Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle

by Jodi Dean

If not communism, what comes after capitalism?

The fact that communism did not prevail does not mean we are still in capitalism. In Capital's Grave, Jodi Dean outlines how capitalist relations and forces of production are undergoing systemic transformation and transitioning into a different mode of production.

After forty years of neoliberalism, society has been afflicted up parcellated sovereignty, power distributed between new lords and serfs,  and a process of hinterlandization. This has resulted in the everyday psychosis of catastrophic anxiety.

Bringing together analyses from different fields—law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis—Jodi Dean shows how the contemporary world’s different elements comprise a single tendency marking the direction capitalism is neofeudalism. Feudalism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present. The question in a society of serfs and servants, how do we get free?

Genres: Politics, Economics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, History

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2025

About the author

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited eleven books, including The Communist Horizon and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not that I’ve been able to read a ton this somehow eventful year (so far) but definitely my book of the year “Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle” by Jodi Dean (VERSO, March 2025).

Not because I necessarily agree with the neofeudal hypothesis but because it brought together so many important pieces of analyses to better understand the current conjuncture.

Disclaimer on hyping a book about the feudal character of the rise of services: a bit rich coming from the propertied faux socialist white middle aged woman who employs two cleaning ladies, a personal trainer, a running trainer, uses Uber as a primary means of transportation, enjoys luxury hotels, and constantly gets her her nails and hair done by underpaid women.

I know. But still.

Guiding and scary question: "What if we're not in capitalism but something worse?"
Capital is turning into something that is no longer capitalist, where holders of wealth are compelled to follow different laws of motion, not competition, reinvestment, and improvement but predation, hoarding, and destruction. Capital is becoming neofeudal.

It's a feast for Marxist nerds: analyzing capitalism’s changing laws of motion through using Uber and the Grundrisse to show what’s distinctive about neofeudalism. Of course, Dean employs all the Marxist big weights Marx, Lenin, Luxembourg, Althusser etc to unpack the material basis of neofeudalism. Then moving from this material analysis to the state, class, spatial, and affective structure of neofeudalism, emphasizing parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and catastrophic anxiety. Then to a vision for class struggle on a warming planet and led by a servant vanguard.

There's a big debate, I suppose led by white Marxist bros on whether this or that interpretation of Marx would support the neofeudal hypothesis. Unlike my ten-year younger self: I don't care!

But very clearly: the billionaires have taken over, captured the state and we must understand the material context for this - it's not about culture or a shift in democratic attitudes. I mean: hey, it cute to see the liberals grappling with the 'end of liberal democracy' and ‘the oligarchy’ but let's have a grown-up look at what's going on.

In the book, Dean develops the idea of neofeudalism to synthesize the effects of forty years of neoliberalism: 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— she shows how neofeudalism’s different elements compose a single tendency marking the direction capitalism is heading.



TLDR: Not too well structured notes and snippets I took the book:

# 1 Neoliberal capitalism has been a period of working-class defeat. Neofeudalism arises from that defeat. Practices and policies designed to protect the class position and accumulation strategies of asset holders, to preserve their wealth and grip on the social surplus, are impacting capital’s laws of motion. We live in a period of transition where capital is undermining its own conditions and becoming neofeudal.

# 2 The economy: 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 neofeudalizing 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. 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 jobs are in services.

# 3 Capitalism is turning itself into a neofeudal order of new lords and new serfs, platform billionaires and a massive sector of servants: Key trends: Rent-extraction as dominant logic of capital accumulation, Diminishing industrial wage labor in favor of service-based dependency, Layered, privatized sovereignty and regulatory capture, New socio-spatial inequalities.

# 4 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.

# 5 Politics: Viewed as a neofeudalizing tendency, parcellization—fragmentation—is not to be embraced as democratic pluralization; it’s the new structuring of economic and political power that drives advancing servitude and hinterlandization.

#6 Psychology: The neofeudal social manor is populated by fragile, competitive others struggling within a broader landscape of anxiety, fragmentation, shamelessness, and hierarchic dependence. Its affective infrastructure is built on what Lacanian psychoanalysis describes as the imaginary plane, a register of identification, aggression, and rivalry.

