Hyphenated Capitalism

There is a general trend that has been occurring lately. People are describing current society with all sorts of buzzwords, technical phrases, terms and labels that mean nothing. You hear them all the time, on social media or in the news, or in real life. Techno-Capitalism. Neo-Feudalism. Late-Stage Capitalism. Terms such as these are thrown about by people who eagerly label themselves as socialist, or even communist, while proposing we simply pass tax reform to 'fix' capitalism. People who don't understand capitalism and communism, let alone understand it enough to distinguish different forms of it. These terms will be looked at one by one, and analyzed to see which have any merit.

Firstly, Techno-Capitalism. What does this mean? Does the capitalist mode of production, of finance and value extraction and wealth-through-ownership, take on a different form when it enters the digital age? Do companies no longer own the means of production? Are workers suddenly no longer propertyless and no longer forced to sell their own labor for survival? Obviously none of these are the case. Capitalism is still existing as it always has. The only thing "techno-capitalism", capitalism in the digital age, does is allow faster transfer of information and transactions, it somewhat unties capitalists to physical capital, and it devalues goods further through computerized automation. In essence, it is just another development in capitalism. Besides, technology and advancement has always been linked to capitalism. Would the invention of the power-loom or drill-press suddenly turn capitalism into techno-capitalism? The die-stamp? The telephone or telegraph? Techno-Capitalism is a meaningless phrase.

Neo-Feudalism is another word thrown around. What is it? It is when the wealth and power is concentrated within the hands of a few, within the hands of a new 'nobility'. This is nothing new, this is how capitalism and broader class society has always operated. What else is neo-feudalism? It is when the workers do not own their land, their housing, their means of production and instead must rent, similar to a serf renting their land. But this is simply not how feudalism operates. Let's see what Engels says in Principles of Communism about serfdom:

The condition of the working man is not similar to that of a serf. A proletarian can leave his rented land, whenever he wants, and work somewhere else. A serf cannot. A serf owns his meager means of production, his capital. A proletarian does not. The term neo-feudalism is a pointless one. It implies propertylessness is a new state under modern capitalism. It implies the ruling class being powerful is a new development under modern capitalism. Both of these are, in fact, the normal condition of capitalism, and the 'golden age' of America, suburbia, the post-war economic boom, etc., are simply a deviation from the normal form of capitalism to appease workers, to reconcile them.

The final term to analyze is late-stage capitalism. This one is somewhat more meaningful, but again often misused. The core idea of historical materialism is that capitalism emerges when the material conditions necessitate it. Capitalism develops economies and markets and the productive forces of a given region in which capitalism operates. Then, eventually, once the productive forces are properly established, the system will naturally shift to the mode of communism. Late-stage capitalism is essentially the second-half of the lifespan capitalism, when the productive forces are fully established and capitalism begins its decay and cannibalization of the markets to extract more value. However, this isn't a new development. Capitalism has been in a late-stage form for well over a century. The, again, mid-century stage of 'good capitalism' is merely an exception. America created an imperialist system, Bretton-Woods, to rehabilitate capitalism in order to prevent the revolutionary sentiment from growing among the working class, especially given the existence and presence of the USSR. America could not risk a communist uprising, when they were the defender of capitalism globally. When the USSR began harshly declining, much of these reforms and programs were phased out. People use late-stage capitalism to just describe America after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system, instead of viewing the Bretton-Woods system as a response to global capitalism entering its late-stage.

Overall, many of these terms are thrown around as something substantial, something meaningful. But a deeper and objective analysis shows that many of these conditions that justify capitalism becoming hyphenated are just general trends of capitalism, not a unique, modern phenomenon.

The ideas of capitalism being hyphenated as something other than capitalism is not only nonsensical, but counterproductive. It treats these negative consequences and developments as a different form of capitalism, as if the core of capitalism itself in the present day is somehow not normally like this, that it is fixable, worth saving, and so on. It distracts from these issues being present inherently in all forms of capitalism, almost as a way of deflecting the blame from capitalism's core tenets, but instead a particular and correctable way it has responded to changes in material conditions.

There is no neo-feudalism. There is no techno-capitalism. We have been in late-stage capitalism since before Bretton-Woods. These terms should not be used, they are distracting and inhibit the movement. Capitalism is capitalism. Call it as such.