Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace.

So on today's episode, Allison and I are going to not so much read or explain a specific text,

nor necessarily talk about current events, but we're kind of taking a middle ground here

where we're taking a

theoretical concept that has been bouncing around the broadly conceived left these days,

and we're kind of wrestling with that concept and making sense of it trying to explain

what is meant by it and offer a Marxist and Leninist sort of analysis and maybe perhaps critique of that

concept. And that concept today is techno feudalism. We've heard the phrase a lot. I've used the

phrase throughout the last year or so. I've used it. But when I have used it, I've made it clear that when I use it,

I'm using it in the sense of a literary flair. I'm using it in more of a poetic literary sense

to get at a certain phase of monopoly capitalism. And I am by no means arguing that we are

regressing to a feudalism out of capitalism or that we're entering

some new mode of production. But that is different than the way that it's popularly used. And I think

most popularly used by Janus Verifakis, who has put out a book and has done many interviews

on the concept specifically of techno feudalism and kind of offers a novel and unique

analysis of techno feudalism as not a regression back to a previous pre-capitalist feudalism,

but almost as a returning to feudalism at a higher level out of a decaying or dead capitalism.

And so we'll get into those nuances as well.

But I think it's really important to, as dialiticians, as materialists, as historical

materialists, as Marxists, to be able to wrestle with capitalism as an ever-evolving,

ever-changing dynamic entity in and of itself, a process that you cannot understand

if you were only understanding it through the lens of writers who came generations before you.

...