The tech barons strategically placed around Donald Trump at his inauguration on January 20 this year were a who’s who of the oligarchic class. From Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg and everyone in between, the leaders of the US tech industry came to pay homage to their new ruler.
Court intrigue was palpable. Journalists speculated about the choreography of the ceremony, examining how the placement of the barons offered insight into their status and favor to shape the new regime. The pyramid structure of American society had never appeared so stark.
Trump’s inauguration was surely the most vivid manifestation of the growing political centrality of billionaire tech leaders. The last few years have seen commentators reach for ideas of “technofeudalism” or “neofeudalism” to explain what has been going on. However, those concepts ultimately bring more confusion than clarity to the debate about where capitalism is headed.
Yanis Varoufakis’s 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism was perhaps the most widely discussed foray into this field. But it has been joined this year by Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Both works suggest that the world has left behind capitalism for an emergent feudal order.
These theorizations of supposed new feudalisms look to the past to envisage the future. They do so, however, in contradictory ways, drawing on divergent medieval pasts. For some proponents of the idea of “neofeudalism,” such as Katherine V. W. Stone and Robert Kuttner, the central transformation is a…
Auteur: David Addison
