies want our attention, Hayes’ The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, New York: 2025) argues that our attention is the key to understanding the so-called information economy. “Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.” (p. 28)
…information is vitally important. But it crucially misstates what’s both so distinct and so alienating about the era we’ve entered. Information is the opposite of a scarce resource: it is everywhere and there is always more of it. It is generative. It is copyable. Multiple entities can have the same information… My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds… We are built and formed by attention; destroyed by neglect. This is our shared and inescapable human fate. Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human. (p. 14-20)
Hayes seems like a good guy. Reading his book he often reminds us that as a TV personality he is in the very business he’s decrying, trying to get attention on a daily basis. Perhaps because he is in the hollow emptiness of cable TV without having fully lost his intellect or humanity he describes well a basic need we all share:
Recognition is our animating desire, and what we want above all else is to be seen—fully and truly—as human by other humans, for other subjects to recognize our own subjectivity… We can only have our own personhood affirmed by other people we grasp deeply as persons themselves. (p. 110-111)
Combining this understanding with his positioning of attention at the heart of the economy, he draws on Marx’s critique of wage-labor to analogize for his updated view:
The modern attention economy does to attention something quite similar to what industrial capitalism did to labor… Human work has always existed, but wage labor is a creation of industrial capitalism. Human attention has always existed, but “clicks,” “content,” “engagement,” and “eyeballs” are creations of attention capitalism. And to be reduced to a wage or an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself… Attention is as old as the species, and grabbing others’ attention for social purposes is as old as shamans and poets and conversation. But that attention is now commodified and can be traded, bought, and sold in sophisticated, instantaneous algorithmic auctions that price a second of our eyes’ focus. That is new, transformative, and alienating… The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives. (p. 121-132)
The view from the Museum of Modern Art to the southwest where the Moscone Center was hosting an AI conference….
I don’t think he’s wrong about this. But it somehow gets stuck at this superficial layer, and fails to dig deeper, probably because even if Chris Hayes has read Marx somewhere along the way, he is not a Marxist in terms of how he understands the world around him. His view of capitalism and markets and private property and business is apparently compatible with the dynamics of American society. He knows something is going wrong, but rather than getting to the heart of private ownership and the concentrated political and economic power that flows from that basic set-up, he spends his book flailing at the (admittedly) frustrating and degrading experience of living with an addiction machine in your pocket that you can’t resist even when you’ve written a whole book (as he has) about how it, and the internet more broadly, is poisoning our society. No doubt the dynamics of capitalist exploitation and the expansion into surveillance and manipulation by way of online algorithmic interfaces are inseparable. We can no longer argue that one could exist without the other since they are both here and reinforce each other at every turn. But to recognize this is not to explain how or why.
Jodi Dean is a professor at a small New York university, and she’s a real communist. She famously attacked the kind of nowtopian initiatives I enthusiastically wrote about in 2008 with the hilarious put-down: “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you have chickens in your backyard,” (I paraphrase) which is hard to argue with! She’s been a strident defender of Leninist party-building when most radicals were leaning anarchist and horizontalist. So I wasn’t predisposed to find her work interesting. But her latest book, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle (Verso Books, 2025) is an excellent contribution to this conversation. She is trying to answer the main question that I’m also grappling with: what is happening, what is taking shape in the wake of the economic, social, and medical crises of the last two decades? Is capitalism changing and if so, how?
