Capital’s Grave [Excerpt]

    Capital’s Grave, by Jodi Dean, is now available for pre-order at Verso Books.

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    Introduction

    One of the most powerful images in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party depicts capitalism’s inevitable demise: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers.” In the Manifesto, these gravediggers are the proletariat, the class of workers compelled to sell their labor power to survive. Exploited by the capitalist bourgeoisie, the proletarians toil in misery. They’re appendages of the machines, crowded into enormous factories and stuck in repetitive drudgery like so many cogs and pistons. The proletariat’s revolutionary victory will send this unjust system to its grave. Emancipating themselves, workers will emancipate society. They will free production from the dictates of profit and manage it for the benefit of all. Classes will cease to exist, and communism will replace capitalism just as capitalism replaced feudalism. Like the long-eclipsed knights of the sword, the knights of industry will be irrelevant figures of a bygone era, brought down by the very class they created.

    The Manifesto inspires workers to see their struggle as one of world-historical significance. The proletariat isn’t organizing simply to win shorter working days and higher wages. They are fighting to transform the entire political and economic order, to end the class-division characteristic of history itself. They are fighting, and they will win. The bourgeoisie may seem powerful, but they’re not invincible. Capitalist industry depends on the “revolutionary combination” of massive numbers of wage-laborers. In capitalist production, previously separated tasks and isolated workers are coordinated, concentrated, and centralized. Capital’s strength is thus also its weakness: the same combined laborers on which production depends can—and will—organize to revolt against the capitalist class. Economic power will become political power. Capital will have called up the forces that bring it down.

    Marx and Engels link the victory of the proletariat to the end of capitalism. Their vision remains tremendously inspiring, but it’s been over 150 years since they wrote the Manifesto and the proletariat still hasn’t won. The last half century has been an especially disheartening period of counterrevolution and defeat. Yes, there have been successful liberation struggles, revolutions, uprisings, and demonstrations. Workers resist. But no one thinks the working class is anywhere close to triumph. The defeat of the Soviet Union and global rise of neoliberalism intensified economic inequality and incited far-right nationalism around the world. Capital is winning.

    McKenzie Wark challenges us to reject this conclusion. She argues that capital is dead. The fact that communism has not prevailed does not mean we are still in capitalism. We’re in something worse. To be honest, the first time I heard this, I thought it was nuts. It seemed perverse to deny that we live in capitalist societies. Neoliberal globalization has subjected the entire world to the dictates of capital. Communicative capitalism has changed our basic interactions into fodder for the private wealth accumulation of tech billionaires. Nonetheless, the possibility that we aren’t in capitalism anymore—that the system is changing, and that we aren’t acknowledging this change—continued to nag at me. Wark was onto something. Most of us recognize that history doesn’t unfold in a straight-forwardly progressive direction. But we still tend to assume that capitalism will continue to respond and adapt to its varying crises until we bring it down. So what if capital really is dead and its grave doesn’t look anything like communism? Wark’s provocation is dizzying, a call to think again about the assumptions guiding action and critique.

    That capital’s grave may not look anything like what Marx, Engels, and millions of their comrades anticipated pushes us to consider a further possibility: maybe its gravediggers aren’t the industrial proletariat. This is my wager and response to Wark: capital isn’t dead. Capital is digging its own grave. Capitalist laws of motion are reflexively folding in on themselves and becoming something no longer recognizably capitalist. 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.

    Becoming neofeudal

    Many of us get our images of feudalism from popular culture—Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Camelot, A Knight’s Tale, The Last Duel, The Name of the Rose, to use a few examples. We imagine serfs toiling in fields, vassals taking the knee, armored knights riding around with shields, swords, and lances, and monks intoning Gregorian chants in immense Gothic cathedrals. It’s a European vision, seen through thick Anglo, Norman, and Teutonic fantasies that screen out regional and temporal variations within Europe as well as non-European feudalisms. We need to attend to these variations and recognize feudalism as a general economic and political formation characterized by fragmented private power and predation.

