The Neo-Feudal Thesis

A qualified defense of a polemical concept.

I’m writing a book about class struggle. Some of the ideas that I develop in this piece will make it into that forthcoming book.

“The Path of Workers”, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, 1901

Has capitalism become something worse? Are we living in a “neo-feudal” social order? Or is the mere suggestion an offense to our better Marxist reason? Let’s say that we are in neo-feudalism, what would this word feudal name, what would it signify? Would it represent a change in the capitalist mode of production, and if so, what exactly would that mean? Perhaps the neo-feudal thesis implies that the bourgeoisie have now regressed to an aristocratic social class?

The neo-feudal thesis names the fact that capitalism has not modified itself in ways that it has historically, which entails a progressive and egalitarian shift towards correcting inequality. This has not come about since 2008. The proponents of neo-feudalism, from Jodi Dean to Yannis Varoufakis to Mckenzie Wark are often not clear with where the idea emerges from. In what follows, I aim to argue that the theoretical tendency of neo-feudalism emerges out of post-68 leftwing theory, mostly in France and then beyond.

Thinkers from Jean Baudrillard, Michel Clouscard, to world systems theory put forward the notion that due to monopoly capitalism and the rise of financial-based capitalist forces, core capitalist power arrangements began to change. The neo-feudal thesis should be read in line with these various attempts to name a series of objective and subjective changes to capitalist social life. As we will see below, these theses were looking at a changed capitalism which they tended to call ‘neo-capitalism’ after 68.¹ As I mentioned, the neo-feudal thesis emerges historically in a distinct post-2008 situation wherein we witness the failure of capitalism to reenter a progressive phase. Unlike past cycles, capitalism no longer seems capable of regenerating itself; capitalism has entered a stage of amnesia regarding its commitments to the social and to its founding ideals.

The theorists of neo-feudalism rarely identify the fact that the thesis contains a subjective component: How do we account for the loss of class-based forces and the capacity of political organization to compel the capitalist ruling classes to bring about egalitarian social changes. This subjective dimension was already expressed more resolutely with the neo-capitalism theorists. 2008 brought out the subjective dimension and dramatized it precisely because the working class enters into a new phase of direct domination, what Will Davies has referred to as the “punitive” phase of neoliberalism, where debt, the carceral state, declining wages etc. have become normal, sunk features of social life. These are features of social life that the left and political movements cannot manage to alter. An ideological and practical crisis of politics ensues.

From the subjective standpoint of class and class power, the neo-feudal thesis has its origins in the historical waning of the political core of socialism, the worker’s movement and Marxism. This movement experienced its Golden Age from the death of Engels in the 1880s up to the Second World War. The question becomes one of historical periodization: When did the worker’s movement begin to stultify? If you read the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the 1950s and C.L.R. James’ work on State Capitalism and World Revolution, the rise of a new middle strata after WWII, combined with the rise of a new form of petit-bourgeois bureaucratic management had seemingly enveloped both the west and the USSR. But these changes to capitalism did not modify the raison d’être of the socialist movement, namely that the social existence of the exploited working class must be politically organized in a movement that is independent from the dominant bourgeois parties and that this must be steered by developing political demands distinct to this class.

Socialism and the worker’s movement may be kneecapped in this new arrangement of neo-capitalism—or neo-feudalism—but the basic premise of the independent organization of the working class remains the primary political task of our time. This stands as a truth of the worker’s movement and socialism, and it remains the only means by which politics can re-connect to the revolutionary tradition and reintroduce a universalist basis to collective life. A socialism built on the independent organization of the working class is the only chance we have to overcome the nihilism and ineptitude of contemporary liberal politics and the identical agendas of the two bourgeois parties. How can we escape the fake rivalry structures of contemporary liberalism? This emerges as a task that will require patience and ideological subtraction from conventional institutions. A profound nominalism plagues intellectual life—especially on the left—a becoming-fictional of politics that must be avoided through new appeals to reality.

