When tech disrupts democracy: the institutionalisation of populist social movements during the transition to Techno-Feudalism
Creators: name: WATERS, Alexander
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 441004
subject: Social change

description: The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 ushered neoliberal capitalism into a prolonged hegemonic crisis. From Brexit, to Trump, from record inequality, to climate politics, the elites of the world-system are increasingly divided on what is to be done. A generalised crisis of legitimacy is thus affecting the world-system, whereby the people as a subject no longer believe as they once did and are no longer capable of acting accordingly. The Coronavirus Crash of 2020 heightened these contradictions dramatically, leading many to begin questioning whether neoliberalism will survive this latest crisis and what will replace it? Historical equivalents of such political-economic transitions suggest that a new social order will be built out of the ashes of the old. But if this is the case, why has a transition to a more progressive next system not occurred already? An eruption of mass movements has been observed globally since the financial crisis of 2008, yet after a month or a year, we hear little about what consequences these exhortations for popular sovereignty actualised. It is precisely within this space - between the several years of aftermath of a social movement's major mobilisations and political-economic transition - that this thesis seeks to make an original contribution to knowledge. The central research question animating this thesis is how have the consequences attributable to three left-populist movements in the wake of their major mobilisations in 2015-2017 shaped the emergent transition to what comes after neoliberalism and what strategy for the institutionalisation of their goals has been the most effective over the medium term? In response, my overall argument is that, as a result of both the external structural barriers and internal collective-agential choices facing the three movements, the Climate Justice Movement in Australia, the Podemos Movement-Party in Spain and the Black Lives Matter Movement in the US, they have each struggled to guide the transition beyond neoliberalism in the direction of a more democratic, just, and sustainable system. I identify the three movement's strategies, respectively, as co-optive institutionalisation (similar to NGO-isation), disruptive institutionalisation (sometimes referred to in the literature as 'from protest to politics') and disruptive non-institutionalisation (effectively indefinite protest and a refusal to develop into any formal organisation over time). Instead of a single revolutionary moment of rupture, the most likely transition, which I argue we have begun living through with the Coronavirus Crash of 2020, is a slow decay from the neoliberal model of capitalism into 'techno-feudalism'. I argue that this represents a new mode of production which can summarily be defined as a return to some characteristics of pre-capitalist class society, and the instrumentalisation of technology for social control. As Wolfgang Streeck's How Will Capitalism End? noted (2016, p. 28 drawing on Winters 2011) present levels of wealth inequality between the richest 400 Americans and the rest of the American population are comparable to that seen at the height of the Roman empire between a senator and a slave. The emergence of techno-feudalism can be observed in a new rentier-based economy dominated by a handful of platform economy corporations wherein the rapid flows of intangible capital and immaterial labour are determined by oligarchs who control - not so much the physical infrastructure of mines, factories and shops as the dominant class did under capitalism - but rather the crucial vectors of information exchange which figures such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have used to become among the wealthiest and influential human beings in history. Techno-feudalism is distinct from capitalism in that it features a new class structure of Techno-Rentier Oligarchs who own the giant platform corporations and a popular class which lives under the dictatorship of the algorithm who have been made increasingly precarious by automation and global labour market competition which I call the Techno-Precariat Commoners. Rather than at the point of production only, as per class struggle under industrial capitalism, under techno-feudalism the elite seeks to everywhere create regimes of New Enclosure by controlling, monopolising, privatising and then militarising all societal resources from public space to creative media shared over the internet. New state functions render the social contract of liberal democratic capitalism void since political and economic power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of this oligarchy and the state repressive apparatus (policing, prisons, intelligence agencies and so on) grows more sophisticated by the year. Cast against this dystopian spectre of technology for social control, the popular class of the Techno-Precariat Commoners employ the social movement strategy of commoning to create New Commons systems of open access and democratically negotiated management. Remunicipalisation movements provide a model for reversing the privatisation of city-scale utilities like water, electricity, gas, public transport and other services. The thesis is shaped by a post-Marxist theoretical framework driven by the ideas of Paolo Gerbaudo, Laurence Cox, Guy Standing, Chantal Mouffe, Nick Srnicek, and Andre Gorz. Within a political economy framework influenced by their ideas, the consequences of the three movements are analysed in relation to mass culture, institutions and policy. Having established that these movements are confronted with a new form of political economy in techno-feudalism, I argue that this is the meta-reason it is so difficult for social movements to have a major impact on society today. Techno-feudalism has created a steeper terrain of struggle in which political opportunity structural barriers have made pursuing the political goals of left-populist movements objectively more difficult than under conditions of neoliberalism, social democracy or early capitalist expansion. Mass surveillance, the capacity for hyper-targeted repression and spectacular algorithmic forms of distraction are new challenges to which social movements will have to adapt and overcome. This does not amount to a call for defeatism. History is simultaneously moving forwards technologically while at the same time it is being driven backwards politically. Technology can provide the illusion that progress happens by default. But when progressive social movements and parties retreat, history does not move forward, nor does it stand still, patiently waiting. Regressive movements, parties and oligarchs have their own visions for what kind of system should replace neoliberal capitalism and it is this revanchist revolutionary subject that has stepped in to fill the void.