Rent-Seeking, Platforms, And The Myth Of Techno-Feudalism with Alex Hochuli

What if the “techno-feudalism” boom is a symptom of our confusion rather than a diagnosis of the age? We sit down with Alex Hochuli (Bungacast, American Affairs) to interrogate the feudal metaphor and make a sharper case: we’re living through total capitalism’s decay, not a return to lords and serfs. That lens helps make sense of platform tolls, anti-market monopolies, surveillance, and institutional rot without pretending we’ve exited capitalism’s basic relations of production.

We trace why the feudal story resonates—unfreedom feels real—then test it against history. Feudalism meant manorial production, oath-bound sovereignty, and overlapping legal orders; our world runs on consolidated states, global supply chains, and platform intermediaries that convert risk into reliable rents. The better comparison is peripherization: practices once common in the periphery now shape the core, from precarious work to state-enabled accumulation. That shift helps explain why labor leverage has collapsed despite rising public sympathy: dispersed service shops, automated production, and logistics-dependence blunt traditional organizing power.

China enters as Rorschach test: state capitalism, social credit, and surveillance make the feudal label tempting, yet the core logic remains capitalist, steered by growth imperatives and legitimacy management. We explore AI’s forked path—job-displacing windfall or costly stagnation—and why care-economy fixes won’t build a livable future on their own. If everyone secretly wants social democracy back, we ask what could replace the vanished conditions that once made it possible.

The conversation ends with “dark hope.” Drop the costume drama, name the system we have, and fight for a directly political project that builds capacity: housing, grids, industry, and public institutions that actually work. Speak against oligarchy in terms a broad public can hear. If you’re ready to trade clever metaphors for concrete ambition, hit play, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:36 Setting The Stage: Feudal Hype
• 5:12 Why Techno-Feudalism Became A Meme
• 9:27 Decline, Disorder, And Decay
• 13:37 What Feudalism Actually Was
• 17:52 Rents, Platforms, And Anti-Markets
• 24:07 Peripherization Of The Core
• 29:05 China, State Capitalism, And Confusions
• 35:52 Post-Democratic Capitalism, Not Feudalism
• 42:37 Labor’s Lost Leverage And New Terrain
• 50:57 End Of The Sixties And Culture Wars
• 59:22 Universities, DEI, And Class Blindness
• 1:06:07 AI, Productivity, And Stagnation Risks
• 1:12:47 Care Economies And Building What’s Next
• 1:19:17 Populism’s Limits And A National Project
• 1:26:47 Closing: Dark Hope And Next Steps

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:49

Hello and welcome to VarnBlog. And today we're with uh returning guest and friend of the show, Alex Wachili, co-host of Off Bumba uh Off Bunga Bunga podcast, um, and uh author uh uh at a variety of places, but the place I find you the most these days tends to be uh your uh big reviews at American Affairs. Um and wanted to talk to you about techno-feudalism, neo-feudalism, all the feudalisms.

Alex Hochuli: 1:24

Um maybe not the old one, maybe we can do the old one too. Yeah, paleo paleo feudalism, paleofeudalism, and uh yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

I mean, even Brenner's interesting because Brenner's changed his what he caused this, because he used to call it neo-feudalism, now he calls it political capitalism question mark. Um, which I also find interesting. Uh um not to get too much into the weeds already, but I I I remember reading his uh piece with Dylan Riley on Bidenism and going, so he thinks Bidenism is Keynesianism that doesn't work, but somehow might work even though it doesn't have profits. I don't know how that works. Um but anyway, uh you reviewed three books, um, one of which I hate, one of which I I uh think is misguided, and one of which I have not read, but the sections of it that I have read, I haven't read the whole thing, but I have read sections of uh the Durham book. Um it's actually the least bad of the three, and I've read a couple more of these neo-techno feudalism books, including some of the right-wing ones like Cotkins. Um uh and I'll just admit my bias in 2019. I actually flirted with this myself because I was trying to figure out uh the weirdness of profitability rates and um quantitative easing, which is not a condition we live under anymore, but I was trying to figure that out, and ultimately I rejected the idea of uh technofuelism because I realized that my notion of capitalism was kind of ahistoric and almost libertarian, like that it was based off of this notion of pure commodity markets that had never actually existed. Um but I wanted to talk to you about this because you your piece for American Affairs uh comes after uh this is everywhere. Like I it I anything that talks about oligarchs on on TikTok or Instagram right now, you go look at the comments and someone will scream accelerationism without understanding it, and technofeudalism, uh, and maybe uh the other one is technofeudalism of the Brolyarchy, which is the most awful democratic party portmanteau I've ever heard in my fucking life. But like um, and I wanted to get before we even get to what this is, why is this so popular right now?

Alex Hochuli: 4:07

Right, right. Well, firstly, thank you for having me on again. Um, always a pleasure. And secondly, you know, we're intimate now. It Bungacast, please. It doesn't need to be Alpha Bunga Bung. Um, uh, and then thirdly, I guess to answer the question, yeah. I mean, obviously there is a uh a premium put in the intellectual world on coining new terms and being the first to call out the new thing. Uh and I mean that this has a very long history, but of course, as things as kind of intellectual production becomes ever more kind of commodified um and engaged in the attention economy, it puts an even greater premium on having the sexy new term. Yeah, there's there's that. Um, but that maybe doesn't explain why this term specifically, that just explains why um there's an emphasis on coining new terms. Um I you know, I try to so in my review essay, I try to frame it in terms of how to describe decline, right? That's the first words, and it's how I begin the kind of conclusion to it as well. Because it's about describing decline or decay. Um, and we can get into why one or not the other of those terms. Um, there's some other D's which I've discussed in terms of uh you know, disruption and disorder are the other two, probably. Uh and they're all different ways of under trying to understand our world. So, you know, uh decline generally comes from conservatives and reactionaries and kind of doing an Oswald Spangler kind of thing. Um, and it's the decline of the West and it's the rise of China or I don't know, Islam or something, whatever. Uh all uh cases which are weak for different reasons, and they come attached usually with the same conservative politics, looking at the those who are kind of draining the vitality of the body politic in the West. And it's usually women or gays or women, gays or blacks. Um and uh and I think we can we can bracket that, but I think it's very important to try to have a materialist understanding of decline or what decline would mean. Um, and maybe we can again discuss why decline or why decay. Disorder, it's tends to be the preoccupation of um kind of managerial centrist technocrats who are concerned primarily with geopolitical disorder and perhaps with the markets, right? I mean, you'll find this perhaps I mean in the in a more sophisticated version with Adam Toos, but um lots of other more uh less sophisticated versions with like Ian Bremer or people like that kind of uh geopolitics consultant. Then you have disorder disruption, which is you know generally actually taken as a positive. It's a recommendation, it's uh it's a proposal uh from Silicon Valley types, indeed, precisely the techno-feudal oligarchs, if we want to call them that, uh, who who push disruption as you know, move fast and break things. Uh that you know, that kind of Mark Zuckerberg idea. Um so that doesn't really capture what's going on today. Uh and decay is probably correct because it it um embraces both the decay of institutions of the 20th century, which we're dealing with, the decay of the neoliberal order, um, which is really advanced now, and perhaps future historians will already say that us human beings living in 2025, we're already in the order to come. And whether that's political capitalism or state capitalism or techno-feudalism remains to be seen. Um, and also perhaps the decay of capitalism itself in terms of its own vitality, which is then a global matter. It's not yes, Western capitalism, but Chinese capitalism is a-okay. I mean, on one level, yes, in terms of rates of growth, for example, and profit rates, but at a deeper level, probably not.

C. Derick Varn: 8:01

Even the rates of growth for China have dramatically slowed, they're just way better than the rest.

