In Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, Jodi Dean sets out to do what few on the contemporary left have dared: name the system. It’s not that capital has ceased to exist, she argues, nor that it has triumphed in its neoliberal phase. Rather, capital is undergoing a systemic transformation, hollowing out its own foundations and reconstituting itself according to a different, older logic. If Marx once wrote that the bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers1, Dean contends that capital has begun to dig its own grave, and the terrain into which it descends is not postcapitalism or socialism, but neofeudalism.
We’ve seen versions of this argument before, though not quite in this form. The term techno-feudalism has made its way from Yanis Varoufakis’s recent writing into op-eds and popular discourse, typically invoked to capture the parasitic dominance of platforms like Amazon, Uber and Google.2 In this reading, what replaces the entrepreneurial capitalist is the rentier lord: a platform owner who extracts fees, hoards data, and commands entire markets without producing anything themselves. Evgeny Morozov has been sharply critical of such framings, accusing their proponents of nostalgic conservatism, longing for a capitalism that was at least dynamic in its exploitation, rather than inert and monopolistic.3
Dean takes the critique seriously. She concedes that “neofeudalism” risks idealising capital’s prior forms. But where others deploy the term metaphorically, she works it through materially, mapping the structural transformations in property relations, labour, accumulation and the state that render “neofeudalism” not just an image but an emergent form. This is not a journalistic coinage; it is an attempt to rethink Marxism’s periodisation itself.
Drawing on Ellen Meiksins Wood, Dean shows how capitalism, in its classical phase, was defined by a compulsion toward competition, reinvestment and productivity.4 But what if those laws of motion no longer hold? What if accumulation is now driven not by innovation but by destruction, by hoarding, looting, and conquest? Today, she writes, “capital is removed from circulation and transformed into assets that, however arcane, might somehow function as a store of value in an increasingly irrational and uncertain context.” Here, Dean builds on the work of Brett Christophers, who has argued that rent, rather than profit, is now the central dynamic of accumulation in what he calls rentier capitalism.5The result is not a smooth continuation of neoliberalism but a jagged descent into a parcellated6 order of rentier dominance, platform extraction, and economic hinterlands.
Dean is especially persuasive on the role of the state. Neofeudalism, she argues, does not mean a collapse of centralised power, but its transformation. The state no longer ensures reproduction through redistribution, but manages it through coercion and market enforcement. What remains of legality is increasingly privatised, fragmented, or reduced to spectacle. Law becomes subscription service; arbitration replaces justice. Appeals to “democracy” misfire because the term no longer names the division, it masks it. After all, as Dean notes, the January 6 rioters claimed they were defending democracy too.
One of the book’s central achievements is to reframe the Marxist debate on class composition. If the industrial proletariat was once the subject of history, who might occupy that position today? Dean’s answer is the “servant class” the millions around the globe now employed in low-wage, low-status, hyper-exploited service work. These are not knowledge workers or factory hands but carers, drivers, retail assistants, delivery couriers, cleaners: people whose labour is aimed not at production but at the reproduction of comfort for the owning class. “Today,” she writes, “Marx’s Mr. Moneybags isn’t a factory owner. He’s a landlord, financier, platform billionaire, or asset manager, someone who takes a cut.”
This is more than sociological observation. Dean links the rise of the servant class to both deindustrialisation and ecological constraint. In a world of climate collapse and technological stagnation, she argues, the left must let go of its attachment to the commodity-producing worker. Services, not production, are now the terrain of struggle. Her wager is that universal basic services7, not UBI or wage gains, offer the most politically and ecologically viable basis for class recomposition. A renewed communist horizon, she suggests, would centre care, education, health and housing—decommodified, public, and collectively governed.
Still, she avoids the trap of romanticising the servant class as inherently virtuous or radical. If anything, Capital’s Grave is haunted by the difficulty of political organisation in an age where consumption, not production, defines identity; where the fantasy of individual choice outweighs collective power. Feudalism, after all, is not just economic, it is affective. It’s in the deference to influencers, the servile tone of delivery apps, the surveillance masquerading as security. Neofeudalism, she writes, “is not simply a return of the repressedit is the mutation of the present.”
Dean’s own experience speaks to the stakes of these arguments. In April 2024, shortly before the book’s publication, she was suspended from her post at Hobart and William Smith Colleges following the publication of an essay on Verso’s blog titled Palestine Speaks for Everyone. In it, she described the image of Palestinian paragliders on 7 October as “exhilarating”, a provocation that, stripped of its context and weaponised by the right, led to public condemnation and administrative retaliation. The college president denounced her remarks as “repugnant” and removed her from teaching duties. For months, her position hung in limbo. She was reinstated only after sustained pressure from academic freedom groups and public intellectuals.
It’s hard not to read Capital’s Grave through that lens. Dean’s clarity, and her refusal to disavow the political content of her views, are of a piece with the book’s broader argument: that we are living not in a moment of liberal disarray, but of systemic realignment. The repression of pro-Palestinian voices, the criminalisation of protest, the institutional demand to “care” while remaining silent, these are not pathologies but features of a decaying order desperately trying to preserve itself.
Capital’s Grave is not a cheerful book. It offers no blueprint, no romance of rupture. But it does something far more useful: it names the shape of the present and points to its fault lines. “We aren’t doomed to neofeudal stagnation and servitude,” she writes. “A better world is possible, if we fight for it.” Whether we call it feudal or not, the battle lines are drawn, and Dean has given us a map.
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Footnotes
- “The bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” This is the line Dean plays on with her title Capital’s Grave, asking what happens when the gravediggers don’t arrive, or worse, when capital digs its own. ↩︎
- Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Penguin, 2023). ↩︎
- Evgeny Morozov, “Critique of Techno-Feudalism,” New Left Review 138 (2023): 5–30. ↩︎
- Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2002). ↩︎
- Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? (Verso, 2020). ↩︎
- Parcellated sovereignty refers to the fragmentation and decentralisation of political authority under late capitalism. Rather than a unified state exercising coherent rule, power is dispersed across a patchwork of actors: landlords, tech platforms, security contractors, hedge funds, NGOs. Each governs a discrete domain—levying rents, enforcing terms of service, or administering life and death, without democratic oversight. It is sovereignty by subscription, not citizenship. The concept echoes feudal arrangements, where lords ruled their own jurisdictions, only now updated for a world of EULAs, gig-work dashboards, and biometric borders. ↩︎
- Universal Basic Services (UBS) offer a materialist alternative to the libertarian-inflected vision of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Where UBI leaves the individual as a consumer in a commodified market, free to choose between privatised options, UBS insists on collective provision: decommodified housing, transport, care, education. Dean aligns with this tradition, not out of technocratic preference but because it reframes the class struggle around shared infrastructure and need, rather than wage supplements to navigate rentier capitalism. UBI subsidises survival in a broken world; UBS demands the means to transform it. ↩︎