Affective dimensions of neofeudalism, the pervasive feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and catastrophe. Umair Haque describes the “existential traumatic shock” behind the regressive anti-revolutions associated with Bolsonaro, Trump, Modi, Brexit, QAnon, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers. Haque uses the example of the average American lacking the savings or social safety net necessary for weathering everyday crises like a medical emergency, home or car repair, death in the family, or job loss: “Life is marked by constant dread and anxiety and panic, not over anything that might come to be—but things that must be, things for which there is no escape, like death, birth, and illness.

#7 Conclusion: Capitalism isn’t immortal—although from time to time it’s depicted as undead. It had a beginning, and it will have an end. The beginning of this mode of production lasted several centuries—and was a violent, bloody process inextricable from colonialism and slavery. Its ending appears to be approaching more quickly if no less violently: hoarding, predation, and destruction are replacing competition, investment, and improvement as primary drivers of wealth accumulation. In the 1970s and ’80s, we were told that information technology and services would expand the number of white-collar jobs, value creative and highly educated labor, and result in growth and prosperity for all. An advanced capitalist knowledge economy would replace industrial commodity production. That’s not quite the way it turned out. Deindustrialization and deagrarianization led to a global rise in services, but the vast majority are unwaged, low paid, informal, and precarious.

We aren’t doomed to being buried alive in capital’s grave. The sector of servants contains a vanguard that can lead the way out of it.

❤️We can’t expect urban gardens and small-scale agriculture to feed 8 billion people so long as the fossil fuel sector continues to drill and temperatures continue to rise. An organized anti-imperialist struggle against the system destroying people and the planet is the only plausible way out of the chronic crisis of social reproduction.

Three dimensions of our present can shape a path toward a communist future: climate change as our general condition, universal basic services (UBS) as an economic vision, and the servant sector as the labor vanguard.

Communists should place the provision of universal basic services at the core of our vision for the post-capitalist future. Reindustrializing is not a serious option: the environmental costs for such a strategy on a global scale are far too high. A more promising path toward economic viability comes from services. As Dylan Riley writes, “What the planet and humanity need is massive investment in low-return, low-productivity activities: care, education and environmental restoration.”

Universal basic services securing the conditions for social reproduction on a warming planet should be the economic and political horizon for working-class struggle today. Together with the long-held communist goals of abolishing private property and replacing the profit motive with planning, an emphasis on universal services imagines a communist path untethered from the industrial and developmentalist assumptions of the twentieth century. Capitalism is changing, and the orientation I suggest here responds to these changes.

"Rosa Luxemburg famously posed the alternative of socialism or barbarism. Our options now are communism or neofeudalism. If we don’t fight for communism, we will end up in neofeudalism. That is the direction society is tending after forty years of neoliberalism. Standing in place, maintaining the status quo, is not an option. Fortunately, capitalism’s own contradictions indicate a way forward and the class that can lead it: the class of service workers oriented toward securing the conditions under which people and the planet will thrive.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Looking backward into the future.”

How daring. What if we no longer live in capitalism, but in the early stages of a new kind of serfdom?

Now by we, I mean Americans, and I’m far from one, but in the hyperconnected global village we live, everything that happens there brings its impact here. The theory that we are entering tech-driven feudalism is gaining traction among scholars, and I'm currently obsessing over this idea (key word: idea, not a fact).

Fisher and Žižek said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, yet the author argues we are watching capitalism end as we speak. And, admittedly, she backs her argument charmingly (cherry-pickingly too, but that’s for later).

If we are to define capitalism, the system, on its most basic level, prioritises making profit by producing and selling goods in a competitive market. The drive to outperform competitors pushes companies to invest their profits in technology and efficiency to lower costs and increase growth, bringing us innovations and better living standards. Right? Right.

However, as the author analyses certain massive companies such as Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and more, she offers us to look at their business practices as something that has moved past the capitalist definition, something that perhaps, even goes against it.

My favourite example was Uber example, which practices I can see in my city real-time. Uber's strategy, she says, is this: flood cities with unusually cheap rides with the help of investor money and debt. Make it so cheap that regular taxis go out of business, and even public transport start to seem no longer worth the bother. Convince the public it's all the good things: environmentally friendly! it offers freedom to work whenever you want as much as you want!, so on and so forth.

