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Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She is the author and editor of fourteen books, including The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging.

For issue #35 of The Internationalist, Professor Dean examines the epochal shift from the economic system known as “neoliberalism” to a new one that she calls “neofeudalism” — bringing along with it a host of new social, spatial, and affective pathologies.

As states, banks, and the global financial class grapple with worldwide inflation on a warming planet, we do well not to let a focus on near-term economic conditions distract us from longer-term political economic tendencies. For over forty years, neoliberalism has reigned as the ideology of global capitalism. Neoliberal assumptions have dominated the absurdity that passes for political common sense, whether we are talking about cuts in public services,  financialization, the creation of ever larger and more complex supply chains, or the rise of technology giants with valuations greater than most national economies.  Now the neoliberal consensus has begun to unravel. The 2008–2009 financial crisis,  collapse of the global development model, necessity of coordinated state response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and intensification of political and social instability across the globe are forcing mainstream political elites to recognize that appeals to austerity, free trade, and capital flow have lost their former power to persuade. The old is dying, but what might yet be born is open, a matter of struggle. If dominant tendencies continue to hold, what will evolve out of neoliberalism is likely to be worse: neofeudalism.

Today, accumulation occurs less through commodity production and more through rents and predation – taking not making, as Brett Christophers explains in Rentier Capitalism. Marx’s Mr. Moneybags no longer looks like a capitalist. He appears as a landlord or financier, someone who takes a cut. In the twenty-first century, most jobs are in services; there are large-scale servant sectors all over the world. In high-income countries, 70–80 per cent of employment is in services; most workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa are also in services. Understanding an economy of rents and services as capitalism’s neofeudalizing tendency helps us make sense of the present.

In place of what Mario Tronti theorized as the social factory, the reflexization of capitalist processes of plunder, extraction, and de-development has led to the social manor. Society is no longer oriented toward the production of workers and commodities; it’s now an order of personalized service, privilege, hierarchy, and fealty. More and more people are forced to sell their labour power to survive; they sell this labour as services to those looking for deliveries, drivers, cleaners, trainers, home health aides, nannies, guards, coaches, and so on. The buying and selling of services are enabled by new intermediaries, technological platforms whose owners insert themselves between service offerers and seekers, being sure to exact a fee along with the data and metadata that accompanies each transaction. Our basic interactions are not our own. With advances in production seemingly at a dead end, capital today is hoarded and wielded as a weapon of disruption, its wielders are new lords, while the rest of us are dependent, proletarianized servants and serfs. 

Feudal language has been circulating around “big tech” for over a decade. People talk about tech-feudalism, lords and peasants of the internet, Yanis Varoufakis being one of the most recent and most prominent. Many lament how with platformization and the gig economy we’re being turned into digital serfs dependent on tech overlords, vassals forced into various sorts of protective arrangements so that our computers won’t be hacked and our identities stolen. 

Far from strictly a feature of our technologized present, neofeudalism is linked to a slew of other developments related to the privatization of public services and the limits to capital accumulation. Capitalism’s dynamics are turning in on themselves such that they no longer follow capitalism’s specific laws of motion –profit maximization, reinvestment of surplus, and improvement of labour productivity – but instead engage in destruction (market disruption), eating or hoarding of the proceeds (stock buybacks), and conquest (rapidly dominating a market, buying up enterprises, seizing free labour). 

The neofeudal aspects of the present fall into four general categories: law, social property relations, spatiality, and affect. Whereas the legal form of capitalist modernity has been the modern nation state, typically characterized by constitutionality, rights, and abstract law, sovereignty under neofeudalism has been parcellated. Instead of universal law to which all are equally subject, we have privatized arbitration, confidentiality agreements, non-compete agreements, separate law for rich and poor, the intermeshing of political and economic power, and so on. Legal theorist Alan Supiot draws out the “reemergence of feudalism” in network society as a shift from law to bond, that is, from general and abstract law to personal economic dependencies. Robert Kuttner and Kathryn Stone likewise observe the displacement of public law by legally sanctioned private jurisprudence. They, too, describe this privatization of jurisprudence as neofeudal. That neoliberalism involves decentralization, fragmentation, and privatization of state services has been recognized for several decades now. What’s relatively less acknowledged are the impacts of subjecting police functions to economic measures: in municipalities dependent on ticket revenues and court fees, policing is less a matter of public safety than it is generating money. Similar extraction occurs at the international level as the IMF forces surcharges on the most indebted countries. 

