Neofeudalism - The End of Capitalism - Los Angeles Review of Books

7/6/2021 Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
- Los Angeles Review of Books
DONATE TODAY!
articles reviews sections blarb print book a/v events workshop channels about
club get involved sign in
MENU
Neofeudalism: The End of

Capitalism?
By Jodi Dean
ab v g f d
MAY 12, 2020
IN CAPITAL IS DEAD, McKenzie Wark asks: What if we’re

not in capitalism anymore but something worse? The
question is provocative, sacrilegious, unsettling as it forces
anti-capitalists to confront an unacknowledged
https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/ 1/22
7/6/2021 Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism? - Los Angeles Review of Books
attachment to capitalism.
Communism was supposed
to come after capitalism and
it’s not here, so doesn’t that
mean we are still in
capitalism? Left
unquestioned, this
assumption hinders political
analysis. If we’ve rejected
strict historical determinism, we should be able to
consider the possibility that capitalism has mutated into
something qualitatively different. Wark’s question invites
a thought experiment: what tendencies in the present
indicate that capitalism is transforming itself into
something worse?
Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to

name tendencies associated with extreme inequality,
generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the
level of the state. Drawing from libertarian economist
Tyler Cowen’s emphasis on the permanence of extreme
inequality in the global, automated economy, the
conservative geographer Joel Kotkin envisions the US
future as mass serfdom. A property-less underclass will
survive by servicing the needs of high earners as personal
assistants, trainers, child-minders, cooks, cleaners, et
cetera. The only way to avoid this neofeudal nightmare is
by subsidizing and deregulating the high-employment
industries that make the American lifestyle of suburban
home ownership and the open road possible —
construction and real estate; oil, gas, and automobiles; and
corporate agribusiness. Unlike the specter of serfdom
haunting Friedrich Hayek’s attack on socialism, Kotkin
locates the adversary within capitalism. High tech,
finance, and globalization are creating “a new social order

that in some ways more closely resembles feudal
structure — with its often unassailable barriers to
mobility — than the chaotic emergence of industrial
capitalism.” In this libertarian/conservative imaginary,
feudalism occupies the place of the enemy formerly held
by communism. The threat of centralization and the
threat to private property are the ideological elements
that remain the same.
A number of technology commentators share the

libertarian/conservative critique of technology’s role in
contemporary feudalization even as they don’t embrace
fossil fuels and suburbia. Already in 2010, in his
influential book, You Are Not a Gadget, tech guru Jaron
Lanier observed the emergence of peasants and lords of
the internet. This theme has increased in prominence as a
handful of tech companies have become ever richer and
more extractive, turning their owners into billionaires on
the basis of the cheap labor of their workers, the free
labor of their users, and the tax breaks bestowed on them
by cities desperate to attract jobs. Apple, Facebook,
Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (the parent company
name for Google) together are worth more than most
every country in the world (except the United States,
China, Germany, and Japan). The economic scale and
impact of these tech super giants, or, overlords, is greater
than that of most so-called sovereign states. Evgeny
Morozov describes their dominance as a “hyper-modern
form of feudalism.”
Albert-László Barabási explained the processes

underpinning such a neofeudalism in his analysis of the
structure of complex networks, that is, networks
characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential

attachment. These are networks where people voluntarily
make links or choices. The number of links per site grow
over time, and people like things because others like them
(the Netflix recommendation system, for instance, relies
on this assumption). Link distribution in complex
networks follows a power law where the most popular
item generally has twice as many hits or links as the
second most popular, which has twice as many as the
third most and so on down to the insignificant differences
between those in the long tail of the distribution curve.
This winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most effect is the
power law shape of the distribution. The one at the top
has significantly more than the ones at the bottom. The
shape the distribution takes is not a bell curve; it’s a long
tail — a few billionaires, a billion precarious workers. The
structure of complex networks invites inclusion: the more
items in the network, the larger the rewards for those at
the top. It also induces competition — for attention,
resources, money, jobs — anything that is given a network
form. And it leads to concentration. The result, then, of
free choice, growth, and preferential attachment is
hierarchy, power law distributions where those at the top
have vastly more than those at the bottom.
Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be

stopped. But that takes political will and the institutional
power to implement it. The neoliberal policies of the 20th
century, however, strove to create conditions that would
facilitate rather than thwart free choice, growth, and
preferential attachment.
Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth

