[US] Jodi Dean / Trans. Jin Chengwei: New Characteristics of the Development of Contemporary Capitalism
I. Introduction
In his new book Capital is Dead, McKenzie Wark puts forward a provocative argument: what if we are no longer in a capitalist society, but in something worse? I respond to Wark’s question through trend analysis rather than a simple "yes" or "no." Which trends are leading us away from capitalism toward a worse society? Drawing upon Rosa Luxemburg’s famous dichotomy of "socialism or barbarism," I argue that we are choosing between communism and neo-feudalism. There are signs that capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism. Our task is to reverse this trend and facilitate the transition from capitalism to communism. Trends do not determine everything; there is both the necessity and the space for political action.
By "capitalism," I mean a system driven by private property, wage labor, and commodity production for the self-valorization of value. To sustain its own development and achieve legitimacy, the capitalist system requires a specific state form: a bourgeois Rechtsstaat [1] that can ensure impartiality and neutrality. Today’s digital capitalism is a system turning into neo-feudalism; its process of self-evolution is intensifying and becoming self-enclosed.
By "communism," I do not mean a political end-point in a reconciled, harmonious totality. As we know from psychoanalysis, struggle is irreducible; it is always present. In my view, communism is a political form that exists for the common self-liberation of the proletarians. In a communist society, production for the sake of capital accumulation for the few will be replaced by production to meet the needs of the majority.
My response to Wark is premised on the view that capitalism is always partially symbiotic with other modes of production and accumulation, depending upon and exploiting them. In practice, capitalism dissolves the conditions under which other modes of production and accumulation operate, subjecting them to external laws and making them worse.
As the process of its real subsumption closes in, today’s capitalism is making itself worse. The monopolistic concentration of digital capitalism, intensifying inequality, and the subjection of markets to governments are leading to the birth of a neo-feudalism. In such a society, accumulation is realized through rent, debt, and power. For instance, in the global knowledge and technology industries, rental income derived from intellectual property rights exceeds income from commodity production. In the United States, the contribution of financial services to GDP exceeds that of manufacturing. More and more capital is no longer invested in production, but is instead hoarded or redistributed as rent. The self-valorization of value is thereby weakened. The process of valorization has moved far beyond the factory into complex, speculative, and unstable closed loops, increasingly dependent on surveillance, coercion, and violence.
II. Four Characteristics of Neo-feudalism
Neo-feudalism possesses four closely related characteristics: first, the parcellization of sovereignty; second, a new hierarchy of lords and peasants and expropriation; third, desolate hinterlands and privileged cities; and fourth, insecurity and catastrophism.
(1) Parcellized and Fragmented Sovereignty
Marxist historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood regard the parcellization of sovereignty as a key feature of feudalism. Two aspects of parcellized sovereignty—fragmentation and extra-economic coercion—are crucial for understanding neo-feudalism.
First, state functions are "vertically and horizontally fractured." Because different types of political and economic institutions seek power and jurisdiction, local power structures take diverse forms. Arbitration and settlement replace the rule of law. The boundary between the legal and the illegal becomes increasingly blurred.
Second, along with the parcellization of sovereignty, political power and economic power become intertwined. Feudal lords extracted surplus from peasants through legal coercion. This behavior was "legal" partly because the lords had the right to determine the laws applied to peasants within their jurisdiction. New lords, such as global financial institutions and digital technology platforms, use debt to redistribute wealth between the world’s poorest and richest populations. Whether feudal or neo-feudal, economic agents exercise political power over specific groups based on conditions set by the "lords." At the same time, when political power is exercised in tandem with economic power, it even functions as a form of economic power, including not only taxes but also fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses, patents, jurisdictions, and borders.
There are many examples illustrating this characteristic. One-tenth of global wealth is hidden in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. Laws do not apply to billionaires powerful enough to circumvent them. The valuations of the largest tech companies far exceed the economic size of the vast majority of the world’s nations. Large companies such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google behave like sovereign states in the cities and states where they are located. Cities strive to attract these companies, negotiating with them and cooperating according to the terms the companies propose. Concentrated massive wealth possesses its own "constituent power," able to set rules that it may or may not choose to follow. Foreign investors also have the right to sue governments in international tribunals. They frequently do so when public interest regulations—designed to protect water resources, communities, and the environment—threaten the value of their investments. Cases of Canadian mining companies suing Latin American governments are ubiquitous. Manuel Pérez-Rocha and Jen Moore point out: "These companies can bypass domestic courts and sue governments in private tribunals such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an arm of the World Bank. The members of these tribunals are highly paid corporate lawyers who have no obligation to consider local interests or the importance of health and environmental protection." In such cases, private tribunals replace national law.
