Rev Left Radio - On Technofeudalism: Rent Seeking in Late Stage Monopoly Capitalism

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Alyson and Breht critically engage with the concept of "technofeudalism" from a Marxist (and thus historical materialist) perspective, analyzing its origin and recent popularity, critiquing its depoloyment and the implication that it represents a "new mode of production", explaining related concepts like rent-seeking, discussing the role of private equity in the modern American economy, the politics of Yanis Varoufakis, and much, much more.    Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. So on today's episode, Allison and I are going to not so much read or explain a specific text, nor necessarily talk about current events, but we're kind of taking a middle ground here where we're taking a theoretical concept that has been bouncing around the broadly conceived left these days, and we're kind of wrestling with that concept and making sense of it trying to explain what is meant by it and offer a Marxist and Leninist sort of analysis and maybe perhaps critique of that concept. And that kind of concept today is techno feudalism. We've heard the phrase a lot. I've used the phrase

throughout the last year or so. I've used it, but when I have used it, I've made it clear that when I use it, I'm using it in the sense of a literary flair. I'm using it in more of a poetic literary sense to get at a certain phase of monopoly capitalism. And I am by no means arguing that we are regressing to a feudalism out of capitalism or that we're entering some new of production. But that is different than the way that it's popularly used, and I think most popularly used by Janus Verifakis, who has put out a book and has done many interviews on the concept specifically of techno feudalism and kind of offers a novel and unique analysis of techno feudalism as not a regression back to a previous pre-capitalist feudalism, but

almost as a returning to feudalism at a higher level out of a decaying or dead capitalism. And so we'll get into those nuances as well. But I think it's really important to, as dieticians, as materialists, as historical materialists, as Marxists, to be able to wrestle with capitalism as an ever-evolving, ever-changing dynamic entity in and of itself, a process that you can't, not understand if you were only understanding it through the lens of writers who came generations before you. If you only understand capitalism through Lenin or Mao or Marx's works, you have an outdated analysis. Not that those analyses are outdated themselves, but that capitalism is always in a constant state of movement. And so you can apply those analyses to make sense of it. But on some level, we have the job of keeping up with it and

trying to understand as it mutates, as it distorts, as it tries to reconstitute itself. We have to try to stay as up to date with our Marxist analysis of capitalism as we possibly can. And I think a term like techno feudalism and the discussions orbiting around that term, I think, are a helpful way of doing that. Because we do live in a 21st century, I would argue, very late capitalist system that is different than it was. was 30 years ago, and it is being bolstered in interesting ways, not only by technology, but by a new era, I think, of techno-monopoly consolidation that is in some ways reminiscent of iterations in the past of monopoly capitalism, the steel monopolies, the railroad monopolies, et cetera, but because of the technology being totally new is at least a different iteration

of that same old thing that is worth wrestling. with. Does everything that I just said there sound okay, Allison, or do you have any critiques of that? No, I think that's a great kind of intro. We'll get into it as we like do the definition work up front, but I think that sets the stage very well. Cool. Yeah. And one of the things I do want to talk about, and we'll get into this in the second and third questions, is rent seeking. I think that's a, I think that's a central, maybe a secondary concept to techno feudalism that we're going to be wrestling with. I don't think Allison and I have really focused on that concept in previous episodes. I don't think we've ever done a text really

analyzing what that means. And some of us have an intuitive sense of what that means, but you know, working through that. And I actually laid out in my notes a bunch of examples of rent seeking in the modern American capitalist economy that I think people will intuitively and immediately relate to to help understand what that term actually means and what it looks like in practice. But starting with techno feudalism, I'm going to kind of guide the conversation by asking the questions. Allison will give her first stab at things, and then I'll follow up and give my analysis, and then we'll move on. That's kind of the structure of this episode. So let's start with techno feudalism. I've alluded to what that might mean, but what is techno feudalism, Alison,

and what are the different ways that the term is kind of used? Yeah. So technofeudalism as a term, as you said, really, I think, is most attributable to the ideas of, and a book of this name from Janus Barofakis, who is a really interesting figure. He is currently the General Secretary of the Democracy in Europe movement, and he was, and this is probably what he's most known for, the Greek Minister of Finance as part of the Sariza government that oversaw the negotiations around Greek debt. So a very kind of important political figure in that. regard and a very important figure around these questions of debt, international finance, the way that the world has become structured by those things. And I think you can see that really

impacting his work. Technofutalism as a concept really becomes developed in his 2023 book named techno feudalism, which he writes as kind of a letter to his father trying to explain this development of what he sees as a new kind of mode of production, certainly something that has transcended capitalism. Before we get into his exact definition, I do want to say that I think the emergence of this term is a part of a broader trend that is happening within people doing kind of contemporary political economy, where people are starting to question whether or not capitalism has transformed so substantially, and the qualitative realities of life under capitalism have shifted significantly enough that we no longer are discussing the same.

system that, for example, Karl Marx outlined, and whether or not we might be living under a different mode of production entirely on the basis of accumulated qualitative changes. There's been kind of a return to the notion of feudalism in analyzing modern economics across many thinkers. The other person whose work I kind of looked into to find some of these discussions is Jody Dean, who puts forth this idea of neo-feudalism, which I think shares a lot of the kind of same fundamental features as Varufoccus's techno feudalism, but I want to call out that this is this broader trend where people are trying to wrestle with this question of, have we transitioned to something new entirely? And the last thought on that, before I try to give a

definition of what techno feudalism is, is that I really do think that ultimately this is a good impulse to have. It is good to ask this question, and it is good for us to try to analyze whether or not things have significantly changed. At the time that Marx wrote his political economic writing, he was writing about a newly emergent system that had just really begun to solidify in ways which allowed it to be studied. And I think it's important that we continue to do that kind of political engagement in that kind of political economic work when assessing the present reality. I think the other example of this that really shines out from our tradition is Lenin's imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which again,

actually finds itself saying that some things have really developed in, you know, trajectories that Marx could not have anticipated and has within it, I think, certain criticisms of Marxism, while also really understanding itself as a continuation of Marxism. And Lenin, it's worth noting, does not conceptualize imperialism as a break from capitalism, but as a highest stage that capitalism has achieved. So I think this kind of work is important. I think it has its place within the Marxist tradition. I'll just say that up front. That said, let's kind of try to figure out what techno feudalism is as, you know, it's defined by Varofocus. So I think techno feudalism is very related to this notion that he puts forth of cloud capital,

which is basically the idea that the kind of capital that is being produced in modern advanced economies is no longer productive capital that can create new commodities, but is this thing called cloud capital. And cloud capital represents really what the entire system of techno modernity kind of runs on, which is data, content being produced online, and a concentration of wealth around these tech firms that really broker in this kind of stuff. And again, these are companies that are not really doing productive labor in any sense and that are not producing capital in the sense of something which can then be used to create further production. There's like a dead endedness to it. in the cloud capital that they have kind of built their businesses around. And so techno feudalism, according to Varifoccus, is actually a new thing. He says several times that, like, we no longer live under capitalism. We live under techno feudalism now.

