Bannon Talks Techno-Feudalism

Is He the Ernst Roem of MAGA Nation, Destined for Slaughter on the Night of the Little Hands?

Steve Bannon is back in the news because in an interview with an Italian periodical, he denounced Donald Trump’s First Lady, Elon Musk. That’s pretty interesting in its own right, because it reveals yet another fissure in the ranks of MAGA Nation. But what caught my eye was Bannon’s invocation of “techno-feudalism,” a word and a concept he obviously got from reading Yanis Varoufakis’s book of that title, which I reviewed for Project Syndicate last February. I went back to Bannon’s interview with David Brooks at the NYT, published on July 1, 2024, and sure enough, there it was, already informing the firebrand’s ranting about what is wrong with America.

Here are links to the Project Syndicate review of Varoufakis and my subsequent thoughts on Bannon’s admiration for Christopher Lasch;

But what’s in a word, in this case “techno-feudalism”? A world of difference, I think. Bannon’s use of it signifies the kind of thinking that has an extremely variable political valence because it expresses a deep suspicion of hedonistic, consumerist, financialized capitalism even as it extolls the bourgeois virtues of hard work, rigorous honesty, and patriarchal responsibility—the kind of thinking that can and does lead, and in fact has led, to socialist, communist, syndicalist, and fascist settlements of political differences. In other words, thinking that can and does lead, and in fact has led, to the radicalisms of both Left and Right.

I know, it sounds paradoxical, contradictory, confused, schizophrenic—or at least illogical. How can you hate capitalism and love bourgeois society?

Well, try this on, from Joseph Schumpeter’s Business Cycles (1939): “capitalist evolution not only upsets social structures which protected the capitalist interests . . . but also undermines the attitudes, motivations, and beliefs of the capitalist stratum itself. . . . [for example] the loosening of the family tie—a typical feature of the culture of capitalism—removes or weakens what, no doubt, was the center of the motivation of the businessmen of old.” (Schumpeter elaborated on this proposition in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1947), Part II, where he credited Marx with the original insights.)

Or this, from Daniel Bell, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (rev. ed., 1978): “Against these views [of classical social theory, Marx and Weber], what I find striking today is the radical disjunction between the social structure (the techno-economic order) and the culture. The former is ruled by an economic principle defined in terms of efficiency and functional rationality, the organization of production through the ordering of things, including men as things. The latter is prodigal, promiscuous, dominated by an anti-rational, anti-intellectual temper in which the self is taken as the touchstone of cultural judgements, and the effect on the self is the measure of the aesthetic worth of experience. The character structure inherited from the 19th century, with its emphasis on self-discipline, delayed gratification, and restraint, is still relevant to the demands of the techno-economic structure; but it clashes sharply with the culture, where such bourgeois values have been completely rejected—in part, paradoxically, because of the workings of the capitalist economic system itself.”

MAGA Nation believes with religious fervor in the bourgeois virtues that organize the techno-economic structure of late capitalism—no matter that the Leader and most of his immediate circle personify the hedonistic, narcissistic culture that Bell, like Schumpeter, sees as the direct consequence of capitalism’s success. For now that comes with the territory.

But for God’s sake, so what? For me, it’s Bannon’s rhetorical assignment of paramount importance to manly production, and its concomitant expression, a fear of feminized consumption, that matters. For this is the affect shared by the Left and Right in their attitudes toward late capitalism. On the one hand, sturdy, upright working men who earn their living with honest, hard labor, consuming only as much value as they have produced; on the other, slender, reclining figures who deduct their incomes from the sum of value created by productive labor, spending freely on superfluous goods. On the one hand, hard truths, class struggle, science and rationality against religion and reification; on the other, slippery slopes, identity politics, fetishism enfranchised and irrationality embraced.

(1) The valorization of the small holder, (2) the anti-monopoly faith in competition between firms as the guarantee of equality of opportunity as well as the incentive to technological innovation, and (3) the suspicion of “finance capital” as a parasitic growth on productive labor—these are the ingredients of populist politics on both the Left and the Right. At any rate they are what Steve Bannon and Christopher Lasch have in common. And Yanis Varoufakis?

By his accounting, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and the rest do not merely operate digital platforms that function as public utilities which should be subject, as Lina Khan has forcefully argued, to the relevant antitrust laws and regulations.

For Varoufakis, these platforms are instead fiefdoms whose income must be called rent, not profit, because it’s a surplus generated after hours by the work of consumption, by users —“cloud proles and serfs”—who produce marketable information for free, to be harvested by “cloud capital” every time they click on a blinking window or a waiting icon. They might as well be clueless peasants producing crops for their suzerains. Hence the title of his recent book, Technofeudalism: “To use the language of early economists like Adam Smith, it is a classic case of feudal rent defeating capitalist profit, of wealth extraction by those who already have it triumphing over the creation of new wealth by entrepreneurs.”

If that sounds like Varoufakis is suggesting that capitalism’s defenders can claim the moral high ground, that’s because he is:

“Capitalism prevailed when profit overwhelmed rent, a historic triumph coinciding with the transformation of productive work and property rights into commodities to be sold via labor and share markets, respectively. It was not just an economic victory. Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets.”

This is precisely the moral high ground of productive labor, the terrain to which Steve Bannon has staked his claim, citing Christopher Lasch, as against Musk. To demonstrate the point . . .

Here are excerpts of an interview Bannon did with an Italian periodical, from Breitbart, January 11, 2025 [my italics throughout]:

“Bannon went on to accuse Musk of being self-serving, insisting that his ‘sole objective is to become a trillionaire.’

“‘He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then — through wealth — power: that’s what he’s focused on,’ Bannon said.

“Bannon said that Musk’s economic support of President Trump has been a positive thing, adding that he should do the same for any of the different populist movements in Europe.

“‘What’s not positive,’ he added, ‘is when all of a sudden he tries to put his half-baked ideas which are really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale. I don’t support that and we’ll fight it.’”

Compare this language to Bannon’s interview with David Brooks, NYT July 1, 2024:

“‘Our movement is metastasizing to something that’s different than America First; it’s American Citizens First.’

[Brooks:] What does that mean?

“‘It means Americans have to get a better deal. Right now, the American citizen has all the obligations of serving in the military, of paying taxes, of going through this grind that is American late-stage technofeudal capitalism. But tell me what the bonus is. . . .

“‘I took Michael Porter’s classes at Harvard back in the ’80s, and globalization was — Harvard, at that time, treated this as the second law of thermodynamics. It was a natural property that could not be questioned. And then I went to the M&A department at Goldman Sachs and I worked with Hank Paulson. I was put on a lot of things to sell companies. You could just see America was being gutted. . . . You see this evisceration, you saw these jobs going, and they were never coming back.

“‘And then I read Christopher Lasch. . . . We have a capitalist economy that has no capitalists, right? It has hypercapitalists or state capitalism. You’ve got to not just reallocate income, you have to reallocate assets. People have to have a stake in this. That’s all they’re asking for. . . . ‘“