Title: Post-capitalist politics contra mutations of neoliberalism: Persistence of value and class under postcapitalism
Abstract: 2008 Crash marked the end of the halcyon days of neoliberal globalism. Its promises of unceasing economic growth and prosperity were crashed and replaced with a bold re-assertion of austerity and authoritarianism. The secular and internal limits of capitalist mode of production, namely its tendencies towards devaluation and increasing organic composition of capital, are joined by its "external" limits in the ecological crisis.
Some theorists are making sense of this moment in terms of postcapitalism, but not as a transition towards socialism but rather as a regression towards a "techno-feudalism" (Varoufakis) or "neofeudalism" (Dean). Tendencies towards platform enclosures and sovereignty fragmentation together with the increasing importance of rent as a mode of extraction are identified as indicators of this transformation at the level of mode of production. While such inquiries on the transformations in the modes of production that are operational in contemporary social formations are most welcome, several questions remain to be explored. First, should we approach our conjuncture from a historicist perspective of a transition from capitalism to feudalism tout court or from a poststructuralist perspective of the articulation of multiple modes of production and extraction within a broader social formation whose adjective is yet to be determined? The latter perspective allows us to see the co-existence of wage labor, self-employment, and cooperative modes of production in various relations of articulation and subsumption to different modes of capital (industrial/productive, merchant, and financial). Second, to what extent do these material tendencies constitute a break from neoliberalism? Is it possible to think about these tendencies as the performative outcomes of a neoliberal episteme that has always been diverse and variegated (ranging …
Working title: Post-capitalist politics contra mutations of neoliberalism: Persistence of value and class under postcapitalism #SummerProject