Alex Hochuli: 8:06

Yes. Yeah, exactly. They're going at five percent, and and of course, now in a much wealthier country, that means uh that means a great deal, but but still. Um I think the the point, anyway, beyond these these four D's is that you know everyone is kind of grasping at a way of conceptualizing, at least in the West, and this applies, this is the cultural West, not just the political West. So it includes uh Latin America, um and includes Africa, maybe as well. I don't know. But whatever, these these kind of conceptualizations, uh geographical kind of concerns aside, everyone's kind of talking about look, greater inequality, oligarchy, um uh new forms of control and surveillance, uh, in lack of dynamism economically, uh reliance on rent seeking of some sort or another. So everyone's aware of these things, and and this applies to mainstream commentators as much as it does to Marxists, and indeed as much to the kind of you know, conservative right of various different guises, right? So everyone's kind of talking about the same things at a descriptive level. Uh and I guess feudalism is just kind of this idea of total domination and is a way of kind of basically explaining our sense of unfreedom. Because it's, you know, the people talking about techno-feudalism, it's like, oh yeah, we're the serfs here, right? Um at both at most, you know, you're the you're if you're a kind of a well-paid professional, you're an artisan who's being de-skilled or something. Um, but you know, you're placing yourself in the feudal order as a kind of one of the unfree members, you know, no one's no one's kind of going, this is techno feudalism, and going, and I and I'm the king, or I'm one of the most powerful lords. Uh and I think you know, you can see other aspects, you know, at a kind of very superficial level, it's a tantalizing idea. And you know, like I was also kind of when I first heard about it, like, mmm, yes, maybe that is what's going on. Uh and you can look at the wasteful forms of consumption from the super wealthy and go, well, you know, that's exactly like um feudal lords not having a way to productively reinvest. You know, there's no conception of that. And so you burn what you I mean, burn, you know, I don't mean it like potlatch or something, but you know, you you you unproductively consume it or you waste it on war, right? Um, and various forms of warlordism, uh, the growth of criminal cartels which erode state sovereignty. You know, all these things kind of seem kind of feudal, and you can kind of map one element on or another. And if you're very eclectic and have no pretense at historical accuracy or really kind of a great degree of intellectual coherence, you go, yeah, yeah, that's all kind of techno-feudal. And I guess that's why that's why it appeals. And and I guess it's also a way of, you know, maybe fascism is is is tired now as a way of saying, Oh, this is coming fascism, and so people kind of go, you know, feudalism instead. Um, yeah, it's exotic, right? I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 11:05

Yeah. I mean, at least at least fascism had the benefit of being itself actually incoherent, which is which is part of why you apply it to everything. Um, whereas feudalism uh has its own historiographic problems. I mean, like the great debates right now is whether or not we should be talking. I mean, it's it's interesting that at the moment we're talking about this. If you're in liberal historical circles, the only people who even believe that feudalism is kind of still a category are like old British Marxists like like uh like um Wickham are uh are the late Rodney Hilton or something. Um and and even they would tell you that feudalism is not one order. I mean, they would define it as manorialism, signory, um uh polycentric social order, uh you know, these these sorts of things, and I guess I would have to define that for for normies. So uh manorialism is tied to a particular manner that develops out of the collapse of the Roman city system in the in the late antique period. Signory is like this system of oaths where you have interpersonal oaths that are basically functioning as state law, and polycentric order means there's multiple laws that are competing with each other that you could be subject to. Um one of the things I find very interesting about uh today is uh I don't see any of that right now. I mean, I do see rents uh as a political economic form, and that's that's a feature of minoritalism insignary, but only a feature. And I see I actually don't see a polycentric social order. I mean, like not yet, although who knows? Uh, at least in the United States, if the if the government stays shut down forever, maybe, maybe we will, but um that's not happening yet.

Alex Hochuli: 13:03

Um, and then the other thing and also and also that polycentric order is like of different orders of of magnitude, right? I mean, you might have a city-state, or you might have a small lord with his small holdings, so it's not even like uh uh the US breaking up and being all states, right? Because right that those states are all of the same type and of the same kind. So you know, the polycentric order of of feudalism was something, and anyway, yeah. I mean yeah, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 13:27

You might have a city state, a vassal lord, and the church canon law, right? Right, all of which can execute you. So um I I think that that's that's interesting, but I could I guess we could focus in on the the two points where they're not completely off, um is rents and rent seeking as a dominant form of uh of engagement, and something that your article doesn't mention. I don't know that the books I've read, like I said, I've read I forced myself to read the Giannis Ferris Focus book, but threw it across the room several times. I'm just gonna admit that to you. I literally hurled my Kindle at the wall.

Alex Hochuli: 14:09

Um I had that with I had that more with Jodie Dean's book, but as you can gather from from from what I write, but yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 14:17

Well, uh Jody Dean's book is what was interesting. I mean, you seem to get madder at Jody Dean's book, but also admit that it makes some more valid points than Giannis. Giannis seems to be the most popular because it's immediately understandable, but as being immediately understandable seems to be the most objectively wrong.

Alex Hochuli: 14:39

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah. Um I I just hate I just hate the style of Jodie Dean's argumentation and the as you know, kind of eclectic approach to theory, which is like of a type, you know, it's kind of leftism, um, in the pejorative sense of just like all the bad, oh yeah, all this bad stuff, that's capitalism or the right doing it, and you know, I anyway, I so I have a particular allergy to that kind of um that kind of leftism. But I think what what one last point just before we get, I guess, onto the more substantial stuff. The which I make in the review article, which is that the idea, this kind of um notion of an undemocratic, completely hierarchical, integrated system of total domination and of completely unfree serves who are not just exploited but extorted and and uh subject to plunder and etc. Like that's pre-democratic capitalism, and the pyramid notion of you know, the king, you know, that that thing which which I think is like a 19th century drawing of like the king, like we rule you, the pre the priests like caste, like we we delude you or something, the business people, the the the merchants, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 15:54

But maybe IWW still likes for whatever reason, right?

Alex Hochuli: 15:57

Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, because it's uh it it's subject to to moralistic denunciation, right? So it that's what makes it appealing, and that's what's appealing about techno-feudalism, because it's something unfair that's being done by capitalist-owned terms, right? Um, it's unf it's unfair capitalism rather than fair capitalism. So, but the the idea there anyway is that that's actually not feudalism, um, even if such a thing existed, it's not the tributary mode of production, it is pre-democratic capitalism, right? And what we are living through now increases post-democratic capitalism, even in formerly democratic states. And that's the analogy if we want to draw something, would draw such an analogy as the one we should be drawing between 19th century capitalism and and today, right? And so all this stuff which seems weird and new and bad to us is um weird and new and bad from the perspective of the second half of the 20th century. So the point that I keep repeating, and I've made this point on bunkcast a number of times, but we're living through the not just the end of the end of history, but the end of the 20th century and its forms, not just its content, but its forms. And that's I think not understanding that is the root of a lot of derangement today and a lot of searching for historical analogies and terms to make sense of our world, but which are misguided.

C. Derick Varn: 17:17

It's one of the things I've liked about Bungacast, actually, it's we've agreed on this, and I've agreed on this with you guys actually for longer than I've been a Marxist, that we have we have been living through the long end of the long 20th century, and that most of our norms are actually misguidedly from about 15 years at the beginning of that, between the post-war consistent to about 1964 to 1968, depending on what you want to define as the the breaking point. But like that's that's barely a generation, right? It just happens to have produced the largest generation that's currently alive. Well, actually, no longer, that's no longer true. It it produced the longest generation that was alive until about five years ago. Now that it's significantly dying, I think millennials are actually larger, but um, but that's not just true in the West, that's true kind of across the board, except in like North Africa and some places where uh birth rates are still really high, but birth rates have been declining everywhere. Um one of the things, one of the problems that I have about techno about the technofeudalism argument uh is I can't tell how geographically determined it is, because when they talk about the West, sometimes it seems like they're talking about just the United States, and sometimes it seems like they're talking about Europe, Latin America, uh, Anglo-North America, and maybe parts of Africa. Again, that's a big that's a big question, Mark. Um, and also Africa also being the odd man out as in 20th century conditions didn't really ever hold there that long, anyway.

Alex Hochuli: 18:55

Um Yeah, and and China, and then China as well, because then you know the the idea, particularly as it's tied to a notion of decline and then China's rise, that China would carry on its wings this new social form, this new order, which would be techno-feudal. And then in some regards, you can go, mm, yeah, because of course, probably state capitalism is its most advanced there. Um, you can see it much more clearly. We had a recent episode with IS Alami on his excellent book on state capitalism, and and I think it uh explains this very clearly, as it being a general tendency, global tendency, but but you know, China obviously is um where you want to see it most clearly, and then the social credit system and all the various forms of surveillance they have there, um, the lack of democracy, etc., it kind of makes the makes a more compelling case for being okay, if that's our future, then you know, maybe that's the techno-feudalism that we're looking at. But you know, again, as as we've already said, you know, it breaks down in the details.

C. Derick Varn: 19:58

Right. Well, I also don't know, like uh the this this particular version of the left stance on China, it seems particularly incoherent. Um, uh, I mean, like, if you read Jody Gain, is China good or China bad? I actually wouldn't know from that book. Um, and I don't know from her from her politics and her relationship to the PSL either. Um and uh let's I guess we should get into this. Uh maybe, maybe how did they define techno-feudalism versus neo-feudalism? Because this is a debate. When I read Eugenie Morozov's uh discussion of this, he kind of didn't separate those two categories, and a lot of these people were criticized in that article, but the books weren't out yet, so then they seem to have responded to that and made a bigger distinction about the difference between the two categories. So, what is what is technofeudalism? What is neo-feudalism, and why even yeah.