And you could hear throughout interviews with him and in his writing various places where he places that in his interview that he did earlier this year with Upstream Podcast, he says 2008 was the end of capitalism, basically, and we are now living in something else. So techno feudalism and this cloud capital concept for him represents a pretty quantitative and qualitative shift away from capitalist development, where now, again, the largest companies are no longer engaged in productive labor. They are engaged in this non-productive accumulation. And this is where the feudalism component comes in. They do not engage in exploitation through wage, but they engage and exploitation in this much more complicated way. According to Verafakis, every time you post

something onto social media, you are producing value for the company that owns the social media website, but you are not receiving any wage and exchange. You are actually doing something much closer to the relationship between a feudal peasant and a feudal lord than between a worker and a boss. And whenever you place an order on your Amazon Alexa, which is an example he likes to use a lot, you are training their algorithm on how to better sell stuff and you are again producing value for them through your act of consumption rather than through the act of productive labor. And so techno-feudalism then is really understood as this really game-changing thing where the largest companies in the economy that are at the control really beginning to exercise

control of the market and of states have gotten rid of traditional markets where we trade commodities that come from industrial production. They've created their own markets like Amazon.com or eBay, and they've created a new form of exploitation that both exploits their workers through traditional wage labor, but then exploits their consumer through, again, what is kind of a feudal relationship at the site of consumption itself. So this is, I think, how I would describe technofeudalism based on all my engagement with Janus Varufakis's work. again, there's a whole book on it and many talks that he's done, but those are the features that I think can help make sense of what he sees as having shifted and what is futile

about these new relations. Yeah, and I think the important thing here from a Marxist perspective is that the wage exploitation still exists in the background, right? It's just a double exploitation on the other end, on the consumer end. Like, you still have to be exploited for your surplus value at the job site in order to get the money to afford the phone that you then go on to get your attention harvested and your data harvested. So it's not a replacement of the fundamental capitalist mode of production. It is a rent-seeking behavior within what I would call late capitalism. And post-2008 capitalism has been referred to by many people, including myself, as a sort of zombie capitalism. That is a way in which a certain type of capitalism died

and what has been like kind of living on fumes and momentum without really being able to produce or even live up to the ideological dictates of what capitalism is supposed to be able to do. And so we see a decaying of society, really a capitalism in decay. And in the process of decay, you get higher levels of inequality, you get fascist and reactionary movements coming to the four, and you get huge monopolies more and more engaged in rent-seeking as opposed to productive and production and investment of productive capital. So there's elements here that I think there's a balance to be struck and a nuance to be explored.

But I take your point, and I agree with it wholeheartedly, that there is this exploitation that is taking place. And we have many examples of this, but just look at AI and the realm of art. you know, AI scrubs the entire internet, scrubs other artists' creations, then takes them all into its sort of background knowledge, data web, and pulls from them to create new, quote unquote, forms of art, but is really just regurgitated other people's art that those people are never, ever, you know, credited or compensated for. And that's, I think, also a limitation of artificial intelligence. It's not really artificial intelligence, large language models, is that they are. derivative they must be derivative um they cannot necessarily create anything new or novel what they do is they regurgitate and reorient knowledge that is already out there that can still produce new insights right you could synthesize information in a way that is that produces perhaps something interesting or novel in one sense but it can't be a total rupture in the sense of a completely new

non-derivative form of insight or intelligence. So that's one aspect of it. Now, Jody Dean's analysis of what she calls neo-feudalism. I want to touch on a bit because I grappled with it. I watched some of her interviews. I love Jody Dean. Respect Jody Dean. Have episodes with Jody Dean.

And I echo your sentiment, too, that this stuff is important to talk about and it's generative to try to work through. And Jody Dean is contributing to this discussion by writing on Neo-Futel. feudalism, but I still think she takes a very dialectical materialist approach to the thing and says that, you know, there's always been feudal elements within capitalism, right? Futalism, there's never been a clean break from one mode of production to the next. We still see slavery surviving in a global economy dominated by capitalism. We definitely still see feudal elements. And as capitalism breaks down, these rent-seeking feudal elements that have

always been present within capitalism kind of become somewhat predominant in some areas of life. So again, I think her claim is a slightly less robust claim than Verifoccus is. And for that reason, I think perhaps a more useful or correct analysis. But I haven't read her full book yet, so I could be missing some nuances. But the other thing I wanted to say as I wrap up here and bounce it back over to Allison is the idea of enclosures comes up a lot. Inclosures is an interesting concept because we associate it to some extent with feudalism but really we associate it with primitive accumulation phase of capitalism as capitalism is emerging out of feudalism there is a necessity to enclose in the case of like the famous case of england right enclosed common land

so that it could then be taken over turned into private property and become a site of capitalist exploitation. So peasants, serfs going out into the woods and collecting firewood in the early developmental phase of capitalism coming out of feudalism was made illegal as those common, those previously common lands were being enclosed by what would become private property. And there's a way in which what we're witnessing in the digital terrain is an enclosure of digital space, that the promises of the internet as a radically free democratic site of communication and interaction has obviously been colonized by corporations and not just corporations monopolized by monopoly corporations and enclosed such that if you are trying to

do anything online you have to do it through these huge techno monopolies and we'll get into examples of rent seeking here in a second with regards to apple google etc but i think that that concept of enclosures and enclosures in on the digital terrain, I think is an important element of this analysis. Yeah, I'll hit on the enclosure thing a little bit more to try to be fair to Verifakis's definition. Because for him, one of the reasons, again, I think he makes the stronger claim that this is no longer capitalism, but is something else, is because it's not just like during primitive accumulation where the commons was enclosed. He actually makes this kind of like fascinating argument that markets are being enclosed, right? Which is this

kind of thing that he's very interested in where the market as a site of free exchange, which I think we could really argue about whether or not those have ever existed. But it's this very important notion within capitalism has been enclosed by the development of what he sees as centrally planned pseudo markets, essentially. So he points at like Amazon.com as an example of this. And he says, when you go to buy something on Amazon, you are not actually shopping in a actual market. You are shopping in a centrally planned economy in which algorithms are determining what you see, what I see on Amazon is different than what Brett would see on Amazon, and where there is this profit maximization and almost production of desire being done on the individual level such that

