Mediating Neo-Feudalism

Travis Workman (bio)

Abstract

This essay discusses contemporary film and media in relation to the political economic concept of neo-feudalism. Questioning the application of a science-fiction dialectics to these media and the tendency to see them as symptoms of the rise of neofascism, the essay rather connects their themes, narratives, and visual styles to Marxist (Dean) and classical (Hudson) discussions of capitalism’s transition to neo-feudalism, as well as to the affect of ressentiment as a means of “governing by debt” (Lazzarato). It then turns to the films of Bong Joon-ho, including Parasite (2019) and Okja (2017), to show how they critique neo-feudalism while also remaining limited by ressentiment and individual acts of revenge. The final part reads the more complex treatments of identity and performance in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) through the connections they make between neo-feudalism and racial capitalism (Robinson).

Fascism or Neo-Feudalism in Contemporary Media?

A number of films and television series of the last decade address social class in what appears to be a simplified fashion. They focus on the affective aspects of exploitation by politicizing performances, attitudes, and behaviors of class, and their intersections with race, rather than providing an exposition of the structures of productive labor processes. They depict apocalyptic scenarios, violent resentment, and revenge as the available responses to injustice, rather than suggesting the possibility of transforming social and economic conditions for the general public good. They create allegorical worlds of entrenched social and spatial hierarchies by including fantastic elements, instead of confronting the everyday symptoms of capitalist crisis in a descriptive manner. They may give the impression that they are merely updating the welltrodden dystopic worlds of science fiction, including classic invocations of the specter of historical fascism, and speculating about a future return to primitive forms of economic and political power. Although interesting as popular culture, they might seem inadequate for a political economic analysis of capitalism that is focused on the commodification and alienation (Entfremdung) of productive labor power as the primary form of exploitation. However, the emphases of these films and television series on affect and direct appropriation rather than production and consumption, and on vengeful violence instead of revolution, are not simply an effect of a reductive social analysis. They are both diagnostic and symptomatic of the contemporary transformation of neoliberal capitalism into an even worse system: what some political economists, both classical and Marxist, call neo-feudalism. Though conscious of the social process of what Jodi Dean refers to as “capitalism turn[ing] in on itself” in neo-feudalism (“Neo-Feudalism” 11), they largely repeat its structures, affects, and moral worldview by depending on individuated revenge narratives and their foreclosure of space for collective resistance. They take the lack of an outside in the communicative and neo-feudal mode of capitalism as a sign of an infinite cycle of exploitation and ressentiment, and thereby tend to reinforce its modes of division and control.

Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017), which I discuss in detail below, depicts the global range of the sovereignty of corporations and the limits of their ability to address ecological issues. The events in Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) take place on a continuously moving luxury train after an attempt at climate engineering has gone wrong, instigating a second ice age. The train is divided between luxury cars in the front inhabited by the elite, and horrific tail cars inhabited by the destitute masses; passage between the two sections is prevented until the rise of an insurgency. Although fantastic elements are more limited in his Oscar-winning Parasite (2019), that film also depicts a bifurcated world of wealthy elite families and working-class families living a precarious life of semi-basement apartments and temporary gigs and cons. Joker (2019), The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–), The Man in the High Castle (2015–19), Years and Years (2019–), and many episodes of Black Mirror (2011–) also use allegorical worlds to represent class opposition, entrenched spatial hierarchies, and apocalyptic scenarios. As I discuss in the final section of this essay, other treatments of neo-feudalism present more incisive critiques of its political economy, because they confront the intersection of race and class within it: Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) takes up the doppelgänger motif to present an uncanny version of neo-feudal race and class relations, and Boots Riley’s dark comedy Sorry to Bother You (2018) deals with the governing power of debt and affective labor.

The popularity and lucrativeness of these globally distributed dystopias, which have an aura of intellectual and political seriousness lacking in most previous apocalyptic blockbusters, suggest that real neofascism and the popular democratic critique of its politics have entered into mainstream popular media. Because of this popularity and the generic science fiction and fantasy elements of these media worlds, it is tempting to analyze them through a familiar science fiction studies framework, such as Darko Suvin’s theory of science fiction utopias as “estrangements” of the mundane, empirical present. From that perspective, projections of speculative worlds and their dialectical relation with naturalist representations would contain the kernel of the texts’ political meanings. Likewise, common liberal or neoliberal readings of such worlds see them as allegorical and speculative warnings against the possibility of fascism, posing the question: if X were to happen, then what countervailing force, or resistance, could prevent the economic and political order from devolving into fascism? The scenarios themselves sometimes purposefully represent fascism as the obverse of liberal democracy. Years and Years begins with the premise of a second Donald Trump presidential term, as though democratic electoral politics could prevent the many horrors that ensue. Although more astute as political critiques, Us and Sorry to Bother You still represent the biological engineering of new slave classes through fantastic elements, and reference contemporary prison labor in the US only indirectly. The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a decisive victory of the most fervent evangelicals in a second American Civil War as a liberal warning against extremism. Snowpiercer imagines a climate engineering catastrophe and the resulting disappearance of class mobility, but within a cartoonish version of the future. The Man in the High Castle takes up Philip K. Dick’s premise in the original novel: what if Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan were victorious in World War II? Only this series includes direct references to historical fascist states, and the reversal of the typical geographical location of fascism reveals Dick’s insights into the science fiction genre in the US in 1962, which tended to repress the fascist or authoritarian tendencies internal to US politics by projecting them outward onto various external or futuristic others.

