What The Hell America!

Yanis Varoufakis’s 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism was perhaps the most widely discussed foray into this field. But it has been joined this year by Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Both works suggest that the world has left behind capitalism for an emergent feudal order.

These theorizations of supposed new feudalisms look to the past to envisage the future. They do so, however, in contradictory ways, drawing on divergent medieval pasts. For some proponents of the idea of “neofeudalism,” such as Katherine V. W. Stone and Robert Kuttner, the central transformation is a legal one. Stone and Kuttner hark back to the moment when the Roman Empire’s structures of public justice gave way to more fragmented, privatized juridical orders.

In contemporary society, they argue, we are witnessing a corruption of public justice by the interests of private capital, exemplified in forced private legal arbitration and the corporate capture of regulatory bodies. According to this perspective, we should see the ongoing privatization of today as the perversion of a legitimate and beneficial model of capitalism, which should be fortified by a strong public sphere. Their argument focuses on the changes to the legal sphere and the control of justice.

By contrast, Dean’s understanding of “neofeudalism” is fundamentally economic. It argues for a shift in the mode of production in contemporary society. Like Varoufakis, Dean traces a move away from competition and profit-maximization on the part of corporate leaders like Zuckerberg and Bezos, and she argues that they are now more preoccupied with establishing monopolies and extracting rent.

This, the analogy implies, mirrors the fate of the medieval rural peasantry, bound to pay rent to monopolistic lords above them. While Dean approvingly cites Stone and Kuttner, they actually diverge in both their notion of historic feudalism and their diagnosis for the present.

As these examples make clear, the meaning and use of “feudalism” is ambiguous in this discourse. There are three main ways in which historians have defined feudalism that are incompatible for purposes of analysis with each other. Contemporary writers all too often merge these definitions.

The first feudalism exists especially in the popular historical imagination. It is the world of rigid hierarchies encapsulated in the image of the “feudal pyramid.” This idea is the staple of school classrooms, a quick search on Google, or the slop that poses as information via artificial intelligence.

The pyramidal view of feudalism describes a coherent social system in which kings granted land to nobility in exchange for loyalty and military service. Peasants at the bottom of the pyramid grew food and received “protection” in return.

This definition has a certain timelessness, since it supposedly existed for more than a thousand years, and a sense of rigidity, since almost no one could escape its fixed, pyramidal order. It is the social system that most non-medievalists seem to have in mind when they are contrasting present and past.

Medieval scholars generally hate this version of feudalism. For the last fifty years, academic historians have criticized this idea as overly broad and unreflective of a dynamic period in human history. Whatever else Game of Thrones and its prequel House of the Dragon might suggest, society does not stand still for centuries with few changes to class structure — unless we count dragons as a class.

Moreover, the term feudalism itself was only coined after the end of the Middle Ages. In fact, since the 1970s, historians in the English-speaking world have even tended to move away from using the word “feudalism” or speaking of a “feudal system.” They sometimes jokingly refer to it as the “F word.”

This leads to the second, much more specific, concept of feudalism. This is a legal idea expressing the mutual bonds between a ruler and their subordinate elites (sometimes called vassals). A ruler would provide land from which a subordinate could appropriate revenues. The ruler, in turn, received a legal pledge from the subordinate, which had to be renewed with each new generation.

The pledge tended to entail military service, fees, or various other rights for the ruler. It was the glue that held elite society together. It was not about peasants. This version can be glimpsed in the medieval images of seated rulers with knights kneeling before them pledging such an exchange.

This feudalism was restricted to a certain time (ca. 1100–1400 CE), a certain place (France and England, mostly), and certain specific individuals (elites only). Medieval historians still usefully employ this legal concept, but this is not the feudalism of today’s debates. It is too narrow, precise, and, well, medieval. Though its symbolic power remains in the metaphors of “vassal states” or “paying homage,” such phrases are figurative, not literal.

A third understanding of feudalism is the feudal mode of production that, in its classic Marxist formulation, characterizes the economic framework of a society. Karl Marx laid out various modes of production, and more contemporary theorists have expanded on Marx’s ideas in useful ways.

Marxist scholars held the feudal mode of production to have developed from the ancient slave mode of production. Instead of requiring enslaved labor, owned and directly dominated by a lord, feudal lords dominated a large mass of peasants in various states of semi-freedom and unfreedom. These peasants produced food from lands they leased on tenure from elites, who appropriated a certain amount of the surplus and, in some cases, demanded labor services.

Under this regime, elite power was rooted in the ownership of land and the use of coercive force to seize goods and enforce the conditions of tenure. The specifics of how goods were appropriated could vary, deriving from taxes or rents, as could the legal ways in which the goods were taken. To differentiate the feudal mode of production from the two non-Marxist forms of feudalism, historians like John Haldon have relabeled the last type as the tributary mode of production.

The problem here is apparent: while there are similarities between the three varieties of feudalism, unless we engage in careful delineation, it is easy to pick and choose a characteristic from any or all of the three to form a catch-all feudalism of an idealized medieval past.

Dean, for example, quotes analysis from all three groups to define her idea: Marc Bloch and Joseph Strayer appear to discuss a feudal society (form 1), Susan Reynolds shows up to note that medievalists have debated whether to use the term (form 2), while Perry Anderson (among others) is used to discuss the feudal mode of production (form 3).