it is no longer what he seems to think counts as a market. You may be able to tell. I'm slightly skeptical of the claim that this is not a market or that markets don't share those features. But that enclosure of markets is one of the reasons that he does see this as kind of a step beyond capitalism that I think is worth acknowledging again to try to be very fair to his argument. Can you elaborate on your criticism of that thing? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, we might get into this in some of the later questions. I think that the idea that there have been actual sites of free exchange is kind of capitalist myth-making to a certain degree. I think that in reality, if you look at America for much of its existence, you will find

that free marketplaces in the sense that he seems to envision them don't exist. The now dying shopping malls that have been replaced by Amazon.com were also not free marketplaces of equal exchange without any mediating centralized body. You were paying for a specific place that gets more foot traffic. You're paying for advertising within that space that also constructs desire. I think even just going to like your local swap meet, you see people competing to get access to different spaces within that. And some of these more complicated constructions of exchange within these spaces I think have always existed within markets. I guess I just don't think that there have ever really been free markets such that there is an actual jump that has occurred from what existed before

to what exists now within something like Amazon. I think it's more just an intensification of existing systems is how I would tend to look at it. But I do want to acknowledge that he does kind of view that as enclosure as this new primitive accumulation that is occurring with those closing off of markets. And that is part of his argument. And I do think that there, to your point, that there is a sort of romantic, nostalgic, abstract conception of capitalism often advanced by its defenders of, you know, this pure form of what is sometimes referred to as mom and pop capitalism. Right. Like the, but and the baker and the candlestick maker and you know they live in a community and um people come

and they exchange you know all exchange this bread for a couple pints of your beer or whatever and that there can somehow be a way that we can get back to that type of capitalism or that that is true capitalism and this new form of capitalism is a bastardization or you know the libertarian argument that this isn't true capitalism this is corporatism or whatever bullshit they say these all fundamentally serve to obscure the actual reality of capitalism. And if you can be tricked into thinking that this isn't real capitalism, you can be sucked into a whole array of reactionary and honestly pro-capitalist positions like libertarianism based on a fundamental error in your understanding of what capitalism is.

This is what it is. This is what it's always been. This is what it's developed into. Lenin talked about in Monopoly Capitalism. capitalism, the highest stage of capitalism, this is where even a theoretically totally free market would end up eventually. So if you, you know, if you, there's kind of that old meme of like, oh, socialists always say that's not real socialism.

And, you know, Marxist, Leninists and Maoists, we pride ourselves on saying we take full acceptance and ownership over the socialist tradition, good, bad and ugly. You know, if you're a, if you're a true defender of capitalism and you don't want to be a, you know, a little like kind of like a rat and try to squeeze out of the actual reality of your system, you know, you have to defend this entire system and it becomes harder and harder and harder to defend. So you have to come up with these, um, romantic, nostalgic and ultimately false ideas of what real capitalism actually is. So, um, it's interesting. Sometimes reactionaries are anti-socialists will say like a system is what it does, right? Yes. You cannot tell me some

theoretical utopian idea of your system a system is what it does okay well taking that argument on face value capitalism is what it does and this is capitalism so either defend it or don't but don't act like this is some non real true version of what you what you defend and believe in yeah i think the one thing i'll add to that before we do the next question is this is what worries me i think about the techno feudalism argument right i'll just say that up front is that i think it can easily become reactionary in that way i do not think that is what very Verifocus intends with it whatsoever. I really don't think that's what he's trying to do. But that's what's at stake, I think, in the claim that this is something other than capitalism. And one of the things that is interesting is that in her writing, Jody Dean notes that the turn to analyzing the contemporary economy within feudalism has become popular among libertarian economists, actually. So you do see them making that move with the feudalism analysis as well in a way that I think does highlight the potential stakes there. I agree, and I think Verifakis would probably have a relatively elegant response to that criticism of your obscuring the fundamental role of capitalism here.

And I'm sure it exists somewhere. And if it does, you know, let us know if he has a specific response to that criticism. But, you know, regardless of whether or not he addresses it in his work, the concepts like this have a way of, you know, kind of going out of the barn, as it were, and running free and being picked up in different ways. and so it's important for us as critical thinkers and as Marxists to wrestle with that term and make sure that we are not falling prey to that idea. And that we are constantly highlighting that this is monopoly capitalism. I would argue as I did in the previous episode, this is the death phase of late capitalism. Like, you know, if late capitalism itself has a beginning, middle, and end, we're towards the end of late capitalism.

But, again, that doesn't guarantee some deterministic shift into socialism. Barbarism is just as viable an option. And in the U.S., perhaps even more likely if the betting markets were to place value on it. Yeah. But, yeah, so let's go ahead and move on to the next question. And this is about rent seeking. Now, I have some examples. You can go ahead and give yours if you want, Allison.

But to keep it kind of simple up front, maybe you could just give us an example of, or just a definition of what rent seeking is and how it relates to this idea of techno feudalism. Yeah, so rent-seeking is an idea that I think is broader than the techno-feudalism argument. It's a concept in economics generally. And rent-seeking is basically it's attempting to grow your wealth or to garner value without actually producing anything or without actually creating any new wealth itself. And so that's why, again, Verifakis talks about the way that in how these tech companies operate, They're not really producing anything whatsoever, and that's part of that rent-sinking component.

In the context of these tech companies, the way that he talks about it, is how they operate almost parasitically on top of markets. So an example that I've heard him give in several of his talks is that in Amazon, when you put your products on Amazon's marketplace, Amazon is just straight up extracting some level of the cell that you are engaging in, but they're not involved in the productive process. They're not involved in the advertising process. they're not involved in any of those other processes. Their wealth comes purely from this exploitative relationship that doesn't create any new

commodity, any new production, or any new wealth in and of itself. And that is one of these features of rent seeking. I think like the other just like classic example is literally the type of rent that we all know, which is the rent that happens in the housing market, right? A landlord is increasing their wealth purely through the secondary, extraction and exploitation that occurs of their tenants. The tenant is this whole other job and is engaging in this whole other economy that may be productive or service economy, but the actual rent aspect of it occurs after the fact and is a pure form of exploitative kind of extraction

in which the capitalist who is doing the extraction is producing nothing and is generating no utility or wealth. They are purely doing that parasitical extraction. So this type of rent seeking again, it happens outside of just traditional rent relationships. It's this broader economic approach. But those are the kind of two examples that I think are sort of easy to start to wrap your head around what that type of exploitation looks like. And we see it all over our economy. And I'll give some examples here in a second, but I got to also make room for the famous Adam Smith quote that speaks exactly to this idea. Adam Smith, you know, the grandfather of capitalism, as it were. And actually the originator of that term, the butcher

the baker the brewer that I referenced earlier it comes from his philosophy um he said as soon as the land of any country has all become private property the landlords like all other men love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce um so he's getting at this idea of rent seeking right and um the slum lord is the quintessential um exaggerated form of a rent Seeker, producing no value, adding nothing to the home, even often skimping on its basic contractual obligations to upkeep the house or maintain bare minimum standards, but still extracts rent just for living there, having the ability to buy the property and then extracting rent from it.

