What kind of regime of accumulation is taking shape
today? The distinguishing features of the contemporary
Atlantic economy—prolonged stagnation, globalized
production, financialization, upward redistribution,
the ongoing digital revolution—have provoked a range of responses.
In Techno-féodalisme, Cédric Durand argued that a qualitative mutation
is occurring at capitalism’s digital frontier, whereby profits are accrued
by predatory means—politically enabled rents and monopolies—in a
manner analogous to feudal relations of expropriation, rather than the
economic compulsion to ‘accumulate via innovation’ that drives capitalist exploitation. Evgeny Morozov has responded with a wide-ranging
critique of attempts on right and left to understand contemporary developments, both in the digital sector and beyond, by reference to the feudal
era. ‘Capitalism’, he insists, ‘is moving in the same direction it always
has been, leveraging whatever resources it can mobilize—the cheaper,
the better.’ It has always depended to some extent upon extra-economic
means of accumulation, so there is no need to reach for novel—or not
so novel—concepts to understand its contemporary dynamics.1
Are
we witnessing a shift to non-capitalist forms—a new mode of production? Or is this, as Morozov would have it, just the latest round of
capitalism as usual?