Within nation-states, sovereignty is also parcellized and fragmented. For example, cash-strapped U.S. municipalities use complex systems of fines to directly fleece the people, an impact particularly evident among the poor. Alexandra Natapoff, in her new book Punishment Without Crime, documents the shocking extent to which misdemeanor law is applied within an already exceptionally bloated U.S. prison system. Poor people, especially people of color, are arrested on false charges and persuaded to plead guilty under the guise of avoiding potential prison time if they contest the charges. A guilty plea is not only recorded but also triggers the accumulation of fines; failure to pay promptly leads to more fines and charges. The "legal illegality" and judicial injustice that emerged during the disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri, following the killing of Michael Brown, are typical. Natapoff writes: "The city’s municipal court and police department openly extracted millions of dollars from the low-income African American population." Police were required to "arrest and issue citations for profit." Municipal governments, like the retainers of feudal lords, use violence to confiscate the people’s property. Aristocratic power marks a social relation of surplus appropriation. Is our relationship with media platforms in digital capitalism not the same? They use the metadata of our communicative interactions to appropriate our surplus and extract "information" resources through networked personal communication devices.
(2) New Hierarchies Leading to Increased Inequality
Inequality is a hallmark of feudal relations. Wood emphasizes that "feudal lords exploiting peasants against the background of parcellized sovereignty" is a prominent feature of Western feudalism. Anderson reminds us of exploitative monopolies such as the watermills controlled by feudal lords. Peasants were forced to take their grain to the lord’s mill to be ground, for which a fee was charged. Peasants not only farmed land that did not belong to them but also lived in an environment where the feudal lord was the "manager and master of the production process and of social life as a whole."
As early as 2010, technologist Jaron Lanier, in his famous book You Are Not a Gadget, observed the emergence of the "network-oppressed" and "lords of the clouds" (titans). As tech giants become wealthier and more attractive, their owners become billionaires based on the cheap labor of workers, the outsourcing of many essential tasks to third-party contractors, the free labor of users, tax incentives granted by cities desperate to attract jobs, and the consolidation of their monopoly positions. Evgeny Morozov has pointed to the feudalization accompanying the rise of tech giants. He writes: "Aside from the privacy disasters, these tech giants almost never pay taxes; their fondness for 'moonshots' weakens any government-led innovation efforts; their welfarism cannot last forever. In fact, the latter is likely to lead to ultramodern forms of feudalism. We will have to pay to access anything through a screen or a button, which will be at least as simple as swiping a transit card." Tech giants are extractive; giving them tax breaks means taking money from the municipality. Their presence drives up rents and real estate prices, squeezing out cheap apartments, small businesses, and people. Shoshana Zuboff’s research on "surveillance capitalism" reveals another dimension of techno-feudalism: service/bondage. Like lords and kings, Facebook and Google collaborate with powerful states, sharing information with the latter that the law prohibits those states from collecting themselves. In short, the extraction of information by today’s network technology is ubiquitous, invasive, and unavoidable.
Therefore, while it may not be entirely accurate to say that the current era is one of "peasants and lords," it is indisputable that increasing inequality (more billionaires, a widening wealth gap) and the solidification of differentiated legal frameworks (protecting the interests of large corporations and the wealthy while exploiting and incarcerating the working class and the masses at the bottom) are characteristics of contemporary capitalist society.
Platformization and the privatization of land characterize the hierarchical and expropriative trends of neo-feudalism. As Nick Srnicek notes, a platform is a "digital infrastructure that enables two or more groups to interact." Platforms position themselves as intermediaries—the core of user activity and the condition of possibility for interaction. Google makes it possible for people to find target information within a massive and ever-changing sea of data. Amazon allows people to easily find, compare prices for, and purchase consumer goods from both well-known and unknown vendors. Uber makes ridesharing between strangers possible. Airbnb offers similar services in the realm of houses and apartments. All of this is realized through the generation and circulation of massive amounts of data. The more people use them, the more effective and powerful they become, eventually transforming the broader environment in which they exist. Consequently, platforms have a tendency toward monopoly.
