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Pre-capitalist economic formations also compelled labour to produce a surplus, expropriated by the master or the lord. Marx understood that the compulsion of labour is not unique to capitalism. Besides, as Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg all emphasized, extra-economic coercion isn’t simply replaced by exploitation, but accompanies it capital comes to overlay, incorporate and rely on previous social forms. It naturalizes capitalism – in a way effectively criticized by Ellen Meiksins Wood in The Origin of Capitalism (2017) – and abandons any effort to recognize and specify systemic change. But this dissolution of the difference between feudalism and capitalism, in favour of eternal expropriation, fails to attend to changes in the forms of exploitation. Morozov takes Wallerstein’s side, arguing that ‘dispossession and expropriation have been constitutive of accumulation throughout history’. Morozov pinpoints this continuing role of ‘extra-economic coercion’ as the key difference between the two. For Wallerstein, by contrast, capitalism also centrally involves processes of expropriation from the periphery by the core.
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Capitalism, by contrast, relies on ‘exploitation’ – surplus extraction by purely economic means: deprived of the means of subsistence, nominally free workers are obliged to sell their labour power for a wage in order to survive in a cash economy. As he notes, Marxists generally conceive the process of surplus extraction under feudalism as ‘expropriation’, driven by extra-economic coercive or political means: lords expropriate produce from peasants over whom they exercise sovereign political and juridical power. In defining what makes capitalism capitalism, Morozov contrasts the conceptualizations of Marxists like Robert Brenner with those of world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Morozov dismisses feudal analogies as meme-hungry intellectual attention-seeking, a failure to understand digital capitalism, rather than insights into the possibility that it might be turning into something no longer aptly described as capitalist. Among those accused of ‘feudal-speak’ are Yanis Varoufakis, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Kuttner, Michael Hudson and myself. Evgeny Morozov’s ‘ Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ in the latest NLR takes aim at the growing list of thinkers who have seen homologies between feudalism and current tendencies in the capitalist system – prolonged stagnation, upward redistribution by political means, a digital sector in which a few ‘barons’ benefit from a mass of users ‘tied’ to their algorithmic domains, and the growth of a service sector or sector of servants.