Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle

Mark Fisher's dictum that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2009: 6) can finally be laid to rest. To be fair, the end of the world has not only been imaginable, but rather real for quite some time now; according to Jodi Dean's new book, however, we are also nearing Capitalism's Grave. While she herself was originally taken aback by the proclamation of capitalism's death by thinkers such as McKenzie Wark and Yanis Varoufakis, with her new book, Dean sets out to convince us that capitalism is in the process of transitioning into something else, and that it is time for the Left to take charge of this transition. I find myself particularly captivated by Dean's analysis of the emergence of neofeudal forms of domination in the first part of the book. She argues that contemporary capitalist systems become undermined when their own processes of exploitation, which used to be directed outward (in the form of imperialism and colonialism), turn inward, thereby reintroducing feudal forms of accumulation and exploitation. By breaking away from the imagination of capitalism as an absolute logic, Dean demonstrates how the inconsistencies and the co-existence of different modes of production provide the conditions for political resistance. For that, the first two chapters of the book urge us to let go of the idea that capitalism is something ultimate, the “last possible relation of exploitation in history” (p. 64), as Étienne Balibar puts it. Dean takes Marx in the first pages of Capital quite literally when he writes that societies came to be “dominated by” the capitalist mode of production, for “dominated” indicates that it was the hegemonic mode of production while coexisting with others. Taking recourse to the Grundrisse, she argues that Marx's historical analysis shows that capitalism never simply replaced the feudal conditions from which it emerged but, instead, recoded existing social relations for its own modes. An example of this is the alienation of workers from the commons—land, raw materials and so forth that were used by the community for social reproduction—thereby freeing them for their use as means of production. In the second chapter, Dean reiterates the analytical distinction between capitalism and feudal forms of social domination. Here, she follows scholars such as Walter Rodney and René Zavaleta Mercado, who have argued that imperial and colonial domination are not part of the “primitive accumulation” at capitalism's origin but, instead, are feudal forms of oppression and destruction that coexist and are co-implicated with capitalism. Hence, capitalism as Dean presents it here is neither absolute nor immortal. I have no doubt that some Marxist scholars will take issue with the historical–material analyses upon which Dean's distinction between capitalism and political domination relies; however, it is intriguing, for it allows Dean to argue that we are currently experiencing a transformation of the social relations within Western societies (Dean's analysis still very much centers around the United States) and that this can no longer be explained by capitalist modes of accumulation. “Capitalism's own laws can turn in on themselves, undermine capitalism, and follow neofeudal dynamics of rent-seeking, predation, and plunder” (p. 22). Hence, the success of “tech-lords” such as Elon Musk is not based upon an exacerbation of capitalist forms of exploitation but takes a political form of feudal domination. This means that neofeudalism is producing possibilities for its own destruction, Dean argues. The second story that the book sets out is the introduction of a new revolutionary class of servant vanguards who, organized in the right way, are able to resist and redirect the transition toward neofeudalism—and it is the question of the right organization where Dean's book, in my opinion, falls short. Dean reiterates: “Our task is to understand this process of destruction … and identify sites of strength and avenues of possibility for building communism instead of acquiescing to neofeudalism” (p. 142). Contemporary societies are developing into service economies. However, service work subverts capitalist value as it is “unproductive from capital's standpoint but nonetheless useful and necessary for social reproduction” (p. 145). The fact that their work breaks with capitalism's dynamic of accumulation allows service workers to press into its opening cracks in the transition to neofeudalism, equipping them to be the vanguards in the class struggle on a warming planet. Dean draws on the success of teacher and transportation strikes to show how particularly powerful their position is. In Chapter 3, Dean finally comes to define what the main features of these new forms of domination she calls “neofeudalism” are. She prefaces this with an analysis of neoliberalism's breakdown of sovereignty that created the condition for the rise of neofeudalism. For a long time, capitalism's law of motion relied on liberal democracy to manage the destructive tendencies of capitalism as well as to legitimize hierarchies through narratives of inclusivity and equal opportunity. Dean here follows Antonio Negri's (2022) description of the Fordist welfare state as a “social factory” that produced the conditions for the free market to flourish. Since the 1970s, neoliberals succeeded in circumventing political authority—a strategy developed also in response to organized demands from nations of the Global South—and instead built a global legal architecture that would serve private interests independent of and even against nation-states (Dean here follows Quinn Slobodian's analysis of neoliberal regulation in Globalists (2018)). The effect of this is the breakdown of political authority, disregarding whether it served or kept in check economic power. Dean takes Uber as an example of how this pans out: Whilst it might seem that Uber drivers are in possession of the means of production, namely, their cars, their position is one of serfs. Not only are they exploited for their labor power, but they are now responsible for the means of production for their very own exploitation. Indeed, they are forced to compete for their exploitation as they are paying for access to the domains in which they can sell their labor power. The relationship between Uber and contractors is no more than a pretense of contract between equals without any protective cover of public law or accountability. Forty years of neoliberalism has unraveled the ideological apparatus of the state, according to Dean, and with it sovereignty in all its forms, including popular sovereignty, for the sake of “suzerainty.” Political power in its sovereign form has broken down and, in its place, we find it distributed amongst economic actors who have come to elude the control of political authorities. For Dean, it is no coincidence that tech entrepreneurs are titled “techlords” and that the suitability of the American president is defended by reference to his success as a businessman. It makes evident that we are no longer exclusively dealing with