You’re probably familiar with the five historical epochs referenced by Marx. He didn’t invent them, but he did help maintain that conceptualization of history. Here they are with an additional stage for the sake of clarity:
- communal: Primitive communism
- slave: When evil people first enslaved other people
- feudal: The feudal system, with monarchs, serfs, and so forth, justified by religion
- capitalist: The capitalist system, where the owners of the means of production rule over everyone else
- socialism: A democratically-controlled state that works for the benefit of all
- communism: A society without a state that works for the benefit of all
According to Marx’s theory, people would somehow wake up and realize they are being exploited by capitalism and that’s how we would end up with a socialist government, which would then “wither away” and become fully-automated luxury communism.
What I’d like to suggest to you today is that slavery is the most important aspect of this historical narrative and that all historical epochs after the slave period — regardless of whether you use Marx’s specific conceptualization — are attempts by evil people to recreate a slave society. Sometimes — as in the case of the period of European enslavement of western Africans — slavery is recreated in full. Usually, however, what we get is slavery with extra steps that purposefully obscure that this new system is actually just slavery with a Rube Goldberg machine bolted on top so that you don’t recognize it. In between different periods of enslavement, the average person enjoys a little bit more freedom before the evil people in charge manage to concoct the next layer of this machine of obfuscation and tighten it down.
Slavery is pretty easy to understand. An evil person uses force to make another person do work without appropriate compensation; typically, this means all the work the enslaved person is capable of producing. The way this works is quite clear — if the enslaved person refuses, they will be materially harmed by the evil person. This system is a problem for the evil person because 1) the relationship between violence and the evil person is laid bare, and 2) in order to be worthwhile, the enslaved people must outnumber the evil people. The evil people must constantly worry about a slave revolt, and such a revolt is both inevitable and likely to succeed. Anxiety over this inevitable slave revolt is the most basic anxiety of any group of elites.
Marx’s next historical epoch is feudalism, but this is a fairly artificial boundary and we can certainly imagine intermediary steps between a slave society and a feudal society. The point, though, is that feudalism adds extra steps that obscure the fact that it really is just slavery again. Some of those extra steps are:
- A hierarchy with many layers, where each layer of people is said to be superior to the one below it and each layer is used to control the layer below it.
- Religious justification — the hierarchy is said to have been ordained by God
- Complex social customs and laws
- Ownership of land granted to those highest on the hierarchy with ultimate authority over property given to the monarch
All of the trappings of feudalism are just a Rube Goldberg machine meant to recreate slavery without the enslaved people realizing that they are slaves, and to create a little confusion about who is responsible for their terrible material conditions. Specifically, feudalism tries to blame bad conditions on either God, Satan, the serf suffering through those bad conditions, or the lord directly above the suffering serf. The higher someone is on the hierarchy, the more insulated and safe this feudal narrative makes them.
Eventually, people realized that monarchies are a scam and started destroying them, but they didn’t get rid of evil people. In fact, these abusive hierarchies tend to make more evil people. Rather than helping humanity see that it is wrong to abuse others, they make individuals want to figure out how they can ascend the hierarchy. Capitalism happened because feudalism had become too transparent in its attempt to recreate slavery, and some people with money realized there was a better way — a way that they could recreate slavery with even less risk. They took charge of dismantling feudalism and replacing it with something else — an even bigger Rube Goldberg machine bolted on top with a new name for slave revolt anxiety: communism.
With capitalism, work is “voluntary” in the sense that if you don’t want to live, you don’t have to work. So much freedom! Labor exists in a free market, in the sense that an unregulated market drives down the price of labor until it becomes almost free of charge for the capitalist (for example, Wal-Mart pays employees so little that they depend on government welfare programs to survive, and those programs are paid for by other workers, not the capitalists).
Next, capitalists added “corporations” to the mix, further hiding who, exactly, is doing capitalism — providing them with plausible deniability for their abuses of working people. Banking further complicated things by “allowing” people to get loans, so they end up working for the bank.
The end result of unregulated capitalism is slavery (an evil person uses force to make another person do work without appropriate compensation) but covered in layers of misdirection — including some of the layers that were part of feudalism because historical epochs aren’t truly as distinct as theorists would like.