Alex Hochuli: 20:59

I mean I mean, between those two terms, I don't think there is anything. I mean, it tends to be the left-wing arguments, which are uh techno-feudalists because they focus primarily on Silicon Valley, though, you know, Joel Codkin's book, which came out before any of these, and he's uh I interviewed him once back in 2019. And I I mean, you know, I like it, obviously he'd be classed as a conservative in in the current US landscape. Um, but he you know he says, Oh, I'm an old social democrat. And I that was immediately obvious from from what he would argue, right? He's like kind of 1950s, 1960s social democrat. And and and you know, probably his divergence for the left comes from you know what his attitude is to development, to uh carbon capitalism, as it's called, to um to suburbs, things like this, right? Um, and I don't care to get into that right now anyway, but uh you know, he he also kind of he looks at California as his model, right? And and Silicon Valley is is quite important in that whole configuration. So I anyway, all of this to say, I don't think there is a difference between techno and neo-feudalism, they're kind of interchangeable terms. Um, in any case, if we're trying to find a common thread to them, it is renteerism, I think, fundamentally, and the way that tech platforms have inaugurated new forms of renteerism and with an anti-market kind of behavior or forms of extracting value. Uh, that's at the core of it. And then the account starts to differ as you as you as you go along, right? So, as I write in the review, some bring kind of ideological elements to the fore, um, which I think are actually tend to be quite useful, the kind of breakdown of a common understanding, etc. Though again, you always have to go back and go, how is this like feudalism? Um, so Jody Dean talks about the the the breakdown of the symbolic order, um, and in probably more popular terms that would be understood as kind of the breakdown of consensus post-truth. That's the other kind of you know, prominent mediatic term which is uh used to describe a similar phenomenon. And that's um you know that that that's like okay, that is going on, but also, you know, how is that related to the cosmology of of a Christian, you know, feudal Europe, right? So there's there's all these ways that these things don't quite connect up. Um, and so this is why I maybe you know Varophakis' book is is maybe the most wrong, but also the the kind of um most straightforward one insofar as he re really is willing to put his neck on the line and go and reduce it to kind of no rent is now important more important than profit. Now, the pro my my issue, and I run this through the whole kind of review, which is that you know, capitalism has always had elements of rent seeking in various different forms. In fact, those moments where capitalism is weaker, it has more dependence on the state. If you look at kind of Latin American history, there's been huge amounts of uh reliance on the state to go and expropriate at various, kick people off land, uh privatize public services more recently, um, you know, all these different forms of of um, or it kind of led to fundiary rent is rentedism, right? Of just basically kind of agrarian capitalism. Um these have all been kind of features of of capitalism in various points throughout its history. So the question isn't when when people point to the novelty of platform capitalism, um, the novelty seems to be in the technology, in that particular the particular forms of mediation that the technology allows, rather than in the fact of there being monopolies or in the fact of uh people being charged to work, right? Which is or charged to sell. Because there's been various forms of kind of anti-market behavior in capitalism. In fact, one one thing which I didn't get a chance to kind of introduce in into the argument, but uh Brodel always had this understanding of capitalism as precisely anti-market, right? So this association of capitalism and market is a kind of you know is a is a kind of thing, uh, an element of classical political economy, which um, you know, as capitalism kind of develops, starts starts, stops losing, begins to lose the the connection between to that kind of old form of of you know market competition um as being central to capitalism. Uh and so you know for Brodel, basically, you know, you have the kind of level of direct production of artisanship of craft, you have the second level of market exchange, and that is a level, that is an area where uh generally profit rates are very, very low because the the competition is high, right? It's like people selling basic commodities, selling, you know, lettuce at the market and stuff like that, right? Um, and the level of capitalism, as you understand it, has always been the realm of anti-market, it's been the realm of monopolies and monopsonies. Um and you know, this is kind of the really looking over the long duree. So again, there's a kind of there's a lot of presuppositions from the pretechno-feudal theorists and going, okay, there's something totally new happening, that they basically ignore the really existing history of capitalism and instead rely on a kind of ideal typical understanding, which is taken variously either from classical 19th century capitalism or from 20th century capitalism, depending on which element you want to focus on. So again, it's like you're looking again, it's people looking casting around, looking at these features of increased domination, increased inequality, oligarchy, uh maybe breakdown of sovereignty, and kind of casting around for a way of understanding this and having to reach for the pre-capitalist past when the reality is actually forms of cat forms of capitalism which have existed, but which have been particularly operative in the periphery, which is why I I argue that the and I'm I'm following lots of Brazilian theorists um who argue this, but that we're seeing peripherization, the peripherization of the core, not so much something like techno-feudalism. Right.

C. Derick Varn: 27:26

Well, for me, it I mean this brings me to some of my frustrations with people who insist on like mid-century third worldism understanding of like, oh well, the the the core's proletariat isn't uh uh isn't um exploited, and I'm like, where are you at? This is not the Ford's social compact of 1950 to 1960. It's just like like that that wasn't actually the greatest argument then either, but at least I understood it. Like now, insisting on it is weird. Um it seems to me that basically And and rest and rest on a kind of globalized identity politics, effectively, right? Like, yeah. Um to me, it seems like this is uh a return to norms that the the post-war social contract uh staved off, actually. It's it's like that's actually the blip, not now. Yes, yes, um, and uh and in multiple ways. I mean, people will bring up the precariat and gig work, and I'm like, well, if you look at the 19th century before the establishment of formal labor, um we've all we've we've had this problem for a long time. Like uh in the United States in the 19th century, uh day day labor relations were pretty common for American working class people, it just was a fact, or even worse, you had outright company towns, which I do think, even though it's early capitalism, have a you know, to me that like if you were to talk about semi-feudal elements of society, that's a real one.

Alex Hochuli: 29:03

What yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that and those types of things still exist in actually in quite advanced capitalism. I mentioned like the Gulf states and indentured workers, right? I mean, it's this is not uh even you don't even have to look very far afield or to you know or deep into the past to find this stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 29:20

No, uh well, I mean the Gulf states, it's funny. I I when I was uh when I was uh a mercenary educator and I would go wherever they paid me, the one place I would not eat go to was the Gulf States because I'm like, well, you take my passport away and I can't leave, like unless you let me. Like, I don't like that. Um, you know, it's not like they had a strong history of like messing up elite labor like that, but they could, and I was just like, uh, I don't think so. And you know, I think we see a lot more of that here. Gig work is I mean, even Marx talks about this. Basically, the gig economy would be the way that most employers like to pay, period, because it treats labor as a um as an even more variable cost. So the that's not new either. And I think your point about the misunderstanding of feudalism, I I honestly think this is like a broad point, and it's not unique to the techno-feudalist or neo-feudalist. Um, I remember reading Hans Hermann Hoppe and Curtis Jarvin. Uh, you know, the whole capitalism is our feudalism is capitalism, but better because it's totally private everything argument. Um, and I remember going, well, that isn't feudalism, and your model for it is actually the early 15th century, which we have to admit is like a transitionary period to capitalism anyway. Like you're not talking about the ninth. Century or something here. Yeah. So you just seem confused to me about like what these historiographic modes refer to. You mentioned Samir Amin and tributary modes of production. I find I found uh that essay that you that you um cited very frustrating because I'm like, are you arguing that everything except for socialism is basically always a tributary mode of production? And how does that help me understand anything then?