hierarchies based around capitalist exploitation, that is, profit and increasing labor productivity; it is a political form of domination. Probably the most significant consequence of the parcellization of political sovereignty is that it leaves contemporary societies in a state of catastrophic anxiety, with people finding themselves in a battlefield of meaning that can no longer be organized by the creation of shared realities but is, instead, “won” through domination. Dean elaborates on this affective atmosphere in the fourth chapter, which becomes a key inference for her political agenda. As mentioned above, Dean argues that neoliberalism's breakdown of sovereignty eliminated traditional forms of political power. She also points this critique against her own wing: “For decades, leftists have echoed neoliberals with their critiques of centralism, sovereignty, and the state” (p. 139). She is clear that it would be a mistake to lament the decline of traditional forms of political authority, including the welfare state, without taking into account the violence, destruction, and extractivism that have enabled the political sovereignty of the few. At the same time, however, this also contributed to the Left now facing neofeudalist forms of oppression with empty hands. She asserts that popular sovereignty needs to be taken seriously for a Left politics, but it requires leadership to redirect the collective force of a new revolutionary class. Dean's response to that reiterates her Leninist agenda, which she has pursued throughout her work, most explicitly maybe in Crowds and Party (2016); her interpretation of the contemporary affective atmosphere in Chapter 4 intends to provide this agenda with a new oomph: Drawing heavily on Lacanian vocabulary, Dean shows how the parcellization of sovereignty together with the war around meaning has led us into a state of psychosis: “Unable to access the commonly accepted symbolic order, the psychotic creates a delusion, becoming fixated on what Lacan calls a ‘captivating image’” (p. 108). Dean thereby wants to capture the affective atmosphere in neofeudal societies, which has fostered deceptive forms of identity politics that are not based on caring about a certain cause but center around concern for one's own identity. It is here that, according to her, the communist party must intervene: “The party provides an affective structure counter to the catastrophic anxiety pervading neofeudalism. It organizes the transferential space of the subject supposed to know as the knowledge of a collective political subject” (p. 126). What is required is an organizing force that provides orientation in this “battlefield of meaning” and that can link the demands of a heterogeneous service sector. Dean leaves some open questions with her proposition of service workers as a new revolutionary class (e.g., what the fact of the global dispersion of service workers means for their political subjectivation as a class). Yet she makes an intriguing suggestion in mobilizing workers from this industry as a contemporary form of servant vanguards that, through their position of providing basic services central to the socio-economic system, hold the potential to cut through capitalist logic. This, however, makes her recourse to the communist party appear even more anachronistic: Why is the “old cadre” of the communist party the only relic that Dean hauls around in Capitalism's Grave? Apart from the very practical problem that there currently is no Left party that could take on that role (despite some hopeful developments in German politics), I find the lack of serious engagement with the “how” of political leadership deeply concerning—especially for a Left that is already burdened by a history of totalitarianism. The question we must address is how we imagine political leadership today, in a way that goes beyond replicating the same neofeudal and authoritarian politics that we intend to resist. This becomes even more pressing as the logical connection between contemporary “wars over meaning” and the need for leadership, although not new for Dean, no longer seems to be a dissenting view. Most recently in Nihilistic Times, Wendy Brown (2023) promotes charismatic leadership in response to contemporary predicaments of nihilism—nihilism in the sense of a condition of modernity in which traditional sources for meaning and value have been discredited. Scientific reason, which has toppled religion from the throne of Truth, however, has not been able to replace religion's power to produce meaning. The moral disorientation that Brown sees resulting from this very much resonates with the condition that Dean describes. Following this Weberian line of reasoning, Brown wagers on charismatic leaders that are able to orient in a responsible fashion “the demands for demagoguery” that arise in nihilistic conditions and that the Right is so successful in taking advantage of: “We need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism” (p. 8). Of course, there are important differences between Dean's and Brown's accounts. Whilst Dean has in mind the overthrow of the socio-economic order with communism as the only viable alternative to neofeudal developments, the form of political leadership Brown promotes constitutes part of a coalition-building that works toward what she calls “reparative democracy,” a program of radical repair that circumvents the distinction between reform and revolution. For Brown, political leaders need to let go of the “pipe dreams of total revolution” (p. 8). In contrast to Dean, it furthermore seems as though Brown, at least in this rather brief work, imputes historical agency to a class that merely needs to be won back from the lures of far-right propaganda, which is something that Alberto Toscano (2023) in Late Fascism correctly identifies as a red herring for current Left politics (pp. 19–24). The risk is to fall into the trap of simply accepting the narrative of the totality of the working class, promoted by far-right actors, that in itself does not exist, but which is mobilized through antidemocratic supplements such as White supremacy and xenophobia. However, neither Dean nor Brown engages with the nature of their inclinations toward political leadership, in the form of either a party or individual figures. Even when accepting the role of leadership, we must acknowledge that it is effective because it plays into the same cultural imaginaries and libidinal economy upon which current authoritarian developments depend. Toscano resorts to the authoritarian studies of the Frankfurt School in Late Fascism, for he lays out how the vertical bonds to leadership figures play into an authoritarian understanding of freedom furthered in contemporary neoliberal societies (pp. 13–18, 49–73). This, in my opinion, must constitute the point of departure to think more carefully about the significance of replicating what Toscano calls “fascist strategies” in the struggle against today's authoritarian trends—before we all too quickly celebrate the organizing force of the cadre party or the enchanting potential of charismatic leadership.