Continue offering rides that put the company in debt until other companies collapse under their inability to offer such cheap services. Once the competition is out, raise fares, cut driver pay, and tighten control through algorithmic management, penalising those who don’t work long enough or refuse rides. Eventually, become a landlord to the market, extracting fees from riders and drivers alike to even access the mobility market. Sounds dystopian, sure, but Uber hasn’t been making any real profit as a company until 2023. For almost fourteen years (!), it survived on investor money and debt, losing billions to fund its takeover of cities such as London, Paris, and New York.

Now, I don’t think Uber has ever fully succeeded in this strategy—at least not to the extent the author suggests. Other platforms with similar models keep entering the market, refusing to give up, and while traditional taxis have certainly suffered, public transport hasn’t died, at least not yet. Still, the premise is awfully interesting: Uber doesn’t aim to innovate or improve what exists; it advances by destruction and clever yet shady practices.

Can you really claim it's neofeudalism instead of regular old monopolistic capitalism? Depends on your creativity. What we are seeing with platforms and algorithms is entirely new to this age. To me, I can see how platforms and algorithms can dominate the markets (and our lives) so completely that we become modern serfs, renting back our own data and labour just to stay included.

Either way, the author makes you think, which I love and adore and admire. Her analysis and examples are wonderful ways to stimulate your brain. However, her solution to all these complex issues is as disappointing as it is ideological: communism. If anyone gives you one answer to all the problems, you know it's a cap. Either way, the 70% of the book is worth everyone's time to get their mind sharpened.

"If under capitalism we sell ourselves, under neofeudalism we pay a fee to access a market where we can sell ourselves."

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the taken for granted views of my world of the political left is that just as capitalism followed feudalism, socialism will inexorably follow capitalism. After all, as Marx pointed out to us in creating the proletariat capitalists created their own gravediggers. Yet, aside from the simplicities of this view, its poor grasp of what Marx thought, and the observation that the places where socialist organisation has had most success are not advanced capitalist states, it has long bothered me that socialism seems really hard to bring about for something that is inexorably inevitable…. What’s more, for large parts of the world, mainly but not only the ‘advanced capitalist’ world, our socio-economic order looks less and less like a capitalist one, with bosses extracting surplus value from the labour of their workers. Such is the world for finance capital.

These trends in the dominant social order, the growing sense that things are not going as expected in the long run of history has thrown many into a state of uncertainty – when not engaging in the day-to-day struggles against authoritarian regimes, the enforced destitution of many, genocide, ecocide, and the ever closer sense of environmental collapse. I see this shift elsewhere in my academic world, as one of the effects of paying closer attention to social, political, cultural and economic conditions beyond the North Atlantic nexus and its outliers, has been a shift away from stagist or stadial views of the world and of the models we use to understand it. One of the effects of all this uncertainty is that scholars, activists, and theorists of all manner of political outlooks are trying to make sense of the current condition. Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave is one of the more insightful attempts with its iconoclastic view that perhaps we’re moving backwards to a state of neo-feudalism.

She’s not suggesting chateaux in parks, barons with peasant farmers, and the like – or not exactly. What she is doing is looking at key characteristics of European feudalism and suggesting that enough of them, suitably adjusted to our globalised, tech-dependent world, exist to say that the emerging social order looks not unlike the political and economic arrangements of that era. The key aspect of her case is that we are shifting from forms of political control based in sovereignty to what she calls suzerainty, that is where political control is exercised over entities that are internally autonomous. That’s a big, sweeping claim that she argues is backed up by a tendency to four characteristics of feudalism in the existing order.

The first, parcellated sovereignty, is the idea that power is fragmented, shifting, conditional, and run through a range of relations, where in the current situation the key elements of that ‘parcellization’ are the widespread presence of forms of extra-economic coercion and the fragmentation of power. Here she points to phenomena such as the rise of the ability of corporations to sue states for losses emerging from changes in state policy, or the extensive set of personal data that is available to banks and lending agencies to predetermine populations’ access to funds, or to the trade in immaterial derivatives that is largely responsible for the 2008 banking crisis.

The second, the shift towards lords and serfs, can be seen in the growing gulf between the rich and the rest, the immiseration of the middling classes, the collapse of stable employment relations, the rise of self-employment and with it the growing dependence on rent-based relations. Here we can see the ‘self-employed’ Uber driver renting the operating system, the ‘self-employed’ fitness trainers renting space in large scale commercial gyms to offer classes the gym used to put on, the growing economic significance of migrant workers’ cash payments ‘home’, or the idea that a wealthy elite appropriate income by skimming a percentage take every time we use their App or social media platform.