    One such variation is the “democratic feudalism” that emerged in reaction to movements for political representation. Even before the French revolution, conservatives realized that they needed to harness popular energies toward the maintenance of order. Their device for doing so, Corey Robin explains, unfolded along two lines: “The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats in the family, the factory, or the field.” The first line of symbolic identification with the ruling class cultivates nationalism. The second line democratizes feudal privilege. With the home as his castle, the husband can rule over his wife. In the factory, the supervisor can feel superior to the workers beneath him. And as the United States demonstrated, slaveholding can turn “the white majority into a lordly class.” Facing the entry of the masses into the public sphere, conservatives entice them with private privilege: “The promise of democracy is to govern another human being as completely as a monarch governs his subjects.” Not only did this promise develop into an elaborate jurisprudence dedicated to fortifying private power, but it also established the contours of the conservative narration of grievance: any increase in the freedom of workers, women, and Black people deprived the lordly class of the status and honor rightfully theirs by birth.

    Another variant eluding our typical view of feudalism is colonial. Confining feudalism to a European past, we forget its role in imperial conquest and exploitation, its continuity and overlap with capitalism’s own development. Rahmane Idrissa’s cognitive mapping of the Sahel, for example, provides a powerful description of the feudal character of colonial domination in the Sudanic region. The exclusive task of colonial political power was predation and plunder. “The parallels with a feudal order were numerous,” Idrissa observes, “including a cascading system of suzerainty from the colonial commandant to the petty village chief, combines of chiefs and clerics as executants of customary governance, droit du seigneur exercised by colonial rulers, provision of security against Saharan marauders as justification for exploitation, and medieval punishments, which in some cases inspired their targets to carnivalesque religious response.” Idrissa emphasizes that this “feudal-style abuse” lives on in the political culture of the region, as does the “non-government” of domination. Unlike settler colonies, “exploitation colonies” such as those in the Sahel lacked the horizon of self-governance. They were peripheral hinterlands, managed from afar for the benefit of the metropole. After independence, these conditions made state formation a challenge. From the start, it was impacted by an international aid regime bent on supplying “depoliticized palliatives to pathologies that are systemic to the centre-periphery relationship.” Even after the destruction wrought by the debt crisis in the 1980s and neoliberalization in the 1990s, the donor class urged decentralization, ideological nonsense in a context where the state barely exists. As Idrissa points out, the subtext here is that Africa consists of tribes. The material reality is that elites don’t want states getting in the way of their private interests while people living in the countryside want useful services and the enforcement of a system of impartial rules. Far from a formation confined to the European past, feudalism is a colonial arrangement with ongoing effects.

    Capital’s Grave isn’t about feudalism, although an array of different feudalisms informs it. Since feudalism persisted long after the bourgeoisie ostensibly felled it, the book is also not evoking the return of the repressed. Rather, I develop the idea of neofeudalism to synthesize the effects of forty years of neo-liberalism: parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and the everyday psychosis of catastrophic anxiety. Capitalist relations and forces of production are undergoing systemic transformation and transitioning into a different mode of production. Bringing together analyses that up till now have been dispersed in different fields—law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis—I show how neofeudalism’s different elements compose a single tendency marking the direction capitalism is heading.

    Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that the specificity of the capitalist mode of production stems from the way market dependence compels certain forms of behavior—namely, “competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labor productivity.” As a whole, the system is “uniquely driven to improve the productivity of labor by technical means.” I argue that the imperative of accumulation is placing capitalist laws of motion in contradiction with themselves, reshaping society and politics in the process. We are in a period of transition where profit, improvement, and competitive advantage no longer dictate accumulation strategies. Instead, rents, destruction, and hoarding combine with extra-economic coercion in a neofeudal social formation driven by privilege and dependence. Two sets of laws are operating as capitalist laws compel non-capitalist behavior.