What Neo-Feudalism Names

The first and most dramatic thing it pinpoints is the end of competition as a logic that organizes macro-scale market relations, which has profound reverberations downward into local markets. The end of competition re-shapes the subjective horizon of individual striving, the ideology of capitalism as fair, meritocratic and dynamic begins to change, justifications for stagnation have to be invented. The end of competition re-structures the superstructure of ideology, culture, etc.—new movies, and television must portray it, and entire culture industries reflect it in the fact that the class backgrounds of the foremost critics, public figures, politicians, professors, and of the elite all come from the upper middle class. The end of competition begins in the “platform capitalism” of Amazon, Google, X, Facebook; industries that undermine the productivist and independent producer ideals that capitalism was founded on.

But the general idea of something like ‘platform capitalism’ at one point in time was welcome from elements of the left. It may surprise you to learn that leftwing liberal philosophers such as John Dewey and Walter Lippmann were advocates of what they called corporate capitalism, which they theorized as inevitable prior to the First World War. They saw the rise of large-scale corporate commonwealths capable of sharing surpluses so as to provide a stable way of life to workers—a wage to afford property, family supervision, health care, etc.—and therefore they welcomed the idea as a collectivist panacea. The corporation would be a “commonwealth” capable of providing a missing stability to industrial workers. They saw this as inevitable, as an objective outcome of where the system was headed prior to the First World War, and they embraced it from a practical standpoint. What emerged was an oversized bureaucracy that governs the sector of waged labor and multiple industries, from the information and entertainment ‘public relations’, to the birth of health care provided by entities such as Kaiser, which began as a mega corporate steel plant during the war, employing tens of thousands.

The sheer market dominance of these monopoly-based industries have been with us for some time. The naivety of liberals before the war was evident; they thought that capitalist monopolies could be compelled to share the surplus, to exert that dignified bourgeois virtue of Henry Ford who willingly chose to raise his wages. This never happened. The platform capitalists of today are avowedly pernicious companies, they share no surplus with their workers, they rely on such low wages that government assistance has to be provided to minimum wage workers. This causes the entrepreneurial mythology of capitalism to go into free-fall and to become incoherent. But this is nothing new, as a system, capitalism is in a continual state of conflict with its founding ideals. After 2008 this spontaneous religion must invent new strategies and new reactions to these contradictions must be created.

This is the spiritual side of capitalism, its cornerstone myth is of entrepreneurial mobility as the promise of a social contract based on property and ownership. The myth is founded in the ideals of the independent producer. Capitalism develops regressions and stagnations born from crisis and imperialism that disrupt this social promise and ideology. But the culture industries perform the work of culture which is to enchant subjects into a mythology of the fairness and the worth of sacrifice to this system. This is where gurus, influencers, and market mentorship is directed, namely at assisting subjects in adapting to the contradictions of the system. It is reinforced by popular film and television, despite the diminishment of property and social expectations, this enchantment continues because it must continue. This is how social reproduction must rely on the superstructural sphere to regenerate class stability and status quo power relations.

The imposition of austerity after 2008 across institutions has only added to the conflictual bedrock of capitalist social life and it has led to the development of a system that must normalize brutality. This brutality begins in labor and on restrictions placed on consumption and property for the working class. This brutality is then reflected as a mirror across the political and popular culture; even literature must normalize brutality and make it natural. A world where deceit and corruption are normalized features of social life was theorized as endemic to the imperialist and colonialist period of capitalism following the Paris Commune of 1871 to World War I. This was Lenin’s idea which Lukács gave a more convincing and thorough analysis to. After 2008, it seems that all of culture in capitalism reflects the sadomasochist normalization of brutality, but this fact is not direct and an entire culture of fantasy still aims to cover it over. While it is true that the ruling class requires the development of aesthetic and spiritual justifications for the perpetuation of labor practices based in cruelty and reactionary individualism, nothing about this necessity should lead us to name this normalization feudal. The name neo-feudal, as a polemical concept, points to the absence of collective social and organization that could be capable of seriously contesting the legitimacy of barbarism and normalized brutality. This absence affects the production of culture because the production of culture is a reflection of the productive needs of the ruling class.