I argue that the imperative of accumulation is placing capitalist laws of motion in contradiction with themselves, reshaping society and politics in the process. We are in a period of transition where profit, improvement, and competitive advantage no longer dictate accumulation strategies. Instead, rents, destruction, and hoarding combine with extra-economic coercion in a neofeudal social formation driven by privilege and dependence. Two sets of laws are operating as capitalist laws compel non-capitalist behavior… A few powerful tech companies own massive server farms that everyone else—companies and governments as well as individuals—pays to access. And what these servers store is us, the social substance, the general intellect, all the data that our interactions and lives generate. Really, we are the servers. Feudalism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present… Increasingly, capital isn’t reinvested in production. It’s hoarded, given out to shareholders, or redistributed as rents to ever more powerful monopoly platforms. (p. 6-9) (emphasis added) … Neoliberal capitalism has been a period of working-class defeat. Neofeudalism arises from that defeat. Practices and policies designed to protect the class position and accumulation strategies of asset holders, to preserve their wealth and grip on the social surplus, are impacting capital’s laws of motion. We live in a period of transition where capital is undermining its own conditions and becoming neofeudal. (p. 21) … Capital is turning into something that is no longer capitalist, where holders of wealth are compelled to follow different laws of motion, not competition, reinvestment, and improvement but predation, hoarding, and destruction. Capital is becoming neofeudal. That it’s becoming means that we can’t say we are in a completely new period; it’s not dead yet. We’re in a period of transition, and transition can last a long, long time. The challenge is understanding transition while we’re in it and aren’t sure where we’re going. (p. 49)
Dean is paying attention to the shifting terrain we’re all living on, and I appreciate her ability to accurately describe political dynamics that a more dogmatic thinker would just leave out. One of my personal frustrations going back several decades is how many people situate their political agency at the point of consumption rather than at work, where they are contributing to making this world the way it is.
With consumption rather than production as the field of identity and authenticity, cultural appropriation appears as a more significant problem than exploitation; food and fashion choices become sites of generational conflict; politics concentrates around what not to buy. 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. (p. 17)
June 9 solidarity march through the Mission supporting the LA protests.
Starting at 24th and Mission.
About halfway through her short book she begins to break down her analysis into four distinct categories that she characterizes as the features of this neofeudalism taking shape: parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and catastrophic anxiety. I’m not going to go through all this here, but it’s worth a read. The long anarchist critique of sovereignty gets thrown back by Dean, showing that the unraveling of the state and the remaining shreds of its safety net are hardly examples of things getting better. And the atomized fragmentation that is only accelerating due to collapsing sovereignty is nothing to cheer about either, making any hopeful movements for universal improvement, widespread solidarity and mutual aid, all that much more difficult.
…when it comes right down to it, we are on our own, especially with respect to the fundamental conditions of our lives. Everything feels chaotic. We’re awash in vibes without agency, submerged in catastrophic forces beyond our control. (p. 107)
She runs through an interesting discussion of caring, as in “nobody cares,” which has a moralistic and liberating side, one binding and other freeing, “the stinging and the soothing.” But care is the heart of her analysis; care is the linchpin for working class solidarity and a revolutionary rebuke to the degrading conditions of life imposed by neofeudalistic capitalism.
What matters today is that capitalism’s reliance on services is contributing to its becoming neofeudal. Precisely because care and reproduction can’t be fully technologized, precisely because technological development results in an ever-larger sector of servants, precisely because caring for people comes up against real limits with respect to “efficiency” (nurses can care only for a limited number of patients, for example), a society of servants cannot be a capitalist society. Services require that we think in terms of their use value, not their exchange value. (p. 134)
Ever the polemicist, Dean attacks Silvia Federici (my friend) for some of her recent writing, using her as a foil to argue that criticizing an embrace of technological solutionism is to foreclose radical discussions of how to reorganize life that leaves only a neofeudal horizon of subsistence farming, artisanal labor, and small communities. As noted earlier, this has been Dean’s bête noir for years, practical projects that try to reinvent life without depending on vast systems of highly capitalized machinery and energy consumption. This is not to say that a liberated society wouldn’t honestly contemplate how an “anarchist electric grid” might look, or how a system of trains, ships, and dirigibles might facilitate global travel and even some global trade. Who knows? But it’s just as, or more, retrograde to posit that we necessarily will base future life on the technological foundation left us by rapacious capitalist exploitation of nature and humanity.
