Everyday tiered pricing makes modern society subjectively feudal

Evidence

Wealth-determined stratification of access and provision is hardly new under the sun. But neoliberal privatization and legitimation of inequality make it more intense, more widely disseminated, and more deeply penetrated into everyday life than at any time since feudalism. The tiered pricing of service, access, and treatment for everything everywhere accustoms all to inegalitarianism and makes us more feudal than democratic in subjectivity and ethos. … Attention to such effects resets the tired Left debate about whether right-wing populism today is born of class or other kinds of resentment, whether it is the rage of the economically left behinds or the rage of dethroned white masculinism. The neoliberalization of everyday life—not merely its inegalitarian effects, but also its relentlessly inegalitarian spirit—richly compounds the two. — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 298

Categorization

• SEED: The boarding-group vignette and tiered-access inventory could anchor an essay on how consumption now performs status hierarchy.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern wealth is inscribed as a palimpsest over precapitalist exploitation — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1021

Broader Connections

• Postmodern wealth is inscribed as a palimpsest over precapitalist exploitation #expands (0.75) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1021