Srnicek identifies "cloud platforms" and "lean platforms" as two types of platforms. The now-familiar cloud features extensive on-demand computing services, typically storage, operating systems, and applications. Enterprises can subscribe to or rent software as needed rather than buying or developing their own. Much like the purchase or re-circulation of land, cloud platforms extract rent and data. Lean platforms possess a similar reflexivity,
This capacity to extract rent without ownership, relying on outsourced labor to handle its own maintenance and training, is a hallmark of the current era. Typical examples are Uber and Airbnb, which reconfigure consumption items into means of accumulation. An Uber car is not used for the owner’s personal transportation, but to make money; an Airbnb apartment is not the owner's residence, but a thing to be rented. In both platforms, personal ownership is transformed into a tool for the platform "lord" to accumulate capital and data. This trend of turning individuals into "peasants"—those who own the means of production but whose labor increases the capital of the platform owner—is neo-feudal in nature.
Next, consider the privatization of land. Over the past 40 years, more than 2 million hectares of public land in the UK (one-tenth of the country's total land area) have been sold to private interests. These land sales occurred at every level from local to national for various reasons, advancing under different circumstances in a "piece-meal process." Marx regarded the enclosure movement as a crucial condition for the development of capitalism, as it drove peasants off the land and forced them to sell their labor power to survive. The following trends are vital to this new round of privatization: "an increase in land hoarding by the private sector; the UK’s increasing transformation into a rentier economy—where more and more people pay rent to a wealthy, land-owning minority; and widespread social dislocation."
As Marx emphasized in Volume 3 of Capital, "Monopoly of landed property is a historical premise, and remains the basis of the capitalist mode of production." Capitalism itself created this model; it established its own preconditions, putting "old wine in new bottles" by giving new forms to old objects and practices. Rather than providing a foundation for capitalist development, the contemporary process of land privatization tends toward a transition to a neo-feudalism (where billionaires purchase and hoard vast amounts of land) that is even worse than capitalism.
Land privatization also demonstrates that, alongside the individualization of consumption, the intensification of inequality has led to the emergence of new types of lords and oppressed peoples. Not all consumers are equal; some are loyal followers who pledge fealty to a corporation in exchange for points, discounts, benefits, and other rewards. As a global aristocracy and ruling class, the ultra-wealthy are increasingly protected. Their planes are private; their schools and clubs are likewise private. More importantly, they amass wealth through various mechanisms of direct expropriation—charging fees on every possible transaction, illegal foreclosures and evictions, breaking services down into separately charged items, and direct wage theft. These are frequent and universal occurrences, and those who cannot afford legal fees find it difficult to address these issues successfully. The financial sector systematically robs the poor to give to the rich. As Richard Westra has observed: "Many of the arcane structures of financialization and its opaque securitization instruments are built upon the surge in debt of ordinary working people across mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and so on." The same structure is repeated on an international scale, where entire countries submit to powerful creditors and are forced to slash social provision.
(3) Widening Gap Between Urban and Rural Areas
The third characteristic of neo-feudalism is its spatiality: protected, vibrant central cities surrounded by agricultural and desolate hinterlands. We might also call this the urban-rural divide, or more abstractly, the rupture between the internal and the external—the cleavage between safety and danger, prosperity and despair. Wood argues that medieval cities were essentially oligarchic: "the ruling class grew rich by providing commercial and financial services to kings, emperors, and popes. Together they ruled the surrounding countryside... extracting wealth from it in one way or another." Anderson describes the feudal rupture between city and country as a "dynamic opposition" between commodity production and natural production. Related to this rupture are nomads and migrants who, facing unbearable conditions, seek new places to live and work but often hit a wall. Their precarious reality on the margins of existence is reflected in the fear felt by those in protected zones who never feel safe enough.
The American hinterland is a place of loss and dismantling, a place that claims a glorious capitalist past, which perhaps temporarily allows some to linger in dreams that their lives might get better. In her book On the Clock, Emily Guendelsberger writes: "I saw so many ghost towns and abandoned factories in Kentucky, Indiana, and North Carolina that you could see one just by driving 20 minutes in any direction." The hinterland is ripe, waiting to accept a new exploitation worse than capitalism. People no longer make things; instead, they scrape by through big-box warehouses, call centers, dollar stores, and fast-food outlets.
