Recovering Feudal Subjectivities

Abstract:

Poststructuralism and postmodernism have helped Marxist political economy criticize and transform its determinism and teleology in order to avoid reliance on modernist categories. However, the question of (class) subjectivity, especially in noncapitalist exploitative contexts, has remained underdeveloped. This paper fills this theoretical gap, conceptualizing feudal class subjectivity. Adapting Gramsci's notion of hegemony, we propose that notions of hierarchy and reciprocity between the exploiters and exploited help us understand hegemony under feudal class relations. An analysis of sharecropping relations in the Southern states of the postbellum United States is used to enrich and deepen our analysis of feudal subjectivity. We end by discussing, without any reliance on modernist conceptions of the rights of the individualist subject, how agency as the ability to challenge hegemony can emerge from within the world-view of such subjectivities.

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