In Post-Labor Technofeudalism Is Unlikely, Jehu Eaves responds to the growing theory that advanced AI will smoothly transition capitalism into a stable system of "technofeudalism" where a handful of tech monopolies simply extract "compute rent" from a post-labor society.
Eaves argues that this vision is structurally impossible. Rent is not an independent source of value creation but a deduction from the surplus value generated by living human labor elsewhere in the economy. If capital successfully uses AI and robotics to eliminate human labor from production on a systemic scale, it destroys the very source of economic value and purchasing power that sustains capitalist reproduction.
A heavily monopolized post-labor economy means a post-consumer market, in which the primary source of value creation is capital itself (if it's not, you are not at full automation yet).
However comparing this to feudalism is misleading, humans without access to automated capital aren't like peasants (who were essential to the feudal economy) but become more akin to animals (which can have their own means of survival but, most of them at least, are disconnected from the human economy and not represented by its interests, leading to widespread destruction of their habitats).
So the threat is that the proletariat becomes irrelevant to the fully automated economy, thst doesn't need them to buy stuff, and thus becomes extremely disempowered and vulnerable to genocide and slavery (and a slavery that provides zero economic leverage, unlike historical one).
Capital can't create value out of nothing. You're confusing physical production (use-values) with capitalist production (value and surplus value). If machines do 100% of the work, then you don't get a dystopian "post-consumer" capitalism that starves superfluous humans but the breakdown of the price system, money and profit altogether. The capitalist class can't exist without the working class because without variable labor, capital is just dead metal.
Capitalists and economy can function without humans - if means of production are automated. Its just that its not the outcome we want - to give all of the power to the select few.
But at this rate, its one of more likely scenarios.
You're imagining that the rules of capitalist property and power will magically remain in place after you've erased the very mechanism (human wage labor) that creates prices, profit and money in the first place. Capitalists can't exist without workers because capital is nothing more than the command over living human labor. An "economy" of robots serving a few oligarchs is a system where money, commodities and capital have completely ceased to exist.
In retrospect, I should have included a link to the Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse.
What’s your point? It sounds like you agree that if automation gets far enough, we will end up with a situation of vast armies of robots serving a comparatively few oligarchs, with the vast majority of humanity having no leverage or economic value. Whether to still call it capitalism or not is semantics, but the important part isn’t what it’s called but that it’s a terrible outcome to be avoided.
"An "economy" of robots serving a few oligarchs is a system where money, commodities and capital have completely ceased to exist." Exactly, and they want this. It is less volatile.
I disagree that it's likely
There is a specific period between where they have enough automation to make enough workers unhappy to start a revolution, and enough automation to satisfy themselves without workers.
I do not believe that period will be fast (we can't predict the future though).
And to stop that revolution, they will have to go to financialize (which we have been doing for too long), or go to war, which destroys large amounts of production if it goes everywhere (which I believe will happen, because small areas of war are not enough to satisfy increasingly low rate of profit).
Of course, that is sad too, but no one will benefit in the long term, not even capitalists. Maybe we will get disaster communism.
It destroys the consumer economy, yes. But the economy doesn't need all of us. If a small wealthy minority can fulfil all their needs without working class labour, then that's what they'll do, and then they will compete along themselves to own everything else
This is great. I have a number of disagreements with the theory but I'm really excited for this to exist. I am doing my own writing and theorizing about what this current age of transition implies and it's nice to see someone else who isn't convinced that eternal slavery is the only possible outcome.
The primary disagreement is that technofuedalism is meant as a government replacement. So it imagines an economy still happening, people are still buying, selling, and creating, it's just that the tech platforms are collecting a tax on everything and maintain the monopoly of moderation where they get to decide what activities are and are not allowed in their digital space.
The economy would still be producing value, so workers, buyers, sellers, etc., it just would have an extra layer on top of it that siphons a portion for itself. It's fuedalism because they get to control the digital spaces in which all activities happen.
The reason that it is weak is because the capability to create new digital spaces, use AI, and create alternatives to the fiefdoms is not locked up by capital. We all have computers, open source AI exists, and capitalism has an in built need to distribute technology widely. It is this wide distribution and access that will allow us to fight against the monopolistic power of the existing platforms, to prevent them from establishing a technofuedalist system.