In the political sphere, the despair of the hinterland manifests in the movements of those living outside the cities. These movements sometimes center on environmental issues (such as struggles over fracking and pipelines), sometimes on land issues (such as privatization and eminent domain), and sometimes on the reduction of services (such as the closure of hospitals and schools). In the United States, gun politics pits the hinterland against the city. The manner in which the hinterland and the city are divided is redefined within the cities themselves, manifesting as the abandonment of impoverished areas and their gradual disappearance due to capitalist land grabs. Cities become wealthier while more people become homeless.
The new prominence of social reproduction theory is a response to "hinterlandization"—the loss of the general capacity to reproduce basic living conditions. Hinterlandization is manifested in rising suicide rates, increased anxiety and drug addiction, declining fertility, lower life expectancy, and, in the United States, the self-destruction of a psychotic society evidenced by mass shootings. The hinterland is etched onto people’s bodies and onto the land. As some hospitals and schools close and basic services diminish, life becomes more desperate and uncertain.
Philip Cerny wrote as early as 1998: "Global nodes of innovation, exchange, and resources (global cities) are at one end, while unwelcome, fragmented hinterlands are at the other; the two are increasingly estranged." Cerny warned of the resulting exclusion and "lumpenization." He noted that because vast geographical spaces lack infrastructure and support, "many people will be excluded 'outside the circle,' country 'rubes' or even wandering bands of the poor... just like in the Middle Ages, forced once again to become predators upon or supplicants to the cities."
(4) Amplified Insecurity
The fourth characteristic is affective and subjective, encompassing insecurity, anxiety, and a sense of the apocalypse. These emotional orientations link the three preceding characteristics. We have every reason to feel insecure. Against a backdrop of severe inequality and global warming, the catastrophe of capitalism plundering the social surplus is a reality.
Loose and mystical neo-feudal ideologies intertwine, amplifying apocalyptic insecurity. This insecurity seems to be taking shape through an embrace of mysticism, techno-paganism, and anti-modernity. Examples include Jordan Peterson’s mystical Jungianism and Alexander Dugin’s geopolitics of Atlantis and Hyperborea myths, as well as the rise of the so-called "Dark Enlightenment" and "neo-reactionaries." For instance, Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, argues that freedom and democracy are incompatible. In a 2012 speech, Thiel explained the connection between feudalism and tech startups, stating that "no founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like ancient feudal structures. People grant leaders various powers and capacities, and then blame them when things go wrong." The interesting point is how feudal structures are rendered as tools of freedom. Corey Robin links this move to American "democratic feudalism," arguing that "the promise of democracy is to rule another person exactly as a monarch rules his subjects." While Thiel is happy to discard the democratic element entirely, he also views freedom as the protection of privilege—privilege being the manifestation of inherent genius. Like other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Thiel is concerned with protecting his wealth from the shocks of democracy, thus advocating "exit" and isolation strategies like seasteading and space colonization, avoiding taxes at all costs. In short, the emergence of this neo-reactionary ideology illustrates how extreme capitalism is stepping into the radical de-centering process of neo-feudalism.
For those on the other side of the neo-feudal divide, anxiety and insecurity are resolved not through ideology but through drugs, alcohol, food, and anything that can mitigate despair, blindness, and endless drudgery. Guendelsberger describes the stress induced by constant technological surveillance at work—being a few seconds late, failing to meet a quota, or using the bathroom too often carries the risk of being fired. Repetitive, low-control, high-stress jobs, like those subject to technological monitoring, are directly linked to "depression and anxiety." Irregular schedules and unreliable wages can feel overwhelming and suffocating. At least for some, the neo-feudal apocalypse may be individual, familial, or local. When a person has experienced generations of suffering, it is difficult to be troubled by climate catastrophe.