    Cédric Durand and Yanis Varoufakis offer powerful arguments for why the system in which we find ourselves is best understood as techno-feudal. They bring theoretical rigor to metaphors technology writers have used for well over a decade to describe the impact of networked digital communication. In 2010, in the influential and prescient book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier—who identifies as the father of virtual reality—discussed newly emergent cloud computing in terms of lords and peasants. The lords own and control platforms and data. The peasants are the rest of us who have become dependent on these platforms. We may own our instruments of labor (laptops, phones, cars), but someone else—the platform lord—provides the means through which we gain access to the market, charging a fee and collecting data about our transactions. Increasingly, we don’t own these items; we finance or lease them, paying not for the item but for its use. Writing just a few years after Lanier, Bruce Schneier—a network security expert—concluded a list of nefarious dealings by Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, and LinkedIn by pointing to the shift of power to IT. IT’s dramatic increase in power, he said, was indicative of a “digital feudalism.” Schneier warned, “If you’ve started to think of yourself as a hapless peasant in a Game of Thrones power struggle, you’re more right than you realize. These are not traditional companies, and we are not traditional customers. These are feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and serfs.” The massive amounts of data and computing power necessary for artificial intelligence (AI) are said to be stored “in the cloud.” But what is the material structure of this cloud? Servers. A few powerful tech companies own massive server farms that everyone else—companies and governments as well as individuals—pays to access. And what these servers store is us, the social substance, the general intellect, all the data that our interactions and lives generate. Really, we are the servers. Feudalism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present.

    Although often overlooked by tech writers, the neofeudalizing tendencies of communicative capitalism show up most dramatically in the servant economy. I’m not referring here to the replacement of jobs by automation but rather its opposite: the limits of automation. Jason E. Smith draws out Marx’s analysis of the connection between industrialization and the expansion of services. As productivity increases, requiring fewer workers, those in need of a wage to survive are thrown into sectors less amenable to automation—that is, services. Services are less amenable to automation in part because of the specific skills care work requires, skills like diapering a baby and moving an elderly person from bed. Services also resist automation because they are cheap, the last jobs available to those thrown out of every other avenue of paid employment. As Marx writes in Capital: “The extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly expanding scale, under the name of a servant class.” Marx’s argument resists simplistic progressivism. Capitalist industry itself reproduces social property relations characteristic of earlier economic forms. Capital’s social reproduction is not limited to the social reproduction of capitalist social relations. It can also reproduce non-capitalist social relations of servitude.

    A mighty service sector has arisen over the last decades. The majority of workers in the advanced economies have moved from being producers to being servants. Employed in services and retail, they assist and help. In the words of economist David Autor, “There’s a lot of people who are there to serve the comfort and convenience and care of affluent individuals.” The COVID-19 pandemic brought out the class character of the service economy: on the one hand, people’s dependence on a previously “invisible” force of warehouse and grocery workers and delivery services (with the resulting billions in profit for Amazon) and, on the other hand, the dependence of service-sector workers in bars, restaurants, hotels, tourism, personal grooming, and entertainment on the consumption patterns of the rich. When the rich stopped buying, when they retreated into their private domiciles, millions lost their livelihoods. And when the rich reemerged from their mansions and penthouses, they gathered and celebrated unmasked while the servants remained masked and faceless.

    Most jobs are in services, and services count for the largest areas of expected job growth. This is true all over the world. In high-income countries, 70-80 percent of employment is in services. World Bank statistics for 2023 show that 54.6 percent of GDP in China comes from services, 49.8 percent of GDP in India (more than that from agriculture and industry combined), and 56.88 percent of GDP in Russia. Most workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa are also in services. In every region with the exception of the Arab world (where industry continues to account for a larger share), services contribute the most to GDP: 58.28 percent in East Asia and the Pacific, 65.33 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 44.41 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.

    Services dominate the informal as well as the formal economy. Across what David Oks and Henry Williams call “the poor world,” large percentages of workers toil in informal low-skilled service work: “The unlicensed taxi drivers, roadside fruit peddlers, freelance porters, squeegee men and women, bidi rollers, beggars, rag pickers, clothing resellers, small-time scammers and thieves, bazaar porters, and general-purpose unskilled jobbers who constitute the majority of the populations of cities everywhere from Kabul to Kabinda to Managua.” An effect of simultaneous processes of de-agrarianization and deindustrialization, the production of an enormous surplus labor force enables middle-class households to employ multiple servants and insurgent militias to sweep up restless foot soldiers. Lacking access to means of subsistence, many of the people pushed into uncertain and informal service work rely on debt to survive, becoming easy prey for scammers and predatory finance.