The third she calls hinterlandization or the situation where there is a small set of urban areas where extreme wealth and power is concentrated, while the rest of the world struggles to get by while providing services or commodities to those cities. This is not the notion of the ‘left behind’ we so often hear discussed by liberal politicians, this is the ‘never intended to get there’ because their labour and more is the basis of the comfort of those wealthy.

The fourth is catastrophic anxiety as more than a life of continual worry, but an all pervasive sense that things can only get worse; that for most there is no future but servitude.

This is a bleak view, but if anything as I reflect back on my youthful engagement with what was then (in the late 70s and 1980s) still called ‘the Transition Debate’ these characteristics of feudalism look compelling, where what we might be tempted to see as democratic pluralization, through forms of regional governance for instance, is likely to be a reorganisation of the social and economic field to drive fragmentation and servitude. Dean is not buying fully into the emerging analysis that sees us entering a techno-feudal condition, but she is stressing that the tendency to neo-feudalism is driven by the power of finance capital. Even so, I would have liked to have seen a closer reading of the power of rentier economic relations – not that she ignores them, they are key to her analysis, but the rentier economy is a much different form of value extraction than capitalist surplus value, and without grasping it as a form of wealth accumulation and appropriation we’re not likely to be able to build a response.

Not that Dean is necessarily pessimistic; she stresses that this is a powerful tendency in the global economy and social relations, but not a done deal even though these neo-feudal dynamics have embedded themselves deeply in global economic relations and social practices. She sees a way to resist this tendency through struggles to build universal basic services, noting that it is no surprise that it is service workers, at least in ‘capitalist core’ (my words, not hers), who have shown the most persistent labour militancy in recent years, with struggles to provide services that meet universal needs, not someone else’s profit. For her these struggles are about building a subject who is ‘supposed to fight’.

I’m not sure that Dean’s analysis or her solution are the answer, but they’re an important part of making sense of what is going on, and are helping me (at least) think better about both where we are, and how to get somewhere better. That makes it an important book for the now. On reflection, 4.5 actually.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a timely and clearly expressed exploration of our current state: giving it a name and offering a response. Dean covers a lot of territory but seems to bring things back to some level of praxis.

"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" (p.3)

Dean offers some examples of modern plunder through The Platforms (like Uber, AirBNB, Amazon, etc.) which informs the thesis.

And she offers: "Three dimensions of our present can shape a path toward a communist future: climate change as our general condition, universal basic services (UBS) as an economic vision, and the servant sector as the labor vanguard" (p.142). The alternative? Well. Serfdom, I suppose.

[Julesreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

The antidote to the problem of neofeudalism, which is being cited as the new form of our neoliberal, globalized society, in some leftist circles, is communism. Dean is a communist. So that’s no surprise. But the book does a great job synthesizing a fair amount of writing from the past few years describing how work, privatization, globalization, neoliberalization, and the withering of the welfare state has led us down a path away from capitalism and towards a new neofeudal society. Dean’s Luxemburgesque posit: communism or neofeudalism, should be considered seriously, though I doubt it will be.

[Sincerely, · Rating 3 out of 5]

While most of Deans economic analysis seems poignant and timely, her interpretations of it are tenuous at best & despite her frequent references to Marx’s writings ignore some of his most insightful remarks on the logic of value. (In short: capitalism ind dissolution is still capitalism! The capitalist laws of motion are contradictory, constantly undermining themselves - that’s the whole point!) Thus, the political conclusions she draws from her analysis appear at best almost unrelated, at worst dangerously idealistic.

And also: what the hell does any of this have to do with Palestine?!

[Timor · Rating 3 out of 5]

great questions bad answers

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative and thought provoking read about the future of capitalism, how neoliberalism is transforming society into neofeudalism now the majority of workers are in service jobs.

[Ben Ingraham · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What if we aren't in capitalism anymore but something worse?" Important questions in this one! The analysis felt a bit scattered at points and the scope of the argument felt like this could have been a much, much longer book (though maybe it could have been a pamphlet?). That's Verso Books for ya baybe!!!

[Benjamin Burgis]

The critique of Silvia Federici was spot-on, and I enjoyed the digression exploring the function of "nobody cares" claims, but overall I was extremely unpersuaded by the central thesis. See:

https://unherd.com/2025/05/the-21st-c...