Alex Hochuli: 31:14

Like no, but I think that the argument here, I mean, and it's not his term. Um it's no it's not term, I think. I can't remember. Yeah. Um but yeah, I mean that's a way of kind of universalizing the pre-capitalist pre-modern experience, right? Um between kind of you know, within within kind of civilization. Um so after hunter-gatherers, before capitalism, very long period over a huge range of uh different experiences, but you know, tributary. Okay, I I mean I can live with that. Um and and and you know, I it's not, you know, I don't know how useful it is, but I think at least it um generalizes uh the that experience in a way which doesn't rely on the very specific conceptions of what feudalism might have been. And again, probably not a mode of production, and if it existed, it existed in like parts of France and England in the you know 11th to the 14th century or something. It's you know, anyway, but it like I don't think the argument is one on on that point specifically, right? Because um because people would be like, wait, hang on, I don't want to care about um I don't want to care about medieval history to make the argument that okay, call it what you want then. It's like rent is everything now, and um there's no more capitalism anymore. Because that's that's what this is about, right? It's things are declining, things are getting worse, things are getting less dynamic and less free, and they are, as I understand it, me techno-feudal theorist, uh becoming post-capitalist. Right? So even if we want to abandon the very iffy association to feudalism, you know, then there's it's still about post-capitalism. And I think then the argument is, you know, can't be about the historiography of of uh of like 14th century Europe, but has to be about uh a clear understanding of what is going on today. And my point, and it's in the title of the thing that I wrote, it's total capitalism, right? That capitalism has vanquished the agrarian, uh, the agrarian world, right? Of small uh subsistence production, of large landowners and and and and kind of peasants working upon it, right? Um that's gone. Our agriculture uses actually very little labor nowadays, you know, and so you have to you have to kind of go to the least developed parts of Africa to really still find um peasants in that form. It's taken conservatism with it and all the traditionalism that existed. Um and then it's defeated, it's defeated the internal enemy in terms of the of proletarian socialism, um, and indeed even kind of any for the proletariat itself as a as a as a subject. Uh, and so you know, when you talk about kind of like I don't know, capitalists getting away with shit, to put it in kind of kind of very kind of vulgar terms, talk about capitalists getting away with shit. I mean, partly is the fact that there's no disciplining function exercised by the working class or even kind of other kind of uh if we want to don't want to reduce it to the working class, uh, you know, of kind of popular layers um organized in some form. It's that lack of kind of disciplinary function which leads to a lot of this stuff. And you could even make an argument that like what Corey Docker calls in shidification, right? Which is a just a huge amount of kind of products and services just getting worse because they can. Part part of that, I think, is a kind of you know, it is a kind of sort of vulture-like activity, which they can get away with, even even uh against kind of you know relatively affluent consumers, because there's a lack of competition and there's a lack of kind of democratic pressure to kind of go, you're not gonna get away with that kind of thing. Right, right? We're just eating shit. Right. Um and and I think that but that needs to be understood as total capitalism. This is what capitalism looks like with no outside and no internal enemy either.

C. Derick Varn: 35:24

Well, I mean, this this this is the key point. The the two things that I think that you have no external enemy really, because even if you don't think China is capitalist, which I don't know how you do that, but a lot of people don't. Um, and if you don't, it clearly doesn't posit like a like a fifth international to fight the global capitalist order. Bricks is absolutely not that in any way, form, or fashion, and doesn't claim to be, like you know, outside of a few people on the internet, no one is deluded about that, and I think even those people are becoming less deluded by the day.

Alex Hochuli: 36:01

Um well, but the China love, I mean, I I see this a bit in Brazil, right? Um, and and and it's telling that it's in Brazil, right? Because the there's the B in bricks, but go ahead, yes. Well, there's that, but no, but it's not about Brazil because like no Brazilian has any illusions in Brazil, right? Unfortunately, which is part of the problem. But that's a that's a story for another moment. Uh it's it's kind of neo-Stalinism and seeing, and there's also kind of really big YouTubers and stuff here who who are basically you know hitching their wagon to to the China train to mix my transportation metaphors, uh, where they see China as as some kind of opposition to the West, opposition to imperialism, opposite and and some kind of new form of uh, well, indeed, yeah, kind of form of socialism in some way, or at least um that China's still in development towards socialism in the way that the West is not. Uh, and it's not by accident that, of course, it happens in a country like Brazil, which has no future um and no kind of sense of political direction or national project. Um, and this probably applies also to kind of Eastern Europe as well, where um, you know, the kind of Stalinist experience in its various derivative forms as well, starts to look quite good as against capitalism. And this has not been so appealing in in in places like Britain or France, because there was still a degree of kind of of genuine liberty which was achieved under capitalist development, uh, which and and democracy, which um would be safeguarding and you say, well, Stalinism would require a great deal of trade-off, right? A great deal of unfreedom in exchange for education, housing, etc., etc. Right. Um, so that doesn't sound like a good trade-off. But if you're somewhere like Brazil, and you know, you live in kind of informal housing, uh, you're like informal labor markets, you don't have any protection, it's violent, um, and for you, you know, kind of democracy doesn't really have a great deal of meaning, um, then kind of the Soviet Union circa 1960 starts to look kind of all right. You know, it's not so much of a trade-off, it seems like a kind of gain relative to where you are. Um and and I think, and so anyway, that that's about kind of Stalinist Russia, but I mean the the point is is about um it's about is it's like I think that explains why China comes to be seen as not just uh a desirable option, but even you know, as kind of socialist in some sense, and we have to kind of squint and and and pretend, but right I I I find this uh this you know my favorite provocation that I do all the time is calling China the most responsible capitalist power to piss everybody off.

C. Derick Varn: 38:56

Um I actually also cut it to believe it.

Alex Hochuli: 39:06

It probably is, and it's and it because in part because its elites are more concerned about their own legitimacy than the American political class, for instance. Which is completely like a you know they they haven't done the even the the the minimum of the obvious, which would be a little bit of redistribution to try to sort things out. I mean, you know, Biden's uh Biden's build back better notwithstanding.

C. Derick Varn: 39:29

Um I I it it it's clear to me they're less given to it despite the fact that the the general population is more progressive, and that includes if the Democrats come back, like if if they come back to power, like um and I know that you know I'm I'm told that I should be nicer to the Democrats these days than my federal leftist friends, but I'm just like I you have to be careful with them because if you actually look at their talking points, or who even shows up on MSNBC now, like or excuse me, MS Now or whatever the fuck it's called. Um uh it's like former neocons, even more than than progressive darlings, who you know, they'll even say, you know, we needed to taunt um um memdani, but we're not really going to offer a strong social safety net at all. We're offering some abundance, which is, you know, uh which is what we're getting now light. Um, you know, uh a faux promise to return to neoliberalism under technological conditions, which by the way, I mean, if if I was to periodize neoliberalism, the tech logarchy comes at the end of it not working anyway. Like, like the the the conditions of quantitative easing are the only thing that allow the accumulation of things like uh of like SpaceX and Tesla and Facebook to be profitable in the first place.

Alex Hochuli: 40:54

I mean, Varafakis here at least is correct in in saying that. Of course, he tries to create this whole new class of cloudalists, as he calls them, which sit above the capitalists and extort the capitalists, even. You know, so if you're a if you're if you're a producer and you set and you sell something on the marketplace and you sell something via Amazon, right? Amazon is going to extort you, which it which it does. I mean, it you know, um, and therefore you're you're the kind of victim in the story, um, as against these cloud lists. And even the cheap, the end of cheap money, supposedly, according to Varapacis, um, won't change anything because you know the cloud lists are entrenched. But I mean, yes, these are these are kind of new monopolists, but um, I it hasn't fundamentally altered the relations of production.

C. Derick Varn: 41:39

No, I mean, which which for me actually is one of the few things that gives me hope, but um but this is because I'm like, well, uh, you can't you you can't uh wealth transfer a market uh into profitability forever, period. End of discussion. Um so um, you know, uh and shidification will only work for that so long. Um, and you know, but that doesn't mean we won't have a thousand bubble economies. I think, you know, uh one of the things though that I have to point out here is like, well, then that makes some of the things we were focused on during the Obama administration or like an early concerns about MMT, uh monetary theory applications to this a little bit misguided in hindsight, which I think may be what's motivating Giannis here, if I'm completely honest, because he's he's never would say this is a self-critique, but it kind of feels like a little bit of a self-critique about earlier forms of Giannis thought. Um uh because there was a sense that there was an argument by a certain group of MMTers uh post uh war Mosler uh that we could we could have our cake and eat it too and not alienate the big capitalists because we didn't need to tax them. That was the promise. And I'm always like, well, okay, even if that's monetarily true, and it may be. I mean, you know, I'm not I don't I'm not entirely convinced on that, but I I'm open to it. Um it is clear that the government can't run out of currency, they print it, duh. Um I am still not convinced that the the capitalists would have ever been okay with that. Like, because it was like this is a miss, this is a this is confusing power with just tax thing with taxation, yeah.

Alex Hochuli: 43:33

Um yeah, but but there's another there's another thing which I I remembered. I mean, this is a point that actually a friend of mine in Brazil made to me, and it I thought it was a very good observation, which is that all I mean, at least the three techno-feudalists that I reviewed are all in some ways left populists, right? Right. So Varafac is very obviously, I mean, he was actually uh a member, a key member of the one left populist uh party or attempt uh to actually get into power, right? Um, so that's very obvious. Cédric Durand is a is a France Insoumis guy, um, so Mélenchon's uh grouping. Uh and Jodie Dean, okay, maybe maybe the the link is more less strong there, but I'm sure she was a Bernie supporter.