This is obviously something that I rent. I've never owned my home, so, you know, landlords can be shittier or better. Luckily, I have a landlord who, like, does, you know, put shit in. but at the end of the day, he is still extracting wealth from a property. He has paid off long ago. So even if the best landlords are still doing this, so it's worth thinking about. But ultimately, just to reiterate, you know, rent sinking is the process by which an entity extracts income, not by producing new value, but by controlling access to something others need.

You need a home. There's a landlord there to stand in between you and that home and extract. value from you. Private insurance companies in the health care market. I think that that qualifies as, you know, they might have arguments about what they do and don't contribute to the system, but fundamentally, they extract billions and billions of dollars from the health care system. They stand between a patient and its doctor and extract wealth and produce nothing of value. Insurance pools can happen outside of private insurance companies, right? Medicare for all, Medicare itself, universal health care systems around the world can replicate the basic logic

of an insurance pool without the private profiteering and rent-seeking inherent in it. So ultimately, insurance companies are a profound source of this. And there again, controlling access to something you need. You need to not die. You have to go through these motherfuckers and you have to pay them every month and then pay your deductible and all this other shit that they extract in the process of producing, nothing. Nothing of value, right? Some other examples in our modern capitalist American economy, the app stores, right, Apple, Google's app stores, they take 15 to 30 percent from all in-app purchases

and subscriptions despite not producing the apps themselves. So if you produce an app, you've got to put it on these stores. They basically, by taking their fee or charging rent for you to have access. So I'm a consumer. I'm an app maker. I want this app. No, no, no. Apple and Google. Google says, is there somebody you forgot to ask? You've got to come through us to get it. Amazon Marketplace, right? Charging sellers, referral fees, fulfillment fees, advertising costs, just to be visible on the platform and have any chance of surviving as a business.

Google search, right? When you go on Google and you search something, they monetize access to visibility, paid ad placement. You'll often see, like, the first people that come up on a Google search pay to be there. So Google search is not, there's Google, Google, is basically standing between you and the thing you're trying to find and extracting money from it. Facebook and meta, whatever you want to call it, charging businesses to reach followers that they already have, right, in this pay-to-boost model while monetizing the behavioral data of users who aren't paid at all.

Obviously, real estate and landlords we just touched on. And on the realm of real estate and landlords, I want to talk about these huge data centers that are going up all around the country. These data centers put out by Facebook and meta and all these other huge companies, companies. I was watching breaking points the other day, and Crystal Ball was talking about that one third of all growth in the economy is coming from data centers right now. There's a really, there's a very real way in which data center construction is preventing the American economy from formally entering a recession. So these are really propping up the entire decaying

economy all around us, which, you know, you can see that as good or bad, but it's not good when one thing is propping up an entire economy. But what are those data centers really? Well, you might initially think, well, they're AI server farms and they're going to, you know, they take all this electricity and this water so they can, you know, train AIs, and that's definitely true.

But there's all these other elements that they have, like cloud infrastructure, logistics, these huge server farms can only be paid for up front by the billions of dollars required to build these data centers by huge monopolies. And then downstream from this, even if the AI bubble,

pops. In order to access that computational power, those server farms for any type of digital business that you want to run or any activity you want to do in the digital terrain, you will have to rent out server farm space from these huge data centers controlled by these monopolies. So this is another form of rent seeking, being built in real time, propping up a decaying economy that is going to, you know, in the future, that's why they're investing billions up front. And you might think, why would these companies invest billions and billions of dollars in upfront cost to construct data centers if there's a very real chance that the AI is just to some extent a bubble that will pop? Well, because there's all these other elements of, you know, computational power and the cloud and logistics that are definitely going to be there even if the AI thing doesn't totally work out. And AI itself will, of course, still work out to some extent, even if the bubble pops.

So they're making a long-term investment in basically their ability as monopolies to seek rent indefinitely from anybody who wants to do business in the form of just raw computational power on the internet going forward. Pharmaceutical patents, right? They charge massive premiums on drugs that are literally developed with public research and money. So the drugs that we have in the world are often first discovered or the research is invested at the academic. pandemic level, often with huge infusions of public cash. And then the pharmaceutical companies will jack up prices and turn that public taxpayer money into private profit as they extract from us in the form of high pharmaceutical costs and patents on drugs that should be the right of every human being to have access to because public money and public research and public infrastructure

was essential to the development of those medicines anyway. And also lastly, and uh you know forgive me if i go on a bit of a tangent here but i want to try to explain this and it's going to be easier said than done but private equity we all know about private equity this is actually a classic case of rent seeking um they've bought up they buy up businesses they buy up nursing homes they buy up hospitals they buy up housing stock right and they their whole goal is to temporarily spike the valuation of these entities while burdening them with huge amounts of debt, stripping the whole business for basically that's copper, if you will, as a metaphor, and then leaving the business in ruins as it walks away. It is a plundering. It's actually very much

akin to mobs when they, you know, mafia, when they would go into their neighborhoods and they go into a store and the store is already fine the store is doing fine you know the store's a business and they come in there and they kind of take over underhandedly that you're going to pay us this much money every month or you know something bad might happen to your to your little store here you know it might get burned down or whatever and so all of a sudden you know these store you know watch the subpranos you know how this goes it's called a bust out and in the mafia and then eventually when they've completely siphoned and extracted everything they can from the business what do they do they burn it down for the insurance money right and that is actually really close to

what private equity specifically in these leverage buyouts buyouts do so they i'm trying to i wrote some notes down to try to explain this as simply as i can so this is a the the the leverage buyout rent seeking scheme of private equity the private equity firm um doesn't pay full price out of pocket for a business so let's say the private equity firm like they did wants to buy Toys R Us, right? They bought and destroyed Toys R Us. That's why we don't see it anymore. Well, what they'll do is they will put up 10% of the price of Toys R Us and then they'll

finance the rest, right? They'll take out a loan for 90% of the cost to buy Toys R Us. But when they do that, they use Toys R Us as the collateral for the loan. So fundamentally, they're taking out 90% of what they're paying to buy Toys R Us is collateralized against Toys R Us, the business itself, which means that debt is not the private equity's debt. That debt is burdening the business itself. So now the business has to, instead of investing in wages or growth or, you know, new buildings or innovating in any way, more and more of its cash flow has to go towards servicing this debt. In the meantime,