    Today, Marx’s Mr. Moneybags isn’t a factory owner. He’s a landlord, financier, platform billionaire, or asset manager, someone who takes a cut. In the contemporary global economy, rents and predation are more effective accumulation strategies than commodity production—taking not making, as Brett Christophers explains in Rentier Capitalism. Predation is normal, even normative. Globally, in the knowledge and tech industries, rental income accruing from intellectual property rights exceeds income from the production of goods. In the US, financial services contribute more to GDP than manufacturing. Increasingly, capital isn’t reinvested in production. It’s hoarded, given out to shareholders, or redistributed as rents to ever more powerful monopoly platforms.

    Understanding the economy of rents and services as neo-feudalizing helps us make sense of the present. It lets us recognize seemingly disparate economic and social phenomena as interrelated elements of a single tendency that extends beyond the realm of high technology. Legal theorists are documenting this tendency as a privatization of jurisprudence. Robert Kuttner and Katherine Stone argue that “elites are pursuing something aptly described as a new form of feudalism, in which entire realms of public law, public property, due process, and citizen rights revert to unaccountable control by private business.” Kuttner and Stone’s emphasis on the role of private law in erasing hard-won legal rights and protections resonates with Katharina Pistor’s argument in The Code of Capital. Pistor describes capitalism as dependent on a feudal legal calculus: “The legal code of capitalism does not follow the rules of competition; instead, it operates according to the logic of power and privilege.” Privatized arbitration agreements, platform labor, social reproduction crises, and widespread feelings of pervasive, inescapable catastrophe might seem disconnected, but together they point to the result of forty years of neoliberalism: a neofeudal order with new lords and a sector of servants.

    Italian theorists in the 1960s used the term social factory to describe the relationship between capital and labor in the post-war era. Today we inhabit a social manor. Society isn’t oriented toward the production of workers and commodities. It’s now an order of personalized service, privilege, hierarchy, and fealty. More and more of the people forced to sell their labor power to survive sell this labor as services to those looking for deliveries, drivers, cleaners, trainers, home health aides, nannies, guards, coaches, and so on. The buying and selling of services are enabled by new intermediaries, technological platforms whose owners insert themselves between service offerers and seekers, being sure to exact a fee along with the data and metadata that accompany the transaction. Our basic interactions are not our own. With advances in production seemingly at a dead end, capital is removed from circulation and transformed into assets that, however arcane, might somehow function as a store of value in an increasingly irrational and uncertain context. The privileged rely on the services of lawyers, consultants, and financial advisors to secure their hoards of value. The rest of us are supposed to stay in our place and focus on our survival. Hoping for more is naïve.

    What’s in a name?

    Numerous terms have emerged as names for our present political-economic system. The most prominent is neoliberalism. When applied to domestic economies in the Global North, it’s associated with post-Keynesian economic policies and the dismantling of the welfare state. When applied internationally, it’s linked to globalization: globalized neoliberalism or neoliberal globalization, fancy terms to disguise intensified expropriation from the Global South. Concern with austerity—policies that cut back on state expenditures on public goods—has led to the theorization of precarity capitalism. Christophers has added the notion of asset manager capitalism to his earlier analysis of rentier capitalism. Theorists focused on technology and communication have introduced the terms cognitive capitalism, digital capitalism, communicative capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism. As part of the critical examination of capitalism’s responsibility for climate change, we have designations like carbon capitalism, fossil capitalism, and thecapitalocene.

    These terms for present economic society accompany a slew of earlier designations that they sometimes preserve and sometimes displace: imperialism, financial capitalism, and monopoly capitalism. The new terms intermingle with the critical vocabulary of racial capitalism and capitalist patriarchy that aims to draw out the dependence of economic exploitation on raced and sexed oppression. They also confront the reactionary label disparaging this critique, woke capitalism. And all these different ways of designating contemporary capitalism coexist with claims that we’ve moved beyond capitalism altogether. Paul Mason, for example, suggests that our era is post-capitalist, and Slavoj Žižek offers liberal communism as the name for the elite ideology associated with Bill Gates and George Soros. Žižek presents their philanthropy as a kind of capitalist self-negation, writing: “Today’s capitalism cannot reproduce on its own. It needs extra economic charity to sustain the cycle of social reproduction.”