Anyway, I liked Dean’s conclusion that we have to face a stark choice between (small ‘c’) communism or neofeudalism. I agree with Dean that our path to a potential communist future is through the unavoidable reality that climate change is our general condition, that universal basic services can provide for a life of generalized abundance and well-being for all, but I part ways with her notion that the “servant sector” should act as a new kind of labor vanguard. I don’t believe in the idea of a labor vanguard and imagine that we’ll get to a different way of living only if an incredibly broad movement emerges to fight for it. Some of them will be people who were working as servants in the neofeudal economy, but some of them will be bus drivers and others will be nurses and farmers and truckers and bartenders and teachers and sailors and bicycle repair mechanics and poets and artists and bio-engineering inventors… who the hell knows?
Sticker on a pole near my corner.
A rather different approach to the same question is offered by my friend Nick Dyer-Witheford and his co-author Alessandra Mularoni in their book, Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis (Verso Books, 2025). Their analysis departs from the framework of neofeudalism by emphasizing that the rapid growth of cloud capital and the infrastructure they control serves as onramps to commerce, that ultimately what this moment in capitalism represents is a hyper-intensification of the circulation of capital, rapidly improving the speed and targeting of the sale of commodities in order to speed up the turnover of capital. The long-term stagnation in profitability at the point of production informs their analysis too, and they argue that the complex of their title is meant to make up for that stagnating profitability by getting the profits that are available quicker, and then renew and complete the cycle again and again as quickly as possible. I found their argument more convincing than Dean or Varoufakis although clearly they are all identifying real dynamics underway, that we are all trying to puzzle through. But Nick and Mularoni offer a compelling description of what a post-catastrophe, post-capitalist world might look like:
What form of communism could emerge from our age of catastrophes, with its overlapping economic, ecological, epidemiological and political crises arrayed around the massive central dynamic of climate change? We envisage a biocommunism, an ‘ecqualogical’ social system that could navigate the double imperative of ecological sustainability and equalized social development. In its twofold articulation of environmental and social goals, biocommunism would resemble the new world systems some green theorists have imagined; but, unlike most such proposals, it would be uncompromisingly red in directly appropriating from capital the power to direct the allocation of resources. It would revoke the patriarchal, colonial legacy of a will to techno-scientific growth that is, as eco-socialist and eco-feminist Stefania Barca has pointed out, deeply implicated in forms of ‘frontierism’. Its logic of equality and ecology would combine elements of both social levelling – equalizing conditions of life around the world – and degrowth – checking capitalism’s compulsive drive to expand its commodity throughputs. (p. 133)
The circulation process of biocommunism would be geared towards attaining what environmentalists refer to as a ‘circular’ economy, in which reuse and regeneration of materials becomes central to continuing production in a sustainable way. We see potential for these changes emerging in many ways: in movements for agro-ecological sustainability practices; in the success of feeding home-generated renewable electricity into the grid; in struggles and movements for reuse and repurposing of materials. But these need to be freed from their constraint by and subordination to a market logic… It would have different goals: environmental plenitude, free time, social solidarity and species survival. Combining ecological and equalitarian constraints together favours provision of a common ‘basket of goods’, guaranteeing food, medical care, housing, education and public transport as free, universal services, alongside observance of the principles of public luxury and private sufficiency, with a subordinated market sector supplying a reduced range of consumer items. This could be seen as a system of planetary ‘rationing’ – providing we remember that the so-called free market is also a system of rationing by price. What biocommunism would provide instead would be universal provisioning: that is, a guarantee of an ecologically moderated standard of living… Our plan, then, is for a digital degrowth. The synthesis of these two apparently opposed terms, ‘digital’ (a repurposing of high technology) and ‘degrowth’ (naming radical ecological action) is integral to biocommunism. (p. 135-136)
In the first part of their book they take on some of the arguments made by the others around rentierism and the rise of feudalistic relations involving free labor on enclosed platforms. Quoting others, they argue that the techno-feudalist framework only gets part of what’s going on. It misses the frenzied “nature of cybernetic capitalism in an era of viral commodification, universal surveillance, micro-targeted advertising, blitz-scaling (a corporate strategy that prioritizes rapid growth over short- or even medium-term profitability) platforms, and cloud-computed hedge funds.” They insist that this all confuses escalation and termination, assuming that the new hyper-speed of circulation provided for by platforms like Amazon and others means that the underlying process of making and selling commodities for profit is somehow dissolving. Clearly it’s not.