As the tech commentators emphasize, neofeudalizing social property relations present new lords and serfs, personalized and hierarchized ties of dependence. Our setting is one not simply of extreme inequality but of inequalities that technological platforms produce and rely on. Examples include Uber, AirBnB, Amazon, and various delivery services. We depend on platforms and the platforms exploit our dependence. Beyond this tech dimension, the inequalities communicative capitalism exacerbates and engenders are as much or even more about capitalism than they are about communication – not the replacement of jobs by automation but the opposite: the limits of automation. Jason E. Smith draws out Marx’s analysis of the connection between industrialization and the rise of the servant sector. As productivity increases, requiring fewer workers, those workers – in need of a wage in order to survive – are thrown into sectors less amendable to automation, that is, services. Services are less amendable to automation in part because of the specific skills care work requires, such as, diapering a baby, moving an elderly person from bed and etc. They also resist automation because they are cheap, the last jobs available to those thrown out of every other. 

The spatiality of neofeudalism is a landscape where desolate hinterlands surround protected, often lively, centres. Space is divided between the cities that are left behind and the cities in which capital concentrates, and within the latter as gentrification makes some areas unaffordable and other ones barely inhabitable. A city gets richer and more people become displaced, dispossessed, and homeless. Public space declines and private spaces become mini-fortresses oriented toward protecting the rich and their assets with services available to the rich depending on what they are willing to pay. 

Finally, neofeudalism registers affectively in generalized anxiety and catastrophism. A new embrace of the cryptic, occult, techno-pagan, and anti-modern amplifies apocalyptic insecurity. Adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory read breadcrumbs dropped on online message boards for clues that will help them understand power relations. Prophets and evangelists operating outside of institutional religion offer healing, visions, and predictions. Globally, fear of and interest in witches is rising. Pervasive mistrust of government science exacerbated the COVID-19 pandemic. People with little confidence in experts – including the US president – embraced pseudo-scientific coronavirus denialism as well as fake remedies. We can add to this mix Jordan Peterson’s mystical Jungianism, Nick Land’s “dark enlightenment,” and Alexander Dugin’s mythical geopolitics of Atlantis and Hyperborea. Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, pushes an explicitly neofeudal worldview. 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 de-centralization 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. Repetitive, low-control, high-stress work like that associated with work that is technologically monitored correlates directly with “depression and anxiety,” as Emily Guendelsberger demonstrates in her book On the Clock. Uncertain schedules (lauded as flexible), and unreliable pay (because wage theft is ubiquitous), are stressful and deadening. For some, neofeudal apocalypticism is individual, familial, local. It’s hard to get worked up about a climate catastrophe when you’ve lived catastrophe for a few generations. People have good reasons to feel anxious and insecure. The catastrophe of neofeudal capitalism’s expropriation of the social surplus in the setting of a grossly unequal and warming planet is real.

Neoliberalism has effected significant changes in social property relations. As has long been clear in the structural adjustment policies and debt arrangements forced on countries by the World Bank, IMF, and other capitalist institutions, neoliberal policies abolish state “fetters” or constraints on markets – employee safety nets, corporate taxation, social welfare provisions, and so on. The enormous stores of wealth that neoliberal policies enable to accumulate in the hands of the few exert a political and economic power that protects the holders of wealth while intensifying the immiseration of almost everyone else. Over time, wealth-holders seeking high returns rely on speculative finance, leveraged buyouts, hedge funds, private equity, and the like to sniff out and chase after high-risk, high-reward pursuits of the kind favoured in Silicon Valley. With goals of disruption and conquest, they throw this capital into destructive platforms that insert themselves into exchange relations rather than production. Production isn’t likely to generate super-profits, but platforms that can make themselves indispensable to market access, that can extract fees in novel ways, that’s more promising. The increase in precarity and anxiety, as well as the broader patterns associated with privatization, austerity, and the decline of the middle class, create a base of consumers grateful for price breaks and a supply of labour looking for work. Dependent on the market for access to our means of subsistence, we become dependent on the platform for access to the market. If we are to work, the platform gets its cut. If we are to consume, the platform gets its cut. At first, it may seem that the price is just information. But it will increase, it does increase. 

We are in a transitional time when the accumulation process is changing in form. The upper classes cannot carry on in the old way. With capitalist processes of accumulation at a dead end, capital is hoarded and used as a weapon of conquest and destruction, its hoarders and wielders new lords, the rest of us dependent, proletarianized serfs and servants. Neofeudalism is not a “going back” to historical feudalism but a reflexivization such that capitalist processes long directed outward through colonialism and imperialism turn in on themselves. Recognizing neofeudalization tendencies in our present can help us make the political and conceptual links between the inadequacies of public law in the wake of privatized jurisprudence, big tech and the ever-increasing sector of servants, hinterlandization’s landscapes of despair, and the broader vibe of catastrophism and anxiety. A grim new order is taking shape as capital comes up against its limits, rendering struggle and unity all the more urgent.

The Internationalist Archive