We must remember how intense the inequality of our modern society is. Some have argued that class mobility has grown stagnant to such an extent that the system now is experienced as completely rigged by the working class. The affects of dejection are felt widely in such a scenario. Not only does this prospect lead to a sense inner symbolic violence, paranoia and even to frustration, it also leads to the invention of vulgar biological means for justifying the end of competition. This falls on the elite liberal thought leaders to perpetuate. The bourgeois class must accept no alternative to this system, and they end up embracing logics of in-born advantage, genetics, IQ, and cognitive development to account for the social division of labor and inequality. This again contradicts the founding ideals of work and meritocratic striving.

This turn to biological accounts of inequality disavows class disadvantage because it has already naturalized class origins as unquestionable par for the course. The gravity of the neo-feudal thesis is found in the notion of the end of competition, a prospect that makes this liberal subjectivist irrationalism fall back on purely racialist concepts. Our time is one in which an entire fake racial conflict is peddled out by the ruling elite and racialization becomes the calling card of liberal thought because liberals have always preferred the biological over the economic.² A violence of the body. The politics of identity is now subordinated to a pure racialist conception of social antagonism, endorsed by the progressive wing of liberalism, and reliant on reified biological and individual differences as the locus of social reality. This worldview will continue to undermine the collective resolve and possibility for political solidarity. If it is not rejected there is no future.

Capitalism has always been a contradictory system, what Engels pointed to as the ‘anarchy of production’³ erodes the social fabric and the class coherence of mutually-shared exploitation. The anarchy of production foments a profound blurring of exploitation, but Engels rightly meant for this fact to become the site where socialist demands are to emanate. The call for reigning in collective worker control over production is not a fantasy or a distant, by-gone dream. To suppose that it is would be to succumb to the neo-feudal thesis too rigidly. We may lack the means to galvanize a movement that would be capable of demanding stability over the sphere of production, but this does not diminish the necessity to aim for such demands.

It is interesting to note that neo-capitalism theorists—post-May 68 thinkers from Jean Baudrillard to Michel Clouscard—pointed to the way that the sphere of consumption grew to become the site of political contestation. The anarchy of production remains a constant, but this anarchy cannot be politically confronted because we experience a loss in worker power. Specifically, what is lost is the capacity for labor power to be leveraged at the site of production in a way that would transform industries of production. This is a hallmark of monopoly capitalism that C.L.R. James and Johnson-Forest witnessed in the 1950s onward.

Neo-Feudalism: Four Key Theses

We have seen how the neo-feudal thesis is a radicalization of the neo-capitalism thesis from post-68 thought. Thus, when we understand it in its full weight, the neo-feudal thesis should stir our sense of outrage and spark a collective commitment to agitation, not in the name of restoring a commitment to fairer capitalist economies rooted in competition. The weight of the thesis, in all its magnitude and gravity, points to a quite sober set of realities implicit in contemporary capitalism. It can thus be thought of as a beginning point to something more fatal while at the same time real. But in order to understand the weight of the thesis, we must get clear on the core claims of the neo-feudal thesis from the perspective of political economy. We will identify 4 main features:

1) The crisis of social mobility. As we have indicated, capitalism has erected thick, seemingly unassailable barriers to social mobility and this has caused a profound unease in the culture and across the field of political ideologies.

2) A change in the class structure of the bourgeoisie and the ruling class born from the rise of finance capitalism. No longer is the core center of gravity of the capitalist system rooted in the extraction of profit through surplus value. This is owed to what world-systems theorists call the finance stage of capitalist development. Money now more so makes money off of money. That is the basic formula for finance capitalism. This gives rise to a most insidious class power nexus embodied through a rentier class that functions like “lords”, extracting value through monopoly, coercion, and rent. They have a tendency to dominate markets, from real estate to finance, to energy. The working class of exploited waged workers have been prevented—through sheer discipline, manipulation, violence, exclusion and cultural power—from leveraging their labor power as a political act that might overcome the status of their alienated social existence.

