Technofeudalism versus Total Capitalism

REVIEW ESSAY
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
by Yannis Varoufakis
Melville House, 2024, 304 pages

How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy
by Cédric Durand
Verso Books, 2024, 240 pages

Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle
by Jodi Dean
Verso Books, 2025, 192 pages

How to describe decadence? It is easier to agree on its features than to arrive at a consensus conceptualization: economic decline, low productivity growth, withered state capacities, and a social landscape characterized by high inequality and crumbling infrastructure—but also fused with high-tech innovations, often directed to surveillance and control. But what could it all mean, other than “down”? The concept du jour is premised on the notion that we are leaving capitalism and entering a new form of feudalism, which recalls the hierarchy, domination, and stagnation of the old.

This understanding of contemporary decline has given rise to the technofeudal thesis. The public intellectual most associated with it is Greek economist and former finance minister Yannis Varoufakis, who has described capitalism’s evolution into something new, under the force of Big Tech and its platform monopolies. His full treatment of the subject comes in the form of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.¹ French economist Cédric Durand’s Techno-féodalisme: Critique de l’économie numérique, originally published in France in 2020, was the first book-length treatment, and it remains the most complete undertaking, earning a translation into English under the title How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy.² Most recently, political theorist Jodi Dean has followed up her 2020 essay “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?” with a book, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle.³

The provocation that capitalism may be over belongs principally to McKenzie Wark and her Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, which appeared in 2019.⁴ For Varoufakis, it is a book “from which [he] drew much courage”; for Dean, the ideas are “dizzying” and a “call to think again about the assumptions guiding action and critique.”⁵ Durand likewise finds something compelling in that account, the emergence of something novel after capitalism’s exhaustion.

As the compound identifier suggests, the proponents of the techno­feudalism thesis believe not only that the future will resemble the precapitalist past but that technology is centrally implicated in this renascent mode of production. Durand holds that Silicon Valley was right in saying that the rise of information technology would change everything, but instead of a liberatory “rejuvenating cure, the course of events instead points to degeneration.”⁶ The epochal nature of change is rarely understated. The debate over neo- or technofeudalism is one carried out in Marxist terms, even if it is meant to overturn those same theories or philosophical presuppositions. Dean, for instance, argues against “Marxist certainties” regarding the impossibility of returning to a prior stage of history, pushing back against the view that labor-capital relations are the last possible relation of exploitation in history. “Today such claims of finality and irreversibility aren’t compelling. Particularly in the wake of the defeat of the workers’ movement at the end of the twentieth century. . . .”⁷

If we take the claims of a postcapitalist transition at face value, then are we not living through a revolutionary moment? For the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin, when the transition is made unconsciously or when the ideology animating classes does not allow them to master the process of change, then social transformation appears to operate like a natural change. In this case, we are dealing with the “model of decadence.”⁸ Just as there was no “feudal revolution” that toppled Rome, so capitalism would appear to be decaying seamlessly into technofeudalism. Unless, that is, we are to grant figures like Elon Musk self-conscious vision and mastery of the historical process. On this note, before engaging more deeply with the authors under review and a range of associated thinkers who mostly reside on the Marxist or liberal left, it is worth visiting with the other side of the ideological spectrum.

Decadence has traditionally been the preserve of conservatives and reactionaries. It is usually of sub-Spenglerian type: the waning of one geographically bound culture or civilization and the waxing of another. The West’s decline would have its obverse in the rise of some imagined civilizational Other, be it Islam or China—or else in the internal corruption generated by wokeness. China, though, represents an ambiv­alent figure in neoreactionary thought. For one cofounder of Palantir, China is to be opposed, but for another, China is a hotbed of innovationist vitality.⁹ Going further, Nick Land sees in China his vision of an accelerationist future beyond modernity, where state and market are united.¹⁰

It would be consistent with a historical understanding according to which Britain (and then the United States) once represented capitalism’s highest stage of development to now see in China the fullest embodiment of “the new and bad.” For those glimpsing a technofeudal mode of production on the horizon, Chinese wings would carry forth technologies of surveillance and control as well as a state-capital nexus that is tighter and more monolithic than any in modernity thus far. Varoufakis and Durand toy with elements of this idea.

In Oswald Spengler’s account of the decline of the West, civilizations are aestheticized, each has its own cultural morphology or physiognomy. The West is “Faustian,” identified by its “direction-energy which has an eye only for the most distant horizons.” Chinese culture, meanwhile, freely wanders here and there but nevertheless eventually reaches its goal. Decline is merely part of an organic rhythm of birth and decay. The avatars of technofeudalism, the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their intellectual representatives, have two responses. In one vision, they are Faustians, rescuing Western civilization from decay. Alternatively, non-Faustian China is a posthuman, postmodern future to be embraced. They are wrong in two ways.

First, the brave new world of “tech” is not Faustian. Instead, to use the terms developed by Marshall Berman in his unmatched reading of Goethe’s oeuvre and the process of modernity as a whole,¹¹ they are pseudo-Faustian. Great feats of modernity often have their tragic element (Robert Moses’s uprooting of New York neighborhoods is a frequent reference in this regard), but while that is part and parcel of development, the pseudo-Faustian is marked instead by a useless “theatre of cruelty and absurdity.” As Berman noted, Stalin’s White Sea Canal project “sacrificed hundreds of thousands of workers” and was, like other similar projects, condemned by “the heartbreaking fact . . . that they didn’t work.”¹² The new algorithmic means of surveillance and control were sold as boons to productivity, convenience, and autonomy. But they have not produced accelerated economic growth, nor more free time and less drudgery, only massive fortunes for the few and evident stagnation for the many. It might not be the insult that would most sting tech oligarchs, but nevertheless: they’re no Faustians.

Secondly, and more consequentially for declinists of both reactionary and radical stripes (the sub-Spenglerians and the technofeudal theorists, respectively), there is no Other. Decline cannot be turned into a geopolitical game, “our” model failing and “theirs” gaining the upper hand, in some Cold War redux. China is neither a civilizational challenger to the West nor is it somehow at the leading edge of our bad future: it may have pioneered new forms of control, but it remains more economically dynamic precisely by adhering more radically to capitalist logic. The truth is there is only one civilization: capitalism is global and total, and its decay is everywhere.

Spectres and Stakes

So, what in essence is technofeudalism, and what are the stakes in describing decline in such terms?