Each of these works poses the problem of a return to fascism by speculating about its future iterations. Because they can be read as warnings about normative liberal society’s future return to fascism, they can carry a mass appeal in societies that remain, for the time being, supportive of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy. That these media worlds incorporate the supposedly alien aesthetics, politics, and cultures of historical fascism emphasizes their exceptionality to a normative neoliberal system. In Snowpiercer and The Handmaid’s Tale, elements of the mise-en-scène are obviously drawn from the motifs of historical fascism and their remediations. Although the equisapiens are darkly comical hybrids, through them Sorry to Bother You raises the specter of biological racism and the engineering of a new man (as does Us). These works’ tendency to turn to historical fascism highlights the ingenuity of Dick’s premise when he formulated it in 1962: what if fascism is not something external that has been defeated by US liberal capitalism and Pax Americana, but rather something internal to and repeated within it? The specter of fascism and its influence on the science fiction and fantasy genres do not provide a sufficient explanation of the speculative politics and economies represented in these films and series. Just as expressed fears of a return to fascism among liberal intellectuals and media commentators tend to ignore fascism’s origins in capitalism, reading these media according to a traditional science-fiction dynamic between normative liberal democracy and the speculative return of fascism obscures their engagement with contemporary political economy and its transformations.

Fascism took shape within industrial capitalism in its monopolistic and imperialist stage, and reappeared in different forms during the era of developmental dictatorships and Cold War anticommunism. Considering the development of the service, communicative, and financial sectors of the capitalist economy, and the intensification of finance- and debt-based exploitation and accumulation, it is necessary to reconsider the iterations of authoritarian rule being projected in media worlds and experienced in everyday life as no longer conditioned primarily by the industrial and imperialist form of capitalism of the early twentieth century (even though media reference that period obsessively). We should consider whether or not the resurgence of the specter of fascism in contemporary media, including in film and television, should rather be understood as a political response to a new stage of capitalism, understanding that no stage completely displaces earlier forms. A new stage is rather the emergent aspect within an uneven and overdetermined structure (as Althusser has argued). If the enabling economic and social basis for the contemporary political resurgence of right-wing ideologies differs significantly from the imperialist capitalism analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, and, eventually, Nicos Poulantzas, then, despite the quotation of historical fascism in these works, returning to an analysis of the history of fascism could be of limited value for contemporary political economic analysis or for an understanding of the projection of speculative authoritarian regimes in media cultures today—the media of neo-feudalism.

The primary political question posed by these films and series is not if normative liberal democracy will be able to resist the rise of a new form of fascist hegemony. It is instead: What political and economic forces are at play in contemporary intensifications of exploitation? As Jodi Dean has argued in “Communism or Neo-Feudalism,” describing the primary conflict of the contemporary moment as one between democracy and fascism obfuscates the economics underlying the politicization of democratic societies to the Right:

capitalist democracies are dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, systems of rule arranged for the benefit of capital and the enjoyment of the powerful. …

To view our present in terms of democracies threatened by rising fascism deflects attention from the fundamental role of globally networked communicative capitalism in exacerbating popular anger and discontent. The rhetoric of fascism prevents us from considering why ostensibly democratic societies appear to be turning to the Right.(9)

“Globally networked communicative capitalism” differs from early twentieth-century industrial capitalism, as well as from the network of Cold War dictatorships, particularly in the way that political affects—including anger, discontent, resentment, and other mass moods—are disseminated through digital media platforms rather than by centralized news and propaganda organs. For Dean, the way the contemporary Right articulates itself through digital platforms, and particularly through social media, means that revived liberal critiques of fascism cannot adequately address transformations in economy and mass politics.

When the film and television series I discuss in this essay call to be read as allegories of a possible fascism, and infuse their narratives with ressentiment by way of limited revenge scenarios, they reproduce the bourgeois morality underpinning neo-feudalism’s governing by “infinite debt” (Lazzarato). It is in this sense that the allegories in these narrative works mediate neo-feudalism through a reductive kind of Hegelian theater. They play out neo-feudalism’s contradictions while offering idealist modes of sublation, such as moral and melodramatic representations, that are symptomatic of its cultural and economic systems. In the following section I discuss some of the primary characteristics of neo-feudalism according to both Marxist and classical economists, and connects these to narrative representations of debt and morality in the films of Bong Joon-ho. The final section connects Us and Sorry to Bother You to Cedric J. Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism to show how they complicate neo-feudal allegory by reflecting on the consequences of racial differentiation in affective labor and the reproduction of class exploitation under conditions of infinite debt.

Bong Joon-ho and Ressentiment

In order to understand the political economy as well as the affective and cultural dimensions of neo-feudalism, it is necessary to connect the neo-feudal institution of infinite debt as the dominant form of governmentality to the narrative and aesthetic forms of neo-feudal media. Transformations in political economy will be discussed through Dean and Hudson, which I connect to affect through Maurizio Lazzarato’s Nietzschean reading of infinite debt and bourgeois morality. In their foregrounding of ressentiment rather than revolution, these media of neo-feudalism—which are in many ways diagnostic and critical of the neo-feudal mode of capitalism—can nonetheless become symptomatic of the affects and narrative logics that reinforce it. Although a fuller analysis would go deeper into the formal and visual qualities of these works—including their hyperreal violence, their mimicking of the aesthetics of online media, and their creation of uncanny worlds through special effects—the following readings focus mainly on narrative in order to establish a ground of comparability between the films of Bong, Peele, and Riley by way of their allegorizing of neo-feudal social relations. This attention to narrative and allegory also opens up points of comparison with the extensive scholarship on the literatures of neoliberalism and financialization, which is particularly significant as streaming film and television have become more literary in their narrative structuring of abstraction and affect (Smith; Shonkwiler).

