This is why I’ve been so frustrated by the whole “techno-feudalism” discourse, as if capitalism is undergoing some sort of transformation into a new system.

Capitalism has always been a system of paywalls! The whole point is that gates stand between us and virtually every aspect of our lives, and some people get to own those gates and grant or withhold permission to pass through those gates.

This means capitalists not only get the pleasure of bossing around their own employees, but also using their wealth to consume the production of other capitalists’ employees.

If it’s getting harder to be a capitalist the old-fashioned way—directing and profiting off the production and sale of commodities—because we’re in a crisis of declining profits or because the ecosystem can’t handle it or whatever the reason, then of course those same people will just shift to new and different kinds of gates.

Now instead of buying a car, you can rent subscriptions for turning your headlights on and off!

If you want to understand the global fascist turn, it helps to look at people like Elon Musk who have very specific expectations about what kind of person they think they’re supposed to be, as a result of having achieved the highest status possible under capitalism, and still not commanding the status, respect, and command to which they should be entitled.

I think the frisson between what Musk expected and what he achieved contributes considerably to both his fascist turn and his obvious mental illness. He and his class ilk are going to break the world to try to remake it into something where people like him are literally deified, the way Roman emperors sometimes were.

This is something David Graeber was working on before he died—the idea that Marxist “modes of production” only really makes sense as a critical theory if we understand the thing being produced not as a kind of *stuff* but rather a kind of *person*.

Classical Roman slavery and US chattel slavery and contemporary slavery in modern capitalist supply chains all take place under wildly different material conditions, producing wildly different material outputs, but we’d recognize them all as kinds of slavery.

To talk about slavery as a mode of production, then, we discover that what we’re really talking about is the production of kinds of people—the kinds of people who become enslaved, or command slaves, or enjoy the products made by those slaves.

A critically important thing to understand is that capitalism, like all the various systems that came before it, is a system of (re)producing hierarchy.

It’s easy to get lost in the elaborate details of Marxist critiques about exchange value and socially necessary labor time and surplus value that the whole point is to keep some people in charge of other people.

People derive hedonic pleasure from possessing high status and commanding other people. Capitalism does that through some fairly circuitous mechanisms relating to production and exchange but, at its heart, that’s what any hierarchical system is about.

So plenty of people are perfectly content to accept a vastly poorer world if it means they get to say the N word without social consequence again, or cosplay commandos and jump out of trucks to slap some suspected migrants around, or sexually harass their secretary with impunity again.

Those things have value to them, perhaps not in a way that we can easily translate into capitalist monetary prices, but they are real values.