of Neoliberalism documents the neoliberal strategy of
undermining the authority of the nation-state over its

economy in the interest of advancing global trade.
Threatened by the organized demands of the newly
postcolonial nations of the Global South for reparations,
sovereignty over their own natural resources, stabilized
commodity prices, and the regulation of transnational
corporations, neoliberals in the 1970s sought to
“circumvent the authority of national governments.” They
advocated a multilevel approach to regulation, a
competitive federalism that would let capital discipline
governments while itself remaining immunized from
democratic control. In the words of Hans Willgerodt, one
of the neoliberals Slobodian studies, the new competitive
federalism required the state to “share its sovereignty
downward with federal structures and bind itself upward
within an international legal community.”
Rather than focusing on the origins of neoliberalism,

Albena Azmanova’s Capitalism on Edge demonstrates the
ways neoliberalism in practice has led to a new precarity
capitalism. Policies pushing deregulation and global free
trade have had unexpected outcomes. The global market
morphed from a system of “national economies integrated
through trade agreements into transnational production
networks.” Because of the unclear and uncertain
contribution of these networks to national economies,
maintaining the competitiveness of national economies
has become “a top policy concern.” Competitiveness has
replaced competition and growth as a state goal, leading
states to prioritize not a level playing field and the
dismantling of monopolies but “to aid specific economic
actors — those who are best positioned to perform well in
the global competition for profit.” Acknowledging how
the private sector has always benefited from public funds,
Azmanova emphasizes the novelty of a form of capitalism

where “public authority handpicks the companies on
which to bestow this privilege.” States don’t intervene to
break up monopolies. They engender and award them.
Monopoly concentration, intensified inequality, and the

subjection of the state to the market have transformed
accumulation such that it now occurs as much through
rent, debt, and force as it does through commodity
production. Azmanova points out that the privatization of
sectors of the economy relatively immunized from
competition — energy, rail, broadband — gave owners
“the privileged status of rentiers.” Globally, in the
knowledge and technology industries, rental income
accruing from intellectual property rights exceeds income
from the production of goods. In the United States,
financial services contribute more to GDP than
manufactured goods contribute. Capital isn’t reinvested in
production; it’s eaten up and redistributed as rents.
Valorization processes have spread far beyond the factory,
into complex, speculative, and unstable circuits
increasingly dependent on surveillance, coercion, and
violence.
Capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism.
II.
Neofeudalism does not imply that contemporary

communicative or networked capitalism identically
reproduces all the features of European feudalism. It
doesn’t. In fact, as historians have successfully
demonstrated, the very idea of a single European
feudalism is a fiction. Different feudalisms developed
across the continent in response to different pressures.

Viewing contemporary capitalism in terms of its
feudalizing tendencies illuminates a new socioeconomic
structure with four interlocking features: parcellated
sovereignty, new lords and peasants, hinterlandization,
and catastrophism.
Parcellated sovereignty
Historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood

present the parcelization of sovereignty as a key feature of
European feudalism. Feudal society emerged as the
imperial administration of the Romans “gave way to a
patchwork of jurisdictions in which state functions were
vertically and horizontally fragmented.” Local
arrangements taking a variety of forms, including
contractual relations between lords and kings and lords
and vassals, came to supplement regional administration.
Arbitration replaced the rule of law. The line between
legality and illegality weakened. Political authority and
economic power blended together as feudal lords
extracted a surplus from peasants through legal coercion,
legal in part because the lords decided the law that
applied to the peasants in their jurisdiction. Wood writes,
“The effect was to combine the private exploitation of
labour with the public role of administration, jurisdiction
and enforcement.”
Under neofeudalism, the directly political character of

society reasserts itself. Global financial institutions and
digital technology platforms use debt to redistribute
wealth from the world’s poorest to the richest. Nation-
states promote and protect specific private corporations.