Dean asserts that neo-feudalism “is characterized by four interlocking features: 1) the parcelization of sovereignty; 2) hierarchy and expropriation with new lords and peasants; 3) desolate hinterlands and privileged municipalities; and, 4) insecurity and catastrophism” (2). By “the parcelization of sovereignty” she means that monopoly corporations and financial institutions assert sovereignty over the people without granting them even the illusion of the individual autonomy granted by the liberal bourgeois state. Political and economic authority blend together, and corporations and wealthy elites control increasingly fragmented and localized domains, largely through the power of primitive accumulation, debt, and rent. Although Dean admits there is no full analogy between neo-feudalism and feudalism proper, under neo-feudalism society is increasingly divided between “lords” who own and govern physical and digital domains, and “peasants” who live in debt-peonage and must rent access to liquid, fixed, cultural, and social capital. The centrifugal character of finance capital and the digital economy creates hinterlands, exacerbating the stark urban-rural divide we see in contemporary US party affiliations, for example. Finally, environmental and epidemiological catastrophes exacerbate the effects of inequality and create a deep sense of insecurity that leads to apocalyptic worldviews.

The degree of reality of the “theoretical object” of neo-feudalism remains to be seen (Althusser, Balibar, et al., 351; Shonkwiler x). However, the concept has currency beyond theoretical Marxists such as Dean or media theorist McKenzie Wark. Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the term neo-feudalism has been applied to the US economy by self-described “classical” economists such as Michael Hudson, who are not concerned with revolution, but rather with reestablishing the power of the productive economy and the sanctity of contracts in the face of the domination of an autonomous financial sector and the reemergence of debtpeonage. Reflecting on finance capital’s complete absorption of the social conflicts of industrial capitalism, Hudson wrote in 2012:

Industrial capitalism’s familiar class conflict between employers and wage labor is now being overwhelmed by financial dynamics. It is appropriate to speak of debt pollution of the economic environment, turning the economic surplus into debt service for leveraged buyouts, real estate rents into mortgage interest, personal income into debt service and late fees, corporate cash flow into payments to hedge funds and corporate raiders, and the tax surplus into financial bailouts as banks themselves succumb to the economy’s plunge into over-indebtedness and negative equity. (5–6)

Hudson warned that the total debt overhead cannot be paid and that “the question is, just how will it not be paid?” (20). In other words, governments’ failures to enact debt write-downs and the continued selling and gambling on enormous debt bundles will “permit massive foreclosures to tear society apart and reduce debtors to neo-serfdom” (20). He suggested that a neo-feudal system could result:

Unlike serfs, debt peons are free to live wherever they wish—or at least wherever they can afford. They may buy land by taking out a mortgage and paying its rental value to the bank. But wherever they live they take their debts with them, from student loans to credit card debt.(21)

Even classical economists who see the capitalist system as redeemable analyze the economic system emerging in the last decade as a more exploitative and unstable system. Its reduction of workers and consumers to neo-serfs and its massive, unregulated marketization of debt means that the production of profit has been increasingly delinked from productive labor and surplus value and linked to what Marx calls the realization of “surplus profit” (751–950). In contrast to surplus value, surplus profit is not appropriated and realized through the production and exchange of commodities, but rather gained from financial speculation on debt and the proliferation and intensification of forms of ground rent, from access to landed property to digital domains and intellectual property. Hudson’s desire to return to a manufacturing economy with regulations and honored contracts downplays the severity of crisis in the circuits of production and consumption prior to the hegemony of communicative and financial capitalism. Hudson is equally aware, however, that the rise of debt-peonage was a result of capital seeking to create new sources of profit as the US industrial manufacturing sector shrank.

