capital's grave by jodi dean
summary
Dean argues that we already have overcome capitalist mode of production. But instead of communism, it made way to something Dean calls neofeudalism. The industrial worker that creates surplus value under capitalist mode of production is replaced by a dispossessed class of people working in the service industry. These servants do not carry out productive labour in the Marxist sense. After sketching out key characteristics of neofeudalism, Dean identifies this servant class as the new vanguard with revolutionary potential.
quotes
Related to political ecology, Dean writes (p. 81–82):
In the same vein, foreign investors have the right to sue state governments in international tribunals. The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system allows foreign investors to sidestep domestic law and bring a claim against a country they've invested in if they think that country has violated the terms set out in specific bilateral investment treaties (BITs) or regional trade agreements (RTAs). The typical suit involves a corporation invoking ISDS when a state passes public-interest regulations designed to protect water, communities, or the environment. In suits against Latin American governments, Canadian mining exploration firms have brought a large number of such cases to arbitration tribunals. According to Manuel Perez-Rocha and Jen Moore, "The tribunal members are highly paid corporate lawyers who have no obligation to consider the rights of local communities or the importance of health and environmental protections."23 The disputes are settled via arbitration agreements "that tend to be highly arbitrary, opaque, not open to public scrutiny, and generally pro-investor in their judgments."24
Related to some personal interests of mine on city development, Dean writes (p. 89):
As in earlier European feudalism, land plays a role in neofeudalism, but the role is different—now it's a way to hoard assets more than it is a means for driving agricultural production. Over the past forty years more than 2 million hectares of British public land (10 percent of Britain's overall land mass) have been sold to private buyers. According to Brett Christophers, this sell-off has occured at various levels, from local to national, for various reasons, and under various auspices in a "piecemeal and fragmented process" (parcellated sovereignty).41 In the US, land is also increasingly privatized: 100 families own about 42 million acres, the equivalent of 65,000 square miles. Christophers rightly points out that Marx saw the enclosure of the commons as a crucial condition for capitalist development insofar as this enclosure threw peasants off the land and forced them to sell their labor power in order to survive. The rise in private-sector land-hoarding has transformed Britain into a rentier economy where the many pay rent to the already affluent landowning few. Since the land isn't put to productive use, enclosure isn't benefiting capital; it's following and intensifying neofeudal laws of motion.
Related to gentrification and hinterlandization, Dean writes (p. 95):
[Alex MacGillis] makes clear that the urban–rural divide today is also an urban–urban divide between the cities that are left behind and the cities in which capital concentrates. This division repeats within winner cities as gentrification makes some areas unaffordable and other ones barely habitable. Public space declines and private spaces become mini fortresses oriented toward protecting the rich and their assets, services available to the rich depending on what they are willing to pay. Rowland Atkinson points to the displays of prestige emblazoned throughout the hyper-secure residential landscape, viewing them as indicative of a "lord of the manor syndrome".49 A city gets richer, more people become displaced, dispossessed, and houseless, and elites engage in new forms of castellation.
My personal favourite part (p. 126):
[The communist party] provides an affective structure counter to the catastrophic anxiety pervading neofeudalism. It organizes the transferential space of the subject supposed to know as the knowledge of a collective political subject. Like the knowledge of the clinic, the knowledge of the party arises over time, in struggle. Like the discipline of analysis, the discipline of the party is a matter of practice, a necessary condition for practical action.
One of the ways that the party provides relief from anxiety is through its line. Rather than endless multiplicity, the party provides direction. Clarifying expectations and establishing boundaries, the party installs for its members a symbolic order that recomposes the decomposed proliferation of the imaginary. Another way to express the same point: through the party, the members establish these expectations for themselves. The party is the form enabling this establishment, this expression of common acceptance of shared expectations. One need not be blown about by neofeudalism's prevailing winds; one can be steadfast in knowing for what and with whom one stands. In a setting of rivalry and aggression, we know which side we are on. We have comrades who have our backs.29 We don't go into political struggle unarmed or alone. Our steadfastness doesn't come from certainty (it isn't psychotic); it comes from shared and practical belief in the party as a necessary form for the political struggle for communism. The party will err; it isn't an omnipotent big Other. That it will err doesn't mean we don't need it: the party is the form through which learning and redress is possible.