Scouting capital's frontiers

Reply to Morozov's 'Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason' E vgeny morozov has provided a salutary critique of recent proposals to conceptualize the social relations of the digital economy-with web users supposedly tied like serfs to tech barons' inescapable domains-by analogy with those of the feudal era. His 'Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason' offers a systematic review of contemporary feudal-speak as a discursive swamp in which, he charges, 'the left has a hard time differentiating itself from the right'-neoliberals like Glen Weyl and Eric Posner, as well as neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin and anti-wokite Joel Kotkin, articulating the same 'neo-' or 'techno-feudal' critique as Yanis Varoufakis, Mariana Mazzucato, Robert Kuttner or Jodi Dean. If radical thinkers have embraced feudal imagery as a rhetorical, meme-friendly ploy, Morozov argues that this is testament not to media savviness but to intellectual weakness-'as if the left's theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion.' By shifting its attention from actual capitalist relations to reminiscences of feudalism, it risks letting go its prey to chase a shadow, abandoning its most original and effective angle of attack on exploitative socioeconomic relations-its sophisticated anti-capitalist political-theoretical apparatus. 1 In defining his terms-what makes 'capitalism' capitalism and 'feudalism' feudalism-Morozov reaches back to 1970s debates, in particular Robert Brenner's critique of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Origins of the Modern World System (1974). 2 In Morozov's view, Brenner's distinction