Jodi Dean

I’ve reviewed a number of books on neofeudalism here, but I keep reading more of them, looking for some sort of perspective the others might have missed. Jodi Dean’s latest, Capital’s Grave, is way out there, taking me places I never expected.

First of all, Dean has read all the same books I have. She references the same authors I do, from David Graeber to Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Kuttner to Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty. And her pop cultural references are the same as mine. It makes show more for a very good overview of what neofeudalism is. Because it is real, present, and invisible to most people.

The easiest explanation is that people today are reverting to serfdom, as in medieval times. They are attached to some lord and master, dependent on them for their survival, with little or no hope of moving up in the world. The lord and master is attached to the government’s web, ever pushing the boundaries of how much money they can make, where to hide it, enacting new laws to encourage more of it without penalty, and how to get away with keeping serfs under control. They do this last bit by pigeonholing labor, ensuring no one reaches outside the narrow job demanded, preventing growth of the individual. Not mentally, not emotionally, and not building new skills.

This has come about because serfs today no longer are the means of production the working classes were until recently. Western workers today don’t actually make anything. They provide services instead. Services have taken over as the main source of employment. The job boards are soaked in the need for caregivers, warehouse workers, installers and technicians. These workers are critical as a whole, but no individual means anything to the system, and is disposable. Disposal is at the whim of the lord, for too many bathroom breaks, or for something said outside the workplace (or worse – within it), or for no reason at all.

Where making a better widget used to lead to a promotion or a new division or even company, taking the elderly for walks does not. Nor does installing the latest Windows update. Or dealing with customers who just want to unsubscribe. This was made evident to everyone during the pandemic lockdown, when delivery people, healthcare workers and trash haulers suddenly became “heroes”, worthy of impromptu concerts of pot banging every evening to show appreciation. It served to point out they were and are the lowest paid, least secure, and with no prospects for better. They even had to work during the plague, at constant risk of disease and death. In other words, serfs. The poster child for this is the gigantic cryptocurrency industry, which employs massive hardware and unprecedented electric demand, to create literally nothing at all. The neoserfs keep the machines running, and nothing more. Artificial intelligence ensures we will continue down this path, as it takes charge of inspiration, creativity, design and controls, while neoserfs keep them up and online.

And everything to empower the lord over the serfs is encouraged. Law, Dean says, is being privatized. Employees must sign away their rights under law before beginning work. They sign noncompete agreements, nondisclosure agreements, nondefamation agreements, and agreements to use compulsory arbitration (financed and run by the lord for his/her benefit). All of them seek to prevent neoserfs from accessing their rights under law. And thanks to their networking, the lords have seen to it that the law will allow this to continue and increase. Some 55% of American workers are already required to sign some or all of these agreements before obtaining employment.

Consumer neoserfs sign away any rights to recourse in advance of using any piece of software or hardware, sometimes merely by virtue of purchasing them at all. Purchasing itself no longer means possession under the law, as more and more items are sold as a “license” to operate but not actually take ownership. The courts have backed all of this, greatly lessening the intentions and purposes of the laws of the land. Serfdom has the population completely encircled.

Dean shows these factors as leading to the death of capitalism altogether. The principles of competition, investment and improvement have morphed to hoarding, predation and destruction, she says. Monolithic companies like Amazon force their own client manufacturers out of business, or buy them up, laying off neoserfs in massive cutbacks. Private equity does the same with old line firms. Monopolies have gone from local to global, creating worldwide trillion dollar monster companies for the first time ever. She says “The fiction of a political system anchored in the rule of law, and an economic system following capitalist laws of motion, gives way to networked private relation in which power and privilege reign.”

Where Dean and I diverge is the future after capitalism. I see all this future as here and now. A future where giant transnational corporations run the economy and the politics of the world. National governments and institutions become as local municipalities and townships at this scale. The neoserf is even farther away from the lords in this scenario. Inequality will continue to worsen and spread deeper.

What Dean sees instead is a massive swing to the left. You have to know that Dean is a full-on Marxist. Half the Conclusion chapter is a dressing down of another Marxist author, who Dean disagrees with in an endless critique of interpretations. She teaches this at Columbia, and her dozen or so books feature Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, their psychology, implementation and future. How Marxism is this irresistible force, building momentum and support. Could anything be farther from the truth?

It was almost laughable to me because I read this book the week of the 2024 Trump election. We are so far from socialism in any form now, and it is receding, as Trump packs the upper layers of the civil service and the Supreme Court with extreme right plants, whose life missions are to dismantle the government and hand everything over to the giant transnational trillion dollar monsters.

Marx taught that capitalism would destroy itself, giving way to a much fairer socialism. That socialism would evolve into full-on communism. Yet all over the world, while capitalism is destroying itself, so is socialism, as more and more countries form more and more rightwing governments. The rare leftwing victory has become an anomaly.