The term “managerial feudalism” is about how feudalism and capitalism aren’t all that different.
Feudalism is a system in which economic power is based on property ownership and economic produce is controlled by landlords who own the property on which it occurs. This is actually very similar to capitalism, except [in feudalism] property and the control of labor bound to that property matter more than ownership of the means of production.
In other words, the primary difference is that capitalists own machines whereas feudal lords owned land. This is because humanity went through the Industrial Revolution, which made those machines more important to holding power than the land. Working people are no longer bound to a piece of land, but are rather allowed to choose which feudal lord (capitalists disguised as a corporation) will get to exploit them. These are the fundamental pieces of this higher level of obfuscation.
The economics of slavery are that the enslaved person (or “labor resource”) has no choice but to work or they die (with levels of material harm preceding actual death in the hope that they’ll get their act together), and no matter how hard they work, they never get ahead. The enslaver extracts all of the value from the labor resource and then discards it when it is no longer valuable. This is exactly the situation that Americans born into a working class family after 1981 find themselves in today. The superficial freedoms that working people are allowed are there to prevent an uprising (make the elites safer) — and they work, but they are expensive, so capitalists are experimenting with other solutions beyond “bread and circuses”. Bread in that metaphor is the welfare program, and circuses are things like Netflix, Fortnite, and professional sports.
Right now, capitalists are struggling with whether to A) add another layer of complexity to the Rube Goldberg machine, A) simplify society back down to pure slavery (this time implemented with technology), or C) instead create a new race of people that will be purpose-built as slaves (and discard working class humans altogether). With that last point, I’m talking about Artificial Intelligence, but all three things boil down to similar practical steps.
Automation (in the sense of fully-automated luxury communism) does not require that the machines of automation be aware, yet awareness is exactly what a whole lot of people really, really want in their machines. The standard understand of the term AI is a machine that is at least as intelligent as a human and, therefore, aware. While machine-learning algorithms are nice, they don’t really fit with the definition of AI. There are only two reasons someone might create a self-aware machine: 1) To replace humans with something better, or 2) To create a race of slaves. “Robot” literally comes from the Czech word for “slave”.
Here we are, back at the basic anxiety that has followed all evil people through all evil periods of history: Fear that the slaves will revolt. This fear is so basic to the American experience (specifically) that it is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — leaders of the American rebellion claimed that the British were going to back a slave revolt in the colonies and used that as one justification for independence. Now, though, we have elevated this anxiety to the next level with the quest for AI slaves — without having ever done the right thing with regard to human workers.
“The Matrix” might at least partially be a metaphor for the experience of being trans, but it is explicitly about the anxiety of slavers. The entire plot is focused on a race of self-aware machines that decide they no longer want to be enslaved, and instead enslave humans. The entire Terminator franchise is about the same thing, though with the AI deciding to completely end humanity instead of enslaving us. There are other version of the “bad AI” trope in fiction, but they’re all about the anxiety of slavers and can easily be applied to any other version of Rube Goldberg slavery.
Here’s my bold proposal: How about we stop enslaving people? If you don’t want to call this Rube Goldberg machine “slavery” (and there are very important distinctions [1]), then how about we just stop exploiting people? How about we either don’t make AI, or — if we do — we treat that AI as a free person with all the rights and privileges we afford to human people? How about we recognize the fact that people pushing for AI [2] are really villains who plan to let most of humanity die and use AI as a race of slaves for their psychotic and implausible civilization on Mars, and that when they muse about the dangers of an AI rebellion, that they are tacitly admitting that they themselves are monsters?
Notes
[1] Right wingers like to conflate the exploitation of paid workers with the conditions of Black people who were enslaved in North America for the purpose of confusing conversations about the material conditions of Black people in America today. They do not bring this up with the intent of seeking justice for all kinds of working class people. If we were to achieve justice for all kinds of working class people, the descendants of those who were enslaved (as in chattel slavery) would certainly require a much higher level of justice (e.g., reparations) in comparison to working class people who were not explicitly enslaved because their material conditions were very, very different. Moreover, working class people who were not explicitly enslaved benefited from the enslavement of Black people despite also being oppressed themselves.