Political power is exercised with and as economic power,
not only taxes but fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses,
patents, jurisdictions, and borders. At the same time,
economic power shields those who wield it from the
reach of state law. Ten percent of global wealth is hoarded
in off-shore accounts to avoid taxation. Cities and states
relate to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and
Google/Alphabet as if these corporations were themselves
sovereign states — negotiating with, trying to attract, and
cooperating with them on their terms. Cash-strapped
municipalities use elaborate systems of fines to
expropriate money from people directly, impacting poor
people the hardest. In Punishment Without Crime, Alexandra
Natapoff documents the dramatic scope of misdemeanor
law in the already enormous US carceral system. Poor
people, disproportionately people of color, are arrested on
bogus charges and convinced to plead guilty to avoid the
jail time that they could incur should they contest the
charges. Not only does the guilty plea go on their record,
but they open themselves up to fines that set them up for
even more fees and fines should they miss a payment. We
got a brief look into this system of legal illegality and
unjust administration of justice in the wake of the riots in
Ferguson, Missouri, that followed the murder of Michael
Brown: “[T]he city’s municipal court and policing
apparatus openly extracted millions of dollars from its
low-income African American population.” Police were
instructed “to make arrests and issue citations in order to
raise revenue.” Like minions of feudal lords, they used
force to expropriate value from the people.
New lords and peasants
Feudal relations are characterized by a fundamental

inequality that enables the direct exploitation of peasants
by lords. Perry Anderson describes the exploitative
monopolies such as watermills that were controlled by
the lord; peasants were obliged to have their grain ground
at their lord’s mill, a service for which they had to pay. So
not only did peasants occupy and till land that they did
not own, but they dwelled under conditions where the
feudal lord was, as Marx says, “the manager and master of
the process of production and of the entire process of
social life.” Unlike the capitalist whose profit rests on the
surplus value generated by waged workers through the
production of commodities, the lord extracts value
through monopoly, coercion, and rent.
Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire

owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers
and billions of users the new peasants. Technology
companies employ a relatively small percentage of the
workforce, but their effects have been tremendous,
remaking entire industries around the acquisition,
mining, and deployment of data. The smaller workforces
are indicative of digital technology’s neofeudalizing
tendency. Capital accumulation occurs less through
commodity production and wage labor than through
services, rents, licenses, fees, work done for free (often
under the masquerade of participation), and data treated
as a natural resource. Positioning themselves as
intermediaries, platforms constitute grounds for user
activities, conditions of possibility for interactions to
occur. Google makes it possible to find information in an
impossibly dense and changing information environment.

Amazon lets us easily locate items, compare prices, and
make purchases from established as well as unknown
vendors. Uber enables strangers to share rides. Airbnb
does the same for houses and apartments. All are enabled
by an immense generation and circulation of data.
Platforms don’t just rely on data, they produce more of it.
The more people use platforms, the more effective, and
powerful these platforms become, ultimately
transforming the larger environment of which they are a
part.
Platforms are doubly extractive. Unlike the water mill

peasants had no choice but to use, platforms not only
position themselves so that their use is basically necessary
(like banks, credit cards, phones, and roads) but that their
use generates data for their owners. Users not only pay
for the service but the platform collects the data
generated by the use of the service. The cloud platform
extracts rents and data, like land squared. The most
extreme examples are Uber and Airbnb, which extract
rent without property by relying on an outsourced
workforce responsible for its own maintenance, training,
and means of work. One’s car isn’t for personal transport.
It’s for making money. One’s apartment isn’t a place to
live; it’s something to rent out. Items of consumption are
reconfigured as means of accumulation as personal
property becomes an instrument for the capital and data
accumulation of the lords of platform, Uber and Airbnb.
This tendency toward becoming-peasant, that is, to
becoming one who owns means of production but whose
labor increases the capital of the platform owner, is
neofeudal.
The tech giants are extractive. Like so many tributary

demands, their tax breaks take money from communities.
Their presence drives up rents and real estate prices,
driving out affordable apartments, small businesses, and
low-income people. Shoshana Zuboff’s study of
“surveillance capitalism” brings out a further dimension
of tech feudalism — military service. Like lords to kings,
Facebook and Google cooperate with powerful states,
sharing information that these states are legally barred
from gathering themselves. Overall, the extractive
dimension of networked technologies is now pervasive,
intrusive, and unavoidable. The present is not literally an
era of peasants and lords. Nevertheless, the distance
between rich and poor is increasing, aided by a
differentiated legal architecture that protects corporations,
owners, and landlords while it immiserates and
incarcerates the working and lower class.
Hinterlandization
A third feature of neofeudalism is the spatiality associated