Debate on the left has most recently concerned the diet version of the postcapitalist decline thesis. In late 2022, the sociologist Dylan Riley and the economist (and doyen of the study of the transition of feudalism into capitalism) Robert Brenner argued that “political capitalism,” a new regime of accumulation, was upon us.¹³ This built on Brenner’s piece two years earlier, in which he observed the enormous pandemic bailouts and money printing as a “politically driven upward redistribution of wealth,” whose aim was “to sustain central elements of a partially transformed dominant capitalist class, as the response to a seemingly inexorable process of economic deterioration.”

The recent debate, including a shorter piece by Riley in 2023,¹⁴ concerned American institutional politics, class coalitions, and Biden’s economic policy. Consequently, responses largely revolved around political strategy, about whether the Left could keep favoring the policies it already favored (industrial policy), or whether a cross-class Green New Deal–style alliance in favor of reinudstrialization would lead, in Riley’s words, to “a massive exacerbation of the problems of overcapacity on a world scale, putting sharp pressure on the returns of the same private capital that was ‘crowded-in’ by ‘market-making’ industrialization policies.” For Riley, “blather about New Deals and sepia-toned ‘Rooseveltologia’ should be exposed for what it is: a backward-facing obstacle to the establishment of socialism.”

If Riley and Brenner are correct in their analogy, then the reformist politics advanced in Jacobin and elsewhere are indeed on a path to nowhere, and the yelps of protest are little more than “let us have our political attachments, whatever the consequences.” Yet, as Benjamin Fong rightly noted in Damage,¹⁵ the eventual problems of industrial overcapacity are a capitalist problem, not an objective limit. There is no ceiling to what humanity can dream of, manufacture, build out—only an economic system whose irrationality inheres precisely in the need for activity to be profitable, and in the redundancy of competitive production. There isn’t too much steel being produced, and there are plenty of trains and bridges that could be built the world over that aren’t being built. Such a Faustian or Promethean gambit should be borne in mind as we examine the full-fat version of the postcapitalist decline thesis, otherwise known as technofeudalism.

Varoufakis’s argument is the most easily reduced, as he justifies discarding capitalism for technofeudalism with reference to the simple “triumph of rent over profit.”¹⁶ There is much about clouds, platforms, and rent—but rather little on what “feudalism” is, and less still on ideas and being, that is, on the ideological and subjective facets of this new epoch.

His is also a somewhat awkward book: its conceit is that it is a letter to his late father, who acts as an imaginary foil for the son and as an authority figure in judgement of his argument. It has its endearing elements, like Varoufakis’s admiration for his father’s learning and wisdom, and the imagined dialogue between the two sets up Varoufakis junior as earnest and honest. But as with much of what Varoufakis does, one wonders if charm and charisma are carrying the weight where logic and depth of insight should be. Puzzlingly, Varoufakis reserves the systematic analysis for an appendix, where, finally, we learn of the relationship between the capitalist economy and the technofeudal one. Even here, there is little deep historical or social vision, so we are left to conclude that the new feudalism really is nothing more than the formula “rent > profit,” which is essentially misguided, as we will see below.

Dean’s limitations are other: too much is self-evident, and if it isn’t, she’ll tell you it is. The supposedly “omnipresent feudal images and language” that is in the ether today captures “our uneasy sense of decay and decline in the context of intensifying inequality.”¹⁷ Dean wields theory as a burlap sack, capacious but unstructured, ultimately a tool with which to bash readers over the head. We learn that “90 percent of app-based drivers in New York City are recent immigrants, most of whom are from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. This suggests an exclusion from the labor market based on immigration status linked to imperialism and climate change.”¹⁸ It is a style of vulgar leftist argumentation in which all the bad things can be put into the bag on the right, the good things on the left, and away we go. But contradictions abound. Feudalism is supposedly just an analytic lens, a metaphor, one whose use “changes how we see capitalism by drawing out what is becoming.”¹⁹ Yet in the introduction, we are told that feudalism isn’t a formation confined to the European past, it is “a colonial arrangement with ongoing effects,”²⁰ and so “isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present.”²¹ This is literally fascism feudalism!

There are some strengths here, though. First, the political and subjective aspects of the new social order are given due consideration. We are faced not just with new lords and serfs, the by-now hackneyed portrayal of inequality, but also “parcellated sovereignty . . . hinterlandization and catastrophic anxiety.”²² Moreover, the section on core-periphery relations and temporalities is well developed, looking at how “processes long directed outward—through colonialism and imperialism—are turning inward in ways that undermine capitalist laws of motion and repeat accumulation strategies typical of feudalism: rent-seeking, plunder, and political control.”²³ Some of this alerts us to what should be present in any discussion of decline: the way significant parts of the core countries are coming to resemble those of the periphery, not just in terms of inequality or corruption, but in a growing informal service class, deagrarianization and deindustrialization, private capital’s dependence on the state, and the greater use of violence.

Durand’s account is the most systematic and complete, and also the most circumspect, aware as it is of extant tendencies that contradict his central argument. He begins by laying out the so-called Californian Ideology and pursues a deft critique of it from the inside. This method acts as a brake on too much eclecticism, the kind in which everything starts looking suspiciously “feudal” if you stare at it too long. Instead, he discusses the new technologies of domination and looks at the way an economy resting on intangible assets functions, before attempting to reconstruct historic feudalism and the features of it that recur today. If there is a formal weakness, it is that after claiming rightly that to fixate on the disciplinary dimensions of IT systems would be to overlook economic underpinnings, his concrete examples of big data platforms don’t build a convincing case as to capitalism’s passing.

What does it matter, though, whether we accept the case being made or not? For Durand, identifying “paradoxical resurgences of feudal logics, even in societies where market production has become generalised” strikes at both liberal assumptions about capitalist competition and “its only real adversary, the Marxist tradition.”²⁴ This is to say, to accept technofeudalism means you can’t hold that “capitalism still works the way it should . . . and this is good,” nor that “capitalism still works the way it should . . . and this is bad.” Dean is of the same view. If commodity production continues to drive capital accumulation, then the Marxist critique remains appropriate; if, however, accumulation depends on rents, predation, and plunder, then attention to neofeudalizing tendencies “allow us to grasp and fight the emerging forms of social domination.”²⁵

It’s not just a matter of accounting for stagnation but of naming the enemy. This bears with it further stakes, as we will see. In the debate on technofeudalism, you can either be guilty of nostalgia for capitalism, or of turning a blind eye to decline. More than this, are the neofeudalist theorists reconstructing an old, already defeated enemy: the aristocracy? As tech critic Evgeny Morozov wrote in an earlier review of the literature, “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.”²⁶