As Lazzarato explains in Governing by Debt, politics, economy, and ideology blend together through the modes of subjection and governmentality enabled by spiraling debt at all levels of the global economy, from individuals to nation-states. In place of the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber at the height of industrial capitalism, according to Lazzarato’s Nietzschean reading (83-90), the masters of contemporary capitalism subject their servants, or neo-serfs, through the slave morality of indebtedness, which, as Hudson argues, follows them wherever they may move. Neo-feudalism marks a difference in modes of subjection. Wage labor remains a site of exploitation in neo-feudalism, but the percentage of that labor performed in the service industries, and as affective labor, has increased greatly alongside the creation of massive debtor classes. If work ethic and the fetishization of labor were the primary modes of subjection operative in industrial capitalism, debt has now become a significant, if the not the primary way of creating subjects of capital. In a critique of David Graeber’s conflation of Adam Smith and Nietzsche, Lazzarato explains why a Nietzschean philosophical and psychological approach to subjection makes sense for the morality of the debtor economy, and therefore provides a way into the relation between spectator and the commodified image that centers on a set of affects somewhat distinct from fetishism and alienation. For Lazzarato, the “slave morality” of bourgeois culture is the mode of governing that allows for a society based on debt to reproduce itself, and the primary affect of this morality is ressentiment. In the 2007–2008 economic crash, after which Hudson warned of the rise of neo-feudalism, the massive buying and selling of debt, especially bundles of poorly rated subprime loans, was premised on the notion that either enough neo-serfs would remain psychologically committed to servicing their debt eternally or that the government would intervene to finance the loans once they went into default (as the US government essentially did when it bailed out the banks that owned the debt). Ressentiment is an essential affect for producing surplus profits out of debt. In order to be lucrative, making loans, as well as purchasing and selling debt, both require a general culture in which individuals desire to be good debtors with a high credit score and consistent income and define themselves against evil debtors—the defaulters—who take loans without the intention or the capacity to pay them back. Ressentiment is directed both inwardly and outwardly, operating as a mode of selfgovernment and as a way of shaming the other and oneself. In relation to state social programs in the US, this kind of shaming has its roots in Reagan-era global neoliberalism, as does the debtor economy as a whole (Harvey). Rachel Greenwald Smith argues that narratives of neoliberalism frame negative affects, including resentment, as the moral responsibility of the individual (7). The media of neo-feudalism narrate the intensification of the negative affects of the neoliberal self, introducing a circuit between the increasingly mystified context of the political-economic whole and often violent revenge against the conditions of debt. The self becomes a narrative and affective mirror to absolute subsumption.

Ressentiment is the most prevalent affect of neo-feudal media to the degree that it is difficult for narratives to contain it within a single frame, ideology, or worldview. In neo-feudal media, good and evil appear around relations of debt, service, affective labor, and the expropriation of life and bodies. On the exploited side of the economic ledger, resistance to the system of debt more often takes the form of revenge against the masters rather than a revolution that has specified goals or is grounded in alternative ideas for society. A truly transformative, heroic, or noble response to debt would be a political deed: the abolition and non-payment of debt. However, in lieu of that possibility, particularly in platformed media productions that are complicit in the neo-feudal economic system that they critique, individual revenge or payback against the master serves as a temporary relinquishment of debt by way of messianic violence. Without having the space for a discussion of the anti-Semitic undertones of Nietzsche’s discussion of the slave morality of Abrahamic religions, I wish to draw from the connection he makes between the affect of ressentiment and the desire for values and revenge, which is pertinent to neo-feudalism’s institution of infinite debt and political responses to it: “This slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge” (36). Conversely, the same bourgeois morality based in ressentiment can also pathologize the other’s revenge, cynically presenting its violence as part of a cycle of immorality: an eternal return without difference, as opposed to Gilles Deleuze’s version of Nietzsche’s eternal return as intensive and differential (Difference and Repetition 222–61).

Revenge has always been an important plot element in socialist and anticolonial literature and film, but the media cultures of neo-feudalism find it difficult to articulate an ideological framework for revenge. Due in part to its history of Cold War military dictatorship and chaebol capitalism, South Korean films of the last two decades, and Bong Joon-ho’s films in particular, have been ahead of the curve in mediating neo-feudalism. “Hell Joseon,” a satirical term of ressentiment popular since 2015, refers to the feudal Joseon period and is directed at educational and economic systems that disguise class privilege as meritocracy while subjecting young adults to grueling college entrance exam preparation, post-graduation unemployment, overwork, and debt (Nahm). Tellingly, both the political Left and the political Right use the term. Hell Joseon has nothing to do with the notion of feudal remnants, or other stagist historical explanations for the fascist form of East Asian capitalism in the twentieth century. As with the term “neofeudalism,” Hell Joseon rather creates analogies between feudalism proper, the contemporary intensification of neoliberalism, and the turning inward of real subsumption. Already in 2007, leading up to the global economic crisis, Rob Wilson identifies the social relations appearing in the major mode of South Korean film exports, including Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, as “killer capitalism.” Contrasting representations of killer capitalism to more minor, independent modes in South Korean film, Wilson connects “vengeance” (boksu) and the spectacular violence that enacts it to a Pacific Rim economy formed through a layered history of genocidal colonialism, war, and rapid capital accumulation.

Bong’s insights into economic relations and his critical focus on social class in the context of US imperialism have proven refreshing to viewers who have grown tired of the occlusion of class in Hollywood cinema. Bong’s willingness to address class is in part responsible for Parasite‘s popularity and its Best Picture win at the 2020 Oscars, as evidenced by the somewhat overblown credit he gets for recognizing that the social effects of global capitalism supersede those of local national contexts. In an interview with The Black List, he says: “After Cannes, I was at the Sydney Film Festival, Munich, Telluride, Toronto—the reaction was all the same everywhere. I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism.” Bong understands rightly that the class themes of the film have allowed it to travel more easily; however, the film also does not move beyond the vengeful violence typical of revenge dramas in South Korean film. During the melee at the end of the film, the father of the poor family, Kim Ki-taek, murders the wealthy Mr. Park after Park recoils from the smell of Geun-se, who had been living secretly in Park’s basement for many years. The film’s use of olfactory affects as class markers is no doubt an interesting and meaningful element that connects Ki-taek to Geun-se at that moment even though they are at odds for most of the film. However, Ki-taek’s violence is represented as a momentary, psychotic response to class discrimination, in line with the rest of the film’s moral ambivalence about the criminal way the Kim family responds to their oppression. Caught in a cycle of ressentiment, no one in the film is capable of formulating an alternative morality to the bourgeois morality of good and evil. After his escape, Ki-taek simply takes the place of Geun-se, living as a near nonhuman in the mansion’s basement.