C. Derick Varn: 44:21

Um before she got involved with the PSL, she was uh the part of the social liberation. She was she was definitely in that mold. She was although I mean Jodie Dean also she rejected tenets of classical Marxism pretty early. Um like uh she like her theory on like on feudalism actually kind of matches with her theories of like oh she used to call it community of capitalism undoing the labor theory of value. And I'm just like, okay, you know, um that's a long-standing thing for her.

Alex Hochuli: 45:01

Yeah, um but anyway, though the point is that I technofeudalism kind of maybe, you know, especially as these theories kind of start emerging in 2019, 2020, act maybe as an alibi for left populist failure. Um, I don't know, you know, like I I what this is always speculative, you know, and and um I guess you can't go too far and just going, ah, it's this is you know, this is your personal political failing, which you leverage into theoretical reflection. I don't know. But you know, to a certain extent, uh encountering a world which feels uh obdurate, difficult to change, no no political traction, huge degree of unfreedom and domination, that suddenly that comes into view as soon as the kind of promising political prospect of of left populism disappears off the face of the earth effectively. I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 45:53

Well, I I think I I think that you I mean this is implied, you don't state that outright, but it's implied in your essay that a lot of these people want their social democracy back, if not left populism.

Alex Hochuli: 46:05

And I mean, everybody wants their social democracy back. This is the this is the yeah, this is the other thing. I mean everyone, you know. Um one can with the thing.

C. Derick Varn: 46:13

I would like it if possible.

Alex Hochuli: 46:15

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. And you can have your individual exclusions, but when you know, when I say everyone, I mean, you know, the general everyone. The the point is that I mean is that like across the political spectrum, right? Everybody wants their social democracy back. Uh the populist right yearns for it. I mean, you know, they they might look at it in a very fetishistic form, it like, you know, having the having kind of get have Coca-Cola back or something. I don't know what that's some MAGA types are like. I I I don't follow this stuff closely enough. But you know, they they look at this the kind of symbolic aspects of the post-war settlement, they just focus on different elements. So they'll they'll you know, they'll look at kind of um greater uh racial homogeneity, um, gender, more traditional gender roles, etc., and emphasize that aspect. The left will focus more on uh the existence of trade unions, of good jobs, uh maybe even the the kind of types of revolts against social democracy which came from the left, which is the form of the new left in a way. Um, but anyway, the the point is that um one, we still take the 20th century, and particularly the second half of the 20th century, as the norm. So the experience of Western countries from 1945 to 1973, or maybe even through to 1990, as the historical norm, uh, and therefore see the new as being necessarily some weird exotic thing like techno-feudalism, uh, and are all secretly wishing to kind of go back to that previous form, um, or not so secretly, you know. I mean, the maybe the left is a little certainly like the left in in Britain has been much more, I think, explicit and and and upfront about like, oh, we want to kind of rebuild social democracy in some form or another. I mean, the that's what the left in the UK has been doing for 40, 50 years in different forms. Um but uh but you know, the the point I'm making is that in a way, you know, everybody's kind of yearning for that. So even the kind of centrist liberals who bemoan um, you know, kind of post-truth, for example, the lack of faith in institutions, the growing distrust in each other and institutions, um, the lack of respect for professionals, uh, for journalism, et cetera, et cetera, right? Um, all this, all these kind of very New York Times types of or even New Yorker types of complaints look back to um the 19, 1950s, 1960s of the world of consensus. So left, right, and center, you know, everyone's kind of wanting to go back to that. And I mean, and it makes sense because it was in a way a better world, or at least a world which even from a even from a kind of a radical perspective, um, was it was still a world where there seemed to be greater exit ramps, more exit ramps than what we have now. So, you know, um across the board, everyone's kind of nostalgic for that. I mean, and and you know, I'm sure we're agreed that there's that there's no going back to that.

C. Derick Varn: 49:12

Um, no, I mean it's based off of uh World War II happening.

Alex Hochuli: 49:19

Yeah, I mean that that that and and that's exactly. I mean, that's a condition of possibility for it. Uh, war and the threat of revolution, and um, you know, that's the only way it would be coming back. And I mean it sadly that's probably the most plausible one, though we might all be dead after that.

C. Derick Varn: 49:34

So, yeah, I was supposed to say war with nuclear armed drones and mass chemical weapons is not one uh the led by robots, is not really one that I want to uh wish upon um anyone. I mean, in that sense, Peter Thiel is is uh, despite his AGI god and everyone who criticized it being the Antichrist illusions, um uh he is slightly more concerningly realistic about the humanity and impossibilities of this, and you know, I mean he just doesn't care. Um, whereas uh there's a lot of other talk about this where I'm like, you know, if you got your early 20th century back, uh the death toll would be much higher than the early 20th century, and it was pretty high then.

Alex Hochuli: 50:23

Um yeah, I mean, we don't know. I I think it would come as a surprise. I think it would always, you know, it would always come as a surprise. It's possibility that it'd be complete nuclear annihilation. It's possible that um because of the various kind of bottom-up disaggregated forms of warfare that you can have now, that you know, everybody can have a drone and whatever, it'd be highly chaotic, but not you know, it would be maybe it wouldn't be weapons of mass destruction, you know. I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 50:47

Um, and I I'm not a kind of no theorist, but yeah, I I don't know either, but I neither one of them are conditions for some of the and none of them are desirable as well. So let's just yeah, um and there's some things there's some things implied in your discussion that I actually want to pull out and make more explicit. One of the things that I I I you talked about the inability of labor to do this, and I want to talk to people about why it is not just the a voluntaristic failure of the labor movement, and this has been like my argument with some let's say damage and Jacobin people, um, who kind of talk like the labor movement failed in the 1980s because Reagan convinced us all that it was bad. And my response to that is like, how do you how do you have effective labor unions in shops that are 20 people in the service sector that even if you shut down every single Starbucks is not going to fundamentally change the economy? Um, and that yes, there are still choke points, but those choke points are in logistics, which have their own problems, and then highly automated manufacturing, of which you I'm not sure that the workers leaving would actually be that huge of a threat. Um, and and those two things make the traditional organizing forms of the 19th and 20th century left really, really difficult to do. And it's not about popularity. As you know, uh Bin Fong is actually quite good on this when we talk about, well, you know, labor has seen a resurgence in popularity all over the world, and in very few places, if any, have we actually seen a growth in the labor movement? Uh, furthermore, and I think this is the other thing that your article points this out. Mark Cecilia has pointed out, communizers pointed out, and it's unfortunately true. The uh the mass mobilizations for the name for national liberation projects were actually peasants, and what do you do when you don't have a viable peasantry outside of the most rural parts of India and Africa, like at all? It's just it's like you you have a you have an urban, informal, pluralitarian economy, um, and most in most of the developing world, and increasingly in the developed world, um so this whole like protracted people's war argument, uh not dealing with the technological barriers that we just talked about, is also hard because you don't have that social subject either. And I'm not saying there's no reason to hope, but I think you kind of uh to to steal a phrase from Benjamin Snoodebaker, you have to give up hope here to have any because your hope is based on things that don't really exist anymore.

Alex Hochuli: 53:44

Yeah, yeah, no, I that's right. I mean, you know, the one can maybe say that there's an analogous uh situation between our kind of petty bourgeois condition uh and that of the peasantry. But anyway, the but you know, that's again making analogies which confuse matters more than clarify. But yeah, I mean I I I I I mean totally agree with you that the kind of that organized labor, you know, doesn't have leverage because yeah, it's not just a it's not just a choice. It's not even if you understand outsourcing to China, etc., as a as a political choice, you know, to an ex to a certain extent, you know, neoliberalism wasn't just merely a choice, it was a response to profitability crisis, which couldn't just be kind of wished away or like you couldn't have just continuity Keynesianism and social democracy. You know, I don't think that was realistic. Not that every aspect of neoliberalism was predetermined and had to happen, but um, you know, nevertheless, um, and yeah, and and Campbell learned as well, you know, um, it had moved from concentration of of labor to dispersal. So even where you do have factories, you know, they're they're in far-flung areas, they're not in kind of big cities. Um, they're all dispersed from one another. Uh and the and then the the simple fact of like less need for living labor in in in manufacturing. Um, and then in services, you just don't have these big agroupments of people in the same way that you did before. Um, so that's all, you know, it does cast us all into a situation of of you know maybe not even citizens, but but subalterns. Um, and suggests that the only form of uh struggle today is a directly political one. Right. Um that that those 19th and 20th century forms of social struggle, you know, they're not to be kind of discarded entirely or anything like that, but um, and certainly in areas like logistics perhaps could could have, you know, could have much more um impact than than their relative weight suggests. But yeah, I mean, you know, I I think the only the only kind of politics left kind of available to us is a directly political one. The issue again comes back to one of what forms of organization would allow for that to happen, because uh precisely that kind of forms of dispersal and atomization and so on have you know prevent these things from forming, and the kind of sense of immediacy and flux prevents any form of durable organization. So, you know, we're back to these sorts of sorts of problems. Um, and and and ultimately of kind of rebuilding society, rebuilding forms of of sociability, um, than we are about considering, you know, how necessarily how to rebuild the labor movement, you know, which is uh has this kind of retro quality to it, which is you know, I mean it's not gonna happen, certainly not in the there's again, not in the the 20th century form. Um and you know, it wasn't even that good in the first place, right? I mean, radical kind of all the radical critics were against that or pointing to its limitations.

