I’ve reviewed a number of books on neofeudalism here, but I keep reading more of them, looking for some sort of perspective the others might have missed. Jodi Dean’s latest, Capital’s Grave, is way out there, taking me places I never expected.

First of all, Dean has read all the same books I have. She references the same authors I do, from David Graeber to Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Kuttner to Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty. And her pop cultural references are the same as mine. It makes for a very good overview of what neofeudalism is. Because it is real, present, and invisible to most people.

The easiest explanation is that people today are reverting to serfdom, as in medieval times. They are attached to some lord and master, dependent on them for their survival, with little or no hope of moving up in the world. The lord and master is attached to the government’s web, ever pushing the boundaries of how much money they can make, where to hide it, enacting new laws to encourage more of it without penalty, and how to get away with keeping serfs under control. They do this last bit by pigeonholing labor, ensuring no one reaches outside the narrow job demanded, preventing growth of the individual. Not mentally, not emotionally, and not building new skills.

This has come about because serfs today no longer are the means of production the working classes were until recently. Western workers today don’t actually make anything. They provide services instead. Services have taken over as the main source of employment. The job boards are soaked in the need for caregivers, warehouse workers, installers and technicians. These workers are critical as a whole, but no individual means anything to the system, and is disposable. Disposal is at the whim of the lord, for too many bathroom breaks, or for something said outside the workplace (or worse – within it), or for no reason at all.

Where making a better widget used to lead to a promotion or a new division or even company, taking the elderly for walks does not. Nor does installing the latest Windows update. Or dealing with customers who just want to unsubscribe. This was made evident to everyone during the pandemic lockdown, when delivery people, healthcare workers and trash haulers suddenly became “heroes”, worthy of impromptu concerts of pot banging every evening to show appreciation. It served to point out they were and are the lowest paid, least secure, and with no prospects for better. They even had to work during the plague, at constant risk of disease and death. In other words, serfs. The poster child for this is the gigantic cryptocurrency industry, which employs massive hardware and unprecedented electric demand, to create literally nothing at all. The neoserfs keep the machines running, and nothing more. Artificial intelligence ensures we will continue down this path, as it takes charge of inspiration, creativity, design and controls, while neoserfs keep them up and online.

And everything to empower the lord over the serfs is encouraged. Law, Dean says, is being privatized. Employees must sign away their rights under law before beginning work. They sign noncompete agreements, nondisclosure agreements, nondefamation agreements, and agreements to use compulsory arbitration (financed and run by the lord for his/her benefit). All of them seek to prevent neoserfs from accessing their rights under law. And thanks to their networking, the lords have seen to it that the law will allow this to continue and increase. Some 55% of American workers are already required to sign some or all of these agreements before obtaining employment.

Consumer neoserfs sign away any rights to recourse in advance of using any piece of software or hardware, sometimes merely by virtue of purchasing them at all. Purchasing itself no longer means possession under the law, as more and more items are sold as a “license” to operate but not actually take ownership. The courts have backed all of this, greatly lessening the intentions and purposes of the laws of the land. Serfdom has the population completely encircled.

Dean shows these factors as leading to the death of capitalism altogether. The principles of competition, investment and improvement have morphed to hoarding, predation and destruction, she says. Monolithic companies like Amazon force their own client manufacturers out of business, or buy them up, laying off neoserfs in massive cutbacks. Private equity does the same with old line firms. Monopolies have gone from local to global, creating worldwide trillion dollar monster companies for the first time ever. She says “The fiction of a political system anchored in the rule of law, and an economic system following capitalist laws of motion, gives way to networked private relation in which power and privilege reign.”

Where Dean and I diverge is the future after capitalism. I see all this future as here and now. A future where giant transnational corporations run the economy and the politics of the world. National governments and institutions become as local municipalities and townships at this scale. The neoserf is even farther away from the lords in this scenario. Inequality will continue to worsen and spread deeper.

What Dean sees instead is a massive swing to the left. You have to know that Dean is a full-on Marxist. Half the Conclusion chapter is a dressing down of another Marxist author, who Dean disagrees with in an endless critique of interpretations. She teaches this at Columbia, and her dozen or so books feature Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, their psychology, implementation and future. How Marxism is this irresistible force, building momentum and support. Could anything be farther from the truth?

It was almost laughable to me because I read this book the week of the 2024 Trump election. We are so far from socialism in any form now, and it is receding, as Trump packs the upper layers of the civil service and the Supreme Court with extreme right plants, whose life missions are to dismantle the government and hand everything over to the giant transnational trillion dollar monsters.

Marx taught that capitalism would destroy itself, giving way to a much fairer socialism. That socialism would evolve into full-on communism. Yet all over the world, while capitalism is destroying itself, so is socialism, as more and more countries form more and more rightwing governments. The rare leftwing victory has become an anomaly.

But Dean lives in a world of Marxist inevitability, and writes as if massive forces are underpinning the stunning move to socialism after the death of capital. It detracts from her arguments about neofeudalism. Neoserfs might be the visible proof of the end of capitalism. But to keep pushing the Marxist outcome of it all, as if it were in any way underway, is just wrong.

David Wineberg