The Emergence of Technofeudalism

If the centuries-long history of capitalism is drawing to a close, then the beginning of the end was only fairly recent, dated to the neoliberal era. Durand traces technofeudalism’s emergence to the defeat of the Soviet bloc and globalization’s free movement of capital; Dean develops her idea to “synthesize the effects of forty years of neoliberalism”; Varoufakis pinpoints the flood of money created in response to the 2008 and 2020 crises as the origin of a new class of “cloudalists.” These are rentiers who sit above capitalists in the social order and “exploit” them; even the end of cheap money won’t dethrone them because the new relations of power are institutionalized. In the past two decades, rent has come out of profit’s shadow, vastly exceeding preceding tendencies, such as “cartels, consumer gouging, the technostructure’s successful manufacturing of desires for things we do not need [and] financialised asset-stripping.”²⁷

The unique feature of this order, Varoufakis explains, is that capital is no longer just a “produced means of commodity production” (i.e., a factory) and a “social relation affording its owners extractive power over non-owners” (the ability to hire labor power whose products are sold for more than their wages).²⁸ Cloud capital now has a distinct “third nature”: it is a “produced means of behavioural modification and individuated command” (italics author’s own).²⁹ If this sounds like a new iteration on the 1950s discovery of the “hidden persuaders” in advertising, it’s because it mostly is. Unlike the old terrestrial capital, cloud capital is reproduced by unwaged workers: cloud serfs. We are all cloud serfs when we willingly participate in our data being extracted from us, “replenishing cloud capital’s own stock (e.g. to upload photos and videos on Instagram or TikTok, or submit film, restaurant and book reviews).”³⁰ Significant as this is, does it amount to a new mode of production?

New technologies are immensely powerful. They’ve “become at once an attention-holder, a desire-manufacturer, a driver of proletarian labour (of cloud proles), an elicitor of massive free labour (from cloud serfs) and, to boot, the creator of totally privatized digital transaction spaces (cloud fiefs like Amazon) in which neither buyers nor sellers enjoy any of the options they would in normal markets.”³¹ Dystopia is here: “with Don [Draper, the protagonist of Mad Men] at least we had a fighting chance. It was his wits against ours. With Alexa we stand no chance: its power to command is systemic, overwhelming, galactic.”³²

One of the strongest parts of the book concerns behavior modification and the killing off of the liberal individual, “snuffed out neither by fascist Brownshirts nor by Stalinist guards,” but by capital, when it began “to instruct youngsters to do that most liberal of things: be yourself!”³³ Here we find the recuperation of countercultural ideals by capitalism, a new way of stimulating consumption and of legitimizing the system—the so-called new spirit of capitalism.³⁴

The issue is that neither here, nor when claiming that platforms set themselves up as the only game in town, isolating sellers from one another, does Varoufakis make a convincing case for the whole technofeudal edifice. After all, supermarkets have been exercising similar, if less totalizing, monopsony power for decades, and have been the object of protest by French farmers as early as the 1960s, with similar mobilizations across Europe up to the present.

Durand, in contrast, does not start with what he as an observer believes to be the new and bad; he begins instead with Silicon Valley’s own self-presentation and self-justification. This might be well-trod terrain, but Durand’s account is sensitive and structured. Ideology is a means to “aggregate wills,” and to do so it “must offer a perspective that is general and practical . . . propose a vision of the world that, in producing meaning, allows for the deployment of actions at the local level.”³⁵

As Durand sees it, what we encounter in Silicon Valley is the last utopia of work: the start-up offering full professional autonomy; a sense of collective adventure; a high chance of failure but also the distant luster of invention and fortune, which justify such risk. Silicon Valley thought engenders five paradoxes. First, the reinvigoration of economic struc­tures through an ecology of start-ups ends up with the return of monopolies, as economic structures become increasingly rigid. The flexible start-up moment was just that, a “settling-in period”.

Second, in lieu of workplace autonomy, we have an intensification of control, an increase in managerial demands and a reduction in employee decision-making. Michał Kalecki’s classic analysis about the way work­place discipline and political stability are more appreciated by business leaders than profits is relevant here, but that insight referred to a postwar situation of full employment. In this century, tech capitalists ask themselves, why not both?

Third, the much-vaunted culture of openness and mobility (think the Google campus) has resulted in intense spatial polarization. “Islands of Silicon Valley need an ocean of non-Silicon Valley to survive”—those places where goods are assembled, sorted, moved; animals are reared and killed; crops grown; and to which waste is transported.³⁶

Every reminder that we cannot live on thin air is a useful one, no more so than here; intangibles require a very tangible, material backdrop. Incidentally, this is Durand’s main point of contention with Wark’s postmortem on capital: information is not and will not be the main mode of value production. The delusions of thin-air life got us to where we are: everything from the fruitless expansion of higher education to grievous underinvestment in public infrastructure, to the predominance of streaming and soundbites over culture and craft, to the outsourcing of industrial production. These perpetuate the illusion that material production happens as if by magic and need not be tended to. It is good to see this worldview taken down a peg, even in books that at least partly argue that tech is changing everything.

Yet Durand also notes that the spirit of mobility and openness encouraged by Silicon Valley is actually that of radical individualism. This absolves the employee of any kind of “organizational patriotism” in return for a total lack of protection and job security; employees grant no loyalty. But this isn’t exactly the peasant tied to the lord’s land, then, is it?

The fourth paradox is a Schumpeterian one: we have innovation without growth in lieu of the promised shared prosperity. “The slowing of GDP growth and productivity, an increase in the deadweight of the financial sphere, persistent underemployment, and, last but not least, a rapid deterioration in ecological conditions. These phenomena, added up, all point to decline.”³⁷ Tech’s disruption of legacy firms, along with the supremacy of its own in terms of market capitalization, hasn’t renewed dynamism. This isn’t creative destruction but “destructive creation,” a breakdown in the social relations characteristic of the previous phase, which also makes the economic dynamic “more fragile in terms of the reproduction of its material and political conditions.”³⁸

Fifth and finally, the obsolescence of the state has bumped into the very evident survival of the entrepreneurial state, as demonstrated by Mariana Mazzucato and others. The leading position of the United States is hardly down to spontaneous market forces, and late entrants like China, South Korea, and Russia have all relied on “public intervention to handle their entry into the digital age.”³⁹

The New Faces of Unfreedom

We find a world marked by rigidity, monopoly, control, stagnation, and the growing weight of the state. It’s not exactly clear what is feudal here. Yes, direct coercion and force in economic affairs was a distinguishing feature of precapitalist life, but the centralization of control depicted here is more of a piece with twentieth-century totalitarianism. For Varoufakis, capital’s power to command now extends beyond the factory, shop, or office: we are all cloud proles or cloud serfs, “unmediated by any market.”⁴⁰ Algorithmic behavior modification joins capital’s existing arsenal of brute force, agenda setting, propaganda power, and capitalist power (to have the proletariat voluntarily generate surplus value through employment) to create a monstrous social order.