C. Derick Varn: 56:53

Um I mean we I'm gonna bring up a movie, and I apologize if you have not seen it. Um, I was thinking about Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, which is based off based off in quotation marks, um uh Vinland by uh Thomas Pinchon. And uh it occurred to me watching that movie that one of my frustrations with the movie is like it's supposedly, I guess, set in the future or at least the now, but it's about a left that is what 30, 40 years before the like the you can't convince me that that's a millennial left uh that's doing the kind of stunts that didn't work for the new left, but you know, we're definitely new left stunts. I mean, we're talking about the weathermen and and whatnot. Um, and I I say that because uh the kind of disavile but also over-identification with um the new left seems to be everywhere today, and that may be part of the novelty of this theory. Um, because even liberals somehow identify. I mean, like you got liberals identifying with the weathermen, which may be appropriate, but like whatever. Um but it seems like uh I was arguing with some people on the internet about like the Weatherman's success, and they were talking about the success of the bombing campaigns. And my only response was okay, after we factor out they got better and quit blowing themselves up after they killed three to four of their own members. Um uh, what goal did those bombings achieve again? I got no answer. None. Um, and I was like, you know, that just doing a thing is not a criterion for success, right? And it occurred to me that that's the imagination of a lot of the left today that, like, even doing anything, you know, even if it had no goal and completely failed on any programmatic or or ideological basis and led to the thing now is seen as somehow good in a lot of people's eyes because there's no vision for this.

Alex Hochuli: 59:02

Um, yeah, I mean go ahead. It's but I it's basically narcissistic, you know. I hate to kind of have recourse to that term, but you know, it's about it's about how it makes you feel more than what it achieves, you know. Ultimately, that's why if you want to really boil it down. I'm in the I'm in two minds about this, right? So I uh we've discussed on bunker cats and I've written about this as well, about how we're living through finally the end of the 1960s. Um, and I think we're in a transitional moment. So, on the one hand, I agree with you that um we are still in the shadow of the new left, and that a lot of politics remains focused on um well, the kind of narcissistic forms of self-expression, of finding yourself through activity. Uh the whole woke thing is still, you know, is basically the long tale of the 1960s um and its struggles around race, class, and gender. Of course, you know, um transmuted through kind of 1980s neoliberalism and and um and and become incredibly bureaucratic, right? As wokeness was um and still is. Um, I saw a post from Blues from Blue Sky the other day. I was like, wow, this stuff's still going on over there. Because yeah, it's weird.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:18

I feel like I'm magically trans-backed when I go over there. I'm like, oh, it's 2020 here. It's eternally 2015. 2020 is even a little late for it. It's right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like back in back when everyone was in the first resistance to Trump mode, and also we would cancel anybody for anything, including stuff that didn't happen.

Alex Hochuli: 1:00:39

Oh yeah, yeah. No, it's bizarre, it's bizarre anyway. But so that that that um, you know, the still the focus on kind of identity. Intersectionality, the um emphasis on um you know voluntaristic action, uh direct action. We can think of other ways of other elements of the new left. I mean, focus on kind of cultural hegemony, ultimately a concern with what people are thinking and and deep down what they really feel, right? Um, so ultimately you want to change people, not change the world. Um, these are all elements of of the kind of new left's legacy. On the other hand, I think we're transitioning out of that world as the boomers themselves die off. And I don't I don't want to just be reduced it to the fact of the boomers carrying it through because Gen Xers kind of carried it through, millennials did too. And I think maybe Gen Z are gonna be the the first post-60s generation um and post-new left generation. Um, I don't know. Uh I can't recall now the the the kind of specific examples I used to make this case, but I I wrote in the Bungercast newsletter about the end of the the end of the 1960s. Um so I'm I'm I'm in two minds about this. Maybe we'll start to see a kind of different forms emerge. I don't I don't know whether that's optimistic or not, but at least it'll be new.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:05

Well, I'm my thesis on Gen Z is that they're going to they're going to be the spaghetti against a raw generation of ideologies, which is why we're gonna see like some truly bizarre shit. I think when people are like MAGA communism is so weird, I'm like, we haven't seen nothing. Like, for one, we kind of saw that in a smaller amount in in Generation X, actually. Like I'm I am of Gen X age, I remember weird, weird ideologies emerging all the time in the early 1990s. Um, I was young then because I'm like literally the youngest Gen Xer you can be, but but still I do remember it. Um and two, I think uh I think this people people have been trying to cast you know Gen Z in a clear political trajectory wrongly for a while. Um uh one is the it's not as homogeneous as millennials, and millennials aren't that homogeneous either. As let remind people in 2005, people were predicting that millennials were gonna be the most conservative generation in history, just just to remind people of that, and and maybe and maybe they were, maybe we were, but in but not in the way that was right, exactly. Like like we were we were conservative in a uh a radically liberal way.

Alex Hochuli: 1:03:26

I don't yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I I do think we're maybe just of the kind of having very naive hopes of people being good, you know, being virtuous and whatever, and then being disappointed with the reality that it wasn't. I mean, I think, you know, as an aside, actually, no, here's a point, here's a point about about really specifically in relation to what we're talking about, right? A lot of political conflict today. One of the axes, but I think to about which people aren't really conscious of, is about post-materialists versus materialists. I don't mean materialists in a Marxist sense or even for your backing sense or anything like that. I mean, you know, the way that um um Inglehart talks about it, for example, you know, kind of talks about post-material values, you know, more concerned with self-expression, with about um rather than kind of survival. Um and, you know, um I think you know, to put it in a kind of kind of reduced form, uh, there's uh a expectation amongst, you know, primarily amongst kind of middle class uh liberal millennials, for example, to pick the kind of clearest expression of it, uh that in fact politics in society isn't about uh struggle, that life isn't necessarily the life isn't struggle, that that life can somehow be um primarily about leisure, primarily about finding yourself, and that uh political progress and social progress can be achieved without really breaking any eggs, that it can be a kind of smooth process. And both the kind of uh conservative populist right, I mean they're they're probably the biggest agents of kind of going, no, things are hard and difficult and we need war. Of course, I don't want to endorse that because it's a Schmidtian vision of just kind of perpetual conflict with no higher order principles and no real sense of progress. It's just um, you know, it's politics reduced to war. But they at least reintroduce a kind of idea that I guess of struggle into society, and whereas the post-materialists kind of still persist on this idea that we can live on thin air, that production happens elsewhere, that friction even in social relations is something which one can try to remove or even labor under the pretense that uh that friction is that isn't necessary, right? Right. Um and I think that that seems to that seems to be like uh at the root of a lot of uh not just conflict, political conflict, but of kind of mis misrecognition. Um and so I think in that regard, like the kind of the archetypal uh you know, millennial middle class liberal um would be would be someone who would still be living in not the legacy of the long legacy of the 60s in a way, um, but particularly as it took shape in the at the end of history, right? And and then there's people who are still in some ways kind of living in the end of history, and there's other people who are who are very much not.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:36

Uh well this is I think this is important. I think it's important to think about like the mass. I mean, we could talk about the PMC and all this, and you you know my critiques of it actually, but one thing I'll give it uh is that what we saw from the 1960s through the 19 actually to the 2020s basically was the idea that you could semi-professionalize everything through education. Um and that education was its own social good for its own sake. Uh, this even shows up in postmodern theorists like Foucault, knowledge is power. No, it isn't power is power fucker. Um knowledge can be used for power, but you know, if you if you don't got no guns, I don't care how much you know.