[Kate Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this really interesting, with ideas that will stay with me and help me understand the current situation, power and organising for change.
It’s short and reasonably readable, though quite academic and there were points where I struggled or just had to accept that I didn’t fully follow that sentence, but would still get something out of her overall take.

[Alex Benach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have long taken issue with the term “late-stage capitalism” and this book is exactly why. we do not exist in capitalism, rather we exist in something much more sinister. thank you to Jodi Dean for this 🙌🙌

[Stefanos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The often quoted line that “it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is becoming less convincing. At this point, we can imagine the end of capitalism. The problem is, what seems to be emerging in its place might be even worse.

In Capital’s Grave, Jodie Dean’s takes on the neo-feudal hypothesis for what is slowly replacing Capitalism. In a way that parallels Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, she argues that capitalism is being reshaped by a set of tendencies that increasingly resemble a new form of Feudalism.

Varoufakis places greater emphasis on the technological dimension, what he calls cloud capital, as well as the broader economic shift from profit to rent. He traces this transformation through the geopolitical aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis: the injection of free government money, the acceleration of financialization, stock buybacks, and the rise of a few dominant Silicon Valley firms built around platforms and data extraction. Central to his account is the exploitation of unpaid digital labor, the content we create and the data we generate (including our reviews on this website) are monetized without compensation.

Jodi Dean doesn’t fundamentally disagree with Varoufakis’s analysis, but she grounds her argument more deeply in Marxist theory, placing greater emphasis on labor, especially service work and the conditions of workers on platforms like Uber and DoorDash.

In her view, the internal contradictions that have built up over four decades of neoliberalism are now giving rise to a new set of laws of motion. The primacy of competition, improvement, and profit, is increasingly replaced by hoarding, destruction, and rent-seeking. As profit rates decline, capitalists turn away from productive investment and toward politically-mediated redistribution; a logic of “taking rather than making”. Capital is no longer primarily deployed to expand productive capacity or raise productivity; instead, it flows into mechanisms of extraction and enclosure. To be clear, rent, destruction, and hoarding have always existed alongside capitalist production, but is increasingly becoming a compulsion.

Engaging directly with debates around transition and temporality, particularly in how the neo-feudal or techno-feudal hypotheses have been received, she emphasizes two key points: 1) The transition out of capitalism, like its emergence, may be a long and uneven process, and 2) different modes of production can coexist.

Dean draws on the Ellen Wood/Brenner framework to differentiate between Feudalism and capitalism. Where the former is defined by surplus extraction through extra-economic means, and the latter primarily by economic exploitation. She critiques the world-systems theory approach, particularly critics of neo-feudalism such as Evgeny Morozov, for blurring this distinction. By treating capitalism as a continuous, all-encompassing system, this perspective naturalizes it and obscures the specific break capitalism represents from feudal forms; an arguably unhelpful move, both analytically and politically.

Jodie Dean identifies four key trends pointing toward a neo-feudal transformation:
1. The State and Power: Sovereignty is no longer centralized. Parcellated sovereignty replaces universal rule. Public law is increasingly privatized. Contracts rule where laws once did. We see the rise of special economic zones, private security and militaries.
2. Property relations: New lords and serfs. A small class of asset holders controls vast resources, while the majority, especially in high-income countries, works in the service sector. Even in China and India, services account for over 50% of GDP. Critically, these services are increasingly mediated through platforms. While platform workers (Uber, DoorDash, etc.) may own the means of production (cars, bikes, computers) they do not sell directly to consumers. Instead, they are matched by algorithms and charged a fee or rent to access the platform. They are not paid a wage, but rather pay for the opportunity to work.
3. Spatiality: Dean describes a process of hinterlandization, the emergence of desolate peripheries, not just between countries but also within them, and even within cities. Core areas are prioritized and fortified, while surrounding areas are neglected, abandoned, or reduced to sites of extraction.
4. Affect: We feel anxious, dependent, submerged in forces we can’t control. The “big Other” (the symbolic structure that once guaranteed meaning or stability) has shattered. There’s no longer a shared reality.

Thus, for Dean, if we remain passive, a new form of Feudalism will take hold. Yet already, over the past decade, service workers have emerged at the forefront of class struggle. Dean sees in them the potential to become a new class subject. Much of service work is essential labor. Despite ongoing automation, deindustrialization, and deagrarianization, it reveals the limits of automation due to its relational, embodied, and context-specific nature. Amid an escalating climate crisis, services become even more vital for sustaining life on a warming planet.