III. New Changes Brought by Neo-Feudalism
By naming this society that is "worse" than capitalism "neo-feudalism," the author counters the view that the primary contemporary antagonism is between democracy and fascism. In the United States, we frequently hear this rhetoric from liberal newspapers and mainstream capitalist politicians. However, given that capitalist democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—a system of rule set up for the interests of capital and the enjoyment of power—it is meaningless to argue that the fascist threat to democracy is the primary problem. In fact, as the power of oligarchs—financiers, media and real estate moguls, and carbon and tech billionaires—grows day by day, who is unaware of this? Viewing the present through the lens of a democratic state threatened by rising fascism diverts attention from the primary role of global networked digital capitalism in exacerbating popular anger and resentment. Fascist rhetoric prevents us from thinking about why ostensibly democratic societies seem to be turning to the right. Fascist discourse naturalizes hatred and processes it based on identity. It fails to see the shift to the right as a form of politicization. The factors behind this right-wing politicization are economic: complex networks produce extreme inequality and winner-take-all dynamics. The turn to the right is a response to this intensifying inequality. People's lives have become more desperate and uncertain. Union power is weaker. The threat of technology to the labor sector is unprecedented, further weakening the sites and opportunities for organized resistance. Capitalism is turning capitalist society into a worse kind of society. When the power of the left is weak, or prevented by mainstream media and capitalist parties from articulating a political voice, popular anger will be expressed by other forces. Currently, these "other forces" are the far right.
When populations experience insecurity and dispossession, they desire something to hold onto and someone to blame. At such moments, the right wing offers an identity centered on the nation, the church, and the family. It points the finger at those who threaten this identity: immigrants, socialists, feminists, and sexual minorities. Thinking from the perspective of neofeudalism, however, allows us to move away from the stage of identity politics and directly confront the impact of extreme economic inequality on political society and institutions. It forces us to face the facts: billionaires hoard trillions of dollars in assets and seal themselves off in enclaves, while millions become climate refugees and hundreds of millions face bleak life prospects as the struggle for survival intensifies. More bluntly, recognizing that capitalism is turning into neofeudalism disabuses us of the luxury of believing that any election or small-scale reform will suffice to address the current catastrophe.
The author’s use of the term "neofeudal" to describe current trends also hints at changes in labor-capital relations. Today, the ideal of free contract labor—which justifies and provides cover for coercive class relations—is untenable. Even the barest fantasy of "voluntary consent" is insufficient to explain the social relations of wealth accumulation today. In the service-dominated economies of the Global North, the majority of people work in service industries. Some find that their phones, bicycles, cars, and houses have lost their character as personal property and have instead become means of production or vehicles for earning rent. Now, consumer goods and lifestyles tied to platforms owned by others have become the platform owners' means of accumulation. Some indulge in the fantasy that "our services are creative and we are part of a privileged stratum of knowledge workers." However, like gig workers, knowledge workers often compete for contracts and, if they win, work for a single wage. The majority constitute a propertyless underclass that can only survive by serving the needs of high earners (for example, as personal assistants, trainers, tutors, etc.). A report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that the occupation adding the most jobs over the next decade will be personal care aides—not health workers, but assistants who help people bathe and clean. In the past, people usually called them servants. The meager income of the working class is further plundered by inescapable debt, fees, fines, and rent.
IV. Neofeudalism is Not Merely Parallel to Capitalism
Some may suspect that the author’s perspective on neofeudalism is non-Marxist. Marx acknowledged the coexistence of different modes of production and that such coexistence could intensify specific trends within those modes, making domination and economic deprivation worse. Relatedly, Rosa Luxemburg identified capitalism's dependence on external non-capitalist modes of production. Primitive accumulation, which Marx relegated to the feudal period, is a permanent feature of capitalism; direct appropriation (rather than exchange) is an attribute of capitalism. The development of capitalist industry was premised on slavery and colonialism. Capitalism relies on violence, extraction, dispossession, and deep-seated, intergenerational hierarchies.
Focusing on the United States, Karen Orren emphasizes the overlap of feudal and capitalist systems as well as labor-capital relations. Echoing Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s analysis of feudalism as the "parcellization of sovereignty" under hierarchy, Orren writes: "Feudal society was a vast beehive of separate kingdoms of different privileges, propagated and enforced by their respective judiciaries. Each kingdom displayed its own distinct morality within the larger feudal hierarchical ethic." [6] From the perspective of the law of master and servant, becoming a worker is not the result of a contract signed with an employer, but a status of personal dependence. Corey Robin similarly emphasizes the persistence of feudal relations in the United States. He writes that the priority of conservative political advocacy is to maintain regimes of private power, allowing men and women to be citizens of a democratic state while ensuring they remain feudal subjects in the home, the factory, and the field. Thus, we once again have strong examples to prove that different modes of power and production arrangements coexist—specifically, that the overlap of capitalist and feudal models, whereby the feudal relations of individualized hierarchy, facilitates and intensifies capitalist exploitation.
