Pondering Neo-feudalism

As I remarked in the notes on my imagined board game, I am drawn to the term “neo-feudalism” to describe the set of transitions that are underway now. This is despite “feudalism” not being a term very much in vogue among medievalists these days. (David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele discuss this here, referring to a classic article from 1974 by Elizabeth AR Brown that reviews how the concept of “feudalism” has never been very well defined and does not account for the great variety of medieval social systems across time and space.)

I think my use of the term “neo-feudalism” refers more to economics rather than a social system. It’s not the relationship of mutual obligations between lords, nobles, and vassals that is being replicated now. Rather it is much more akin to land ownership by nobles who capture the wealth of serfs..

In short, I believe that capitalism as an economic system is coming to an end now or has already ended. (When people write about “late capitalism” they don’t seem to mean this, rather their usage is more like “the system in its current incarnation”) One writer who believes this is the economist Yanis Varoufakis, who has come up with the concept of technofeudalism. In his view, tech companies function like modern feudal lords. They make their money via rents rather than producing goods. For instance, Apple makes 30% profit (or something like that) from producers and consumers just for the monopoly privilege of selling apps on their app store.

A second argument is not one that Varoufakis makes, but seems clear to an environmental scientist. One of the oldest sayings in environmental science is that “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. The upcoming decades will be the ones where we hit profound limits to growth. Tom Murphy discusses the physical limits in a 2022 paper in Nature Physics. For instance, our energy use has been increasing at a tenfold rate over the past century, and this rate simply cannot continue (in four hundred years we’d be boiling due to waste heat). There is also a limit to which economic activity can be decoupled from physical activity.

But a capitalist economic system is primarily about one thing: return on investment. If growth is no longer to be had, the financial system will necessarily start to break down. To be replaced by some other economic system that no longer is demanding returns of 3, 4, 5, 8 percent and so on. I don’t know what this new system will look like, but it seems it will be a lot more static than what we have now. An economic system based on capturing rents rather than producing goods. “Neo-feudalism” seems evocative, if nothing else.