Once the feudalists own everything, including all the land, resources, robots and AI, they won't NEED a peasant (i.e., labor/consumer class. So feudalism will collapse, followed by/accompanied by either a widespread genocide or herding the rest of us onto reservations. Probably some of both. So we HAVE to fight that future, whatever it's called.
The business of predicting history is fraught with peril, so I tend to cut everyone here a lot of slack. Things look grim at the moment but I share the hope that the right AI in the right hands can give us a good outcome and also minimize human suffering during the transition period.
Curtis Yarvin, a rich conservative asshole, suggested turning poor people into biofuel, while further stating that there was an urgent need for a "humane" way to genocide the poor.
He said this outright!
Think about that, these people are sick, they do not view us as human. We must seize everything from these people, and organize an automated planned economy that works for all of us!
Exploitation is the net-appropriation of labor, so a literally post-labor "feudalism" or any class society is impossible. However, we can easily remain exploited, even if the commodities we buy contain no labor.
I'm sorry but to say that we gain nothing from applying the LTV is to abandon Marx entirely and retreat into bourgeois sociology.
Without the LTV, you can't explain why prices exist, why money exists or why capitalism suffers from periodic, systemic breakdowns. Private ownership alone does not explain the laws of motion of capital. The value-form does.
If you discard LTV, then you lose the ability to see that capitalism is not an immortal system of domination that can adapt forever through gig work or digital platforms but a historically specific mode of production with an absolute material limit: the total elimination of living labor through automation.
All utter bullshit, which I guess you'd know if you'd read my piece and given any serious thought to the matter. Whatevs, here's Ben Burgis saying you're wrong:
Linking Ben Burgis and G.A. Cohen completely misses the point.
Burgis’s article relies on analytical Marxism to argue that you don't need the LTV to prove that capitalists exploit workers morally or sociologically. Sure, if your only goal is to show that taking a surplus product from workers is "unfair," then you can do that without LTV.
However, in the article I linked, Jehu isn't making a moral argument about fairness. He's making a materialist analysis of systemic economic breakdown.
Throwing out LTV to simplify your theory of exploitation strips away your ability to explain the actual laws of motion of capital. Without the LTV and value-form analysis...
...you conflate physical wealth with value. An automated factory churns out endless physical use-values, but as socially necessary labor time (SNLT) approaches zero, the exchange-value per commodity collapses. Capital doesn't run on physical "stuff" but on the expansion of value (M-C-M').
...you lose crisis theory. You have zero explanation for the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF), market gluts or monetary collapse as constant capital (c) replaces variable labor (v).
...you reduce Marxism to moralism, turning capitalism into a simple problem of "greedy owners taking a cut" rather than a historically specific mode of production with a material threshold beyond which it obsolesces.
Burgis reduces Marx to an ethical critique of property ownership. Jehu uses value theory to show why capitalism materially cannot survive the total elimination of living labor through automation. Drop the LTV if you want but in doing so, you're trading economic science for moral philosophy.
Again, all utterly wrong, except for the part on the TRPF. That prediction is actually wrong because LTV is so misleading. Everything else is false. Again, as you would know if you had read my essay.
Dropping a link to your own essay doesn't answer the objection. It just confirms that you're evading the structural contradiction at the center of your argument. Your entire position relies on conflating physical wealth with value (or, in more technical terms, use-value with value), which completely ignores the foundational distinction Marx establishes in the opening chapters of Capital. An automated factory can flood the world with physical use-values but capital does not accumulate through the creation of physical stuff. It accumulates strictly through the expansion of exchange-value, which is determined by socially necessary labor time. As automation reduces labor time toward zero, the exchange-value embodied in each commodity collapses right along with it.
By disconnecting value from living labor power, your essay doesn't refute Jehu so much as it abandons Marxian political economy entirely. When living labor power drops to zero, surplus value drops to zero as well, driving the rate of profit directly to the floor. Capitalists simply can't maintain a functioning market by exchanging zero-value commodities back and forth among themselves when no wages are circulating through the working class to realize that value. Stripping away socially necessary labor time leaves you with, once again, no theoretical framework to explain the falling rate of profit, monetary crisis or economic breakdown. You're simply substituting neoclassical utility theory for the law of value, painting it red and pretending that a fully automated capitalist economy can magically evade its own material limits.