these private equity firms are charging management fees and monitoring fees. these absurd forms of doing basically nothing they take over a company burn it with debt um they charge themselves fees to do this and the debt right now the company has a bunch of debt that debt is now used to justify cuts right so hey we got to lay off some workers we have too much debt we got to service this debt so the debt that we put on you by the way so now we need a layoff worker so we can have more money for debt we got to cut wages and benefits so that we can pay off this debt let's sell some real estate so we can pay off this debt. Now, increase workload or automate jobs away, whatever is profitable to make the company look leaner and more efficient. And in the process

of doing this, you pump up its valuation, right? And the PE firm forces the company to take on more debt, pay a dividend to the private equity owners, blah, blah, blah. At the end of this thing, then they sell the business, either to the public stock market or whatever. And they, they sell the company to another firm, whatever it may be, and they cash out. And what they leave behind is a hollowed out, debt-ridden company, and most of them fail. And they've done this to hospitals and nursing homes, where in nursing homes, for example, you can look this up. They've stripped it for assets. They've cut the staff, the quality of life for the people in the nursing homes have declined. There was a study that showed that 50% of patients in private equity-owned nursing

homes or on antipsychotics, which is an easy and fast way to just sedate somebody instead of in any meaningful way take care of them. This happened to Sears, to J. Crew, et cetera. Now, this is a classic example, not innovating, not creating nothing. A parasitic class of private equity managers come in and they like termites on a wood table, just hollow it out, take everything for themselves and leave the rotting husk. And what? what's super sad about this is that these private equity firms are often invested in by retirement funds of union workers and teachers unions, right? There's ways in which these pensions for these workers are funneled into private and public equity as forms of investment that

they get returns on later in life. But so on the front end, they're stripping these businesses, laying off workers, fucking over communities, destroying businesses, blah, blah, blah. On the other end, they are siphoning money from public and private pension funds for teachers and workers and they're extracting billions of dollars from those pensions. So since 2006, $230 billion, billion has been transferred from investors, i.e., these pension, on many cases, these pension retirement funds to private equity firms through these stupid, nonsensical performance fees. Um, now this is admittedly a complicated thing, but I think it was worth trying to go through. And I'll, I'll leave a link, um, to a really good episode put out by more perfect union of how private equity plundered the American economy so that people can, can go and kind of take their time with this and try to learn more about this. It helped me understand it's, you know, admittedly a complex thing to try to wrap your mind around and understand we're not in business. We don't think like this. Um, but we all are aware of black rock and vanguard. We're all aware of the, you know, concept of private equity but i wanted to make the case i mean just not even make the case just

point to the fact that private equity especially in the form of these leveraged buyouts which is a strategy that private equity employees often is a classic example of rent seeking parasitic bullshit in our economy that is making the lives of everybody worse making prices go up worsening the lives of teachers and union pensioners as well as real live workers here and now as their wages and benefits are slashed to extract as much value as they can from these companies and this is totally allowed Democrat and Republican administrations Biden and Trump fully in the pocket of private equity they spill billions of dollars in the campaigns of Democrats and Republicans alike to keep this obvious fucking scheme

going forward and really the only reason that that they can keep doing it is because it is relatively obscure and hard to understand for the average joe working a job cannot understand what private equity is and so what can you do if you don't understand something you can't challenge it meaningfully but it's a classic case of of disgusting parasitic rent seeking um in our in our economy and these people make billions and billions and billions of personal dollars for their own pockets through this fucking scam this mafia ass scam on an economic level. It's actually profound that we allow this to happen. Yeah, I think I'll build real quick on that private equity example because I think it hits at the other part of this conversation

that we haven't adequately touched on yet and that I think we will get to, you know, as we develop this more. But all of what we're talking about under this like concept of techno feudalism and then contemporary samples of rent seeking is deeply tied to the financialization of capitalism generally, right? And I think. that's the missing piece that we need to talk about. And here's where I'm going to make, like, the Orthodox Marxist-Leninist move and say, Lenin already predicted this development in a really interesting way, right? If you look and go back and read imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin is already, at the beginning of the 20th century, beginning to see a shift from productive

capitalism to financial capitalism and to the, you know, the trend towards monopolization, leading to the primary money-making form of capitalism within the imperialist countries being the export of capitalism and colonial exploitation, right? And this financialization really has, over the course of the 20th century, transformed the imperialist economies themselves. And I think that's really the fascinating thing that has occurred since Linen wrote. To the point where the American economy now is very de-industrialized, it is no longer a heavily productive economy.

and where the sites of extraction value occur is really in the financial markets and in the financialization of every part of our life. I think the financialization of housing is like the other really easy example that private equity overlaps with, but also that just shows the extent to which the material goods necessary for the reproduction of human life are an afterthought in financial American capitalism. Housing is not conceptualized as a thing that is necessary for you to live. A house should you buy one is an investment. Housing is a thing that is traded on the market by various financial firms engaged in the collection of these assets as something that supposedly will appreciate in value. But even more kind of fascinatingly, we began to trade

housing debt on the market and actually financialize the inability of people to pay off their housing as well, which was the key part of the financial crisis of 2008, which again is what Verifucus points to as the example of the end of capitalism. That is the moment that he sees a transition having occurred when the government bails everything out in response to that. And so I think this rent-seeking behavior, here's going to be my argument, is not necessarily a new phenomenon that has developed. It actually really is downstream of the financialization that Lenin was already predicting 100 years ago, right, and beginning to see. And the intensification of that.

Now, the last thing that I'll say, because again, I really want to be fair to the techno feudalism people, and I think it's important to be fair, is that per the principles of dialectics, a sufficient amount of, you know, quantitative changes within a thing changes it qualitatively as well, right? And so it's possible that the intensification of all of these aspects of capitalism has fundamentally shifted what we are living into a new system. That is a conclusion that one could reach, that I don't want to throw out. But it is important, I think, to point out the continuity with theories of financialization, which were already being developed by Marxists at the beginning of the last century. Yeah. Yeah, that's really good. And again, this echoes, this really points to concepts of exchange value versus use value.