The struggle, Dean argues, begins with demands for universal basic services—health care, education, housing, transport, environmental restoration— laying the foundation for a society oriented toward meeting human needs rather than maximizing profits or rents. But they also point toward a Communist horizon: the abolition of private property and classes altogether.
Where Rosa Luxemburg once framed the historical choice as “socialism or barbarism,” Dean updates the dichotomy for our time: “communism or neo-feudalism.”

Overall, this is a vital and timely read. Capital’s Grave is an important contribution to understanding the current moment. There are clear overlaps with Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, and ideally, if you can, read both. The neo-/technofeudal hypothesis has already sparked lively debate. Yet whether it proves accurate, and whether it inspires political organization, remains to be seen.

[Charles H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would recommend, although not sure I follow all of the argument (it's been awhile and I'm not an expert on Marxist political economy or dialectics), I think Dean makes good use of the term neofeudalism within the context of what's she is theorizing here.

The early and crucial distinction Dean lays out between what makes capital a social relation, what makes capitalism distinct from feudalism etc. (accumulation via exploitation, drive for profits/accumulation driven by need for more accumulation) is done well and is useful, in my opinion, in contrast to those who ignore the question and more clearly and convincingly than other recent Marxist attempts to similarly "expand" or develop Marx's argument in Capital to make sense of the relationship between exploitation - expropriation (Nancy Fraser, for example).

Dean argues capitalist laws of motion have turned in on themselves: capital's "neofeudalism" emerges as something new on the ruins of neoliberalism-- neoliberalism the period marked by capital's defeat of the working class, out of its victory has come something new, in which capital's own "laws of motion" have changed, but it's grave diggers are still here.

Short, dense, serious, worth a read.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent follow-up to Dean's landmark communist trilogy but I remain skeptical about the neofeudal thesis even as it is hard to deny the increasing role of suzerainty, parcellated sovereignty, service labor, hinterlandization, & occultism in the present moment of capital & empire. The chapter & the section on catastrophic anxiety are essential for understanding the psyche of the present moment regardless of whether one shares the writer's communist commitment or neofeudal analysis. This book, Anna Kornbluh *Immediacy*, & Cedric Johnson *After Black Lives Matter* are the essential theory works of the 2020s thus far. An aside, it was delightful to learn that Dean & Darko Suvin are writing buddies.

[TheEoJMan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The constant references to “neofeudalism” not being a term rooted in historical fact shows its lack of theoretical rigor and usefulness. Hard for me to believe we’re in (or moving towards) a new mode of production where the law of value no longer applies considering countries still export steel, iPhones, t-shirts, etc. made from wage workers in factories. The service economy surplus value that’s enjoyed by America has to be extracted from somewhere productive, no?

Regardless, I don’t think Dean misrepresented any facts neither did she say anything too disagreeable about how our contemporary situation sucks. I agree, it does suck! The last chapter’s call to arms and defense of technology as a potentially liberating force was nice as well.

[Benjamin Solidarity · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent read that concisely tackles a number if current developments from app workers, to the housing crisis, to tech oligarchs, to debt, and the rural vs urban divide. Where Dean fails is her core argument that what we are seeing is a distinctly new system of "neofeudalism" that differs fundamentally to capitalism. Her arguments I found unconvincing, and largely just described new evolutions within capitalism. "Neofeudalism" works better as a new era in capitalism - like neoliberalism or Fordist keynesism - than as wholly new system. Still its a good metaphor for many current developments.

[Chad Sinckler · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I agree with the authors analysis of various trends in capitalism, I am not convinced that those trends don’t represent a more intense form of capitalism rather than a new system of production. On the other hand, the book’s claim that service workers have a particularly revolutionary potential at this moment because of the growth of the service economy does make sense. As a warning, this book was jargon-filled and dense. Altogether an interesting read, even if I’m not convinced of the neofeudal thesis.

[Roberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jodi is such a concise and simple writer and it actually makes her works excellent and tangible. I didn’t really understand the title at first but thanks to Jodi’s writing style I am fully convinced of her position. Moreover, I adore Jodi’s staunch commitment to Marx’s writings and explains them not in a dogmatic way, but in a scientific, honest, and principled manner. Keep publishing Jodi we love you

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

god its so refreshing to hear someone push some relatively staid ideas into this century! does this book have its flaws? yes, absolutely. for one i really wish it was a little more accessibly written. i think that would help in its mission. but overall i immensely enjoyed reading this and would recommend.

