No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.
No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.