What, then, are the characteristics of this “same country of capitalism,” and how are Bong’s films embedded within it? In the cycles of apolitical ressentiment endemic to neofeudalism, more than one article on Parasite points out the irony that the film was bankrolled and produced by CJ Group and its vice chair Miky Lee, an ultrawealthy heiress to the Samsung Corporation who was on stage at the Academy Awards to accept the Best Picture award along with Bong. Making an obvious comparison with the house of the Park family in Parasite, a Dirt.com article includes an aerial photograph of the Lee family’s 8-acre Beverly Hills estate and its two mansions (McClain). It is possible to read such contradictions as ironies or hypocrisies at the level of the individual, but they also have bearing on the limits of class politics in Bong’s films and on the media cultures of neo-feudalism more broadly. These antagonisms suggest what is obvious: we do not all occupy the same positions within capitalism, even if we all live there. Just as cinema and television of the broadcast era struggle to self-consciously address their own often exploitative conditions of production and consumption, the cinema and streaming media of neo-feudalism contain these antagonisms within their narratives and visual modes.

Let us take Okja as another example of the insight and the limitations of the representation of neo-feudal economic relations in Bong’s films. The world of this film seems like a popular cinematic and televisual prefiguration of Jodi Dean’s theory of neo-feudalism. The cartoonish opening sequence utilizes web-style aesthetics in its critique of Grandpa Mirando’s old industrial factory: Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton) says that the Mirando Corporation committed atrocities against working people and the environment. She claims that in order to overcome that history, the Mirando Corporation will feed the world with non-GMO, eco-friendly super pigs derived from a super piglet discovered on a Chilean farm. In a competition that is later revealed to be an exercise in greenwashing, she says that the Mirando Corporation has given out a super piglet each to local farmers in twenty-six countries where it has offices, and each farmer will raise it “honoring traditional techniques unique to their respective cultures.” Whoever raises the biggest and most beautiful super pig over ten years will be given an award at an event in New York City where the twenty-six super pigs will be unveiled. After the opening credits, the film cuts to a rural mountain farm in South Korea ten years later, where a young girl, Mija (Ahn Seohyun), and her grandfather (Byun Hee-bong) have raised one of the super pigs, Okja. Television zoologist Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), the face of the Mirando Corporation, shows up with a television crew and a scientist who has been monitoring Okja’s vital signs remotely through a digital black box attached to Okja’s ear. But when Okja is en route to New York City, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) captures the pig and inserts a camera into the black box, which eventually records the inside of Mirando’s highly secure New Jersey factory farm where the super pigs are bred en masse for slaughter. Mija follows Okja to New York, and with the help of the ALF breaks into the factory farm, where with a gold pig statue given to her by her grandfather she purchases Okja from Lucy’s twin sister, the more cutthroat CEO Nancy Mirando, and returns the super pig to her family farm.

The parcelization of sovereignty under neo-feudalism appears in the film in Mirando’s control and surveillance over the twenty-six super piglets in the countries where it has offices. Nation-state borders and regulations are circumvented by the capital of corporations, and by the digital technologies that connect the various local farms and allow the corporation to surveil its property in the hinterlands. The launch at the beginning of the film invokes the apocalypse of overpopulation and food shortage as a tool of governing, because it couples the fear of impending ecological disaster with the marketing of a greenwashed commodity solution. The lords of Mirando expropriate the farm family’s affective and physical labor for ten years, solely with the purpose of creating a digitally reproducible spectacle of competition. Mija is under the impression, created by the grandfather, that Okja belongs to the family, an illusion that is shattered when Mirando comes to repossess the super pig after the ten-year rental. The exploitative relation of rent is tied to Mija’s and her grandfather’s physical and affective labor of loving and caring for the animal. Mija sees ownership as care, whereas the corporation (and the grandfather) see it in terms of capital and control over rent and competition. The grandfather is reconciled to his relation as debtor to Mirando, remaining morally loyal to an unequal contract that only promises the family temporary capital and temporary digital connection to the global economy, as well as the speculative possibility of future earnings. Mija however refuses to feel that indebtedness or to recognize its contract, and is driven solely by her desire to save Okja from being made a cultural commodity or, worse, slaughtered. Her refusal to participate in the economy of care and indebtedness set up by Mirando makes her the hero of the film and distinguishes her from the activists of the ALF, all of whom reveal their moral limitations at some point.