with feudalism, one of protected, often lively centers
surrounded by agricultural and desolate hinterlands. We
might also characterize this as a split between town and
country, municipal and rural areas, urban communes and
the surrounding countryside, or, more abstractly between
an inside walled off from an outside, a division between
what is secure and what is at risk, who is prosperous and
who is desperate. Wood says that medieval cities were
essentially oligarchies, “with dominant classes enriched
by commerce and financial services for kings, emperors
and popes. Collectively, they dominated the surrounding

countryside […] extracting wealth from it in one way or
another.” Outside the cities were the nomads and
migrants who, facing unbearable conditions, sought new
places to live and work yet all too often came up against
the walls.
US hinterlands are sites of loss and dismantlement, places

with fantasies of a flourishing capitalist past that for a
while might have let some linger in the hope that their
lives and their children’s lives might actually get better.
Remnants of an industrial capitalism that’s left them
behind for cheaper labor, the hinterlands are ripe for the
new intensified exploitation of neofeudalism. No longer
making things, people in the hinterlands persist through
warehouses, call centers, Dollar Stores, and fast food. Phil
A. Neel’s recent book, Hinterland, notes patterns between
China, Egypt, Ukraine, and the United States. They are all
places with desolate abandoned wastelands and cities on
the brink of overload.
Politically, the desperation of the hinterlands manifests in

the movements of those outside the cities, movements
that are sometimes around environmental issues (fracking
and pipeline struggles), sometimes around land
(privatization and expropriation), sometimes around the
reduction of services (hospital and school closings). In the
United States, the politics of guns positions the
hinterlands against the urban. We might also note the way
the division between hinterlands and municipality gets
reinscribed within cities themselves. This manifests in
both the abandonment of poor areas and their eradication
in capitalist gentrification land grabs. A city gets richer
and more people become homeless — think San

Francisco, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles.
The increased attention to social reproduction responds to

hinterlandization, that is, to the loss of a general capacity
to reproduce the basic conditions of livable life. This
appears in rising suicide rates, increase in anxiety and
drug addiction, declining birth rates, lower rates of life
expectancy, and in the United States, the psychotic
societal self-destruction of mass shootings. It appears in
the collapsed infrastructures, undrinkable water, and
unbreathable air. The hinterlands are written on people’s
bodies and on the land. With closures of hospitals and
schools, and the diminution of basic services, life becomes
more desperate and uncertain.
Catastrophism
Finally, neofeudalism brings with it the insecurity and

anxiety of an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. There is
good reason to feel insecure. The catastrophe of capitalist
expropriation of the social surplus in the setting of a
grossly unequal and warming planet is real.
A loose, mystical neofeudal ideology, one that knits

together and amplifies apocalyptic insecurity, seems to be
taking form in the new embrace of the occult, techno-
pagan, and anti-modern. Examples include Jordan
Peterson’s mystical Jungianism and Alexander Dugin’s
mythical geopolitics of Atlantis and Hyperborea. We
might also note the rise of tech sector neo-reactionaries
like PayPal’s billionaire founder Peter Thiel, who argues
that freedom is incompatible with democracy. In a lecture

in 2012, Thiel explained the link between feudalism and
tech start-ups: “No founder or CEO has absolute power.
It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest the
top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then
blame them if and when things go wrong.” Along with
other Silicon Valley capitalists, Thiel is concerned to
protect his fortune from democratic impingement, and so
advocates strategies of exodus and isolation such as living
on the sea and space colonization, whatever it takes to
save wealth from taxation. Extreme capitalism goes over
into the radical decentralization of neofeudalism.
For those on the other side of the neofeudal divide,

anxiety and insecurity are addressed less by ideology than
they are by opioids, alcohol, and food, anything to dull
the pain of hopeless, mindless, endless drudgery. Emily
Guendelsberger describes the stress caused by constant
technological surveillance on the job — the risk of being
fired for being a few seconds late, for not meeting the
quotas, for using the bathroom too many times.
Repetitive, low-control, high-stress work like that
associated with work that is technologically monitored
correlates directly with “depression and anxiety.”
Uncertain schedules, lauded as flexible, unreliable pay,
because wage theft is ubiquitous, are stressful, deadening.
Neofeudal catastrophism may be individual, familial, or
local. Getting worked up about climate change is hard
when you’ve lived catastrophe for a few generations.
III.
What’s the benefit of thinking of our present precarity

capitalism as something post-capitalist, as neofeudal? For
conservatives like Kotkin, the neofeudal hypothesis helps