Durand similarly glimpses machines of total control: “govern­mentality bypasses human subjects and deprives them of reflexivity, producing action without the formation or formulation of a desire.”⁴¹ Here he follows Susanna Zuboff’s depiction of surveillance capital though also rightly identifies that such a surveillance regime is of uncertain stability—and moreover, at an analytical level, we mustn’t overlook surveillance’s economic underpinnings.

We are left with a sort of iron cage theory in the footsteps of Weber and Foucault. The machines of domination and control can only grow in strength. As consumers dedicate ever more of their existence to platforms, “the quality of the service on offer increases in tandem with [tech companies’] profits, as users generate more data. It is in the interests of platforms to lock users into their ecosystems by limiting interoperability with their competitors. Their growing strength thus goes hand in hand with a logic by which the internet itself becomes more fragmented.”⁴²

Tech critic Cory Doctorow’s work is apposite here. In The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023) and other books, Doctorow wields the demand for interoperability as a wedge to break up Big Tech’s control.⁴³ A pro-market logic of free competition would be a means of undermining the giants of the market. But Doctorow’s work also alerts us to a countervailing tendency. Yes, the network effects lock in consumers for whom the costs of porting over to a different network are prohibitive. But the quality of many platform services and products is deteriorating, leading Doctorow to coin the term enshittification, which became Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year for 2024. Platforms abuse consumers to the point that customer retention may become difficult. It might not be easy to leave, but exhaustion with tech is growing.

The flip side to surveillance is the apparent “attachment of subjects to the digital glebe.”⁴⁴ “Just log off,” we might answer, when considering social media. But it is worth recalling that “tech” is no longer just a sector: its techniques reach across the economy. One of Doctorow’s favored examples is the way a farmer cannot perform maintenance on his John Deere tractor himself, because technological restrictions, especially Digital Rights Management, prevent users from repairing or modifying the devices they own. Copyright law and software locks are used to enclose physical property, and it is likely that only a political campaign in favor of the right to repair can overturn these technologies of control. “If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it,” argues Doctorow. Along these lines, opposition to technofeudalism would take the form of a demand for ownership and for market competition.

If such demands constitute “voice,” then what does “exit” look like? For Durand, “the augmented human being of our digital age does not escape the empire of algorithms, any more than the socialised human being escapes the empire of institutions.”⁴⁵ This is a profound statement on the direction of contemporary unfreedom, because the reality is that we increasingly find ourselves not just dominated by algorithms but simultaneously deinstitutionalized and desocialized.⁴⁶ A correlate to this is that we are moving away from “the principle of the supposed horizontality of the commercial exchange between agents freely able to enter into a transaction,”⁴⁷ as subordination in a wage economy becomes dependence on the platform economy.⁴⁸ The exit costs are huge; like peasants running from the fief, they have to make it on their own.

Yet in medieval Europe, individual production was still possible, and peasants outside a fief might still have access to the means of production (as rudimentary as a bow and arrow, a hoe, or the right to use common land). In capitalism, not so. The accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, always to be relied upon to restate the worst contemporary trends in intensified form as a positive development, talks about “no voice, free exit” as a model for the future. People will live under “gov-corps” or private authorities, where there is no democratic voice. Denizens can just exit if they don’t like it.⁴⁹ Even in this fantasy, feudalism doesn’t seem the right lens to understand the near future.

Dean’s understanding of the coming unfreedom also seems too continuous with capitalism. For her, neofeudal serfs are proletarianized serfs, “free” from the land, “free” from job security, “free” from social-welfare safety nets, and dependent on markets for every aspect of their lives. It’s unclear how this is different from Marx’s assessment 150 years ago that the laborer is “free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.”⁵⁰ Dean’s riposte is: “If under capitalism we sell ourselves, under neofeudalism we pay a fee to access a market where we can sell ourselves.”⁵¹

But consider that in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century company towns, workers were paid in scrip, overpriced tokens, such that workers had to pay back part of their wages for their means of subsistence. Or take modern-day migrants who pay recruitment agents thousands of dollars to relocate them to work grueling jobs in, say, the Gulf States. Dean might respond that the Gulf States are precisely the harbingers of a technofeudal future, but numerous other possible counterexamples from capitalism’s past and its contemporary periphery should alert us to the fact that what is taken as the “pure” capitalism from which we are departing may just be a universalization of Euro-American capitalism in the twentieth century.

Indeed, the suspicion remains that the whole technofeudal theoretical project is indicative of a lack of imagination. Feudalism follows capitalism follows feudalism: this logic resembles the thinking of many on the left who assumed that the only possible order that could follow neoliberalism was a return to social democracy. The emerging global dispensation assures us that this is not so. There are other ways for the new to be bad, and there are other ways for the bad to take new forms.

Turning to other matters of the imagination, Dean warns against embracing Silicon Valley and its effects. Writing from a (Lacanian) psychoanalytic perspective, she sees the parcelization of sovereignty reflected ideologically in the “fragmentation of the symbolic order.” Mobilizing what Slavoj Žižek calls the “decline of symbolic efficiency,” Dean observes that there is no master signifier holding meaning together, “just as there is no sovereign law but instead extensive forms of legal privatization and personalized networks of fealty and privilege.”⁵² Though the final point is overstated, the practical effects are there to see: the individualization of experience, the fragmentation of subjectivity, and the scrambling of the possibility for a coherent life course are, taken together, at the root of a lot of contemporary “derangement.” Similarly, there is an increasing turn to mysticism and magic.⁵³ Dean is right to warn those of a libertarian bent, both on the left and right, not to embrace fragmentation as “democratic pluralization,” nor to reject reason as a path toward “creative flourishing.” That way lies demodernization, extinguishing enlightenment.