In discussions held in Latin America regarding "emerging feudal elements," Andrew Gunder Frank long ago analyzed that what appears as feudal elements is an effect of capitalist economic "development," and in Latin America, an effect of imperialism. Lenin viewed imperialism as the intensification of capital concentration, monopoly, and financial oligarchy. Today’s complex digital, communication, and information networks lead to power-law distributions, reinforcing trends toward greater inequality. As Frank once pointed out in his analysis of Latin America, in today’s United States, United Kingdom, and even globally, neofeudalism is the continuation of imperialism. This becomes very clear when we analyze the structure of complex networks.
Albert-László Barabási, in his book Linked, expounds on the formal characteristics of power-law distributions in complex networks—networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. These are networks where people link or choose voluntarily. The number of links to each site grows over time, and people like something because others like it. For example, the volume of links (clicks) for the most popular books, restaurants, or websites is usually double that of the second most popular in its class, and the second’s link volume is double that of the third, and so on, until the differences at the bottom of the food chain or the tail of the distribution curve are negligible. This winner-take-all effect is a power-law distribution. Those at the top possess significantly more than those at the bottom. The shape of the distribution is not a bell curve but has a long tail. The most popular person on Twitter has over 100 million followers, the ninth and tenth ranked have about 50 million, while the average person has only about 200. To make a space equal requires intervention.
The structure of complex networks demands inclusiveness; the more items in a network, the greater the rewards for those at the top of the pyramid. This triggers competition for attention, resources, money, work, and anything else given network form, which in turn leads to concentration. Thus, the results of free choice, growth, and preferential attachment are hierarchy and power-law distribution, which allow those at the top of the pyramid to possess more wealth than those at the bottom. In other words, hierarchy is inherent to networks. To escape or fight them requires the destruction or abolition of the institutions that produce them. That is to say, the abolition of inherent hierarchy requires political action.
We gain further insight into neofeudalization when we realize that digital networks make us constant producers of the primary resource of digital capitalism—data. Our communications and interactions generate data used for the benefit of others, not ourselves. Our lives and interactions have been turned into resources for capital accumulation. Capitalism has failed to maintain its profit rates through the exploitation of productive labor. It now utilizes consumption to extract surplus by treating data as a resource and squeezing it for all it is worth, which in turn reacts back upon labor, production, circulation, finance, and debt.
In a deeply racist society like the United States, after decades of movement struggles centered on gender, race, and ethnicity, it is difficult to imagine that bourgeois fictions of liberty and equality can still provide legitimacy to market relations. Today, the wealthy and white no longer feel the need to justify their unequal share. The burden of proof rests on the rest to show why they deserve anything at all. Imperialism has closed in on itself to such an extent that monopoly capital can compel the state to cut taxes, provide rebates and incentives, and formulate treaties that replace national courts with private tribunals. For the sake of capital, states must sell off public property and assets, seek deals to attract developers, and adopt strategies that court the rich while displacing the poor.
Neofeudalism is not a conservative retreat to original political-economic forms. On the contrary, neofeudalization is the continuation and reflexivity of imperialism under the conditions of digital capitalism. The structure of complex networks explains the reasons for contemporary capitalism’s shift toward neofeudalism. Complex networks undermine equality through inclusion, free choice, and democratic participation, while reinforcing hierarchy. Hierarchy is an inherent attribute of networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. At the same time, in digital capitalist society, practices associated with democracy, such as freedom of speech and discussion, are assembled and disassembled within affective networks. Here, politics is reduced to daily outrage. Liberated from the shackles of democracy while still feigning democratic legitimacy, the state is refined into a tool of coercive force, surveillance, and control, as well as a means of maintaining order amidst constant expropriation, dispossession, and fragmentation.
V. The Political Trade-offs of the Neofeudal Hypothesis
Currently, one of the problems facing the Left is that some widely supported ideas reinforce neofeudalism. Localism validates fragmentation. Technological and platform-based paths reinforce hierarchy and inequality. Local autonomism confirms the urban-rural divide associated with hinterlandization [7].