Alex Hochuli: 1:07:26

Um, and yeah, and that language games can effectively somehow change reality.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:32

Oh god, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Hochuli: 1:07:34

Yeah, like if they're the kind of constructionist bias, basically.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:38

Yeah, but it's a weird constructionist bias, too, though, because if like you threw Ian hacking at these people, they'd also freak out, which I think I'm gonna actually do, and point out that like, oh, all your categories because there's like strategic essentialism everywhere. Uh, you know, um, where like, oh, everything's constructed except the categories I really care about, which is not, which I will say constructed, but I will also treat immutably and can never change ever, ever. Um so we have the multiracial Reich of the of the Democrats coming, which I've always, you know, my critique that never was true, it was never gonna happen that way. Like there that that treated ID I um well, like demographic determinism, yeah, yeah, and and as and it's static too. Like, I'm like, okay, so you actually start providing material goods for people. Why do you think they're always gonna vote with the progressive coalition of the Democrats then? What I don't I don't really see how this works, friend. Um but you know, all that aside, I I mean, I I think your point of technofeudalism, I also think we have to be careful about saying we know why people did something, but it's very convenient right now to be like, well, we never could have won anyway, because really the lords have come back. And I'm like, and I'm like, well, if you never could have won anyway, why did you like why aren't you criticizing yourself for picking the wrong battle?

Alex Hochuli: 1:09:00

Yeah, like uh Yeah, and and why didn't and why didn't we even see that confrontation actually happen? I mean, other than the fact that you know oligarchs obviously um weighed in on politics, but I mean, you know, that would that's again a kind of uh of a piece with a certain millennial naivety where um, as we've discussed before, you know, there's this kind of expectation that like you know, the the struggles within the labor party that happened in the UK, that um, well, look, we're all part of the same party, so the Corbonites will can win over the centrists ultimately. You know, they're not gonna centrists aren't gonna totally sabotage us. Well, yeah, they will. I mean, there's different interests there, you know, like right. I mean, and that's okay. You know, people can there are interests in the world and they are conflicting, and we could be honest about these, um, you know, not try to smuggle everything in uh under a under some some notion that um you know that we have some consensus or some shared values or something that that we can work from.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:57

Yeah, well, I I to bring this back to the point of maybe maybe something that ironically isn't feudal but is kind of interesting, is a lot of what people are brushing against with social friction is the realization that class origins and class both exist. And those aren't the same thing either. Like um, I think about the way I was trying to talk in university, which is a neutral, non-offensive way of speaking, but also hides everyone's origins. Um, if you speak it, you don't know where you're from, you don't know where you're from both geographically and you don't know where you're from uh in the social hierarchy, except for the acknowledgement of race as kind of like a disability cap that we have to acknowledge, but then also pretend don't have their own internal contradictions classes or whatever, because then you can't do stuff like say that affirmative action to Harvard is going to fix racial problems in America, uh, when you know some of that affirmative action quotas being met by accepting students from Nigeria. And in fact, you know, or even like the a dirty secret here is that the more we push DEI projects, and I mean DEI specifically, not just civil rights projects, we actually saw a defunding of a lot of things that for the colleges did with like urban poor black kids. Like it really was an elite washing movement, and that was why it wasn't that hard to get people from various social classes, not a majority, but enough to turn against it. This and um it's very hard to convince people uh in the cores of American radicalism, which also happened to be the cores of American finance, uh, the the two coastal cities, that this is true for the rest of the country. It it really is. I mean, I have friends of mine who I talk to on a regular basis who don't understand that, like, yes, people cared about not attacking, I don't know, your trans workers. They did care about that, but no, they did there were not mass pushes for DEI from the unions in red states that did not exist, it didn't happen, even if they didn't have a problem with certain protections for people, as long as you didn't get too uppity about like trying to change things through language codes, and that is you know, because that ideology, I mean, people say, Oh, well, the the the the liberal activist class dominated no, the liberal activist class also dominated a lot of the key thinkers of general society, not just the yeah the the the Democratic Party, because we forced everyone through it through the university system and made it to where progressive politics was somehow completely dependent on that. And I don't know, yeah, there literally seems to be no answer for that. Just I mean, even people who I kind of like, I like Doug Henwin a lot, but when I he was talking about the the the fall of trust in uh institutions in America, I'm like, one, it's not unique to America, and two, you should blame the institutions to just not talk about how Americans are stupid, right?

Alex Hochuli: 1:13:05

Like um like it, I don't know who you're winning over except yourself, like you know, um and this is and then even the the centrality of the university to left-wing politics, which again is a story from the 60s onwards, really, is itself maybe coming to a close. Because and that's good, you know. I mean, I obviously the attacks on universities, you know, it's particularly the kind of Trump's attacks on are not good.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:33

They're bad, I'm not happy about it, but yeah.

Alex Hochuli: 1:13:35

Um, and you know, if there's less funding for for higher education, that's probably that's not good. But you know, that's of a piece of their marketization, etc. etc. That's a whole anyway, it's a whole other story. Um, but you know, if the left has to find some other redoubt, um, that's that's fine, you know. Um or you know, ideally that there would that whole left, that whole that whole idea of what we understand to be left disappears, right? Because you know, that that it was part of the problem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:05

Um ironically, one of the funny things about this ironically, uh just it's occurs to me right now, um the Academy before it was marketized is actually one of the few semi-feudal institutions actually left in Western life, right? Yeah, we're like true. We're like, but no, we're talking about techno-feudalism at the expense of one of the only feudal institutions that still exist, other than like, I don't know, the Catholic Church. Um so uh it just the irony has just never occurred to me till this exact moment.

Alex Hochuli: 1:14:41

That's a good that is good though, yeah. Yeah, it's certainly like Axbridge or something, you know. It's like, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:46

Um right. Um well, I know you don't have a ton of time today, uh Alex, and you'll be back on them. People should definitely check out what you guys are doing over at Bungercast. Um but uh you know, you ended with a moment of kind of what I would call dark hope, which is hope, but it's hope of of the we might head this the Benjamin Studebakerian kind, where it's like if we admit that our attempts here are a problem, um, to like bring back the 20th century or hold on to it, and I mean I admit the irony with millennials is we're holding on to a 20th century that we barely fucking existed in. I mean, like we're we existed in the vacant.

Alex Hochuli: 1:15:28

And we got the bad version of the you know, we got the kind of peak neoliberalism and and after, like, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:34

Right. I mean, like, it's like peak neoliberalism and then whatever the fuck the post-aughts were. I mean, like, it's like uh gross. Um uh, you know, you don't even get the cool pop culture of the 80s and 90s decay period or whatever.

Alex Hochuli: 1:15:49

Um well, and but and that's at that that's at the root of the stupid generational politics, which is like you boomers used up all the resources and and screwed up the world for us, and and you know, you're you shouldn't have pensions because you know, or whatever, like which is just uh a reactionary politics, but uh yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:05

Well, I mean, to be fair, the the boomers that are probably still alive don't. Um, so uh well I mean the it depends where you are, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it depends where you are, but like in the in the United States, there is a there is a middle dividing light of boomers on pensions, and we are now past that. Like, um, and Gen Xers, I mean, you know, Zoomers will call me a boomer, which is hilarious. But Gym Xers, the older ones are now approaching retirement in the next what I think five years, and they don't, I mean, they don't have anything like enough to retire. And um, I mean, uh I was talking to someone about and this is like I get why this leads to the techno-feudalism thing, but there's two horrifying proofs about the at least the US economy right now. Um, if AI is profitable, it means we have a post-job society, but luckily AI is unlikely to be profitable, in which case we have a no-growth society, which is also pretty bad. Um, because it's not just that there's no no immediate growth once you factor out not just AI, literally server center uh creations for the AI. So if you don't invent digital god soon, um then you you have a massive boondoggle of one of the most wasteful investments that have ever existed in human history. Uh and with no clear out as to what's going to come after it at all, there's not a clear technology horizon, even um, after this, exactly, if it's not as productive as predicted, and it doesn't look to be at the moment. Um, not saying AI is useless, I I don't think that, but like it's it's not it's not leading to the massive productivity gains or anything that they said that they were supposed to.

Alex Hochuli: 1:17:54

I mean, that's the thing. It it's disruption there certainly will be. I mean, and that's entirely leaving aside all the decivilizing, desocializing, dehumanizing aspects of it. Uh, you know, we didn't we never saw the pr the big productivity gain from from ICT, you know, in the first place. Uh or or you know, so uh or maybe it just compensated for otherwise declining productivity, but you know, anyway, the story was of stagnation. Uh it's yeah, I don't know if AAI will do that. It's but lots of lots of people will may be made unemployed. Um either way, paralegals and and and and you know, yes, profit lots of professionals basically who white-collar jobs and so on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:35

Yeah, well, very specific white-collar jobs though. Thing thing that white-collar jobs that are based on throughput are pretty much gone. Um uh I think that I think we have to deal with that. Um, the other thing that we have to deal with is uh the United and this is more true for the US, but maybe it's true for a lot of the world. I I actually haven't looked at all the stats. It's not true for Brazil, I'm sure. But um but uh this idea that we can float the economy off of healthcare spending and care work, uh that is also based on massive wealth transfer and also massive inefficiencies, like in the United States in particular. Um we have a worst of birth world system. Like I've lived in a place that had a true no insurance free market, Egypt. That just there was nothing. And I've lived in so and places with socialized medicine, they're actually both more efficient than what the US has.

