Because y’all shouldn’t fall for this moralistic and anachronistic nonsense. The rentier bourgeoisie controls the servers and data centres (vulgarly called “cloud”) like they did before with the railways, the shipping infrastructure, the airlines, energy, the production and redistribution of oil and gasoline, and even other forms of communications infrastructure.
Reframing the rentier bourgeoisie as some new unique stage of development beyond capitalism (and smuggling in liberal moralisms about “fiefdoms” and “feudal lords”) is just yet another European attempt at reframing the current regressive nature of capitalism as not-capitalism in order to defend the status quo as a “democracy” at risk.
And this author doesn’t even get into Imperialism in his critique.
…Are we following the same economist?
Yanis has been very clear that this stage of capitalism could still be considered capitalism, but he’s specifically meaning this period as technofeudal because the relationship of worker to the mode of production has meaningfully shifted with the owners of cloud capital
Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don’t work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations
The workers under cloud capitalism (the other name for this shift) are better described serfs as they are not wage labor and will never be
You probably pay for the bus, internet connection, phone, as well as the imposed value of transportation and infrastructure on your consumer goods, rather than get it for “free” in exchange for some valuable data. And your employer probably also pays that rent in their literal workspace rents, software licenses, security contracts.
And in the odd case your main income comes specifically from these social media corporations as a “content creator”, you’re still not a serf, you’re more like an entertainer or a marketeer.
Historically, serfs are bound to the land, produce collectively for their own consumption and are “taxed in kind” on that produce for the lord, who wields absolute authority over that land, secures it through his own personal militia, and neither party significantly engages in commerce for their social reproduction.
Wage labourers work for a propertied employer for money, which they use to buy their consumption off of the market. The employer can buy and sell more property and the worker is “free” in the sense they can be fired and seek employment somewhere else. In capitalism, the absolute authority over that worker is the state, as well as the “security” force, and not only is the worker expected to rely on commerce for social reproduction, but every single aspect of society (like the aforementioned security) is tendentially reduced to commerce.
I don’t see how any rigorous definition of serfdom would define corporations extracting surplus from their property of surveillance systems — as, if extracting your data cost no labour, it’d have no value — as somehow closer to feudal lords than landlords, or their targets as serfs.
It’s just monopoly capitalism, A.K.A. imperialism, as it manifests in the core.
Please read this with the intentions of maintaining this as illuminative disagreement rather than another inane internet argument
I think we can agree that all of these criteria are confirmed with my initial point except taxation.
Ex. your data is bound to the service provider, users produce content collectively for their own consumption, a private militia via security teams, and that users and the corporation do not use commerce for social reproduction (at least from each other in this case)
Imho, I’d argue that the taxation is in the form of attention, which is also commodified by the corporation to sell targeted ads as per your point about surveillance capitalism
This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”. Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.
The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.
For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their “content”, doesn’t mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.
All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it’s easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.
This is just wrong, there is a vast amount of dead and living labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud (data centers), every single piece of hardware in a server is a commodity itself, just like the software required does not develop itself. In order for them to have no value, they would literally need to pop out of nature. Same goes for data, there is a lot of dead and living labour involved in collecting and storing data, even if computers have made it infinitely easier to reproduce and distribute data than before. A single byte of data or row in a table is insignificant and near worthless, but we are talking about trillions of bytes of data handled by data centers, it’s qualitatively different.
This does not mean i agree with Yanis, i dislike the man and his kind with every molecule of my body, but disregarding data is frankly absurd.
You are totally right but that’s not what Yanis means by “cloud capitalism”, which is what I was referring to.
“Cloud capitalism” is about collecting fees for access to digital markets, collecting your personal data, monetising user content without paying creators, actual content of user-facing platforms like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebok, not things you’re talking about: labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud, server as a commodity itself, labour involved in collecting and storing data. This is why the user I was replying to referenced “unpaid labor”, none of the things you mentioned are unpaid.
In https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital:
Respectfully, I think you’re missing a great deal of labor value in the cloud.
One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption
I don’t know if you’re in the tech industry or have exposure to the level of engineering as well as the value of processed data harvested from users, but the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator
Both of these forms of labor power create the underlying value of cloud capital (as well as the all of the upstream workers, but they are not novel forms of value to your point)
Secondly, there seems to be a meaningful incongruence regarding influencers. I think we agree that their form of labor pales in comparison to the other labor inputs noted above.
Technofeudalism isn’t concerned with influencers at all, and it’s a red herring to suggest so imho
But to your closing point, while I agree this comes from a global north perspective, its consequences are universal in that serfs from the global South are tilling the land of cloud capitalism for free just as much as folks from the global north
The value of producing algorythms vs producing servers themselves is hugely overblown, there’s value transfer from one part of the global population to another.
We don’t create value by shopping online, algorythms training by observing our behaviour does not change that.
It’s not, that’s the whole point. The money flows don’t reflect actual value flows, thanks to super exploitation.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, the cloud has value - the value of the information stored in it.
“Cloud” is servers, energy required to run them, building housing them, etc.
Information in it can be freely copied and has no real exchange value (it does has use value but that’s not something Marxism deals with).
Edit: to clarify, for Marx workers directly involved in creating commodities capitalists sell create value, while workers involved in circulation, marketing, sales, logistics, transport, security, etc consume value created elsewhere, this is the difference between productive and unproductive labour for Marx. Unproductive labour is necessary to realise the value created by productive labout, but it does not generate new surplus value.
Transportation is not, by Marx’s definition, work that belongs to circulation of commodities. And I would also say that logistics also falls into the same sphere as well. Both would constitute a part of the production process itself. As would, on social averages, the marketing departments that produce branding and the aesthetics of a commodity.
The clearest examples of unproductive workers are those paid from capital: workers involved in realising surplus value, I.e. sales teams, shop clerks. And workers paid from revenues: directly hired servants (More likely in Marx’s time), and workers hired by the state for local and state administration, and others like them whose labour is paid out of taxes (i.e. surplus value collected by the state), but some of these are part of the ‘faux frais’ of production itself - like health and education workers, and can constitute productive labour as such.
A good article breaking down the topic from across vol 1, 2 and 3 of capital plus the theories of surplus value:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/howell/produnprod.htm
Also, and it’s touched on in the article, the incessant need to split this or that labour into productive and unproductive feels almost entirely unnecessary in regards to the organisation of the proletariat toward revolutionary ends. That any given member of the working class is employed in productive or unproductive labour doesn’t change the potential precarity of their position as a waged labourer subject to the whims of capital and its state.
Thank you for correction about transportation! By marketing I really meant ads, I had no idea marketing departments also design aesthetics of commodities.
“Unproductive” is not a judgement, it doesn’t mean a worker is less revolutionary or lives under better conditions. It’s only needed to understand where the value is created and where it is consumed. It’s important to understand global value chains, value transfer from the Global South to the Global North.
in what way are modern workers not part of a wage labour relation?
I don’t think I suggested they weren’t, but please clarify if I did