An emphasis on livelihood and survival makes the peasant economy seem plausible—not only for the more than half of the population living in cities (including 82% of North Americans and 74% of Europeans) but also for the millions displaced by climate change, war, and commercial land grabs. Of course, those living in the hinterlands face political, cultural, and economic conditions that prevent them from making a living through agricultural work (about 50 countries are classified as low-income food-deficit countries; most of these suffer the brunt of climate change and are located in Africa). Universal Basic Income is an equally untenable survivalist path. It promises that those living in the hinterlands will be able to survive as long as they do not go to the cities where they cannot afford the cost of living.
In summary, these positions envision a future of small groups engaged in self-sufficient agriculture and artisanal cheese production: perhaps survivalist enclaves on the city fringes, with tech workers using drones to experiment in urban gardens. Such groups collectively remake their lives, but the communities they remake are necessarily small, local, and in a sense, exclusive and elitist. This is a basic view of the future: "cool cities" surrounded by organic farms (with little attention paid to the mode of agricultural production). Do the peasants choose to be peasants, or were they born that way? Do they own their land? Do they share it? Do they export their products? What are the underlying conditions (the builders, cleaners, and maintainers of infrastructure, the providers of transport and communication, and workers in health, education, and childcare) that make "cool cities" possible? Are the cities "cool" for them? How do these cities relate to one another? Are they federated fortresses (implying borders and walls, police and insecurity, and growing fear of the barbarians at the gate and the nomads of the hinterland)? Does prosperity on a warming planet actually presuppose a larger, unmentioned state capable of seizing and destroying the large-scale fossil fuel economy? Popular Leftist views reflect neofeudal tendencies; they converge by abandoning the forgotten hinterlands, rural areas, and small cities, while cultivating urban elements that favor the wealthy and the educated. This model ignores the working class and is far from a vision grounded in working-class liberation. When work is imagined at all [some on the Left argue we should adopt a "post-work imaginary"], it looks either like romantic, risk-free agricultural work or like tech work—"immaterial labor."
By now, the exposure of the drudgery in call centers, not to mention the traumatic labor triggered by disturbing and illegal content on surveillance sites like Facebook, has rendered the inadequacies of the "immaterial labor" perspective an undeniable fact. It is equally evident that post-work imaginaries similarly erase industry, manufacturing, the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, the vast amount of labor required for social reproduction, and potential state structures. Given that most cities are located in coastal areas, this model lacks the institutional foundation required to respond to climate change.
The neo-feudal hypothesis allows us to see both the appeal and the deficiencies of popular Leftist perspectives. They are appealing because they resonate with the mainstream consciousness; they are weak because this mainstream consciousness is itself a manifestation of neo-feudal tendencies.
VI. Struggling for the Realization of Communism
Some outside the Left long ago critiqued contemporary conditions using the concept of an emerging neo-feudalism. Some have pointed out that "economic feudalism... has no private sector, no capitalist relations, only vassals and feudal lords." Analyses such as these argue that neo-feudalization stems from the state. Conservative and libertarian economists in the United States, meanwhile, argue that large-scale serfdom stems from sustainable "green" elitism and the currently popular downsizing that practices "less is more." For example, Joel Kotkin argues that sustainability is a liberal politics of the rich that harms the interests of the majority. Compared to high-tech and finance, the energy, agribusiness, and construction sectors employ more people, meaning they are more beneficial to the majority. Kotkin writes: "The old economic system emphasized growth and upward mobility. Conversely, the new economic order focuses more on the concept of 'sustainability' than on rapid economic expansion, reflecting a feudal worldview." Kotkin provides a method for dividing the internal members of the bourgeoisie; much like the division between the many and the few (i.e., a populist division), he places the oil and gas sectors on the side of the people. He believes that high-tech, finance, and globalization are the enemies, threatening "to create a new social order that in some ways more closely resembles a feudal structure than the chaotic industrialized capitalism, where the barriers set against mobility are often unbreakable." In this libertarian imagination, feudalism occupies the position of the "enemy." The threat of centralization and the threat to private property remain constant ideological elements.