Alex Hochuli: 1:19:29

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:29

Um, yeah, I wouldn't want to be poor in the Egyptian one, but I don't want to be poor here either, nor do I want to be middle class here. In fact, I think I have to be really, really fucking rich for this not to be a constant existential threat to me. Um, and yet, you know, um all jobs growth has been in that area, and particularly if you're not highly skilled and professional. Um, if you think about Gabe Winant's work about the lives of former industrial area uh things, it's all not just in nursing, but also co uh billers, clerks, all that stuff. And frankly, if you had a rational healthcare system, you'd probably have the nurses, but a lot of the other sub uh supplementary positions would not exist because they exist to facilitate communication.

Alex Hochuli: 1:20:17

These things are all incredibly hot top-heavy. That's why that's the problem. And and that and and that goes for supposedly socialized systems, which aren't, but something like the NHS, which is the single most socialized medicine in in the world, um, as a form of organization, you know, but of course it's extremely marketized. Um, that is extremely top-heavy, right? It's a lot of administrators, a lot of pencil pushers. Um, so even a ration, it's a rationalized system would lose all of that. Um, and you might have more nurses and so on. But you know, again, I I mean I even hinted at this in the conclusion of the techno-feudalism thing that Jodie Dean is an advocate also of the kind of you know care-based, I don't know, economy or whatever. Um, and it's premised on a notion that there is nothing left to build and to be done, right? That there is no kind of developmental trajectory in the future. And if you're not pushing for that, then I'm I, you know, and and really just want a kind of settling of accounts on the present, just a redistribution of the present. I'm afraid that isn't gonna win people over. Um, I don't think that's much of a much of a vision. I don't think it's also gonna be possible either, certainly not within a kind of capitalist uh capitalist economy.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:30

So um and it's not gonna deal with the it also won't deal with the stuff they think it'll deal with, like like um, you know, as I've talked with people, if you want to do green uh a green world that's more fair to the developing world, blah blah blah blah blah, at least at the beginning, it's gonna require massive infrastructure investment, yeah. The likes of which we have not seen since probably World War One. Um, and uh it's possible, you know, and and it could even be non-growing after you set it up, but you gotta set it up, yeah. And that will require massive throughput. You can't have a bunch of teachers and and nurses do that, unfortunately. I mean, I say this as a teacher, I it's the I say I think one of the things that amuses me about this. When you tell a lot of these people are college professors and not high school teachers, of a high school teacher, I do not want all of society to be run like my fucking job, like like that could be a nightmare. Um, but that seems to be the model that the the the best model any of these people can come up with is like mid-tier bureaucratization as the eternal socialist model. I'm like, that's I can't get anyone to fight for that. What do you want? Like, no one wants that. The people who were in it don't really want it, like um, like no, uh-uh. But anyway, um, so uh to enter in your dark hope, where where do you think we should start looking? Because uh one thing uh one thing that you imply is like we do have to look for new things, we're gonna have to look for a new, you know, directly political confrontation with this. And so so what is that for you? That's my last question, by the way.

Alex Hochuli: 1:23:13

Yeah, uh I don't know. I mean, you know, on one level, I think trying to reinitiate a sort of national project on a kind of popular basis is not a bad start. Now, for reasons we've discussed, a lot of that isn't really possible, but you have to start pushing, right? And I think one can't this is not a stagist idea, and I certainly don't have anything as developed and thought out as a stagist idea, and stagism is wrong anyway, because through acting, you change the conditions on which you're acting upon. So, you know, you don't arrive at stage two in the way that you planned because history happens, things you know. Um, so that it's not that, but the point is, is you know, you have to start creating the conditions, I guess, for politics. Um, and so to start thinking about kind of, you know, I don't think that the kind of some elements of left populism I think were good. You know, probably Bernie Sanders is probably the best form of it, certainly in terms of the things that he was calling for, the type of rhetoric and communication where it fell down and made it the worst type of of left populism was because it it saw no avenue other than the Democrats to go and pursue that. So, you know, that's where the kind of contradiction lied. But you know, I don't think that sort of that sort of politics is is complete wrong. I'm uh there's um this piece by Perry Anderson where she where he discusses kind of populism and why um the to you know to think in kind of much more directly political terms and kind of really about more the the immediate present, um, that populism hasn't been able to really deliver on its promise because it's been hived off into left and right variants. Um and Bernie Sanders probably came closest to um breaking through that, I think. Um, whereas a lot of the left populists remained too leftist, right? Um, or or to use Anton Jaeger's phrasing too left and too populist. They were too populist in their forms of organization, which is to say too leader-based, too ephemeral, etc., and too leftist in terms of still um only speaking to kind of left-wing niches. A genuine um kind of populism which was able to evade the capture by existing left and right kind of institutional forces, would need to be able to speak against oligarchy and be able to offer something, have an answer at least to the kind of migration question, which is the third rail of Western politics today, um, you know, in a in a way which is be able to put it up, put things on its head, which is really to fundamentally treat it as an economic and political matter, not as a cultural one. Um, but you know, that might be the the the start of a kind of a national of a certain sort of kind of national project, a discussion of politics on those grounds. Um and that applies also to somewhere like Brazil, where it might say, okay, where are we going? You know, because I don't think we can start from a kind of popular basis, not on a working class or proletarian basis specifically, because I think that assumes too much in terms of forms of organization, in terms of class consciousness, all these things which um which aren't um aren't present today. Um and and then and then you know, in the kind of ideological realm uh of kind of dreaming big, of kind of speaking to people's ambitions, um, not just as not just as victims, right? Um that we can build a bit better world, get things done. You know, that there's that the basic thing that I think a lot of kind of politicos and intellectuals don't understand, which is a lot of kind of normal non-political peoples kind of why why would you vote for someone like Donald Trump, or why would you vote for one for Erdogan or whatever? It's like well, because the guy's decisive and he gets things done, you know, and one one under you know, I think a lot of kind of you know political intellectuals underestimate the kind of simple appeal of that, and that isn't to say that we should endorse some sort of demagogic populism, no, and on very much on the contrary, but you know, there's an element for kind of making big claims and trying to not in a kind of left disguise, but in really like, no, we're gonna build stuff, we can build stuff, we can get things done. Um, I think that's the only way to kind of confront the fundamental cynicism of the age.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:28

Yeah, um, I think it's a good place to, and I I would agree. I mean, I've been on what I would like to call neo-workers politics, but I have to admit that I've run up against the same things that we've talked about. Like the unions are what they are, the professional unions and the work and the like blue-collar unions have very different aims and goals. Um, the blue collar unions are basically decimated, they the you know, outside of the Teamsters, whatever. And it's no one no one who follows anything thinks the Teamsters are particularly left wing. And um, you know, and worldwide, I think there's a lot of like, oh, it's this is just an American problem, and I like to like, no, it's it's unfortunately not. It's actually it seems more terminal in in the UK than it does here.

Alex Hochuli: 1:28:12

Yeah, um, no, and then and uh US US kind of fond looking fondly over the Atlantic, and like, oh, maybe we can do Nordic, blah blah blah. Come on, that's in crisis, it might just not be as advanced as the US because it was starting from a higher level, but you know, it's fucked too. Don't there's no there's no there's no model out there to be found somewhere else.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:33

Right, yeah. I've been yeah, I would agree with you on that. Um, where can people find your work, Alex? I mean, you've been on the show before, and we've obviously talked about uh Bunkercast, but where else can they find your work?

Alex Hochuli: 1:28:43

Well, yeah, principally, principally on BunkerCast, I write uh for American Affairs, and I'm currently working on a book on on peripherization, um, on lessons from the B side of the West. Um so um I hope to bring that to light um in in coming uh times because I can't set a deadline on that. Um but uh yeah, also we have the kind of Bungacast substack. I've got my own Substack as well, um, which I don't write for often enough. But um I would also like to invite you on to Bungacast. Um long overdue. Maybe we could talk about literacy or contemporary illiteracy, which I know you can do. I would love to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:23

Yeah, that's a concern of mine. It's something I actually study for my day job.

Alex Hochuli: 1:29:26

Um let's let's do let's do that. Let's let's do that soon. I'll I'll send you an email.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:32

Sweet. All right, take care.

Alex Hochuli: 1:29:33

Okay, nice one. Take care, bye bye.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:35

Bye bye.