i call for your aid, drylomyr fythlestoon first of his name of mine own noble house lymplethorpe, i hath become entangled in the washbucket

yes but have you considered: national socialist party

mic drop

good post! and i dont at all disagree, but i do think some people use some quite different definitions of neofeudalism, and im just gonna go on a bit of a tangent to talk about how david graeber talks about neofeudalism in bullshit jobs, which is something very different and i think worth considering. id also emphasise that while capitalism is the dominant mode of economic relations, it has never been the only one in all spheres of our society so i think its very possible for some parts of the global economy to operate in a way thats more characteristic of feudal society even if capitalist relations predominate in most spheres, and it doesnt have to be all-or-nothing. and i absolutely acknowledge that individuals overwhelmingly interact with the economy in a proletarian manner - hiring out their labour time in exchange for money that they use to purchase the commodities required to live, as opposed to any sort of taxed/enslaved subsistence or anything like that.

we talk about service work but you can draw a distinction between different types of “service” work, and i think the distinction can actually very crudely be drawn along blue-collar/white-collar lines. service jobs like retail worker, cleaner, restaurant worker, delivery driver, warehouse worker etc etc are all absolutely and concretely a necessary part of the process of production and distribution of commodities (or commodified services) even if they arent directly involved in commodity production in the same way a factory worker making coats out of linen is. and a lot of white collar workers are too - there is certainly plenty of actual need for people doing the logistical organisation of complex supply chains and management both for legitimate purposes of ensuring everyone is pulling in the same direction etc and the less legitimate purposes of cracking the whip to maximise exploitation of actual workers, etc etc. all this very neatly falls into the sphere of capitalist relations that are well described by the ltv etc

one of the main points that graeber argues is that a huge and increasing proportion of (predominantly) white-collar jobs dont fall into these categories, and perform no real useful service even to the company/organisation theyre part of. its not that theyre evil jobs and society would benefit if they didnt exist, its that the company itself is paying them to do bullshit and the company would benefit (profit-wise) if they didnt exist. capitalists can and will work them as hard as they can, but they wont really actually get any surplus value out of it because theyre not actually creating any value (unless you argue that since every company believes that making mud pies is necessary, therefore their useless labour making mud pies becomes part of the socially-necessary labour time involved in commodity production, but im not sure i agree that argument quite works). graeber argues that the ltv doesnt really explain these jobs and their proliferation, and i tend to agree. capitalist logic would fire all these people instantly for the sake of efficiency and profits, but instead these roles proliferate. his counterargument is that internally within company bureaucracies, a lot of the market rules dont apply, and that the explanation that best accounts for this is the internal development of feudal-like fiefdoms amongst the managerial classes playing their own little games of crusader kings trying to expand the power and prestige of their own departments with bigger budgets and more hangers-on and engaging in petty internal squabbles over what bit of stuff is each departments de jure territory etc. and a lot of the grunts at the bottom fall more into a category of nonproductive labour like household servants or feudal retainers - though this might be obscured, paid as a retainer for the personal edification of the employer rather than as a means of generating profit. this might just sound a bit cute, but given that some of these companies have huge numbers of staff and revenues bigger than actual countries and a lot of people spend a large portion of their lives inside these structures, i think theres some justification for suggesting this could be considered a real kind of internal neo-feudalism as graeber does. perhaps feudal-like social relations rather than feudal-like economic relations, and acknowledging that the wealth that pays for all these people to be paid to do fuckall of use comes from the very capitalist exploitation of the labour of productive workers, mostly in the global south (who would effectively play an equivalent of the serfs here). theres a real structural dynamic at play here that doesnt play by the normal “rules” of capitalism and that i think we need to account for because it affects so many workers in western countries in particular. i felt like this was possibly the most important part of the book, which got buried in the discourse under the “we should work less” side of things, and i wish he or someone else had expanded it further.

and then of course the finance/insurance/real estate sector that has exploded under modern neoliberalism, which are much more m-m’ rather than m-c-m’ with very often nobody doing anything that could be described as c in the middle. as solaranus discusses they very well could be described as like a feudal rentier class. but also because theyre large employers of people in the west and also make tonnes of money without having to really worry so much about the actual productive labour like industrial capitalists do, their ability to generate these useless feudal-like internal hierarchies is much greater than other organisations.

and theres a real question of “yeah so what does this matter?” and apart from the tremendous waste of labour and time, to be honest im not sure. for one, that we maybe need to be careful in trying to understand these jobs through purely capitalist market lenses. and certainly, as the sense that youre involved in “production” becomes ever more distant in these structures, the possibility of people ever identifying as a “worker” looks ever more remote (the pmc types i know would be very offended if you called them workers). and as they see less difference in what they do and what the parasites at the top do, its much easier for them to identify as a class with the bosses rather than with other workers (remember theyre closer to feudal retainers than to serfs). but also i think as contradictions heighten and companies struggle to maintain profit, while such people will absolutely get fired and have their pay and conditions cut etc, because their employment is operating under such different logic, the dynamics of this can potentially follow very different patterns from that of productive workers. maybe theyll be the first to go, but i suspect (as we have been seeing) that theyll often be closer to the last. and if nothing else this has the potential to really undermine solidarity even further. certainly my attempts to organise pmc types has been a struggle and a half, and i think this extra distance from “normal” capitalist relations makes it even harder to get them to see themselves as workers or exploited.

sorry this is a bit of a ramble, but this is one of those things that doesnt really get talked about much and i thought it was worth bringing up