3) The loss of class coherence and worldview-making potential diminishes for the working class. The working class struggles to find itself, to cohere its interests. This is because surpluses generated in the sphere of production have been taken over by monopoly markets which has given rise to a new “lords and peasants” structure to class conflict. The lords are still lodged within the bourgeoisie, and the peasants are still the working class. Both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat lose a dialectical logic of antagonism towards one another because they have been internally split apart. This is not a post-class vision what so ever. It is a mutation in social power and the possibility of social transformation, as Byung-Chul Han argues in his more recent book Capitalism and the Death Drive. This means that no longer is the Hegelian master-slave dialectic operative; the dialectic of classes has stalled.⁴ But Han shamelessly derides Marxists like Antonio Negri (RIP) precisely because they insist that the class struggle is still alive in the sphere of production. Indeed, the struggle in the productive sphere still remains the task for the worker’s movement to coordinate, but the condition of the working class subordinated as it is to atomized individualism prevents coordinated and large-scale collective interests to emerge.

4) A final feature of the neo-feudal turn is that imperial hegemons (nation-states) struggle for domination of markets but this struggle has a new configuration, different than the 20th century nation-state model of power based on three worlds theory or based on two primary hegemons. Imperialism now operates on a model of sovereignty that Jodi Dean calls “parcellated”, a concept that has some resonance with multipolarity theory, but which places the nexus of power on the side of market demands and less on the Machiavellian whims of Bonapartist leaders within states.

Neo-Feudalism as the Exhaustion of Telos

We should be clear that the concept ‘neo-feudal’, which we have demonstrated in these four key points, indicates something very stark as it pertains to the subjective side of social existence and class struggle. While these four points refer to objective changes, at a more subjective level, the neo-feudal thesis signals a response to collective desperation of contemporary labor and life in capitalism more generally. The neo-feudal thesis should invite us to make an inventory of desire, affect, emotions and popular sentiment, and it should also invite us to make this analysis internal to the left. How else might the left ever wage a struggle capable of transforming the system? Without self-criticism the left will remain adrift from the revolutionary tradition, without this inventory the left will continue to call itself liberal.

This desperation became evident after 2008 when theorists from Mark Fisher to Paul Mason observed similar objective changes to the system which they named “post-capitalism.” Implicit in these post-capitalism theories was the admission that strategies for revolt and contestation to capitalism have grown inefficacious, if not downright impotent. Post-capitalism, in ways similar to the neo-feudal thesis, pointed to the intensifying rigidities to the class system, the monopolization of entire industries, to the tyranny of finance capital and its frequency of capital flight and capital mobility. These changes indicated something qualitatively distinct as much as they called for new thinking for what is to come after.

Post-capitalist theorists held to an exhausted telos of capitalism for implicit in the idea is the notion that something has to give, that there will come a time when the system changes. This meant that post-capitalism theorists were in fact more optimistic than the neo-feudal theists today. They had a telos, or the idea that capitalism will overcome itself, and this telos encouraged a technocratic solution to the crisis of capitalism after the great economic crash of 2008. Consider Žižek’s response to the failures of Occupy when he said, time and again, that Occupy failed due to a lack of planning for what a post-capitalist society would look like. As if the ruling class would somehow give us an ‘A’ on our research project for a post-capitalist future and permit us entry into the governing apparatus so that we young upstarts might implement it. But this liberal technocratic thinking is not surprising from Žižek given that Slovenia was succumb to a type of neo-colonial occupation similar to France after WW II and the imposition of the Marshal Plan. As I try to articulate in this talk critiquing his liberalism, I am of the mind that Žižek is terminally liberal in terms of his praxis and ultimate vision of what is to be done politically.