In the case of housing, the use value of a house is that fucking human beings can live in it, that they can have shelter. and we have plenty of housing stock in general that if we had a mode of production that actually cared about human well-being instead of profit maximization and private property, we could supply people with homes so their families could live in it, but it is actually used under financialized capitalism as an exchange value, right, as part of an investment portfolio for people moving capital around to invest to make money off their investments and that distorts the entire market. Then private equity, of course, is sinking its vampiric fangs into the housing stock

and trying to buy up huge swath of it so that they can become, and they've admitted this in their internal memos explicitly, you know, the corporate landlords of America going forward. That housing is unaffordable and out of reach for most people. We're actually making the problem worse by buying up all the housing stock and using it, you know, as our financial vehicles and that we can continue to make profit indefinitely by becoming America's corporate landlords in a way that we couldn't if every American owned their own home eventually paid off their mortgage and owned that home well then that now shuts down as a site of profit extraction we can't have that so um you know and that's just one example in our economy but it hits close to home quite literally because it is about

our homes and our houses and then also the relations and forces of production this core contradiction in capitalism that, you know, has always been talking about, angles talked about it early on, which, and they've all talked, all the thinkers have talked about it, which is that we have the capacity, especially now in the 21st century, to do something like provide all people with homes, to do something like provide all people with health care. And it is precisely because of the relations of production, i.e. the fact that we need exploiters and exploited owners and workers, bosses and employees, and this whole relation structure of capitalism that acts as a fetter on the productive forces. Instead of producing things that we clearly need, like an updated

21st century infrastructure, like homes for everybody, health care for everybody, a decent quality of life for everybody, none of that is profitable to a small amount of elite that want to extract as much profit indefinitely as they can from a planet that they are killing in the process of draining it of its life force. It's an assault on human dignity. It's assault on our future. It's an assault on the biosphere and the web of life itself. And it has its core logics firmly rooted in colonialism.

And it manifests today as monopoly capitalism, which is another way to say imperialism on the global scale. And the crises that result from it, from homelessness to climate change to genocide and everything else, is a direct function of the way we organize our socio-economic life. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and move forward and kind of touching on things that we've been already working through.

It's important to kind of drill down on this one point. What is it that actually makes tech companies valuable? And how does this fit into the concept of techno-futalism? Yeah. So I think, you know, we've established rent-seeking and what is interesting, at least in you know, Verifocus's definition is that tech companies engage in a very interesting form of rent-seeking. And actually, it is in tech companies in particular that he really locates the feudal part of this. Because again, as I think we've gotten at capitalism has always

had rent-seeking behavior within it. It would be incorrect to conceptualize rent-seeking as something that hasn't existed all along within various stages of capitalist development. but there's something unique in tech that, you know, really lends itself to this idea of techno-feudalism. So I hinted at this before, but I want to make the argument very explicit, which is that basically in the act of consuming what is offered by these various tech companies, one is giving them value and is in a sense performing labor and producing something for them not in exchange for any sort of wage. And so this really is one of the key differences between this and traditional capitalist value production through labor. That normally occurs based on paying a worker wage. But that doesn't exist in this.

In addition to that, the argument that Verifoccus makes is that historically, the thing that has been produced is capital, which itself can be used to further production. But that is not the case in the context of techno feudalism. When I post on Facebook, I have produced value for Facebook, but I have not produced capital in the classic sense. I've produced, again, what he calls cloud capital, which is this more amorphous thing that does not further production in any way whatsoever. And I have done this within the little online fiefdom that is Facebook, a place that there is no public control over, that has no kind of concepts of interoperability, that is purely private.

controlled as, again, kind of a feudal domain where I have engaged in this uncompensated value-producing labor of posting. But posting is not the only example that he gives. Again, he talks about how using Alexa trains their algorithms. When you use AI, you are also training the models that underlie that and making them more efficient. And so we engage with these tech companies in ways that produce value for them through our very act of consumption within their own private enclosed spaces, and it's this part that really is understood as feudalism in, you know, kind of the techno feudalist framing. So having made that explicit, though, I think that one of the discomforts that I feel with this is that I don't think it adequately accounts for where

the other aspects of value from these companies, you know, come from. One of the things that Varifucus says is that, you know, there is not really a profit. for most of these companies. They're not actually generating profit for anyone, which is true. Many of them are not profitable. They are really staying afloat based on financialization and the investment often of state funding, but they are also engaged in more traditional forms of capitalism that I think are worth acknowledging. Data brokering is kind of like the underlying aspect of this, where these companies sell off the data that they are gathering and are able to bring in money based on that, even if it doesn't turn out to an actual profit on their

balance sheet at the end of the day. So I do think they're engaged in more kind of traditional capitalist activity in some ways. But the other example that he returns to over and over and over again is Amazon. And I do think it is also worth noting that Amazon does not make most of its money from its enclosed markets like the Amazon marketplace. It makes it through offerings, you know, its offerings of Amazon Web Services, which is providing servers, providing these real concrete goods that are available. Now, I will say, say that Amazon Web Services also really is rent-seeking because you don't own the things that you are buying through it. They are resources controlled by Amazon and their data centers that you

are then getting access to. But I think my worry with techno-feudalism is it really focuses on the content production and the consumptive aspect of these tech companies. But these tech companies are generating value through other means like data brokering, like offering cloud infrastructure. And so that's one of the reasons that I do think, yes, there is something new. that is occurring in these new private online spaces that these companies have created that can adequately be said to have formal similarities with feudalism and that there's a production of value within those spaces that does not occur in the traditional waged production of value that capitalism offers. But I think Verifakis just overstates his point

when he says that this is a new thing and that capitalism has been left behind. Because these very same tech firms, again, often are engaged in more traditional capitalist economic activity, even if that is rent-seeking activity, because again, rent-seeking has always existed within capitalism. So that's just kind of the other point I wanted to get into as we try to think about this a little bit, because there's a really good claim that the techno-futilist theory puts forward. But I also think we need to balance it by not, you know, ignoring continuity that exists within these new companies. Yeah, part of me kind of wonders if like the Verifocus thing about, you know, This is a new mode of production.

If that was like a kind of a marketing scheme, like a big part of the selling thing is like capitalism is dead. If you look it up, like you, it'll always say like techno feudalism, the end of capitalism. And that's like a obviously like a selling point, like a robust claim that gets people's attention. So I think like the more subtle point of like this rent seeking behavior within late capitalism, these feudalistic elements on the digital terrain, that's all actually very useful. and I salute him for doing that. But, you know, this idea that capitalism is dead, I think even he would, and you even say he's kind of cheeky about it in interviews, he would shy away from making that actual claim,

even though it is a selling point in the marketing of his book. But, you know, neither here nor there. We're here to just try to understand what's useful about it. But I do want to make a quick point on what you said about, you know, owning nothing, about streaming everything. You want to watch a movie made in the fucking 90s before this technology even existed, you have to have the right streaming service to go on and buy it from them. And even after you've purchased it, there's no actual guarantee that you're

not given anything physical. You have, if you go buy a movie through Amazon Prime or something, you have that movie as long as Amazon Prime decides to give it to you, as long as, you know, that IP is under Amazon Prime's control if you take their word for it. But at the end of the day, And even if just the electrical grid goes down, you don't have that anymore. Same with music, Spotify, all these sort of middlemen between artists that have created music for decades and decades and decades, only way you can access them is through these rent-seeking corporate monopoly middlemen who don't actually give you anything physical in return. You can't walk home with anything.