    Different political analyses underpin these different terms. The terms identify different sets of problems, dynamics, property relations, power relations, and sites of struggle. The most compelling theorization of neoliberalism describes it as a reactionary class response, a class project of wealth appropriation. Emphases on imperialism draw out the exploitative imbrications of development and de-development as well as the necessary interconnections between liberation struggles and struggles against occupation and militarism. The different analyses also correlate to the popular struggles of the last few decades: the Movement of the Squares, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street; struggles around austerity, cuts, and precarity; environmental struggles—not only pipelines but also prices, as in the gilets jaunes movement in France; housing struggles, rents, foreclosures, and evictions; Black Lives Matter, racist policing, police abolition, and struggles against occupation, apartheid, and genocide; struggles around sex, gender, sexuality, bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and abortion. Recognizing the reactionary charge of “woke capitalism,” we can even include here the struggles from below that take racist and sexist forms as they oppose immigration, vaccination, and the violation of the democratic feudal privilege of excluding or dominating another. All these struggles are over access and control, over who defines and controls who and what we are, what we get, and where we can go, in a world where capitalism cannot solve its problems—even when it controls the state—and a new formation is not yet in place.

    The challenge is theorizing the connection between the crises of intensified economic inequality, social reproduction, political incapacity, and truncated political horizon (the reduc- tion of political goals to survival and subsistence). Approaching the extremes of crisis and polarization as a struggle for democracy misrepresents the problem. Democracy fails to name the division in the present. For example, the rioters assaulting the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, said that they were fighting to save our democracy (when we all knew they were fascists). They mimicked the US government in its consistent undermining of other countries’ democratic elections in the name of democracy. Viewing the problems of the present as an issue of democracy likewise fails to address the conditions for its absence—economic inequality, an imperialist system of exploitation that cannot be addressed through local actions, and the incapacity of existing political institutions to deal with contemporary problems. Nevertheless, the call for democracy identifies that something is missing or has been lost—but what? Popular sovereignty? Our freedom? Our future? The illusion of or desire for equality? In the civil war of contemporary society, democracy is held up in contradictory ways, to uphold the imperialist colonial order and to champion its abolition, to defend against fascists and defend against Antifa (I have in mind the bizarro world of some US Americans who glamorize the Second World War without knowing why it was fought).

    If we read democracy as lost, we take the temporal perspective of a post-democratic future. If we read democracy as having never been achieved, the place from which we see is pre-democratic. The democratic expansion associated with the bourgeois revolutions didn’t happen, or was foreshortened, incomplete, unfinished. A stubbornly linear Marxism-Leninism would say that pre-democracy or incomplete democracy positions us in a feudal era, the time before the democratic revolution. We’re thus caught in a strange combination of temporalities. Comparisons with different historical moments illuminate different aspects of the present, which makes it hard to determine which history is repeating itself, what is tragedy and what is farce. Against this background of temporal instability, I present neofeudalism, a tendency where something new is emerging in the guise of something old.

    Looking backward into the future

    Medievalists argue over the meaning of feudalism. Some think the term is useless, a modernist effort at self-distinction. The European Middle Ages lasted roughly a thousand years, com- prising multiple overlapping, changing, and coexisting political and economic forms with ties and relations extending into Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Conversely, we also have the view that “feudalism is apt to appear whenever the strain of preserving a relatively large political unit proves to be beyond the economic and psychic resources of a society.” From this angle, feudalism is less a mode of production than it is an effect of disintegration, a loss accompanied by combined forms of constraint and coercion imposed in order to extract surplus.

