By ELEUTÉRIO FS PRADO*
There is no good reason, to be found in the dialectical presentation of Capital, to think that a spontaneous transformation of capitalism occurs either into neofeudalism or into technofeudalism.
1.
Here we comment on a piece of writing by Jodi Dean in which this author from the critical field explains why she thinks that the capitalist mode of production is transforming into a new one that she calls neofeudalism. Her article From neoliberalism to neofeudalism newly published[I] It is well suited as an object of criticism because it is constructed on the basis of methodological naivety.
Here he presents this thesis based on a definition of capitalism: “It is important to make clear how I understand capitalism. I follow Ellen Meiksins Wood[ii] when she emphasizes that the specificity of the capitalist mode of production comes from the market, from the way it forces certain forms of behavior, such as “competition, accumulation, profit maximization and increased labor productivity.” Wood explains, in addition, that the capitalist system as a whole “especially drives the increase in labor productivity by technical means.”[iii]
After establishing this meaning, he examines certain characteristics of the currently existing mode of production to conclude that it is transforming into another that reproduces certain constitutive determinations of feudalism.
The imperative of accumulation under conditions of declining profit rates (secular stagnation) is placing capitalist laws of motion in contradiction with themselves; through this process, a remodeling of society and politics is also taking place. Profits, continuous improvement, and competitive advantage no longer dictate accumulation strategies; instead, rentierism, privatization, and hoarding are taking over, requiring extra-economic coercion. A social formation driven by privilege and dependency is thus being constructed. Moreover, a subversion is occurring as capitalist laws now force agents to adopt non-capitalist behaviors. Capitalist relations and productive forces are thus undergoing a systemic transition toward a different mode of production. I call this mode “neofeudal.”[iv]
2.
Now, as you know, you can go through the hundreds of pages of The capital without discovering a definition of capitalism. Karl Marx, as is also known, did not even use this term throughout this writing, perhaps because he feared – precisely, so to speak – the petrification of this concept through common understanding.[v]
The usual notion of definition is incompatible with the method employed in the construction of this singular work. As is also well known, the dialectic that comes from Hegel does not take the object of prior investigation and subsequent exposition as a “fixed being”, but as a “being in the process of development”. For this very reason, these authors do not construct theories in the traditional sense, but rather dialectical presentations that reproduce the object as a concept, that is, “in its own self and in its own becoming”.[vi]
If one wants to understand capitalism, therefore, one cannot look for a definition, but must follow the conceptual exposition of what it actually consists of. The capital. Herein lies the practice of the art of progressively revealing the object. As is well known, the capitalist mode of production, at the beginning of Book I, appears as one in which merchandise is produced above all. Wealth appears here as an “immense collection of merchandise.” The individual commodity – this author expressly states – consists of its elementary form. Social interaction through markets, therefore, is a primary characteristic of this mode of production.
However, this first description is quite insufficient to understand this object. As section IV of the first chapter shows, merchandise is not “a simple, trivial and evident thing”, because, in fact, it is something mysterious because, in addition to being a thing, it seems to have value; for this very reason, it does not readily lend itself to rigorous scientific knowledge. When noticing it, one must see that one is in the presence of a “very complicated thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological tricks”.
The mystery of the commodity form, Marx explains further, consists in the fact that the social labor of humans is posited through it as an objective value that exists therein, something that therefore figures as the objective determination of the products of labor. The fetish of the commodity thus arises from the praxeological confusion between the social form assumed by labor, manifested as exchange value, and the support of this form, use value.
Up until Chapter IV of Book I, capitalism appears as a system in which “reified relations between people and social relations between things” prevail, that is, M – M – M; therefore, vulgar economics understands capitalism only as a “market economy”. Now, in this chapter this appearance is demystified. Marx, developing the concept, goes from the appearance of the system to its essence, that is, from the circulation of goods to critically examine the production of goods.
By examining the production of commodities, he finds the social relation of capital, whose movement M – M – M' is infinite in principle. He then presents capital as a “value that valorizes itself” and, for this very reason, as an “automatic subject” that does not dispense with the capitalist as the agent that personifies it. He then shows that this movement is only possible because capital buys a special commodity that has the particular characteristic of being a source of value: labor power; now, the use value of this capacity, labor as abstract labor.[vii], can be accumulated under different forms: means of production, money, shares, bonds, etc.
At this point in the exposition, Marx presents, for the first time, what he will call industrial capital, a moment in the system of capital relations that will receive the main attention throughout Books I and II and the first three sections of Book III. Here is a moment in this presentation in which Marx indicates how industrial capital marks an entire historical epoch of the social process of production, that is, of capitalism.
The specific forms of money, whether as a mere equivalent of commodities or as a means of circulation, whether as a means of payment, treasury or world money, refer (…) to very distinct stages of the social process of production. However, a relatively undeveloped circulation of commodities is sufficient for the constitution of all these forms, unlike what occurs with capital. Its historical conditions of existence are in no way given with the circulation of commodities and money. It only arises when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets the free worker in the market as the seller of his labor power, and this historical condition encompasses an entire world history. Capital, therefore, from its first emergence, heralds a new epoch in the social process of production.[viii]
3.
Well, it is quite clear at this point that Jodi Dean privileges this moment to find a supposed definition of capitalism. However, if she is right about the core of the concept of capital, it is necessary to note that this concept, as such, is not yet complete: industrial capital cannot prosper without finance capital. In section IV of Book III, Marx introduces merchant capital and money merchant capital.
In the following section, by examining the credit system, it is shown how loan capital, that is, money capital seeking to increase in value, contributes to the accumulation process. To this end, it takes the form of interest-bearing capital and its derivative form, fictitious capital. In the first case, it finances production, taking a portion of industrial profits in the form of interest; in the second, it accelerates private and state consumption, and can also encourage speculation.