You make an online transaction. You get access to something. They're granting you that access. but you don't have anything really at the end of the day to call your own. So you're basically fundamentally renting it from them under the pretext of buying something, of having something that you don't actually have. And I think that there maybe is a small subcultural movement

that has the potential to grow over the years where there is an increasing infatuation with physical things. So perhaps we'll see in the coming years a trend of people going back to getting away from Kindle and buying physical books, getting away from Spotify and buying, you know,

vinyl or, God forbid, CDs. You know, buying the hard case of movies, buying old Blu-ray players and hooking them up in your house. I don't know if that will actually happen, but it feels like there has to be some sort of cultural backlash to this techno-feudalist era

where you own nothing. And another irony here is, you know, the fucking right wingers for like the last 10 years have been like talking about whatever the, I forget the, what's the big corporate entity that they're saying you will own nothing and be happy? Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't know a specific one. I know the talking point. It's like the world economic form or something. Sure, that sounds right. Yeah, they did a thing several years ago at a talk where they were like, you know, you'll own nothing and be happy, meaning like this idea of like this rent.

inter-economy sort of thing. And they're always using that as like, you know, anti-liberal rhetoric. Like, this is what they want you to do. They want you to eat the bugs and get in the pod. You know, you will own nothing and be happy. But what they fail to fucking see is that capitalism has already done that. And more than you will own nothing and be happy, under late capitalism, you will own nothing and not even be happy.

Right. So, like, I always thought it was funny that they used that. And, you know, they frame it in like this global communist. ball takeover of our freedoms but in reality it's just monopoly capitalism ripping everything away from you and training you like a good fucking dog to call it communism um so i always thought there was a deep irony in that and every time i see some right winger be like you will own nothing and be happy i'm like you already own nothing and you're fucking miserable and that's because of capitalism yeah no i mean i think that is the important point and you know well we'll get into the whether or not

But I do think, yes, capitalism has already created all of these horrors that everyone is talking about. It is funny in the like physical versus digital media thing where, yeah, like people are nostalgic for DVDs now, which is kind of a thing that I would have never expected as a point we would reach. But it does make sense because there is a real loss of ownership of a commodity even, right, when you are streaming something or renting it on Amazon that is occurring there. And we are seeing that really transcend across all parts of our economy now. And this is why I want to be fair, because, again, enough quantitative changes like that can qualitatively change what society is, right? Like, there is a point where maybe we are seeing that so thoroughly that something really has fundamentally changed in a way that shouldn't be thrown out. And is why I think this conversation is worth engaging in. But, yeah, it's kind of just interesting to observe.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha will never know the elation of going in to like a homer. and buying a CD and taking out that little front booklet and like flipping through it and see like the lyrics and pictures of the band and it's like just your dopamine system lighting up when you bought these bought these albums and I'm sure that was true for vinyl as well but there's something to be said for it and when the younger people rediscover the joys of that maybe there will be a countercultural movement maybe but okay let's go ahead and move a little bit forward we've definitely touched on this so I'm going to combine the next two questions and hand it over yeah I think that makes sense yeah So we understand how the idea of techno feudalism, that this new era does function differently in some way. But a two-part question is, is this a fundamental break from capitalism? And as we were talking about and alluding to earlier, what's the risk of declaring that capitalism is over, even if it is a sort of silly marketing scheme at the end of the day? Yeah. So, one, I think it's very clear I don't think capitalism is over or that this is a fundamental break from capitalism. I think Brett and I are on the same page about that.

I don't think that that question is off the table ever, right? We should always be willing to ask that question when we see massive shifts in economics. So I don't think that, you know, it's a bad question to ask. What worries me, and here's my critical component of this, I guess, is that yes, to a certain degree, I think techno-fuelism as a new stage of economic development is a cheeky marketing term. it also, I think, represents two things that I want to be careful of. One, I think academics have this very frustrating tendency to seek novelty above all else. And that is because that is what rewards you in academic publishing, right?

Coming up with new concepts. And you can do a lot better for yourself as an academic, putting forth, oh, here's this revolutionary new idea, not let me update Lenin for 2025, right? those are not to equally appreciated in the world of academic publishing. And so the techno-feudalism thing annoys me perhaps a little bit and worries me a little bit because I see in it that kind of academic novelty seeking to a certain degree. Now, Verufoccus is not an academic per se. He calls himself like an ex-academic. He is much more of a political figure at this point. So I don't know to what extent that is at play with his work. But in here I will be slightly critical while saying

that I find him a very fascinating figure. I have a lot of respect for the writing that he is done and for his willingness to push these ideas. I think he seems like quite a joy to talk to based on all the interviews that I have listened to. But I also think that it's not totally just cheeky marketing and that within the politics that he has associated himself with, you can actually see some of the risk in this idea that there is a serious break, right? I'll make this just explicit. Verifakis calls himself a libertarian. Marxist or a libertarian socialist is the language that he has used. And if you hear him talk about his vision of what socialism is, he makes references to like workers councils, like again, a lot of

these more libertarian Marxist concepts. And obviously I am not coming at Marxism from that same perspective. But I also think if you look at the political projects that Verifakis has been involved in, you can also see them as part of what I see as kind of a like post-Marxist left wing populism, right? Sariza in Greece really represented this kind of like big tent approach to economic populism and the democratic movement that he's involved in now also really places itself in that like post-capitalism milieu of thought. And I think it is not incidental that kind of the leading politician and theoretician within this European sort of post-Marxist populism has, again, we could debate how seriously he is about it, to close.

declared that capitalism has died and we are fighting a new thing. Because if that is the case, then yes, traditional Marxist politics, the necessity for the Leninist party of a new type, is all outdated. And perhaps the move is to fight through these more, you know, contemporary European political forms. And so I do think there is some political content to the Declaration that still is worth being concerned about. And I think in particular, if techno feudalism does represent this new development, there are a couple of implications. The first thing that we would have to wrestle with is the fact that in traditional Marxist economics, what comes after capitalism is socialism. There is a pretty linear theory in traditional Marxist thought. And in particular,

socialism emerges from capitalism because capitalism has created the conditions for socialism. It is socialized labor and created all the necessary seeds that socialism relies upon. But if we have now move past capitalism and we have moved to a new stage like techno feudalism. Is socialism even still possible? Is Marxism entirely invalidated by it not having been proved correct about what occurs in the next stage of development? Those are real political concerns that I think are opened up by that debate in a way that is complicated and worth taking seriously. Now, I think the second thing is if we want to maintain a position of ourselves as socialists and if techno feudalism is this new kind of step past capitalism, well, as socialist,

we might be tempted to conclude then that what we need to do is undo the developments of techno feudalism and return back to capitalism in some form or another. And this is actually where I get slightly worried is that in the references that I can find for Varofocus about what we ought to do. There is kind of this idea of those without cloud capital are on the right side of the struggle, which means that the small capitalists and petty bourgeoisie actually ought to be a part of the broader political coalition that fights against cloud capital and techno feudalism. And again, I think we should be careful here. The petty bourgeoisie can be brought into a socialist politics. The party,

as Lyndon conceptualizes, it takes all the progressive classes or potentially progressive classes and subordinates them to proletarian politics and proletarian interests. But in the vision of techno feudalism, the proletariat doesn't even really necessarily exist anymore. And so this more broad economic populism that would include the small capitalist kind of becomes the new political subject of resisting techno feudalism. And I think at that point, we have strayed very far from Marxist politics whatsoever, potentially. And so, yes, I think there's some cheekiness in the use of this term techno feudalism as an actual break from capitalism. But I also think the politics of European post-Marxist populism that Verifucus is very much grounded in, I don't know. Like,