Here we find a total triumph of capital, and in its stead, of instrumental rationality. This is a world without God, which has emerged through an abortive or perverted process of secularization. The trajectory of modernity had, until fifty years ago, been toward demystification, to a scientific worldview, but one complemented by a higher-order humanism premised on a belief in our species’ ability to gain self-consciousness and mastery, to assure the conditions for truly human life. To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci: we looked forward to a life without illusions, without becoming disillusioned. Some used to call this “communism,” until regimes led by parties with that label proved at least as antihuman as decadent capitalist societies. In any case (and it’s hardly necessary to say), this harsh, disconsolate, and godless world is a great departure from the cosmology of feudalism.

The social fragmentation I have previously discussed in this journal as Brazilianization is the engine of the turn to irrationality that Dean observes and insists on calling feudal.⁵⁴ Yes, we can observe an embrace of “the cryptic, occult, techno-pagan, and anti-modern,” and that this only “amplifies apocalyptic insecurity.”⁵⁵ But this irrationalist turn is a product of the desert of instrumental rationality and scientism, the breakdown of old belief systems and the absence of new ways of explaining the world and one’s place and purpose in it. In the periphery of global capitalism, the religion of the poor is increasingly fundamentalist. In Indonesia, precarious workers adopt Islamic piety; in Nigeria, the growth of Pentecostalism and Islamic fundamentalism proceeds apace; and in Brazil, a sometimes apocalyptic evangelical Christianity has grown to be a significant political force.⁵⁶

Feudal talk is a distraction from decay; it is a mediatic plaything. It cannot function as a fire alarm, nor a pair of binoculars. This is not to say that the observations of technofeudal theorists are without use. What they describe may be real, but they misunderstand its nature.

Deconstructing Feudalism

While there isn’t room to do justice to the theme, it is nevertheless worth noting that “feudalism” isn’t even feudalism anymore. For decades now, medievalists have avoided using the term, with empirical research revealing a much more variegated picture than received ideas imply. The responsibility for the latter rests with figures like French historian Marc Bloch, who wrote in the early twentieth century; critics complain that academics of his type generated an image of feudalism that was never as coherent and unified as presented. For instance, Bloch conceptualized feudalism quite neatly as a continuum of readily discernable social features:

A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority—leading inevitably to disorder; and, in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during the second feudal age, was to acquire renewed strength—such then seem to be the fundamental features of European feudalism.⁵⁷

Susan Reynolds challenged this portrayal of feudalism as a hierarchical system rooted in vassalage and land tenure, with the legal basis for such being much more ambiguous and variegated across Europe. For Reynolds, medieval Europe was more marked by “horizontal” social bonds between people of the same status.⁵⁸ If this is so, it would make a nonsense of feudalism as a byword for hierarchical domination based on extraction. The “feudal pyramid,” that schoolroom image of the feudal order in which “the ‘feudal state’ was an organized hierarchy of fiefs and powers, from the king down to the most minor lord” is grossly misleading. It arguably has more in common with predemocratic capitalism.⁵⁹

The story becomes even more complicated when examining the precapitalist world outside Europe. If capitalist modernity is a unified system governed by universal laws of motion, precapitalist life was characterized by its lack of systemic integration. At most, it amounted to an order in which “the primary producer, whether cultivator or herdsman, is allowed access to the means of production, while tribute is exacted from him by political or military means,” or what the Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf called the “tributary mode of production.”⁶⁰

This more nuanced understanding of the feudal era complicates claims, like Dean’s, that we can today witness “a tendency where something new is emerging in the guise of something old.”⁶¹ Either today replicates feudalism in its substantial and varied aspects (political, social, economic, ideological), a difficult claim to sustain, but one that allows the author to pick and choose elements; or it is a reductionist account, which is prima facie easier to defend but only works if the case is watertight.

Durand defines feudalism, following Brenner, as the arbitrary nature of lords’ relationships to serfs and peasants and the extraction through direct force from the latter, not equal exchange via contract. It is in light of this sort of understanding, for instance, that Varoufakis claims that (vassal capitalist) app producers live under terror of removal from the (technofeudal) Apple App Store without need for bailiffs. This isn’t very convincing on its own terms and is even less so when we consider the ostensible “feudal mode of production” in the round. For Durand, in feudalism, what is decisive is not the vassal-suzerain relationship nor the absence of markets but rather: (1) the hegemony of small-scale production, with the direct producer having access to the means of production; (2) the independent (as opposed to socialized) nature of production; and (3) the resolution of the tension between landowner and independent producer through force.

On this basis, we understand feudalism’s Malthusian trap: increased production leads to population growth, which leads to shortages and scarcity, which leads in turn to the population falling. Significant increases in productivity are impossible because the lords extract the surplus before peasants can invest. Indeed, the surplus is consumed unproductively through military adventures or through ostentatious display.

Varoufakis notes that if the steam engine had been invented in a precapitalist era, in his example, in ancient Egypt, the most that could have been expected is “that the ruler of Egypt would have been impressed and placed one or more of his engines in his palace, demonstrating to visitors and underlings how ingenious his Empire was.”⁶² For all the ostentatious and unproductive consumption in today’s capitalism, and the widespread practice of share buybacks can be understood as part of this, profits are nevertheless still reinvested in R&D.⁶³

Isolated peasants under what is known as feudalism had access to the commons, the enclosure of which was a necessary step for the development of capitalism, as landlords could rent land to farmers and a new class of landless were forced to work for others. What commons remains today? Moreover, it is a repeated feature of tech criticism, sometimes in the name of the early libertarian frontier spirit of the net, to critique the way the digital commons has been privatized (see the aforementioned Doctorow or the work of Jaron Lanier). The extraction of data is one such example. But there are three problems with this.

First, data is not the same as the premodern commons in that it is not exploitable on its own in individual production. Second, unlike pastures or clean rivers, data must be manipulated and combined with other data for it to be useful and productive. The digital commons is not given by nature but has been produced by human beings (freely, hence Varoufakis’s notion of “digital serfs,” who continue to produce for free, even though the products are already privatized). Third, even if the enclosure of the digital commons were directly analogous to sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England, it would suggest that we should characterize the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a moment of renewed capitalist accumulation, or a deepening of capitalist social relations, not a departure.

The technofeudal thesis also rests on a supposed parcellation of sovereignty, both in the precapitalist past and in the emerging postcapitalist future. Dean places great emphasis here, noting how the contemporary world is characterized by capital seeking to escape regulation through the creation of special economic zones, Quinn Sloboian’s recent work on this being the key reference.⁶⁴ Durand likewise notes, in analogy with today, that feudalism featured the “lack of centralisation of power and the overlapping of seigneuries [which] resulted in the fragmentation of sovereignty and the persistence of margins of peasant autonomy.”⁶⁵ This view at least does not reify the understanding of feudalism as a pyramidal structure. But it risks misreading what is going on today.