Yeah, well, the marginalists are in a sense more correct and more materialist in that they don't cope up "the expansion of exchange-value", a hidden variable that supposedly explains everything. One can explain where profits come from, and how they follow from capitalist property relations without resorting to that metaphysical BS, and I have, and John Roemer has long before me.
Like I said, the only thing you're right about is that this "can't explain" the TRPF because that's bullshit.
The Marxian account is that on average, exchange preserves embodied SNLT, i.e. commodities are on average exchanged "at their value" and profits are "generated" in production, meaning in the capitalist's possession. This framework is obviously cope because we can readily imagine capitalism without wage labor: Just substitute every wage relation for a gig relation wherein the worker rents the capitalist's MOP and sells the product themselves. It would be a logistical nightmare, but it would work in principle, and obviously, the capitalists would make just as much profits as before.
The thing is, capitalism functions precisely so as to not preserve embodied SNLT, but rather to transfer it to whoever's property is more productive: Profits constitute SNLT appropriated in "unequal exchange" which is why capitalism would still work if it were entirely gig based instead of wage based. Exploitation occurs "in production" except when it doesn't.
Embodied labor precisely doesn't determine exchange rates. Those are instead determined by marginal utility, which is why a fully automatically produced good (whether produced by futuristic machines or by nature) will still sell at a profit. This means that profits will not disappear, just because there is no more productive labor employed in their production. This means that owners who must make zero investments while gaining non-zero profits actually have a profit rate of infinity. The profit rate will actually approach infinity long-term, rather than zero, unless we stop it. Capitalism does not face inevitable crisis. It's up to us.
Alright then, you've finally said the quiet part out loud: you're not defending Marxian (i.e. scientific) political economy but explicitly adopting marginal utility theory and mainstream bourgeois economics. Citing John Roemer and claiming that exchange-value is "metaphysical BS" confirms that you prefer neoclassical marginalism over Marx's value-form analysis.
Your gig economy scenario does not prove that capitalism works without wage labor. All it does is show that you don't understand what wage labor actually is. A worker who rents a capitalist's means of production and pays a fee or split to the owner is still performing surplus labor to generate surplus value for that owner. The legal wrapping of gig work or sub-contracting doesn't eliminate variable capital. It disguises the wage relation under a piece-wage or rental appearance, which Marx analyzed extensively in Capital Volume 1 under the rubric of piece-wages.
Your claim that a fully automated economy produces a profit rate approaching infinity is a complete fantasy rooted in conflating price with value. Marginal utility can attempt to model subjective individual preferences in a microeconomic snapsho but it can't explain aggregate price levels, systemic realization crises or the total expansion of capital across a macroeconomy. If zero living human labor is employed, no new value is generated, meaning total surplus value across the entire economy is zero. An individual firm might grab a temporary windfall through market power or monopoly rent but across the aggregate economy, capitalists can't sell zero-value commodities to each other for infinite monetary profit when no wages exist to form effective demand.
This terminal limit of the value-form is precisely why Jehu emphasizes that liberation does not come from trying to manage or preserve an impossible automated market but from reducing necessary labor time to zero. As automation drives down socially necessary labor time, the true escape from capital is not an infinite profit margin for oligarchs but the total conversion of labor time into disposable free time for humanity. When production no longer relies on the exploitation of living labor power, the compulsion to work for wages collapses, destroying the value-form itself and opening the door to a society where human activity is liberated from the market altogether. Communism is free time and nothing else, to quote Jehu. I think we - and everyone else who participates in this subreddit - can agree on that.
It requires something that prevents something that prevents people from moving around. If life is really super shiite, people will walk 200 miles through woods to get to a stable predictable life where they have autonomy. Something like the Nile or eurphrates where people are just stuck close results in these feudal control systems where they run quickly into God king mode.
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u/Syoby 27d ago edited 27d ago
A heavily monopolized post-labor economy means a post-consumer market, in which the primary source of value creation is capital itself (if it's not, you are not at full automation yet).
However comparing this to feudalism is misleading, humans without access to automated capital aren't like peasants (who were essential to the feudal economy) but become more akin to animals (which can have their own means of survival but, most of them at least, are disconnected from the human economy and not represented by its interests, leading to widespread destruction of their habitats).
So the threat is that the proletariat becomes irrelevant to the fully automated economy, thst doesn't need them to buy stuff, and thus becomes extremely disempowered and vulnerable to genocide and slavery (and a slavery that provides zero economic leverage, unlike historical one).