The Rise of Neo-Aristocratic Ideologies in the Culture

It’s seldom explored but there is a superstructural expression to neo-feudalism that appears in the culture industry, in the sphere of ideology, and even in spirituality. I call this neo-aristocratic ideology. It is driven materially by the rise of oligarchic companies across the tech and finance sectors. Consider the intellectual ecosystem of Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel’s philosophical mentor René Girard. As I write in my book on the family, Girard offer a vision of social life predicated on a neo-aristocratic vision. What Thiel extracts from Girard is the idea that what is most damaging to subjective life in capitalism is competition.

Girardian thought is attractive to Thiel in a highly practical way; Girard lends credence to the persistence of monopoly and oligarchic takeover of entire markets by creating institutional ecosystems that have done away with competitive logics. Girard encourages an institutional and group theory that has effectively undermined the capitalist drive to constant competition and in this way his philosophy is highly contradictory.

In this interview with the This is Revolution podcast I elaborate on the neo-feudal turn and how it appears in popular film and television series.

This aristocratic element to ruling class ideology is alive across our culture, from the rise of shows like Succession, to the Red Scare aesthetic, to the crisis over work and leisure since the pandemic, there is a sense of a latent aristocratic ethos that has become a mirror of social life.⁵ Aristocratic values are not to be entirely rejected outright, they must be assessed first in their contradictory status, they point to a tension in the ruling class itself and to a yearning for the amenities and needs that aristocratic life affords.

If the zeitgeist of contemporary capitalism is rampant with neo-aristocratic ideologies this is most apparent in neo-Nietzschean thought on the liberal right, from Richard Hanania to Bronze Age Pervert, to the dime-store Nietzscheans. Hanania is most emblematic of the ideological turn to neo-feudalism because at the core of his vision of contemporary capitalism is the wager that since capitalism has such a great deal of inequality and class rigidity, this can serve as a bulwark to the promotion of any egalitarian changes to the class system.

Hanania’s support for the liberal status quo persists even though the left does not have a viable universal and class-based egalitarian project. If socialism was a viable and hegemonic institutional and democratic force than Hanania would remove his liberal mask and endorse more outright monarchial forms of social hierarchy. In his Nietzschean vision, what is most important is that capitalist rank order retain its rigid division, and that those with superiority and strength be empowered, while those who are weak and of lowborn intelligence, remain disempowered. The degree to which an unequal society can remain static, liberalism will remain defensible in his eyes.

What Hanania’s liberalism shows us is that a quasi-feudal and aristocratic vision of class is embedded in liberalism, which the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie disavows, while the rightwing avows. Engels points to the way that Napoleon Bonaparte retained aristocratic hegemony in his liberal class coalition, and this aristocratic appeasement remains an essential aspect of subsequent Bonapartist political leadership. Bonapartism is the preservation of a class coalition that maintains—and does not abolish—aristocratic forms of class power and this entails cultural and intellectual forms that express a nostalgia or even a desire for aristocratic values and ideals.

1. ‘Neo-capitalism’ names a series of profound mutations in class alignment, the structure of bourgeois parties, the power balance between labor and capital and a host of other changes to the capitalist system following World War II. I recommend reading about Michel Clouscard’s brilliant analysis of neo-capitalism in Aymeric Monville’s newly translated work by the same title.

2. If the left does not reject this racialist and biological account of social antagonism and adopt a class perspective it will only succumb to radical liberalism or some progressive variant of leftism that is hellbent on maintaining the class status quo.

3. Anarchy of production was a thesis of Engels and Marx that largely remained consistent from 1848 to the late 1880s.

4. I led a guided study group on Byung-Chul Han’s book Capitalism and the Death Drive which I found to be a good book due to its treatment of Freud in a fairly exegetical and textually rigorous manner. We incorporate Deleuze’s work around drive theory and masochism if I am not mistaken.

5. An analysis of the cultural forms of what I am calling ‘neo-aristocratic ideologies’ will be a big focus of my forthcoming book on class theory with Zer0 Books.