For all the weakening of state sovereignty and the triumph of multinational corporations (the central motif of globalization theory from the 1990s and 2000s⁶⁶), the infrastructural power of the state only grows, visible in the capacities for mass surveillance and behavioral modification cited by the technofeudalists. The authors under review refer in different ways to the growing nexus between the state and capital, the fusion of political authority and economic power. This sits uneasily with an account of feudalism where power is dispersed, irregular, and where ultimate central authority is usually absent. Books with technofeudalism in the title end up closer to a depiction of the fantasies of Silicon Valley oligarchs and neoreactionary gov-corps than to the reality of, say, China’s social credit system.

The analogy falls short in other respects as well. Feudalism was not a work society: peasants were independent subsistence producers who worked when they needed to (which was only a third to half of the year). The world today is characterized by the coexistence of overwork and underwork, the latter arising from the lack of formal employment. Permanent activity for the precariously (un)employed is the reality: there is no other way to survive. Durand at least is aware of this breakdown in the feudal analogy: “Any isomorphism with medieval Europe and Japan is, of course, remote and incomplete. In particular, the ‘hegemony of small-scale individual production.’”⁶⁷

Indeed, Durand notes that the “generalised dependence on the owners of das Digital” is a kind of “Pyrrhic victory” for Marxism. Economic production is ever more socialized, confirming the long-term tendency Marx already identified in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the fact that much production happens within huge monopolistic conglomerates indicates the triumph of economic planning, not market coordination via price signals. Yes, Marx’s vindication “takes on the hideous face of a generalised crushing of society,”⁶⁸ but it points to the possibility of a more free and human postcapitalist future under the order of democratic planning, rather than to an (unfree and inhuman) existence in a postcapitalist state of perpetual decline.⁶⁹

The Problem of Rent

The predominance of rent in the economy is central to the technofeudal thesis. For Durand, intangible assets act as barriers to competition and mobility. Investment is not directed to develop the forces of production but goes instead to the “forces of predation.”⁷⁰ A variety of forms of rent flourish in contemporary capitalism, including: IP rents, such as pharma patents; natural monopolies, such as Apple in controlling the entire supply chain; dynamic innovation rents, whereby data generated by industrial processes becomes the object of intellectual property; and accumulated differential rents on intangibles, which can then be reproduced at negligible marginal cost. This last is critical to the argument because tangible and intangible sectors increase in value at differential rates, as do their costs. Therefore, “companies that control the intangible links in the chain receive a disproportionate share of gains as total production increases.”⁷¹

These phenomena might be deleterious to the generalization of wealth across society, but are they indicative of postcapitalism? Repeatedly, forms of income accruing to capital are treated as “rent.” For instance, Durand concedes that in the 1990s, Schumpeterian creative destruction may have been operative as companies invested in R&D in search of innovation rents. But this trend has now slowed due to new barriers (principally, intellectual property), thus stimulating the emergence of a stagnant feudal-type order. But why deem these “innovation rents,” when, throughout modern history, these have been understood as superprofits?

If rent is going to play such a central role in a narrative about the “revenge of the feudal,” then rent must be understood in classical terms. “Economic rent” of the kind fixated upon by Durand and Varoufakis is not really feudal at all. It rests on a confusion of the specific and unique nature of land, from which rents accrue.⁷² It should be remembered that land is not a commodity because it cannot be produced: a landlord’s monopoly on land is not ownership of capital (that is, a produced means of production and a social relation affording its owners extractive power over nonowners), because the landowner does not ipso facto have the means to realize value from it. This relation is rather different from that of Varoufakis’s “cloudalists,” who build platforms that, for instance, intermediate themselves between a driver and a rider, or a producer and a consumer.

Orthodox economists may understand higher-than-normal profits—attainable due to a lack of competition—as “economic rents,” but it is still ultimately profit, implicating capitalists (and not “cloudalists” as the new technofeudal lords). The contemporary usage of rentiers is broad, capturing “everything from Wall Street banks to monopolistic tech firms.”⁷³

As Matt Huber observes, the politics that usually accompanies such a broad analysis is one of moralistic opposition to rentiers as those who gain income without having worked for it. The consequences should be obvious: capitalist activity is remoralized as “work,” and we are back to understanding profit as “wages of superintendence,” an understanding that Marx demolished. Huber urges us to maintain an analytical distinction between landowners as rentiers and capitalists as owners of the means of production. “Perhaps we should conceptualise capitalist rentiership or rentiers as profiteering or profiteers?”⁷⁴

We can go further, as Evgeny Morozov does, in a highly astute critique of technofeudal reason that appeared before the books under review were published.⁷⁵ Just as rent proper should be distinguished from economic rents accruing to capitalists, many of the activities undertaken by tech giants should be seen as commodity production rather than mere squatting on assets.

Spotify, for instance, “sells a very peculiar commodity: a unique, personalized user experience that provides real-time access to a nearly infinite collection of music.” So “all that data is just an add-on to the main business of Spotify: its unique music-cum-branded-experience commodity. The despised rentiers in this model are the music labels; Spotify is as much a card-carrying capitalist as Henry Ford.”⁷⁶ Similarly, Google gives away its search commodity for free. This in turn allows it to “sell another, highly profitable commodity—access to its users’ screens and attention—to advertisers.”⁷⁷

Now, none of this is to argue that there aren’t unproductive rentierist practices throughout tech firms (for instance, Google’s data holdings). But that doesn’t mean it is not a standard capitalist firm. Getting fabulously rich without working used to be the ire of critics of capitalism, not feudalism. To look at a Google, or indeed a Standard Oil, and find it noncapitalist because it is wealthier than the actual value it produces is the fruit of an analytical error. Throughout the system, some owners of capital are able to appropriate surplus value created and extracted elsewhere, and this accrues to capitalists as profit, not as rent.

With the technofeudal thesis resting on a category error regarding rent, the final argument is a much less expansive one, in line with “political capitalism.”⁷⁸ The problem is that what has so far been treated as expressions of an emergent feudalism have, in fact, been features of capitalism at different points and places throughout its history. Would it not be simpler to enlarge and refine our understanding of capitalism somewhat by incorporating these elements: a Really Existing Capitalism that might differ in degree but not in essence to the Marxian understanding according to which the accumulation of surplus value happens exclusively through economic means, that is, exploitation not expropriation?