    Neofeudalism isn’t about the past. It’s about tendencies in the present. Omnipresent feudal images and language index the challenge of understanding how our societies are changing and the difficulties we encounter in assessing continuity amid transformation. How do we see the present and identify the direction things seem to be going? There is little optimism about the future, and contemporary life is not what we were promised. Twenty years ago, people joked, “Where are the flying cars?” Now they wonder whether they will pay off their student loans or find affordable housing within a reasonable distance from their workplace. The service sector bleeds into servants bleeds into serfs trapped for life in a life they didn’t choose. When the whims and consumption choices of a class of lords drive the visible economy—influencers, tech giants, strange billionaires—it registers affectively, in the feeling of hierarchy, inequality, and entrapment. Jeff Bezos has a $500 million super yacht, a yacht so big that it requires its own support yacht with a helipad. Capturing our uneasy sense of decay and decline in the context of intensifying inequality, feudal analogies critically illuminate key aspects of our con- temporary experience.

    In his 1973 classic The Country and the City, Raymond Williams analyzes the idealization of feudal values in the context of the rise of capitalist agriculture in England. A longing for the olden days, for hallowed forms of community and reciprocity, carried a critique of their displacement by self-interest and cash payment. Williams writes, “The structure of feeling within which this backward reference is to be understood is then not primarily a matter of historical explanation and analysis. What is really significant is this particular kind of reaction to the fact of change, and this has more real and more interesting social causes.” Locating the displaced values in the feudal past complicates their utility for social critique: Is the goal a defense of tradition, of blood and soil? If the values are in the past, what does it mean to recover them?

    A risk of the neofeudalization hypothesis—the idea that capitalism is becoming neofeudal—is not idealizing feudalism (although there are some libertarians and neoreactionaries who do); rather, the risk is inadvertently defending capitalism. Against the extra-economic coercion, dependence, and violent expropriation of neofeudal pillage and plunder, capitalism may not look so bad. For example, the conservative writer Joel Kotkin uses the threat of mass serfdom to defend suburban home ownership, fossil fuels, and the American dream. His neofeudal order is topped not by lords or knights but by tech oligarchs and an academic and media elite promoting a woke green ideology. Against Kotkin’s mobilization of a neofeudal imaginary for a populist defense of carbon capitalism, I argue that capital itself is neofeudalizing. Capitalism isn’t an alternative to neofeudalism. The drive to accumulate is transforming its own laws of motion from competition, investment, and improvement to hoarding, predation, and destruction. While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect: investors raid and dismantle functioning firms; tech start-ups aim at demolishing entire sectors; cryptocurrency-mining operations consume enormous amounts of energy while making nothing at all, cryptocurrency being the ultimate anti-commodity. There’s a risk, then, that neofeudalism is a conserving analytical frame, because by being worse it might make capitalism seem not to be so bad.

    At the same time, neofeudalism helps account for why “class” fails to organize politics today, why left politics is so perpetually fragmented, and why the left has a hard time connecting to workers. In the so-called advanced economies, class no longer functions as a powerful political identity. The perspective of working people is not associated with an orientation to the future. The class that up through the middle of the twentieth century was able to improve its quality of life by forcing capital to make concessions has dwindled in presence and power, an effect of deindustrialization and financialization. Being a worker isn’t a source of strength and pride, it’s something to qualify—knowledge worker, cultural worker, tech worker—deny, or get beyond. The weakening of working-class identification is typically explained as the result of the capitalist class’s sustained attack on unions. That’s not wrong, but it’s a forty-year-old explanation that doesn’t shed much light on what’s happening to workers now. According to Atlanta writer George Chidi, “People are trying very hard to avoid the word ‘serf,’ but that’s kind of where we are.”

    The wager behind the neofeudal hypothesis is that people have a hard time identifying as workers because they don’t see their work as driving social production and collective energy, as carrying a future they believe in. Instead, they recognize it—perhaps at an inchoate or subliminal level—as serving the consumption requirements of the ruling class, a marker of feudal political economy. We work to live, while the ruling class enjoys the benefits of our labor. This recognition helps explain the prominence of identification as consumers. People use consumption choices to signal that they are more than a job: they are unique individuals with taste and talent; they belong to groups with histories that command respect. We might not make much money, but we still have our values and can cling to our guns. With consumption rather than production as the field of identity and authenticity, cultural appropriation appears as a more significant problem than exploitation; food and fashion choices become sites of generational conflict; politics concentrates around what not to buy. And because consumption is a terrain of individual expression, building collective power becomes all the more difficult, which makes it easier for the ruling class to get away with domination, destruction, and plunder.