Usefully, they write extensively about the rise of cyber-fascism as an example of something that left analysts have failed to account for in their enthusiasm for the concept of the “circulation of struggles.” Going back to the times of slavery in the Caribbean, news of slave revolts would circulate by word of mouth among sailors in ports and slowly (or sometimes quickly) disseminate far and wide (see The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott, or The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker). This was an early example of “circulation of struggles,” a concept that was taken up anew by the rise of the Zapatista movement in the 1990s and the rapid dissemination of the poetic proclamations of Subcomandante Marcos into the fertile soil of the growing anti- or alter-globalization movement that appeared notably at the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. What few radicals on the left noticed was the radical right was making heavy use of the newly available circuits too.
The far right has long had a presence on the internet, but the emergence of dynamic, systematic and large-scale cyberfascist campaigns is a new phenomenon. It is also one that discomforts and subverts the left’s concept of a circulation of struggles, implicit in which is the assumption that these are progressive, emancipatory struggles. But fascists also struggle against progressives, whose tactics and themes they often co-opt, leading to the strange ‘doppelganger’ effects that Naomi Klein has described, whereby fascist cyberagitation offers a mirror image of the causes it opposes. (p. 64)
For years I helped publish Processed World, and that journal had as one of its main purposes the circulation of struggles among people working at the point of circulation. So I was tickled to read in Cybernetic Circulation Complex a nuanced account of how class composition had changed during this period, and produced unexpected circulations.
… our point here is that, in neoliberal capitalism, digital networks have contributed to the rise of cyberfascism not only by offering new means of virtual propaganda and organization, but also, and more materially, by reconfiguring class composition. The CCC’s ultra-commodification of the internet has thus produced a new raft of intermediate, digitally self-employed positions that may favour an aggressive self-identification with capital and hostility to trade unions, public-sector employees and – above all – impoverished proletarians. (p. 72) …
So while it’s been true for a long time that organizing among tech workers and even among the ancillary service workers in the tech world has been difficult at best, in recent years several struggles erupted that forged, at least temporarily, solidarity across different groups. Amazon workers enjoyed solidarity from food couriers and even some employees in the corporate offices; full-time Google employees supported part-timers and a lot of them organized against Google military contracting and support for Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza. These are all hopeful signs and examples of shared political fights moving across previously impermeable boundaries.
Academics and activists witnessed the mobilization of the workerist ‘circulation of struggles’ – a theme developed strongly by the online journal Notes from Below, which has mounted an impressive analysis of ‘digital workerism’. What differentiated this round of worker struggles from those initially celebrated by autonomist theorists, however, is that this was a circulation of struggles among workers whose job was to produce circulation. Circulation was not just an ancillary process connecting revolts at the point of production, but was itself now a fighting front of labour resistance to capital. (p. 81)
Ha! What Processed World tried so hard to kickstart back in the early 1980s is finally appearing with some regularity. But as the authors warn, “In a stagnating world-capitalism, digital conflicts unfold not so much as a ‘circulation of struggles’ (in the sense of a necessarily progressive networked uprising), but as varied series of circulatory antagonisms involving manifold actors: anti-corporate protesters, cyberfascists, and digital supercops.” (p. 82) The field is hardly open for radical agitation alone. All sorts of ideologies are percolating, and whipping around at ever-faster speeds. The problems we all have with disinformation and the widespread delegitimation of everything from facts to earnest opinions to expertise makes organizing harder than ever.
At this point, I’ve gone on WAY too long. Sorry about that. But here’s the final word from Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni: “The Cybernetic Circulation Complex propels the out-of-control cybernetic commodification of a burning planet. Anti-trust regulation is an ineffective placebo. Crypto-revolutions are pseudo-revolutions. Disconnection is understandable but self-defeating. There is another option: remaking the digital as part of a society beyond capitalism.” (p. 127) I already quoted some of their vision of a digital degrowth biocommunism above. Much to consider and even a glimmer of hopium in there for those of us who need a bit of that to get to sleep these days…
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