As Morozov argues, lack of clarity with respect to the precise relation of expropriation and exploitation, and the extent to which the former is historically redundant, generates the perceived need for “extraneous concepts like Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossesion’, Veblen’s ‘predation’, Vercellone’s ‘cognitive rent’, or even Zuboff’s ‘extraction of behavioural surplus.’”⁷⁹ Likewise, Riley and Brenner’s “political capitalism,” in which elements like tax breaks, privatization of public assets, low interest rates, and state spending aimed to bolster private industry are cited. Yet all of these existed during capitalism’s postwar golden age.⁸⁰

A clean separation between the political and economic is important to maintain in theory, but this does not exclude empirical recognition of extraction as a reality. This is so that the waxing and waning of the nature and role of the political in the economy—effectively, the transformation of the state—isn’t each time mistaken for a new mode of production, a new social order. On the contrary, the role played by the state can be an indication as to the health and dynamism of “the economic” and its laws of motion. Does competition generate labor-saving innovation? How much competition is there within capital? Is there a crisis of valorization, requiring politically driven dispossession to expand into new areas?

There is always a geographic dimension. The global periphery was always the site for acts of dispossession, no more so than through the neoliberal period (i.e., the privatization of land, resources, and public goods and services). It has historically been easier to challenge political acts of expropriation than economic exploitation, because the former can more easily wield moral outrage. After all, the latter is carried out under the guise of formal freedom of contract. This explains, in part, the greater apparent militancy of left-wing and popular politics in the periphery through the turn of the millennium, at least as compared to the global North. This tendency may also explain the theoretical appeal of technofeudalism, for it stipulates that something “unfair” is being done, even according to capitalism’s own rules.

Dean, in response to Morozov’s critique, is resistant to any interpretation which widens the definition of capitalism to include expropriation. “Morozov forfeits the ability to distinguish [capitalism] from feu­dalism.”⁸¹ This is fanciful. The differences are still overwhelming: com­modity production, market dependence, the primacy of formally free labor, the drive to invest in labor-saving innovation, the compulsion of competition. All are unique features of capitalism. But Dean’s argument hardly requires a response here, for she undermines her own case when she writes: “feudalism as expropriation is not the whole of the Marxist story: extra-economic coercion isn’t simply replaced by exploi­tation. It accompanies it. Capital comes to overlay, incorporate, and rely on previous economic and social forms.”⁸² What exactly is the issue, then?

Naturalizing Capitalism

Dean accuses Morozov of naturalizing capitalism through his supposed dissolution of the difference between the modes of production, abandoning “any effort to recognize and specify system change.”⁸³ This is unfair, for both Morozov’s argument and mine here is not that the extraction of surplus is the same across history and there is nothing to be done about it, nor that it is impossible that other forms of domination might emerge. Rather, it is that technofeudalism rests on a misunderstanding of precapitalism as well as a misidentification of contemporary tendencies and specious analogies between historical epochs. Moreover, once these errors are stripped away, all that is left is vague handwaving at the mere possibility that “capitalism’s own dynamics can transform it into something else, something worse.”⁸⁴

Dean rejects the notion that she is arguing that capitalism is moving in reverse, but all she has in return is to insinuate this means one holds to a “linear progressivist notion of history.” To this is added intimations of Eurocentrism, whereby critics of the technofeudal idea work on a presumption of a “completed process” of real subsumption, in which “capital’s continuous encounter with and absorption of noncapitalist elements” is neglected. But the argument here is precisely the opposite. Really Existing Capitalism, particularly in the periphery, has always had moments of expropriation as well as exploitation: it is the technofeudal theorists who seek to ignore this by depicting capitalist decay in the core as constituting wholly novel elements (that is, novel to capitalism but supposedly evocative of feudalism). Dean’s argument must be flipped. The technofeudal theorists are the ones who naturalize capitalist unfreedom.

Take Varoufakis: “Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets.”⁸⁵ The tone may be sarcastic, but there is nevertheless a valorization of profit over rent. “Capitalist mega-firms, like Ford, Edison, General Electric . . . generated the profits that outweighed rent and propelled capitalism to its dominance. However, like remora fish living parasitically in the shadow of great sharks, some rentiers not only survived but, in fact, flourished by feeding on the generous scraps left in profit’s wake.”⁸⁶ The problem is not that he recognizes capitalist progress, the historically necessary process of development and the conquest of the feudal Malthusian trap. This is right and good. It is to hive off profit-making as “capitalist” and any other seemingly extraneous features as belonging to a deep swampy past. Landowners and rent are part of the capitalist social totality. So are monopolists.

Varoufakis complains that the cloudalist wants you to exit the market altogether, as one supposedly does when one enters Amazon (“enter amazon.com and you have exited capitalism”).⁸⁷ But not only is capitalism not exclusively characterized by markets, it has always been the case that every capitalist is a monopolist in his dreams. Some may ideologically affirm competition, others may think it’s “for losers” (Peter Thiel), but all would take the price-setting and superprofit-sucking privilege afforded by monopolism.

In fairness to Dean, she accepts that a “risk of the neofeudalization hypothesis . . . is inadvertently defending capitalism. Against the extra-economic coercion, dependence, and violent expropriation of neofeudal pillage and plunder, capitalism may not look so bad.”⁸⁸ She thus calls out Joel Kotkin’s Neofeudalism for “using the threat of mass serfdom to defend suburban home ownership, fossil fuels, and the American dream.”⁸⁹ This “populist defence of carbon capitalism” is not only distasteful but impossible, because “capitalism isn’t an alternative to neofeudalism”: capital itself is neofeudalizing. Desperate to avoid the horror of suburban homeownership, Dean wields her neofeudalism as a means of bringing “the struggles of today’s proletarianized neoserfs together by showing how they are all struggles against capital’s self-transformation.”⁹⁰

But if we are to be realistic about the nature of political struggles today, about resistance to technological surveillance, domineering Silicon Valley capital, deindustrialization, and a grueling and low-productivity service economy, we must recognize it is more often than not carried out in the name of postwar arrangements—at the very least, tacitly. Millennial socialists wanted social democracy back,⁹¹ and MAGA supporters likewise, even if the emphases are different. Whether it is downwardly mobile professionals or petit bourgeois at risk of pro­letarianization, these classes are alike mounting a “populist defence of carbon capitalism.”

Durand is more careful. He is conscious of the risk of overstating the newness of the digital, for in doing so, we disarm the traditional critique of capitalism, even if he is also worried about the opposite: relativizing the new, and only cherry-picking those phenomena that fit within our preexisting schema of capitalism. His work remains the high bar in technofeudal thinking, the only text really worth engaging with.