I think those have to be considered in what is at risk there. And that's what I feel is the concern, you know, about this concept. And I think those critical, critical insights just elucidated by Allison is why I truly believe, you know, Allison is one of the most important Marxist thinkers on the American continent today. I truly believe that because that sort of critical insight and getting below the cheeky marketing scheme and showing the actual political implications of taking this idea seriously and finding its historical and material roots in European parliamentarianism and post-Marxism I think is absolutely brilliant. And I could not agree more. So absolutely probably the culmination in the highlight of this episode is that point right there, those two points right there. So let's go ahead and wrap up, I think, here, unless there's anything else you have to say. But I have a little bit of a cheeky question to end on, which is, well, you know, this is maybe the episode we've said the word cheeky more than any other episode. But what is to be done, right? Like given this analysis and given, you know, the critical analysis we have towards the term itself,

But all the stuff we've talked about with regards to this era of decaying capitalism and the rent-seeking behavior, what can we do as individuals and, of course, as organized collectives to resist this new era of monopoly capital? Yeah. Isn't that the question that I wake up every day and kind of wonder the answer to, honestly? So I'll give my personal answer here, which is the way that I have chosen to relate to this. Or, you know, let me just say this. Again, I'm sympathetic to the analysis of techno feudalism in as much as it is describing real economic trends. I live in Los Angeles. There is some manufacturing in parts of Los Angeles. There is very little of it compared to traditional capitalist cities. Los Angeles is a city full of gig workers, full of service workers, who often work in extremely non-socialized forms of labor, actually. So I live and do socialist work in a city

where I see the realities that this concept is getting at daily. So I'm sympathetic to it, and I think it poses a problem that we really have to wrestle with. And here, I'm just going to kind of put out my pitch for, I think this is precisely the problem that the Los Angeles Tenants Union is trying to respond to and has put forward some theoretical attempts to show how tenant work can intervene in this new rent-seeking economic focus that has developed within capitalism. In particular, if we really have had the isolation of workers, a move away from socialized, productive wage work, then we need to find other sites of collective struggle where we can work with the working class and where we can bring them

into unity and develop them. And I think, you know, this is my position, this is what I am living out in my life presently. That means tenant organizing in a lot of instances. If you live in a city that does not have that traditional productive aspect to its economy. Because in tenant organizing, you can find a building where everyone in the apartment is engaged in working class labor that is, again, often particularly, you know, atomized. One of the buildings that by local organizes and has people who work as independent gardeners, people who work in a service job where they're the only employee at a company, people from, again, very atomized forms of labor, who are nonetheless part of the working class.

And because we can't get clear access to them in that traditional, industrial, productive context in a city like this, which I think is a techno-feudalist city in some sense, we are able to find them and interact with them and organize them in the buildings that they live in as tenants in a way that actually allows us to confront literal rent-seeking that is occurring in this city and to begin to show through agitation and struggle the way that this broader system of private ownership and rent seeking is at the root of the exploitation they face in their workplaces and the exploitation they face in the building that they live in and spend their life in. So I'll make my pitch that I've made before. I think tenant organizing is one of the answers of what is to be done here. We have to find these other ways to get access to the working class that have been enclosed upon, partially by the development.

that get lumped under this concept of techno feudalism or neo feudalism. And that is the answer that I've personally invested in. I'm pretty involved in my local at this point with the Los Angeles Tenants Union. I think it is a very clear path forward in the cities that have similar positions to this. So I don't have the what is to be done for where you live necessarily. But that's how I'm analyzing this where I live and intervening in the organizational struggles here. Amen, beautifully said. Absolutely on point. I am now entering a high-skilled trade union, and there's lots of interesting dynamics and contradictions on that front.

I haven't been in it long enough to come out with any solid conclusions or particularly novel insights, but certainly as my journey progresses in the trades, I think I will also be able to speak now uniquely to the labor union side of things. the contradictions, the tensions, the pitfalls, as well as some of the possibilities and hopes as well going forward. So if you stick with us at Red Menace at Rev. Left, you will certainly get some of those insights as I learn more and throw myself into this brand new world at the ground level. But as for everything, Allison said, I could not agree more. And the fundamental needness, the fundamental utility for the material fact of human beings needing a home. home and that being an obvious sight of struggle and an obvious mechanism by which we can we can meet the ruling class i mean the ruling class meet the working class to combat the ruling class um that is

that is fundamental and essential and and hats off to all the tenant organizing that's going on across the country all right absolutely any last words alison or no i think it's a good place to end on right like you know and again actually maybe one last piece of last words that's what i've landed on based on my analysis of the city I live in and listening to the analysis of other organizers in this city, and it might be different where you live. And so while I have been critical of this new concept of techno feudalism in this episode, the impulse behind it to say what has actually changed in the economy, what are the present conditions, and how we intervene in it, is a core Marxist impulse that should be practiced by everyone who considers themselves

a Marxist, and you should practice it in the context of the place you live as well. Don't let the criticism that's been offered in this episode turn you off from the idea that we need to constantly be doing this re-engagement because it's absolutely fundamental to being able to make strategic interventions as organizers. So I want to, you know, end on that note because I think there would be a way of reading this episode as, oh, okay, we just need more linen and we should never theorize anything new. But no, you should. It's just we need to be careful and think about the political implications of it. But that constant critical reassessment is kind of the core of Marxism in my mind. Yeah. Well said.

And at the end of the day, our ultimate goal is political power, is getting political power so we can exert our will and impose our will on the material world, the political world, the economic world. And anything that builds political power is a step in the absolutely right direction. And we can never lose sight of that. So that's our episode for today. Let us know what you think in the comment sections. when we post this online, we'd love to get people's feedback.

This is, of course, an attempt to wrestle with the kind of cutting edge of capitalist evolution in the 21st century. And it's a worthwhile thing to engage in. So I hope this helped other people think through this historical moment. And I would, as always, love to hear people's own thoughts and analysis on this concept and the surrounding concepts. So love and solidarity. Talk to you soon. You know, You know,

Thank you.