them identify what they want to defend — carbon
capitalism and the American way of life — and against
whom they need to fight — that segment of the capitalist
elite that is enriching itself at the expense of the middle
class, namely, green high-tech entrepreneurs and their
allies in finance. Neofeudalism is part of a diagnosis
aiming to enlist working-class support for a particular
section of the capitalist class, namely, fossil fuels, real
estate, and big agriculture.
For those on the left, neofeudalism lets us understand the

primary political conflict as arising out of neoliberalism.
The big confrontation today is not between democracy
and fascism. Although popular with liberals, this
formulation makes little sense given the power of
oligarchs — financiers, media and real estate moguls,
carbon and tech billionaires. Viewing 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. Underlying the
politicization toward the right is economics: complex
networks produce extremes of inequality, winner-take-all
or winner-take-most distributions. The rightward shift
responds to this intensification of inequality. When the
left is weak, or blocked from political expression by
mainstream media and capitalist political parties, popular
anger gets expressed by others willing to attack the
system. In the present, these others are the far right.
Thinking in terms of neofeudalism thus forces us to
confront the impact of extreme economic inequality on
political society and institutions. It makes us reckon with
the fact of billionaires hoarding trillions of dollars of
assets and walling themselves into their own enclaves

while millions become climate refugees and hundreds of
millions encounter diminished life prospects, an
intensifying struggle just to survive.
The neofeudalism wager also signals a change in labor

relations. Social democracy was premised on a
compromise between labor and capital. Organized labor in
much of the Global North delivered a cooperative
working class in exchange for a piece of the good life.
Labor’s defeat and the subsequent dismantling of the
welfare state should have demonstrated once and for all
the bankruptcy of a strategy requiring compromise with
capitalist exploitation. Yet some socialists continue to
hope for a kinder, gentler capitalism — as if capitalists
would capitulate just to be nice, as if they, too, weren’t
subject to market logics that make stock buybacks more
attractive than investment in production. The neofeudal
hypothesis tells us that any labor struggle premised on the
continuation of capitalism is dead in the water. Capitalism
has already become something worse.
In the service-dominated economies of the Global North,

majorities work in service sectors. Some find that their
phones, bikes, cars, and homes have lost their character as
personal property and been transformed into means of
production or means for the extraction of rent. Tethered
to platforms owned by others, consumer items and means
of life are now means for the platform owners’
accumulation. Most of us constitute a property-less
underclass only able to survive by servicing the needs of
high earners. A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
says that over the next 10 years the occupation that will
add the most jobs is personal care aides, not health
workers but aides who bathe and clean people. The

dependence of the ruling class on the vast sector of
servants — cleaners, cooks, grocers, cashiers, delivery
persons, warehouse personnel, et cetera — suggests new
sites of struggle, points of weakness where workers can
exert power. Strikes of nurses, Amazon workers, and
others target the neediness of the wealthy by blocking
their access to the means of survival. If labor struggles
under capitalism prioritized the point of production,
under neofeudalism they occur at the point of service.
Finally, neofeudalism is an idea that lets us identify a

primary weakness of the contemporary left: those left
ideas with the most currency are the ones that affirm
rather than contest neofeudalism. Localism encourages
parcelization. Tech and platform approaches reinforce
hierarchy and inequality. Municipalism affirms the urban-
rural divide associated with hinterlandization. Emphases
on subsistence and survival proceed as if peasant
economies were plausible not only for that half of the
planet that lives in cities (including 82 percent of North
Americans and 74 percent of Europeans) but also for the
millions displaced by climate change, war, and
commercial land theft. Many who dwell in the
hinterlands face political, cultural, economic, and climatic
conditions that make it so that they can’t survive through
agricultural work. Universal Basic Income is an untenable
survivalist approach. It promises just enough to keep
those in the hinterlands going and barely enough for
urban renters to handover to their landlords.
Catastrophism becomes that hip negativity denigrating
hope and effort, as if the next hundred years or so just
don’t matter.
Taken together these current left ideas suggest a future of

small groups engaged in subsistence farming and the
production of artisanal cheese, perhaps on the edges of
cities where survivalist enclaves and drone-wielding tech
workers alike experiment with urban gardens. Such
groupings reproduce their lives in common, yet the
commons they reproduce is necessarily small, local, and
in some sense exclusive and elite, exclusive insofar as
their numbers are necessarily limited, elite because the
aspirations are culturally specific rather than widespread.
Far from a vision anchored in the emancipation of a