Look Around, Not Back

So, how to describe decline? As I have argued before, growing inequality, new forms of control, increasing extra-economic use of force, and an intermeshing of the political and economic are features better understood as particular to the periphery of global capitalism. What is distinct about our age, the bad and the new, is that the conditions of the periphery are increasingly prevalent in the core. The interrupted or collapsed modernity that was characteristic of the periphery is no longer exclusive to it.

The work society was cited above as a feature of capitalism that distinguished it from feudal agrarianism. Today, we are witnessing the undoing of the work society—but not in the direction of premodern individual subsistence production. Instead, precarity is increasingly generalized, and though discipline is exercised in the workplace, it is also increasingly done across society. Extra-economic violence becomes more common in its stead. As the Brazilian theorist Thiago Canettieri writes, “even the so-called core countries have to deal with this situation of catastrophic desocialization. Contrary to expectations, a huge amount of resources is mobilized to build powerful repressive apparatuses (of all kinds) and to enrich an ever smaller number of individuals.”⁹²

Dean appears sensitive to such a notion when she notes, for example, the persistence of seigneurial-servile culture in a place like Bolivia, where landholding still retains feudal features. We should not have as our only image of backwardness the European past, from which Europe has now emerged. There is another: the asynchronous present in the periphery or the reproductions of it that are spreading to the core. But her claim that “the neofeudal hypothesis aims to shatter any remnants of that image” misunderstands the effect of her intellectual project.⁹³ Her work encourages us to see backwardness as feudal (and therefore pertaining to precapitalist Europe). Dean is stuck in the 1970s, a world of a developed core and a semicapitalist periphery held back by imperialism. In contrast, a perspective that emphasizes peripherization understands that capitalism is now total, far and wide, high and low. The periphery is not the source of some revolt against subsumption drawing on precapitalist, extra-European sources. It is instead the site of these increasingly hybrid elements: informal work flourishes, undermining the homogeneity of the work society.

Some years before his death, Samir Amin observed that “Some people are resigned . . . and believe that our time is not one of socialist transition but of worldwide expansion of capitalism which, starting from this ‘little corner of Europe,’ [it] is just beginning to extend to the south and the east. At the end of this transfer, the imperialist phase will appear to have been not the last, the highest stage of capitalism, but a transitional phase toward universal capitalism.”⁹⁴ It is this that we must now reckon with.

Capitalism has overcome all barriers to modernization on its own terms: deagrarianization has seen to the end of the peasant countryside, taking conservatism as a coherent political force with it in its wake. The restructuring of production, direct political assault, and the disaster of barracks socialism led to the defeat of capitalism’s internal opposition, the organized working class. Socialism went with it. The central paradox of our era is that as capitalism triumphs, it begins to decay. As automation and technology replace living labor, value creation collapses, undermining the very foundation of capitalism. In total capitalism, this contradiction becomes acute: everything is commodified, but value can no longer be stably produced.

There is no going back. The mantra can lose force through repetition, so it is worth reminding oneself of its meaning. There is no going back to feudalism, just as there is no going back to social democracy. But the way forward is unclear. There are overlapping progressive responses to total capitalism and specifically to the features of decay depicted here that emerge.

A mobilization in the name of “true capitalism” would seek to uphold free competition. As Adam Smith understood it, a market is free if it is free from rent-seeking. Capitalists hate capitalism because they desire monopoly. Competition, they believe, is only for those in labor markets. Cory Doctorow’s proposals on interoperability or the right to repair work along these lines. The small middle class’s opposition to corruption, to the state-capital nexus, and to socialism for the rich would be another instance of such a response.

In a specifically humanist philosophical register, Varoufakis and Durand both seek to rescue the liberal individual. In order to salvage the notion of liberty as self-ownership, Varoufakis argues that there needs to be a “comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly cloud-based instruments of production, distribution, collaboration and communication.”⁹⁵ Durand similarly holds that “resistance against individual derealization presents a serious obstacle” to the consolidation of technofeudalism. “The advent of the ‘totally developed individual’ requires that the farewell to the market go hand in hand with a reinvestment in subjectivity.”⁹⁶

It is true that the most radical critiques of an ideology often present themselves as its most faithful adherents. Slavoj Žižek has long argued that the most effective way to be subversive is not to reject the dominant ideology but to take it more seriously than it takes itself. This strategy of “over-identification,” to repeat the ruling ideology’s own excesses, would expose its inherent inconsistency. Capitalism will not return to its liberal bases, but the act of challenging it in the name of those values could be at the root of a movement for the new and good. The problem we encounter, though, is that capitalism in decay has abandoned liberalism, be it individual autonomy or free competition. This makes an immanent critique ever harder.

In a more concrete political register, Varoufakis hints at a cross-class alliance, bringing together not just the traditional proletariat and the new cloud proles but also the cloud serfs and at least some of the vassal capitalists. Single-day joint boycotts and strikes could be the beginning. A producerist populism would be consistent with capitalism’s own history, particularly in the periphery, when industrialization in the early twentieth century in Brazil or Argentina set itself against the old latifundiary rentierism. But even if we ignore the economic possibility of such a move today, when profit rates are much lower and manufacturing does not employ many people, at the political level, it would require a reorganization of the state in pursuit of material production.

The ideological resources for that are absent on much of the left, as Dean exemplifies. She baldly states that reindustrialization is not an option because the environmental costs are too high, a view which ignores the proposition that the only credible response to climate change rests on a huge build-out of industrial capacity. Instead, she accepts the reality of a society of servants, particularly care workers. In her account, care and reproduction cannot be fully technologized: teachers, nurses, and other service workers are, therefore, at the vanguard of a new class struggle. This concedes far too much to the low-productivity information and service economy that has emerged over recent decades. Dean’s assessment works to entrench and naturalize capitalist decay, seeking only to “welfarize” it.

Against such apparently limited imaginative horizons, where does one even begin to search for a way out? It is here worth remembering Theodor W. Adorno’s words of constructive consolation: “In a world of brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity.” The technofeudal critique may still generate insights for what a programmatic remedy to the ills it describes could look like. If the economy is indeed grounded on the ever-growing socialization of production—and we know that there is much left to be built and developed, that manufacturing essentially has no ceiling, and there is work that could be done, even if it might not be profitable—we may yet discover that the project of modernity need not be over. And in such a realization, we may find the seeds of a new Faustian option.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025): 129–57.

Notes