First the good news. The moratorium on imagining the end of capitalism, noted in the 1990s by Fredric Jameson, has finally expired. The decades-long recession of the progressive imagination is over. Apparently the task of envisioning systemic alternatives has become much easier, now that we are allowed to work with dystopian options—for apparently the long-awaited end of capitalism could merely be the beginning of something much worse. Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic. But having made dystopia great again, some on the left have quietly moved to revise the Jamesonian adage: today, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the continuation of capitalism as we know it.
The not-so-good news is that, in undertaking this speculative exercise in apocalyptic scenario-planning, the left has a hard time differentiating itself from the right. In fact, the two ideological poles have all but converged on a shared description of the new reality. For many in both camps, the end of actually existing capitalism no longer means the advent of a better day, whether democratic socialism, anarcho-syndicalism or ‘pure’ classical liberalism. Instead, the emerging consensus is that the new regime is nothing short of feudalism—an -ism with very few respectable friends. True, today’s neo-feudalism arrives with catchy slogans, slick mobile apps, even the promise of eternal virtual happiness in the borderless demesne of Zuckerberg’s metaverse. Its vassals have swapped their medieval garb for the elegant t-shirts from Brunello Cucinelli and sneakers from Golden Goose. Many adherents of the neo-feudal thesis contend that its rise is concomitant with that of Silicon Valley. Thus, terms like ‘techno-feudalism’, ‘digital feudalism’ and ‘information feudalism’ are frequently bandied around.footnote1 ‘Smart feudalism’ is yet to gain much traction, but it may not be far away.
On the right, the most vocal proponent of the ‘return to feudalism’ thesis has been the conservative urban theorist Joel Kotkin, who targeted the power of ‘woke’ techno-oligarchs in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism (2020). While Kotkin goes for ‘neo’, Glen Weyl and Eric Posner, younger thinkers of a more neoliberal persuasion, opted for the ‘techno’ prefix in their much-discussed Radical Markets (2018). ‘Techno-feudalism’, they write, ‘stunts personal development, just as feudalism stunted the acquisition of education or investment in improving land.’footnote2 For classical liberals, of course, capitalism, corroded by politics, is always on the verge of lapsing back into feudalism. Yet some on the radical right see neo-feudalism as a project to be embraced. Going under labels such as ‘neo-reaction’ or ‘dark enlightenment’, many are close to the billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Among them is the neo-reactionary technologist-cum-intellectual Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine, which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010.footnote3
On the left, the list of people who have flirted with ‘feudalist’ concepts is long and growing: Yanis Varoufakis, Mariana Mazzucato, Jodi Dean, Robert Kuttner, Wolfgang Streeck, Michael Hudson and, ironically, even Robert Brenner, of the eponymous Brenner Debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.footnote4 To their credit, none of them goes as far as to claim that capitalism is completely extinct or that we are back in the Middle Ages. The more careful of them, like Brenner, suggest that features of the current capitalist system—prolonged stagnation, politically driven upward redistribution of wealth, ostentatious consumption by the elites combined with increasing immiseration of the masses—recall aspects of its feudal predecessor, even if capitalism still very much rules the day. Yet for all these disclaimers, many on the left have found that calling Silicon Valley or Wall Street ‘feudal’ is simply irresistible, just as many pundits cannot resist calling Trump or Orbán ‘fascist’. The actual connection to historical fascism or feudalism might be tenuous, but the wager is that there is enough shock value in the proclamation to rouse the soporific public from its complacency. Plus, it makes a good meme. The hungry crowds on Reddit and Twitter love it: a YouTube video of a discussion on techno-feudalism by Varoufakis and Slavoj Žižek garnered over 300,000 views in just three weeks.footnote5
In the case of well-known figures like Varoufakis and Mazzucato, tantalizing their audiences with invocations of feudal glamour may provide a media-friendly way to recycle arguments they have made before. In Varoufakis’s case, techno-feudalism seems to be mostly about the perverse macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing. For Mazzucato, ‘digital feudalism’ refers to the unearned income generated by tech platforms. Neo-feudalism is often proposed as a way to bring conceptual clarity to the most advanced sectors of the digital economy, where the left’s brightest minds still find themselves very much in the dark. Are Google and Amazon capitalists? Are they rentiers, as Brett Christophers’s Rentier Capitalism suggests?footnote6 What about Uber? Is it just an intermediary, a rent-taking platform that has inserted itself between drivers and passengers? Or is it producing and selling a transportation service?footnote7 These questions are not without consequences for how we think about contemporary capitalism itself, heavily dominated by technology companies.
The idea that feudalism is making a comeback also coheres with left critiques condemning capitalism as extractivist. If today’s capitalists are mere lazy rentiers who contribute nothing to the production process, don’t they deserve to be downgraded to the status of feudal landlords? This embrace of feudal imagery by media- and meme-friendly figures of the left intelligentsia shows no signs of ceasing. Ultimately, though, the popularity of feudal-speak is a testament to intellectual weakness, rather than media savviness. It is as if the left’s theoretical framework can no longer make sense of capitalism without mobilizing the moral language of corruption and perversion. In what follows I delve into some landmark debates on the distinguishing features that differentiate capitalism from earlier economic forms—and those that define political-economic operations in the new digital economy—in hope that a critique of techno-feudal reason may throw fresh light on the world we’re in.
Neo-reactionaries apart, virtually everyone who uses the term finds neo-feudalism deplorable, a throwback to an oppressive past. But what exactly is wrong with it? Here, as with Tolstoy’s unhappy families, those unhappy with neo-feudalism are all unhappy in their own way. The differences derive in part from the contested nature of the term ‘feudalism’ itself. Is it an economic system, to be evaluated in terms of its productivity and openness to innovation? Or is it a socio-political system, to be assessed in terms of who exercises power within it, how, and over whom? This is hardly a new debate—both medievalists and Marxists know it well—but these definitional ambiguities have crossed over into the nascent discussions about neo- and techno-feudalism.