multinational working class engaged in a wide array of
paid, underpaid, and unpaid labor, popular left
recapitulations of neofeudalism can’t see a working class.
When work is imagined — and some on the left think
that we should adopt a “postwork imaginary” — it looks
like either romantic risk-free farming or tech-work,
“immaterial labor.” By now, the exposés on the drudgery
of call center work, not to mention the trauma-inducing
labor of monitoring sites like Facebook for disturbing,
illicit content, have made the inadequacy of the idea of
“immaterial labor” undeniable. It should be similarly
apparent that the postwork imaginary likewise erases the
production and maintenance of infrastructure, the wide
array of labor necessary for social reproduction, and the
underlying state structure.
The neofeudal hypothesis thus lets us see both the appeal

and the weakness of popular left ideas. They appeal
because they resonate with a dominant sense. They are
weak because this dominant sense is an expression of
tendencies to neofeudalism.
Just as feudal relations persisted under capitalism so do

capitalist relations of production and exploitation
continue under neofeudalism. The difference is that non-
capitalist dimensions of production — expropriation,
domination, and force — have become stronger to such
an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and
equal actors meeting in the labor market even as a
governing fiction. It means that rent and debt feature as
or more heavily in accumulation than profit, and that
work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. What
happens when capitalism is global? It turns in on itself,
generating, enclosing, and mining features of human life
through digital networks and mass personalized media.
This self-cannibalization produces new lords and serfs,
vast fortunes and extreme inequality, and the parcellated
sovereignties that secure this inequality while the many
wander and languish in the hinterlands.
Jodi Dean teaches political, feminist, and media theory in Geneva,

New York. She has written or edited 13 books, including The
Communist Horizon and Crowds and Party, both published
by Verso.
Featured image: “amazon warehouse” by Scott Lewis is licensed

under CC BY 2.0.
13 Comments Los Angeles Review of Books 🔒 Login

1
 Recommend 8 t Tweet f Share Sort by Best
Join the discussion…
LOG IN WITH
OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?
Name
GD • a year ago
Great article. Succinct, readable, jargon free. Chilling...nice
job...
4△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›
Samwise Figgins • a year ago

I feel like the criticism of “contemporary left” here is shallow
and broad, as is the use of historical analysis of feudalism. The
author correlates the Left’s efforts with neofuedalism, and
misrepresents (not evening naming!) specific Left movements
she is critiquing.
I recommend Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch as well as

Reenchanting the World for a Marxist feminist look at
feudalism, accumulation and enclosure and “neofeudalism” the
contemporary enclosures, accumulations and the Left’s
Commons movement. Also Peter Linebaugh’s book Stop Thief!
on peasant resistance during feudalism. Federici discusses the
commons as autonomous spaces from which to challenge the
existing capitalist organization of life and labor, not the mirror
that Dean sees. To me it sounds like Dean has little experience
or knowledge with regenerative and autonomous movements
happening at the edges or under the radar, those building dual
power—intentional communities, eco villages, Transition
towns, maker spaces, food not lawns chapters, tool libraries.
And yeah, guess what, being a peasant is about the household
economy, but also the local community management. It’s
growing food, making things, reusing things, finding ways to do
things differently.
Also, the author of this article erroneously conflates apocalyptic

religion (hello Christianity?) with “occultism and techno-
pagans”, again failing to see the resistance and power of beliefs
held by peasants in the past and present day, and conflating
them with that which they resist.
2△ ▽ 1 • Reply • Share ›
Simon Else > Samwise Figgins • 2 months ago

The $6,000 permaculture internship I participated in
certainly seemed to be gearing us for peasantry.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›
Robert van Krieken • a year ago

A useful angle on this issue is explored by a leading German
sociologist, Sighard Neckel, here: https://journals.sagepub.co...
1△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›
Brian • 7 months ago

"Communism was supposed to come after capitalism and it’s
not here, so doesn’t that mean we are still in capitalism"
The great delusion of the left. A. that communism would be

better than this and b. that it was an inevitability. The answer to
both is that it isn't.
And before you say it. I sit reliably (and comfortably) left of
centre and not in the USA sense.
BarryG • a year ago