Like Bong’s earlier monster film, The Host (2006), Okja grafts a political critique of the negative social and ecological effects of the US military and corporations onto blockbuster-style genre, action, and melodrama. It also engages in penetrating ways the new forms of sovereignty, class relations, spatiality, and apocalypticism that have emerged with neo-feudalism. However, like Parasite, Okja does not address the political question posed by Dean: How can the Left respond to neo-feudalism without simply reinforcing its tendencies? It would be naïve to expect that streaming media such as Okja could be politically self-conscious in an exhaustive way, yet the ending of the film exhibits a common limitation of the media cultures of neo-feudalism. The antagonisms and contradictions in the film are resolved through melodrama, which naturalizes the neo-feudal system as an unbreakable cycle and represents political conflict as an expression of individual ressentiment. Dialectics are replaced with individual redemption. The melodramatic mode presents a Manichaean moral universe structured by Nietzsche’s “bourgeois morality”—inner goodness and innocence are contrasted with an external evil and are redeemed by way of an allegorical magic. The origin of the grandfather’s gold pig is unknown, but it is so valuable that Nancy Mirando accepts it as payment to release Okja, who is back on Mija’s family farm at the end of the film. On the one hand, the gold pig is a humorous symbol of the value of family heirlooms and provides for a purposefully anticlimactic and microcosmic conclusion to the conflicts, reminiscent of a fairy tale. However, the gold pig is also magic capital, seemingly from nowhere, that brings order, normalcy, and comfort to the weighty issues of sovereignty, class exploitation, marginalization, and even apocalypse. The individual debt is paid, the family pet rescued, and the small Korean farming family can remain good; however, the system of genetic engineering, animal abuse, and exploitation is undeterred.

The social and economic issues in Okja are perhaps too large, pertinent, and encompassing for us to feel satisfied with a melodramatic (and comedic) conclusion that dissolves all of the film’s fascinating conflicts while expressing hesitancy about the effectiveness of organized political action. Although the ending of Parasite is more tragic in tone than is Okja‘s, the gold pig and the return of Okja to the family farm serve the same narrative function as Ki-taek’s revenge killing of Park and his exile in the basement of the mansion. They both present as intractable the power of neo-feudalism and its corporate sovereigns, lords, and elites to individuate collective social and political conflicts through its technological sovereignty and control of space. Ressentiment detached from deeds transforms into a desire for values, revenge, and a moral feeling of security. Under neo-feudalism, such desires are prevalent on both the Left and the Right. If nothing can really change, at least good and evil, self and other, can be clarified, and the identity of the individual maintained. Bong’s films, and much of the media of neofeudalism, express both the repressiveness of capitalism’s contemporary transformations and present in alienated form those affects through which indebtedness and the moral order reproduce themselves.

Perhaps the idea of “mutual aid” of Peter Kropotkin, who supported the liberation of his family’s serfs in 1861, has regained such widespread use and effectiveness in contemporary political and social movements because it is one antidote to the ressentiment of lords and serfs and the fallacies of Social Darwinism (ix). The interspecies connection between Mija and Okja is based in an affection of mutual aid, or cooperation in Kropotkin’s original naturalist formulation, that occurs outside cycles of debt and exchange (notwithstanding that Kropotkin himself largely remained tied to the notion of species). So the film does hint at a political response to neofeudalism but stops short, in its allegorical fairy tale, of articulating this response more fully outside the framework of individual morality, ownership, and vindication.

Racial Capitalism within Neo-Feudalism: Us and Sorry to Bother You

Although they sometimes deal with the US military and corporate occupation and sovereignty over South Korea, Bong Joon-ho’s films are not particularly nationalistic. Okja ends with the super pig returned to the family farm in the remote mountains of South Korea, but it would be a stretch to claim that the ending of Okja presents a clear political contrast between an idyllic and pastoral Korean hinterland and the evils of US capitalism. Bong largely stays true to his statement that we all live in a single country called capitalism and addresses US empire not by asserting Korean national identity, but rather by engaging creatively with Hollywood genres in order to critique various intersections between capital, empire, and the nation-state. There are moments when this critical play with genre brings to light political and social perspectives that would not appear in a typical Hollywood film, and other more typical moments of return to identity, security, and individuation, by way of ressentiment and revenge.

Jordan Peele’s Us and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You are also revenge narratives of a sort. However, these films disrupt the more sanguine, cyclical representation of neo-feudal exploitation by reintroducing the problem of racial capitalism, a term of Cedric J. Robinson’s that has increased in popular political usage with the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. These films present fantastic worlds that are divided into lords and serfs and reproduced through indebtedness. Rather than melodrama returning the characters to their individuality and their proper morality, however, they remain what Deleuze calls “dividuals”—the effect of multiple techniques of control and multiple performances and mutations of class, race, and species (“Postscript”). It is Bong’s tendency to universalize that occasionally gets him into trouble when he humanizes his characters without recognizing the irreconcilability of the multiple positions of the dividual. By virtue of his revenge murder of Park and his exile in the basement of the mansion, Ki-taek’s and the family’s double identities are resolved, just as Mija returns to her family farm through her magic payment of her debt. In both Us and Sorry to Bother You, in contrast, characters are at least double throughout, and actually multiple. What do the doppelgänger motif in Us and the hybridity of the equisapiens in Sorry to Bother You have to do with racial capitalism under neo-feudalism? Why do the two worlds of these films remain open at the end, rather than being defined by mythical cycles of exploitation and revenge?