    Fighting back

    Tendencies are not all determining. There is a space for, a need for, political action. We are in the setting we describe, the picture we take. Capitalism is turning itself into a neofeudal order of new lords and new serfs, platform billionaires and a massive sector of servants. Nevertheless, we can intervene. We must intervene.

    Strikes and movements around the world fight back on various fronts—organizing unions, demanding an end to fossil fuels, opposing racist policing and militarism, defending women’s, LGBTQ, and Palestinian liberation. The struggles of service workers are class struggles, although many of them are not at the point of production. Debt, cost of living, transportation, education, health, and housing struggles all take on the expropriative practices of asset holders. These struggles are not fought against capitalists as the bourgeois class of owners of the means of production. They are fought against landlords, banks, and the state that imposes cuts, fines, and force on the many in the interest of maintaining the power of the few. Neofeudalism is a concept that helps bring the struggles of today’s proletarianized neoserfs together by showing how they are all struggles against capital’s self-transformation.

    Keeping the line of struggle in sight is crucial. Any argument that associates neofeudalism with the return of the repressed or some kind of repetition and regress risks falling prey to the assumption of incomplete bourgeois revolution. The corresponding path would then be toward the restoration of liberal democracy and the buttressing of capitalist class and property relations. The incessant appeal to democratic values and liberal norms goes in this direction—as if democracy were possible in neofeudalizing conditions. Such an appeal reinforces the political form of wealth expropriation while ignoring the intensification of inequality and unfreedom. The result is democracy for the rich and servitude for the many—especially in a global capitalist context where winning the state can never be enough.

    A more promising line embraces services as primary labor processes in future society, holding up universal basic services (UBS) as a communist ideal alongside our traditional emphasis on the abolition of private property. On a rapidly warming planet, commodity production cannot be the central component of planned economies. Services will have to take its place, which is not just happening but accelerating. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, attention to essential healthcare workers hinted at the need for and appeal of universal services before quickly shutting it down. Recognizing the labor vanguard within the array of services can link workers’ and climate struggles: unionizing teachers, nurses, baristas, and hotel workers is important not only for workers’ well-being but for the shape of society on a warming planet. An expanded sense of service also counters the growth and redistribution model favored in some social-democratic circles. Of course, universal basic services will have to be combined with communist goals of more free time and meaningful engagement in planning and participating in the reproduction of our common world. What’s crucial to my argument is the pivotal role of services and service workers in ushering in communist society.

    Given how much underpaid service work is done by non-citizen workers, the service sector is a fruitful space for international organizing. It might even be the case that emphases on care, care work, and the crisis of care point to the emergent ideology of the servant sector. The value of care work ruptures capitalist value; irreducible to exchange, it points to an alternative mode of valuation, one that prioritizes maintenance, sustenance, and flourishing. Additionally, the emergent ideology of care attends to social reproduction—survival, basic needs—in ways that emphases on democracy presuppose but cannot acknowledge. With communism as the horizon, we move beyond surviving to thriving, beyond basic needs, to needs for the time and space for creativity, conviviality, exploration, and joy. Universal basic services provide the infrastructure for emancipated egalitarian forms of life.

    The first chapter details capitalism’s changing laws of motion. It uses Uber and the Grundrisse to show what’s distinctive about neofeudalism. Chapter 2 sets out the temporality of neofeudalism, thinking through the logic of transition and demonstrating how the Marxist tradition always had a richer, more varied understanding of time than the straightforward parade of stages suggests. The third chapter describes the state, class, spatial, and affective structure of neofeudalism, emphasizing parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and catastrophic anxiety. Chapter 4 takes up the psychotic atmosphere pervading neofeudalism, reflecting on the ubiquitous sentiment that “nobody cares.” I conclude with a vision for class struggle on a warming planet and led by a servant vanguard. We aren’t doomed to neofeudal stagnation and servitude. A better world is possible, if we fight for it. ♦

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