[Povilas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Actually, no, this is worth its well deserved one star. Fuck this shit. People should just read Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism for a serious original research and proper account of our political economy and its current tendencies. This drivel is just stenography. Same holds for Varoufakis' paranoid pulp fanfic.

[HO · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn’t read the book but listened to author’s presentation of the ideas in the book. There’s a breathtaking ignorance of very basic concepts of value, work, or even capital. I’m surprised the author is employed, even if it is at a fringe university.

[nin. · Rating 4 out of 5]

i think this is a necessary reading for all young people, even if they don’t 100% align with everything posited by the book. however, on that note, i’ll be the first one to say that the book is not written very accessibly and had me googling meaning/ translation of almost every other word.

[Kyle Rutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've read Varoufakis' Technofeudalism, you should read this to get a perspective of the concept as a mutation of capitalism and not as a distinct mode of production.

[Wyatt Browdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jodi Dean is a comrade I will fight for

[Peter Harrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jodi Dean's book is a genuinely interesting, if rather summary, critique of modern capitalism. She assesses the reconfiguration of capital around large technology companies with billionaire owners that control access to work and the market for millions of workers and consumers. This genuinely feels like a development from the industrial capital as we've known it, and Dean's analysis if insightful. It's noticeably a bit academic in the section built on Lacan's psychoanalysis which discusses the anxiety induced by these changes (the summer 2025 edition of Tribune has a more readable version of a similar thesis about the impact of modern capitalism on young people) but it is nonetheless interesting for all that.

Dean therefore rightly draws a distinction between what we might think of as the 'classic' capitalism described by Marx in Capital where profit is driven by the exploitation of labour in production to generate surplus value, and modern capitalism where billionaires extract rent for access to technology platforms - whether that's Amazon, Google, or whatever. Dean's proposal is that this shows capitalism becoming something else. Something that isn't capitalism anymore, the word that Dean gives for this is neofeudalism - meaning a society where accumulation is based on personal relations of domination and not on indirect control through economic exploitation based on the compulsion to sell labour power through the market.

But this all feels like a bit of a stretch. Insightful as Dean's analysis of modern capitalism is, is it really a different dynamic that is no longer driven by the logic of value and the production and circulation of capital? In fact to me it feels like we are still within the logic of Capital volume 3. Dean herself, building on Brenner, describes how a reduction in the ability to create profit has manifested over the last 50 years (since the crisis of the postwar settlement in 1973). In this context capital continues to seek ways to continue accumulating, and volume 3 of Capital describes how capital will short circuit the need for production if it can, using a financialised circuit to directly accumulate 'fictitious' value and cut out the awkward production middleman. It strikes me that this is what Dean is describing, a world where driving profit from production has become less attractive than finding ways to commodify and circulate things that don't depend on physical production. Given the opportunity capital will always prefer the circuit M-M' to M-C-M' if it can make it work.

And this is what the tech billionaires are doing. In a world where physical production brings only limited returns they are grabbing control of what they have been lucky enough to gain control of and sweating those assets for all they can in a world where a declining rate of profit means that physical production isn't the route to accumulation it used to be. But this modern world is still based on the creation and circulation of commodities, even if those commodities are now immaterial data rather physical widgets.

Dean suggests that this rentierism is a fundamental breach with the 'proper' behaviour of capitalists who use technological innovation to drive productivity improvement. I think this is a gross oversimplification of the history of capitalism. That it doesn't bear much relation to anything that might be described as feudalism is comprehensively debunked by Jeremy Gilbert and Eleanor Janega in a recent episode of Gilbert's Culture, Power, Politics podcast.

What this leaves is an interesting summary critique of modern capitalism, but one where the central premise, that represents a shift to something called 'neofeudalism' is deeply flawed.

This review can also be found on my blog https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

I also wrote some thoughts about real subsumption and the service sector after reading Dean's book here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

And I added some thoughts on neofeudalism and Marx's theory of rent here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

[Thomas Ray]

College Library Rm 1191 due back 2025.12.30 https://search.library.wisc.edu/searc...