In contrast to Peele’s earlier Get Out (2017), which depicts wealthy, mostly White liberals luring Black people to the countryside to hypnotize them and sell them as slaves, Us does not refer directly to slavery or to the origins of American capital accumulation in racial capitalism. Every American, regardless of race, seems to have a tethered double who lives underground and is eventually organized by Red (Lupita Nyong’o)—who we later find out is actually Adelaide—for the revolution of untethering. Dressed in red jump suits and wielding scissors, they go above ground to kill their doubles and enact their own version of Hands Across America, an event in 1986 when Red attacked Adelaide and switched places with her. (Presumably, Hands Across America was one of impressionable Adelaide’s last memories from her life above ground). The relation between above-ground Americans and their tethered doubles seems to be primarily an allegory of class, of lords and serfs. The government initially created the tethered doubles to control their originals, but the program was unsuccessful. The tethered are driven underground and mechanically act out the actions of their originals, because they share a single soul with them, and many go mad because of their lack of freedom. According to this spatialized “double-consciousness (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 13), the materialistic and shallow bourgeoisie cultivate their commodities and their superficial appearances above ground while the tethered below are forced to perform these same labors with none of their affective meaning or value.

In his theory of racial capitalism, Cedric J. Robinson complicates the economic determinism of the Marxist understanding of slavery, showing that slavery was neither an effect of nor was ended by capitalist development and the formation of a proletarian class of wage laborers. Slavery was rather born of the racialist worldview of Western civilization, which informed all political defenses and critical responses to industrial capitalism and its immiseration of society—the liberal, conservative, socialist, nationalist, and eventually fascist politics of the European bourgeoisie—from the eighteenth century to the present (Robinson 1–70). Racist state and civil institutions, including nation-states as racial states, cannot be understood by economic or historical determinism, nor can the history of capitalism be considered without regarding them as fundamental.

The fantastic horror world of Us presents an allegory of a double consciousness of both Black and White characters, which is in line with Du Bois’s understanding of it (he did, after all, also give the Hegelian treatment to White people in the “The Souls of White Folk”), and also introduces divisibility into the representation of subjects and their control. In the hall of mirrors Adelaide enters in 1986, that leads to the world of the tethered, there is a sign pointing to the entry door: “Vision Quest: Find Yourself.” Of course, being a horror film, this vision quest does not lead to the hominess of the self and family, but rather to a confrontation with the uncanny, that is, the foreign and the strange in what is supposedly the most familiar. (Freud spends a number of paragraphs in “The Uncanny” on the doppelgänger motif.) Once the tethered are above ground, enacting their violent uprising, Peele uses the uncanny aesthetic to full effect, showing that when enslavement is no longer a matter of ownership of Blacks by Whites and the direct conflation of skin color with economic and political rights and power, then the dividing of the self into multiple intersecting racial, class, and gender identities as a technology of control is essential to the reproduction of capitalism. When Red (Adelaide) states that “we are Americans,” it is obvious that “we” and its correspondent Us refer to both family and nation, and that the divided selves of the characters refer to two or more Americas, to the multiple positions within the same country of capitalism. Prior to the insurrection of the tethered, this dividing of racial subjectivity is already in operation. The Wilsons’ consumer life is a cheaper version of the Tylers’, and Gabe is jealous of the White family’s commodities. Meanwhile, Kitty Tyler hates her husband, gets plastic surgery, and is jealous of Adelaide’s beauty, and the twins Becca and Lindsey Tyler call Jason Wilson “weird” when they talk to Zora on the beach.

In often comedic ways, the insurrection of the tethered magnifies this racialized ressentiment between the two families. After the Wilsons escape their tethered, they go to the house of the Tylers, who have already been killed. There the Wilsons have to defend themselves against the White family’s tethered. Because they are fighting the zombie versions of the White family, they can express their built-up aggression toward them—Gabe symbolically leads Tex (Josh’s tethered) to Josh’s boat and shoots him with the flare gun; a low angle shot captures Zora as she beats a twin’s double overzealously with a golf club. Jason, who is often suspicious of his mother, watches disturbed as Adelaide (Red) finishes off Dahlia (Kitty’s tethered). The scenes at the Tylers’ house are particularly uncanny and humorous. The Wilsons show that they are capable of brutal violence, and their actions blur further with those of their doubles.

Neo-feudalism is an intensified capitalist system, and the capitalist system is a racialist system. In the aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crash, it became apparent that the predatory lending practices of subprime loans were made disproportionately to Blacks (G. White). The explanation is clear and documented: lower credit scores, lower income, and smaller down payments and collateral—all effects of centuries of unequal capital accumulation—mean higher interest rates and more expensive mortgages. Through predatory lending and other financial practices that exploit racial minorities, the financial sector of neo-feudalism, with its dependency on the marketization of debt, reproduces class inequalities in a racialized manner. Attention is rightfully given to police brutality and the prison industrial complex—including prison labor and the exploitative cash bail system—in contemporary analyses of American racial capitalism, but the uneven distribution of debt and credit along racial lines is equally important. Within Us‘s myth of neo-feudal class relations, the animosity that the Wilsons harbor for the Tylers is not racially neutral.