And here it is necessary to point out that money capital has another use value besides that which allows the purchase of commodities in general and of labor power in particular. As Marx himself says, it has an “additional use value, namely, that of functioning as capital.” Thus, in the “condition of possible capital (…) it becomes a commodity.” Instead of M – M – M’, one simply has M – M’, in such a way that “the general and ordinary formula of capital [is] condensed in an absurd way.” Now, it is part of the very logic of the system that M – M’, as it develops, comes to subsume M – M – M’; instead of merely serving industrial capital or supervising the productive application of capital, financing capital tends to become the commander of industrial capital.
In this form, capital is capital par excellence, a vampire above all. In Marx's words, this is how it is expressed: in this form, "this automatic fetish of value that valorizes itself is produced in all its purity, money that generates money, but that, in assuming this form, no longer bears any scars of its birth." However, if one only pays attention to this appearance, it may seem that one is no longer dealing with capitalism; one may judge that one has already entered another economic system based on the extraction and not on the production of specifically capitalist wealth. For, financing capital now presents itself as a great succubus formed by looting rights.
Consequently, it is worth mentioning the following: financialization, which only became consolidated in the second half of the 20th century, is not an event that negates capitalism. But before it – it is worth asking here – what did we have?
4.
From a historical point of view, capitalism in the 19th century and much of the 20th century, when large-scale industry dominated, appears as industrial capitalism par excellence. However, as is well known, in the second decade of the last century, Rudolf Hilferding showed that large-scale industrial capital was already being transformed into financial capital.
He examines the case of imperialist Germany, noting that large-scale industrial capital ceased to be the private property of capitalists and became the property of banks and joint-stock companies, thus becoming the collective property of more or less numerous fractions of the capitalist class. “An ever-increasing part of the capital employed in industry,” he notes, “is now “financial capital,” that is, capital that has been socialized and is now controlled, through bank and share ownership, by financial capitalists. This is how the capitalist par excellence ceases to be the industrial capitalist and becomes the financial capitalist, owner of large sums of money, shares, and public and private bonds.
Now, what Rudolf Hilferding discovers in historical reality was already announced as a conceptual possibility in the presentation of The capital.[ix] In Chapter 27 of Book III, commenting on the creation of the joint-stock company, Marx finds the following passage: “Capital, which as such has as its basis a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labor power, thus directly acquires the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as opposed to private capital, and its enterprises present themselves as social enterprises as opposed to private enterprises. It is the sublation [repeal] of capital as private property within the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself.”[X]
Therefore, Marx, even though he did not observe this in the reality of his time, predicted the arrival of a new era in the social process of production in which socialized capital would come to dominate private capital in the strict sense. Now, as we know, this process, which continued to develop throughout the 80th century, gained a new dimension with the advent of neoliberalism from the XNUMXs onwards. [xi] Even if neoliberalism is more complex as a historical phenomenon, it brings the process of socialization of capital to its culmination.
From then on, capitalism can no longer be considered as the dominion par excellence of industrial capital. Rather, it must be understood as a system in which finance capital dominates in various forms. And this capital appears in the form of withdrawal rights over the wealth produced, which gives rise to the dominion of finance over production and distribution, that is, what has been called rentierism since Marx's time.
Its vehicles are interest-bearing capital that extracts surplus value from the profit generated in commodity production, and fictitious capital that does so by capturing dividends from corporate enterprises, part of the taxes through financing public spending, and private income through loans to consumers. But also what has been called platform capital since this is largely in the form of “capital as a commodity” and therefore no longer functions merely like the old industrial capital.
Furthermore, as the form of capital thus established adheres to information and communication technologies, it becomes capable of exercising control over all human activities, economic and non-economic, and of extracting extraordinary income from them in various forms.
There is, therefore, no good reason to be found in the dialectical presentation in which it consists The capital, to think that there is a spontaneous transformation of capitalism into either neofeudalism or technofeudalism. This way of thinking is simply a misunderstanding. There is, however, good reason – and good arguments – to believe that we are currently observing the decline of capitalism.[xii]
* Eleutério FS Prado is a full and senior professor at the Department of Economics at USP. Author, among other books, of From the logic of the critique of political economy (anti-capital fights).
Notes
[I] See Dean, Jodi – From neoliberalism to neofeudalism. In: Emancipations: a journal of critical social analysis, January 2025.
[ii] Wood, Ellen Meiksins – The origin of capitalism, Back, 2017.
[iii] Dean, op. cit.
[iv] Idem.
[v] See Musto, Marcello – The genealogy of the concept of capitalism. Site the earth is round: https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-genealogia-do-conceito-de-capitalismo/
[vi] Müller, Marcos Lutz – Exposition and dialectical method in Marx. https://eleuterioprado.blog/2015/09/09/metodo-de-o-capital/
[vii] This abstraction, as Ruy Fausto knows, is a measure – it is not, therefore, an abstraction of understanding. And it is posed by the social process, objectively, that is, independently of the consciousness of the agents. See Marx: Logic and Politics. Volume I. Brasiliense Publishing House, 1983.
[viii] Marx, Carl – Capital – Critique of Political Economy. Book III. Boitempo, 2017.
[ix] Hilferding, Rudolf – the financial capital. Abril Cultural Publishing House, 1985.
[X] Marx, Karl – op. cit.
[xi] See Chesnais, François – Finance capital today. Brill, 2016 and Maher, Stephen and Aquanno, Scott – The fall and rise of American finance, Back, 2024.
[xii] Prado, Eleuterio FS – Capitalism in the 21st Century – Decline through Catastrophic Events. CEFA editorial, 2023.
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