Neofeudalism Arrives as Capitalism Departs?
Stained glass, Poynter Room, V&A Museum. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
As a gap between billionaires and everybody else swells, a bipartisan project decades in the making, Jodi Dean, author and professor, considers if we are living through a change in the form of capitalism into what she terms “neofeudalism,” writing in Capital’s Grave (Verso Books, 2025). The book’s title is a reference to a line in The Communist Manifesto about the class relations of capitalism creating its fatal contradictions: “What the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.” Yes, this process has yet to bear fruit.
While beginning to read Dean’s new book, I questioned her thesis that feudalism is emerging from capitalism in 2025. Current events in part shaped my thinking. For instance, President Trump’s global trade tariffs are showing the central role that the production and circulation of commodities are to world commerce, upon which finance and tech platforms that exploit consumers and workers depend.
Then there is a central feature of capitalism: unequal relations between employers and employees. That links to the ties between the employed and unemployed. Suffice it to say that these relationships are baked into capitalism, with this takeaway. Feudalism as a labor system that existed for centuries lacked unemployment as a permanent feature. Under feudalism, there was economic security within a hierarchy of ruling lords and ruled serfs. Meanwhile, capitalism uses joblessness to hold wage-income down by pitting the employed against the unemployed. That division intersects with racism and sexism, as American employers pay nonwhite and women workers less than their male counterparts.
Dean’s thesis is that the capitalist class is shifting from making commodities for profits to taking labor income from workers on digital platforms via charges, fees and rents to accumulate monopoly profits. Consider intellectual property rights that the federal government grants to Big Tech and Big Pharma, for example, allowing these monopolized industries to charge market prices that can and do exceed the actual costs of production. Take pharmaceutical companies that make costly cancer medications. Accordingly, a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment is a path to bankruptcy and poverty, thanks to the for-profit U.S. health care industry.
I do find Dean’s analysis in her first chapter, What the Grundrisse Tells Us About Uber, persuasive. The rideshare company grabs, in a feudal way, income from its contract drivers. They are free for exploitation, somewhat like the former peasants were free to leave the colonized countryside of Ireland to migrate to England to be wage labor as commodity producers there. She shows, convincingly, how Uber, a platform company, frees its drivers for exploitation in ways that depart from the employer playbook in plants. There, employers own the machinery that employees use to take the value in commodities priced higher than labor wage-income. Employers can extend and intensify the labor process to increase their taking of the value that workers produce.
As Dean details, Uber drivers own their vehicles and must pay to operate them. Drivers’ expenses range from gas and oil to maintenance and insurance. Platform employers such as Uber effectively govern drivers’ access to the marketplace of riders. In contrast, factory employees from the 19th century on do not own the machines they use. Employers, then and now, are the machine owners.
This distinction brings me from agreement with Dean over changes in technological development to disagreement with her defining that change as a new or neofeudal departure in the global system of capitalism. As I see things from the belly of an American empire in economic decline, the rise of platform employers complements industrial commodity production for profit abroad. The low-priced goods, for example, available to low-wage shoppers at Wal-Mart, Inc. stores stateside, are there because of the capitalist exploitation of workers as an industrial labor force in the Global South, mainly China, but also nations such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Vietnam, where wages are low versus U.S. workers. Arghiri Emmanuel analyzed this process of high wages in developed nations and low wages in developing countries in terms of unequal exchange, a theory based on Marx’s concept of value. Low wages that labor receives producing commodities in the Global South in part create higher profit rates flowing to corporations in the Global North. Just ask the CEO of Apple Inc.
Unequal exchange explains why America’s capitalist class shifted industrial production from manufacturing states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania abroad. There are several takeaways. One is that the Chinese Communist Party is winning the global race of capitalist for-profit commodity production. This is an irony of world history. Uncle Sam under Presidents Biden and Trump can threaten China militarily over Taiwan, and most recently, the latter can increase a sales tax, or tariff, on that nation. However, that fails to reindustrialize the U.S., as President Trump and those before him have promised and failed to deliver. Imposing tariffs on U.S. trading partners does, however, harm bond and stock markets and consumer confidence. Dean points to neofeudalism as a culprit, in part, with its tech-driven form and corresponding government-guided interventions on display. I prefer the idea that capital itself is the main barrier to its growth imperative. Consider the limits of the planet to sustain human life in the face of climate chaos due to rising sea levels and other weather-related crises from spiking carbon emissions.
Dean lays out, in chapter three, Neofeudalism’s Basic Features, some changes in the state form guiding capital accumulation. The continuity is that the capitalist class controls the state. Its main role is to guide the accumulation of capital in the class that rules, economically and politically. Dean writes, “The fiction of a political system anchored in the rule of law and an economic system following capitalist laws of motion gives way to networked private relations in which power and privilege reign.” Where she sees change, I see continuity. Case in point is America’s industrial mobilization for World War 2. What else was that but a demonstration of a state-guided plan for private industry to alter and then, in the postwar period (Marshall Plan), to resume capitalist laws of motion under a legal regime of political power? President Trump’s tariffs on U.S. trading partners are also a case of exercising political power to benefit billionaires and harm everyone else. This is capitalism, from the bowels of which can emerge fascism.
I did like her conclusion that service workers are the vanguard of social change for human and planetary sustainability. The rise of service employment that pays low wages is, of course, characteristic of former industrial-dominant nations such as the U.S. Dean points to nurses and schoolteachers as service workers whose withholding of their labor with strike actions shows us how to build class solidarity. As these striking workers have shown in deed and word, their labor conditions are organically connected to the people who they serve. Teachers’ labor conditions are students’ learning conditions, as authors Diane Ravitch and Mercedes K. Schneider have written. Likewise, nurses’ labor conditions are also dependent on workplace standards that shape patient care. According to Dean, and I concur, given the political economy of the U.S., service workers whose daily labor employers can’t totally automate are strategically situated to change relations for the better between the capitalist class and everybody else. Thus a “service vanguard,” as she terms this fraction of the working class, is an emerging revolutionary force. That and the provision of universal basic services are tools in the revolutionary toolkit that Dean favors. I do as well.
For some, the term revolution can strike fear. Revolutionaries are coming to steal from me! Wait. I offer the following. Bear with me. I return, as Dean does in the opening of her book under review, to The Communist Manifesto, now nearly 175 years old.
Capitalists are the revolutionary class. They, and not labor in that brief but powerful work, are constantly revolutionizing society’s mode of production, or MOP. The MOP combines the production relations between bosses and workers plus the means of production (machinery and technology). The motive is profit. There is nothing new here under the imperatives of the profit motive. When the working class intervenes for reasons of sustainable life and work, the revolutionary agent can change from capital to labor. When we serve each other in ways that sustain life and the planet, humanity can advance to a higher condition of civilization.
War, a leading cause of ecocide, no more. Billionaires banished, once we get back what they have stolen from us. Dean’s new book delivers critical insights on humanity and society, some of which I differ with, but others on which we agree. Readers can judge for themselves.