Borrowing is a mode of impersonation that splits consciousness. On the one hand, people gain access to the accoutrements of middle-class life, such as houses, cars, and boats; on the other hand, they lose their future freedom from work and their freedom of movement, because they must service the debt that makes their impersonation of class mobility possible. The degree of wealth inequality in the US would be impossible to maintain without the governmentality of debt. While Us does not address financial debt directly, the division of America into creditors and debtors, lords and serfs, is certainly in the background of the film’s mythology. Debt creates a duplicity between the consuming self and the working self, a duplicity that is structurally distinct from commodity fetishism because of the intermediation and primacy of finance capital rather than of production in the splitting of the subject. Unlike in Okja, in Us none of the characters returns to a stable individuality through ressentiment, not only because we find out that Adelaide is actually Red but also because the conflict with the tethered is not a Manichaean one that would allow for the reestablishment of a stable sense of good and evil through revenge or magic. Neo-feudalism is a system of control that governs through multiple divisions of the subject that occur differentially according to racialized positions within capitalism, and dividuals inhabit the country of capitalism according to their multiple connections to racial violence and disenfranchisement. One strength of Us is that it tracks these multiple political relations while foregoing any final determination of “us” and “them”—racial positions are differentiated by class, and class positions are differentiated by race.

Sorry to Bother You is one of the more radically anti-capitalist mainstream American films to come out in the last decade and pinpoints several characteristics of neo-feudalism and its modes of subjection. As his fellow workers at the telemarketing company Regalview organize and strike for better pay and benefits, the aptly named Cash Green (LaKeith Stanfield), who makes huge sales as a telemarketer using his “White voice” (played by David Cross), gets promoted to the elite upstairs offices of Powercallers, where he makes million-dollar deals in slave labor for Worryfree (a company dealing in human [variable] capital that signs its workers to lifetime contracts while housing and feeding them in massive cramped dormitories). Cash’s success pits him against the labor movement, his friends, and eventually his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), and is directly connected to the housing crisis and the gentrification of Oakland. His primary motivation is to pay off the mortgage of his uncle Sergio (Terry Crews), who says he is going to default on the loan and work for Worryfree. Cash’s debt to Sergio and Sergio’s debt to the bank drive Cash to use his White voice technique, taught to him by older Regalview employee Langston (Danny Glover), in order to move up the corporate ladder until his job is to sell workers into the very slavery from which he manages to spare his uncle. Just as Us explores the uncanny horrors of impersonation created by indebtedness to an invisible other, Cash’s friends react with queasiness when he uses his White voice outside of the workplace (e.g. at the bar), when his alienated and racialized affective labor blurs into the sphere of consumption and comradery.

Like Okja, Sorry to Bother You takes up the problem of the parcelization of sovereignty, but even more negatively. Worryfree is not simply a multinational corporation but also a sovereign that replaces the social contract of citizenship with lifelong labor contracts whereby workers trade in their worry about the future for enslavement as human capital. Interestingly, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), a casual Bay Area bro, says that his company Worryfree will “save America” from the very phenomena that Marx discusses in Volume 3 of Capital before Marx gets to the discussion of surplus profit: an overproduction of goods, unemployment, and decreases in consumer capacity and in relative surplus caused by increases in the efficiency of capital and the immiseration of the proletariat, as well as the concomitant tendency for the rate of profit to fall. More than any other work of neo-feudalism, Sorry to Bother You points to the contemporary economic crises within which Right and Left political positions emerge and disseminate. On one side, you have a response to capitalist crisis that insists on the intensification of the biopolitics of neoliberal governmentality, the transformation of Gary S. Becker’s “human capital” into new forms of serfdom or even slavery (Worryfree’s slave labor is not a speculative proposition if we consider private corporations’ use of prison labor not as some sort of rehabilitative response to crime, but rather as a neo-feudal response to capitalist crisis) (Becker; Foucault 226–30). Responding to capitalist crisis, corporations devise new ways to produce profit by institutionalizing marketable debt and controlling access to capital through rent. At the economic bottom you have forms of subjection embedded in racial capitalism and the affectations required (e.g. White voice) for Pyrrhic success in the service economy. On the other side, there is a desire to return to the social-democratic nation-state as a protector of workers’ rights against the excesses of capital.

Sorry to Bother You does not present its politics without self-reflection. It also points to the interventions of the technologies of neo-feudalism, including the fascist mediation of violence symbolized by the fictional TV show I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me and the meme of a striker hitting the scab Cash in the head with a soda can, as well as the engineering of human capital in the creation of the equisapiens—horse-human hybrids that serve as chattel slave labor. By showing Cash literally falling into people’s living rooms when he makes his telemarketing calls, the film directs our attention to a problem that also concerns Jodi Dean. If social space is now dominated by communicative capitalism to the degree that there are no more outside spaces, then even modes of resistance to neo-feudalism can very easily reinforce its modes of division and control. Cash depends on the mediation of mass communication in order to hide his blackness. If the cinematic fantasy of equisapien revolution at the end of the film has any bearing on the real problems that Sorry to Bother You analyzes, it would need to be more than a fantasy of revenge that only amounts to a temporary catharsis of ressentiment. After all, such catharsis is readily and continuously available through the very digital platforms that reproduce the relations of debt. In so far as the nation state remains an agent of racial capitalism, imperialism, and ecological ruin, a revolution beyond revenge would also need to avoid being contained by the national borders of electoral politics and social democracy. The fantastic elements and revenge sequences of the more lucrative media cultures of neo-feudalism lead us to realize that global revolutionary politics are both beyond their narrative scope and exceed the political economy of their production and distribution.

Travis Workman is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His recent work includes essays on humanism and area studies and a forthcoming volume of translations of Korean literary and cultural criticism. He is finishing a book on North Korean and South Korean film melodrama of the Cold War era and starting one on neo-feudalism and contemporary media.

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