If we combine all three understandings of the original feudalism to create a picture of neofeudalism, the idea becomes unmoored from such conceptual definitions. It ends up as a transhistorical (and indeed ahistorical) idea, fit for a new purpose in the present.

This generic concept of feudalism suggests a lack of progress and a return to a less advanced society with more inequality, fewer freedoms, less property ownership for non-elites, and less mobility into the elite class. These transformations appear both in Marxist ideologies — as a move backward from capitalism to feudalism — and in liberal critiques — as the failure of a progressive narrative that has stalled and gone into reverse. Our aspirational future, whether consisting of socialism or a looser form of progress, has receded from view.

Yet few of these changes are necessarily linked to feudalism. Tech barons can offer fealty to President Trump or other rulers to advance their eminently capitalist goals, which may well involve privatization, but of a capitalist form. They aim to insert themselves and their businesses into state arenas to control lower classes and bend them to their will.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the case of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as proponents of state control through a capitalist ideology: efficiency, market power, and privatization are their mantra, whatever outcomes they produce. Neither Musk’s ideological justifications nor his material goals resemble the feudalism of the modern imagination, with its rigid class structures, ceremonial expressions of order, and equivocal sense of private property.

Trump himself is evidently less attached to market forces, as his single-minded pursuit of tariffs shows. Yet in this, he is at remarkable variance with much of the donor class whose members brought him to power.

Elite figures such as Musk have long dominated political power by creating their own private jurisdictions. We could be speaking about Count Robert of Artois terrorizing peasants with a pet wolf in late thirteenth-century France, a robber baron of the 1890s, or the Disney Corporation today. However, the legal and economic framework for Count Robert was entirely different than for the other two cases.

The way in which private jurisdictions function in the twenty-first century is specific to our current capitalist system, which has chosen to center economic efficiencies and profits over human flourishing and the enjoyment of life. Such choices and structures would appear grossly out of place in most regions of medieval Europe, including Count Robert’s.

Part of the problem also rests in applying a singular notion of historical feudalism, whether we equate it with disordered private justice or a world in which plunder or monopoly power is the only avenue for the extraction of wealth. Even in the Middle Ages, we cannot speak of a single “feudalism.” Although the capitalist mode of production did not structure medieval Europe and the Middle East before modernity, capital, wage labor, and markets could nonetheless dominate in specific places and times.

As Chris Wickham recently argued, capitalist relations of production played an important role in parts of the Eastern Mediterranean from ca. 950–1150 CE, even while the overarching economic system remained feudal. Orientalist-inflected perspectives on the Islamic world have resulted in its capitalist elements being downplayed. The Middle Ages have served as a blank slate for many possible ideas of feudalism, with supposedly “well-known” aspects, such as private justice and predation, combined as seems useful to serve present needs.

Getting to grips with today’s version of capitalism does not require us to fall back on a caricature of medieval feudalism, even if certain elements do appear similar. Private jurisdictional power has certainly exploded over the last several decades as massive corporations have expanded their reach into new spheres of life. At the same time, we should remember that even the most neoliberal state remains vastly more powerful and far-reaching in its influence than its pre-modern forebears.

Countries today may appear weak in comparison to the stronger states and public realms of the mid-twentieth century. Yet those cases represented a high point in public power, trade union mobilization, and redistributive policy, not the norm against which we should measure today’s capitalism.

We are dealing with a transformation within capitalism rather than a transition from capitalism. As tech platforms have created ever more precise data, they have simultaneously required larger capital injections to become viable and, eventually, turn a profit. Some have become rent-seeking, like Google, while others have purchased vast swathes of real estate.

Instead of creating new products, they destroy their competitors and existing markets to gain ever greater returns, encouraging investors to prop up loss-making ventures on the promise of supposedly secure future income. While Dean is correct about these changes in her work, none of this constitutes a new mode of production. It is, rather, a change in how capital works.

If it was the norm half a century ago for people to go in person to a community hall where they could buy and sell used clothing once a month, Facebook’s Marketplace fulfills a similar role every day by capturing the used clothing market through efficiency. But Facebook simultaneously uses the collected data to sell new products, rendering the consumer and their attention a secondary product to be sold to advertisers and content producers.

This practice owes much to modern psychological models developed by advertisers and tech companies and has nothing to do with feudal relations. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has conceptualized this extractive, data-driven business model as representing ever greater capitalist colonization of the domain of private life and the private self. This is a much more stimulating idea than that of techno- or neofeudalism.

We do not need the concept of feudalism, in any of its variants or forms, to explain the ongoing problems of our respective states and systems. The appeal to archaic models to explain contemporary changes is a morbid symptom of an age in which visions of a better future have been replaced with oppressive fears of backsliding and regression. Things do get worse as well as better, but it gives too much credit to capitalism, in its various forms, to imagine it as the antithesis of monopoly power, the private corruption of justice, and the political rule of corporate elites.

Capitalists have often defined capitalism’s own ideal form against an image of “old world” feudalism, not least in the post-independence United States. We must not take these deeply ideological perspectives at face value. We are not regressing into the system from which capitalism once emerged: we are witnessing a new and dangerous transformation that is internal to capitalism itself.