To free ourselves from our technofeudal overlords, we must think like Karl Marx. The corporations would asset-strip our brains, but we can take back control
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people, or institutions, with the capacity to do good who instead damaged humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that: not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force.
Preceding social systems may have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produce.
Young people feel this. But, the backlash against migrants, identity politics, not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices, paralyse them. But here re-enters Marx with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time.
Take the argument that minorities living in the West should assimilate lest we end up a ‘society of strangers’. When Marx was twenty-five years old he read a book by Bruno Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that, to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Bauer’s argument was that Germans lacked freedom. So, he asked: “How are we to free you, Jews?” As Germans, he continued, Jews had a duty to help emancipate Germans, humanity more broadly – not agitate for their rights as Jews. Marx was livid.
Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer’s argument is a sight for sore eyes:
“We ask the converse question: Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion?… Just as the state evangelises when… it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.”
The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to religious freedom, of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc., with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share or much like must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, blacks, LGBT+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But, freedom will take a lot more than that.
Shifting on to migrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today’s younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have also bitten the anti-immigration bait.
In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting Irish cheap immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But, for Marx, it was self-defeating for trades unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat migrant workers.
Speaking of trades unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But, let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words:
«Trade unions» work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.”
Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he owns part of the firm they work for.
Lastly, Marx’s freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that Big Tech, along with Big Finance and our states, have surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital, or cloud capital, that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks, and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains.
Only through Marx’s lens can we truly get it: That to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively.
For the Guardian site, click here.