But Dean lives in a world of Marxist inevitability, and writes as if massive forces are underpinning the stunning move to socialism after the death of capital. It detracts from her arguments about neofeudalism. Neoserfs might be the visible proof of the end of capitalism. But to keep pushing the Marxist outcome of it all, as if it were in any way underway, is just wrong.

David Wineberg show less

So, I will begin by (noting that I am) ignoring the awful, awful theoretical cant in this book, because shit, M, what did you expect? For similar reasons I will ignore the first chapter, which sets out, impenetrably, the principles with which Žižek works, because they are explained and illustrated much better when you're reading through the argument proper and using them to understand the ideas.

Chapter 2: "Totalitarianism," the equation of Nazism and Stalinism, is false and a pernicious show more strategy of liberal democracy to discredit alternative models. Nazism as ideology is a strategy to preserve capitalism by externalizing its tensions onto the Jews and eliminating Jews and tensions both. Its law and logic depend on the preservation of a space where they do not apply, and it is intrinsically pathological. Stalinism, on the other hand, is a perversion of the legitimately revoluitonary Leninist project, and the difference between perversion and abomination is clear when you consider the difference between a pogrom victim, organizing in labour action and singing songs as they atre cut down, and a concentration camp inmate to see the difference. Stalininsm contains a kernel of hope and legitimacy. This is the best chapter.

Chapter 3: Liberal pluralism, like fascism, is a strategy to preserve capitalist exploitation. In liberalism's case, it co-opts the "other" as legitimate or insider ("uchi," if I may) difference and pathologizes the potentially revolutionary other as fundamentalism. (Not that we want fundamentalism to win, just that) this is how liberal capitalism works: by convincing us that what we have is democracy, that even if it isn't it's the best we can hope for, and by atomizing or expelling our struggles within and against the system. Class struggle becomes just one struggle among many, less easily got hold of than racial or gender struggles, and its real universal "underlyingness" is obscured.

Chapter 4: Law depends on the injunction to enjoy. Whether you're enjoying following the rules or transgressing against them, you're still letting them define you, and that is killing to the revolutionary project because it allows capital the opportunity to define and (un)limit participation and transgression. "Nightly law" of transgression is subsumed into and supports day-law, and we all buy Asian food and feel good and think about female circumcision and feel bad and etc.

Chapter 5: So dood, the superego is keeping you down with its command to enjoy. Treat law as incidental, a condition to be worked within or without as suits instead of a structure to be overthrown, and it loses its compusive power. Do the work of politics without letting enjoyment fix you in place - that is, let enjoyment be part of your humanity without it being part of your relationship with politics or law. Instead of a necessary, othered space where your law does not apply, a fundamentalism that makes democracy what it is, create a space, in yourself or whatever, where law is the "not-all;" where it is incidental and the rest of the glass is filled with a Pauline spirit of love. And then, yo, you're free!

But free for what? Contemporary fundamentalisms also immobilize, enjoin to enjoy. So, create an ill-defined revolution(ofthespirit)iary party that makes its own truth, an alternative myth that by the very fact of being alternative is a blow against tyranny. Make your own truth. Make it with love. Hell, make love! And at least you'll have created the space for something good to maybe happen.

This last bit, as you can see, becomes mythic itself, and while AS myth it's strong tea, it just doesn't quite come together enough - it's notes in the direction of. Which is fine, because this is Dean not Slavoj and his project isn't Capital Answers anyway and blah blah, but you can't help but think that the vagueness she declines to explore could be a lot more creepily "proletaristocracy of the mind" than she suggests.

But it is interesting stuff. And the careerism of "constructing Zhizh" remains latent, but check the internet for many, many examples of how yes, humanities grad students are still about constructing themselves as intellectual superheroes with poststruc freezerays that are as doctrinaire as the old stuff . . . call it deconstructuralism?

But I'm ranting. You want good things and say some good things, Jodi, and you've definitely insighted me to SŽ. But you don't know the difference between a sentence and a fragment and you don't know how to use a comma. WHY?! show less

Dean is at her best when synthesizing and applying other theorists. As a result, I find her work a bit derivative, but she does have flashes of insight with respect to her object of interest (blogging and other online media).

I found her steadfast technological pessimism a bit refreshing, because the relenting reminder that new media is often a tool of capitalism rather than a subversion of it sounds a much-needed cautionary note to counterbalance the technological optimism of other media show more theorists. Yet, it seems that she misses or glosses over some of the truly interesting things about online media because of her investment in her Lacanian theory of communicative capitalism. For instance, she misses some of the interesting ways that the internet affects physical space. What about when new media is used to organize in-person meet-ups, like protests or making an IRL date with an online sweetheart or simply friends gathering at each other's homes for parties planned on Facebook? She mentions that online games seem like the height of fantasy, yet affect the real economy. I would love to hear more on this - what does it mean that people buy imaginary WoW objects? How does Bitcoin relate to her theory of capitalism? What about cases where the real world economy and state infringe on the internet and the internet denizens fight back, like battles over Net Neutrality, illegal downloading, the Silk Road, and Anonymous?