I like the analysis, but it doesn't leave me with any feeling for
"so here's what to do". I'm a higher end feeder in this system
(Google bought a company I started, Microsoft bought another -
- I don't get a Lear Jet, but I get to "tag out" -- I don't need
income anymore ... does that make me the equivalent of a noble
in feudal times? I guess it goes by powers of 10. I'm in the lower
tens of millions, above me are the 100s of Millions, the Billions
and the Gods (Larry, Sergey, Zuck, Bezos). Below me are the
workers on these platforms, they can accumulate millions
"working for the man" -- competitively against each other,
below them just tech people who could accumulate but often
don't, and below them my vision blurs.
Now, what to do. I run a lot of open source projects, including

helping with open sourced redevelopment of ag tech. This
ld ll ll f i hl f h
would allow smaller farms to compete with larger farms. Is that

good in the above or bad?
But in a larger sense, what do you want to see? I do not see any
possible utopias -- I'd like to create a system that self balances
against winner take all and pays for it's infrastructure and
maintenance. I kind of see taxing corporations on ownership
(stock) and redistributing that to citizens. Something like that.
Alan > BarryG • 5 months ago

Taxation is the answer along with redistribution, there is
no other way. Neoliberalism is quite simply a scam
perpetrated by the very wealthy and they are the ones
funding most of the political campaigns on both sides to
ensure that nothing actually gets changed on the basis
that it will affect growth. This is a lie as well, look at your
own American history, when there was high taxation for
the wealthy your country also enjoyed the highest
growth. The reality is its just human nature, if you had
that much money and lived like a god would you allow
things to change if you had any say in it ? Also
remember in capitalism the only way to consistently win
is to have some form of a monopoly, just look at any of
the major winners today and they all have significant
moats.

Neofeudalism - The End of Capitalism - Los Angeles Review of Books

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Neofeudalism - The End of Capitalism - Los Angeles Review of Books

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

7/6/2021 Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?

- Los Angeles Review of Books

club get involved sign in

Neofeudalism: The End of

IN CAPITAL IS DEAD, McKenzie Wark asks: What if we’re

Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to

finance, and globalization are creating “a new social order

A number of technology commentators share the

Albert-László Barabási explained the processes

characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential

Power law distributions are not inevitable. They can be

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth

undermining the authority of the nation-state over its

Rather than focusing on the origins of neoliberalism,

Azmanova emphasizes the novelty of a form of capitalism

Monopoly concentration, intensified inequality, and the

Capitalism is turning itself into neofeudalism.

Neofeudalism does not imply that contemporary

across the continent in response to different pressures.

Historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood

Under neofeudalism, the directly political character of

states promote and protect specific private corporations.

New lords and peasants

Feudal relations are characterized by a fundamental

Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire

impossibly dense and changing information environment.

Platforms are doubly extractive. Unlike the water mill

The tech giants are extractive. Like so many tributary

A third feature of neofeudalism is the spatiality associated

and popes. Collectively, they dominated the surrounding

US hinterlands are sites of loss and dismantlement, places

Politically, the desperation of the hinterlands manifests in

and more people become homeless — think San

The increased attention to social reproduction responds to

Finally, neofeudalism brings with it the insecurity and

A loose, mystical neofeudal ideology, one that knits

that freedom is incompatible with democracy. In a lecture

For those on the other side of the neofeudal divide,

What’s the benefit of thinking of our present precarity

conservatives like Kotkin, the neofeudal hypothesis helps

For those on the left, neofeudalism lets us understand the

assets and walling themselves into their own enclaves

The neofeudalism wager also signals a change in labor

In the service-dominated economies of the Global North,

workers but aides who bathe and clean people. The

Finally, neofeudalism is an idea that lets us identify a

Taken together these current left ideas suggest a future of

Far from a vision anchored in the emancipation of a

The neofeudal hypothesis thus lets us see both the appeal

Just as feudal relations persisted under capitalism so do

Jodi Dean teaches political, feminist, and media theory in Geneva,

Featured image: “amazon warehouse” by Scott Lewis is licensed

13 Comments Los Angeles Review of Books 🔒 Login

 Recommend 8 t Tweet f Share Sort by Best

Join the discussion…

OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?

Samwise Figgins • a year ago

I recommend Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch as well as

Also, the author of this article erroneously conflates apocalyptic

Simon Else > Samwise Figgins • 2 months ago

Robert van Krieken • a year ago

Brian • 7 months ago

The great delusion of the left. A. that communism would be

BarryG • a year ago