Capitalism is over, but the new is worse: reflections on rent, services, and capitalist feudalism

Erik Swyngedouw

Chapter 2 in The Value of Place, 2025, pp 23-39 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Yannis Varoufakis, Jodi Dean, and McKenzie Wark, among many other critical scholars, have recently argued that capitalism as we knew it in the twentieth century is in its terminal dead throw and that a new political-economic configuration – variably termed technofeudalism, capitalist feudalism, or just the new feudalism – has taken over. In contrast to the Marxist hope for a socialist dawn emerging in the twilight of capitalism's decay, capitalist feudalism propels the contradictions of capitalism to new heights. Capitalist feudalism refers to the global dominance of a few global tech-players whose capitalization massively outstrips the GDP of most of the world's countries, and who thrive on rent extraction, financialization, and the provision of commodified services extracted from the very users of these digital platforms. It refers to players like Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Amazon, Alibaba, and Tencents whose wealth rests on rent extraction. At the same time, feudal capitalism rests on the inclusion of a small number of people in a high-value chain while excluding much of the world's population, rendering them supernumerary to its expanded reproduction. Pavlos Delladetsimas's and Flavia Martinelli's intellectual work focused on the twin pillars that would eventually propel capitalism beyond its existing frontiers. The articulation of rent extraction through the provision of particular types of services transforms and revolutionizes the role of rent production and extraction, as well as the concept of ‘services’ itself. Standing on the shoulders of their earlier work, the chapter explores the contours of the rise of capitalist feudalism.

Keywords: Technofeudalism; Rent; Capitalism; Platform Economy; Class Struggle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035347919
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035347926.00009 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:24001_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().