These fears of the Right point toward what the Left needs to embrace: the communist alternative to neo-feudalism. Returning to the four characteristics of neo-feudalism, we can identify the possibility of turning neo-feudal trends in another direction through political organization and will. Parcellated sovereignty can be redefined as the weakening of nation-state power necessary for the realization of communism. It presents not fragmentation, but the separation of elements of a global state structure that could be reconfigured to respond to disasters—including transnational organizations such as financial institutions, corporations, social media platforms, political parties, issue alliances, and political organizations. This brings to mind the rationality of public structures that leap across and transcend the nation-state. It is not difficult to imagine them being repositioned as global communist apparatuses, committed not to capital accumulation and the protection of billionaire wealth and privilege, but to the liberation, equality, and flourishing of the majority.
The bourgeoisie will not let go on their own; achieving this depends on political struggle. Parcellated sovereignty reminds us that the power of the bourgeoisie is far more fragile than any of us believe. This provides a line of thought for considering how to form an international communist "realm" from a complex, tangled mess of alliances—operating in ways that transcend simple vertical and horizontal geometries or the clichés of geographic "local and global" binaries.
Lords and peasants—that is, hierarchy, inequality, and expropriation—provide the opportunity for a "second opening." [8] The communist path acknowledges this rift and sides with the peasants and the proletarians in the class conflict. Such a trajectory has already gained momentum in peasant organizations promoted by La Via Campesina. [9] Eliminate the lords, abolish private property, and seize the means of production in fields such as production and circulation, making production serve human needs. It is not very difficult to disperse trillion-dollar scale virtual capital; the capitalist system does this frequently, and so shall we. We need to carefully consider what kind of science and technology we want and need, as well as their actual costs. For example, are we willing to serve a sentence in coltan mines for the sake of mobile phones? Shall we completely abolish the collection of metadata, or find ways to use it to better assess needs? Freed from the shackles of capital accumulation, we can finally grasp the fundamental choices concerning our collective life, rather than allowing these choices to be decided behind our backs.
As for the town and the hinterland, the end of the economy of capital accumulation makes possible the dissolution of the town-country distinction and the division of labor that causes it. More specifically and immediately, our upholding of a communist vision that attends to the hinterland problem opens up new possibilities for organized struggle based on current trends; we might think of the strategy in Mao Zedong Thought regarding the "rural areas encircling the cities." In any case, the political gambit around immigrants and refugees is intensifying. Class struggles carried out in various forms in city suburbs and the growing anger of the dispossessed in the hinterlands—playing out in France, in a United States where electoral politics drives a turn to the Right, in Hungary, Poland, Canada, and elsewhere—provide the context for launching a genuine struggle, but we have yet to make a decision. A turn to the Right is not inevitable. This is a question of organization, a question of providing a politics capable of meeting diverse human needs and concerns, as well as the possibility of prosperity.
Finally, rather than being haunted by insecurity and apocalypticism, we can and must cultivate communist virtues such as solidarity, courage, discipline, and self-confidence—virtues that stem from and produce a sense of comradeship. Lacking any of these, we are destined to head toward neo-feudalism.
VII. Conclusion
We need to consider why we are no longer in capitalism, but in an even worse neo-feudalism. This does not mean there are no longer capitalist relations of production and exploitation, but rather that other aspects of capitalist production—such as expropriation, domination, and coercion—have become so powerful that it no longer makes sense for free and equal subjects to organize for confrontation in the labor market. It means that the roles of rent and debt in accumulation are equal to or even exceed the role of profit, and work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. It means the state forms associated with the bourgeoisie have been radically altered. Monopolies, finance, and the territorial partitioning of the world require another analysis; neo-feudalism may allow us to have a different understanding of the forces generated by digital capitalism itself. [Rosa] Luxemburg emphasized that imperialism is a sign that capitalism needs "external" support, as capitalism always relies on materials and labor that it does not produce itself. What happens when capitalism is global? It turns inward, generating, surrounding, and mining the features of human life through digital networks and mass-personalized media. This reflexivity produces power-law distributions, new lords and the oppressed, immense wealth and extreme inequality, as well as the parcellated sovereignty that ensures this inequality, while many people wander and suffer in the hinterland. To face this situation directly and avoid it requires an organized political struggle for the realization of communism.
(Notes omitted) (Author’s affiliation: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA; Translator’s affiliation: First Research Department of the Institute of Party History and Literature of the CPC Central Committee) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends, 2022, Issue 4