As the previous paragraph may demonstrate, the best part of reading this book was that it helped me formulate some interesting research questions about new media. Another positive is that I gained a greater grasp of the media theory literature, because Dean engages with it comprehensively and gives summaries that make the debate easy to follow even if you haven't read the other theorists. On the negative side, she doesn't make much of a theoretical contribution. I also disagreed with her conclusions a fair amount, but that may be because I'm not a Lacanian. show less

Jodi Dean writes:

Recent developments in network science demonstrate structure in seemingly random networks. On the web, for example, sites are not equally likely to have the same number of links. Nor are links randomly distributed among sites in a predictable, bell-curve fashion. Instead, there are clusters and hubs wherein some sites are nodes to which many sites link. These hubs serve as connectors for other nodes. In his path-breaking work on structure in complex networks, Albert-László show more Barabási finds hubs on the Web, in Hollywood, in citation networks, phone networks, food webs in ecosystems, and even cellular networks where some molecules, like water, do much more work than others.

Barabási explains that degree distribution in networks with hubs, most real networks, follows a power-law. He writes, “Power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links. The few links connecting the smaller nodes to each other are not sufficient to ensure that the network is fully connected. This function is secured by the relatively rare hubs that keep real networks from falling apart.” In most real networks, nodes don’t have an average number of links. Rather, a few have exponentially more links than others. Barabási describes the difference between random networks and networks that follow a power-law degree distribution with the term scale. In random networks, there is a limit to the number of links a node can have as well as an average number of links. Random networks thus have a characteristic of “scale.” In most real networks, however, “there is no such thing as a characteristic node. We see a continuous hierarchy of nodes, spanning from the rare hubs to the numerous tiny nodes.” These networks don’t scale. They are “scale free.”

Barabási notes that others have observed power-law degree distributions. The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that 20 percent of his peapods produced 80 percent of the peas – nature doesn’t always follow a bell curve. He also found that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. In business management circles, Pareto’s law is known at the 80/20 rule (although he did not use the term) and is said to apply in a variety of instances: “80 percent of the profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of customers, 80 percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on.” Further examples might be Hollywood’s “A list” or the “A list” that emerged among bloggers. Like scale-free networks, Pareto’s law alerts us to distributions that follow power-laws.

How can power-laws be explained? Is some kind of sovereign authority redirecting nature out of a more primordial equality? Barabási finds that power-laws appear in phase transitions from disorder to order (he draws here from the Nobel prize-winning work of the physicist Kenneth Wilson.) Power-laws “are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems.” Analyzing power-laws on the web, Barabási identifies several properties that account for the Web’s characteristics as a scale-free network. The first is growth. New sites or nodes are added at a dizzying pace. If new sites decide randomly to link to different old sites, old sites will always have an advantage. Just by arriving first, they will accumulate more links. But growth alone can’t account for the power-law degree distribution. A second property is necessary, preferential attachment. New sites have to prefer older, more senior sites. Differently put, new sites will want to link to those sites that already have a lot of links. They don’t link randomly but to the most popular sites which thereby become hubs. Barabási argues that insofar as network evolution is governed by preferential attachment, one has to abandon the assumption that the Web (or Hollywood or any citation network) is democratic: “In real networks linking is never random. Instead, popularity is attractive.” Nodes that have been around for awhile, that have to an extent proven themselves, have distinct advantages over newcomers. In networks characterized by growth and preferential attachment, then, hubs emerge.

The fantasy of abundance – anyone can build a website, create a blog, express their opinions on the internet – misdirects some critical media theorists away from the structure of real networks. Alexander R. Galloway, for example, emphasizes “distributed networks” that have “no central hubs and no radial nodes.” He claims that the internet is a distributed network like the U.S. interstate highway system, a random network that scales, to use Barabási’s terms. Embracing Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s image of the rhizome, Galloway notes that in a rhizome any point can be connected to any other; there are no intermediary hubs and no hierarchies. For him, the Web is best understood rhizomatically, as having a rhizomatic structure. Barabási’s work demonstrates, however, that on the Web, as in any scale-free network, there are hubs and hierarchies. Some sites are more equal than others. Imagining a rhizome might be nice, but rhizomes don’t describe the underlying structure of real networks. Hierarchies and hubs emerge out of growth and preferential attachment. show less