Link: Theory Discussion A Working Definition of Neofeudalism – New Essay

NinaIllingworth November 14, 2019April 15, 2025 Affordable Care Act, Amazon, anticapitalism, austerity, Ayn Rand, Big Tech, bribery, CA4, colonialism, corporate power, corruption, debt slavery, domestic policy, Economics, Essays, extractivism, Ferguson, financialization, left wing theory, lexicon, medical insurance, Medicare for all, monopoly power, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, Obamacare, Offsite Writing, panopticon, Patreon, Patreon Blog, pig empire, policing for profit, private surveillance, privatization, Propaganda, Rec Reads, Recommended Reading, rents, social safety nets, special economic zones, ST2, subsidies, taxation, Theory, Theory Discussion, Uber, Wall Street bailout, Walmart

Editor’s Note: this post was originally published on my Patreon blog back in 2019; unfortunately I was forced to take it down at some point due to some very disagreeable people trying to use to justify what I consider outright fascism. I’ve since learned to write far more defensively to make it impossible for far right actors to co-opt my writing, but the essay itself is still valid analysis so I’m sharing it here on NIDC, a website I’m pretty sure fascists have little active interest in.

Theory Discussion: A Working Definition of Neofeudalism

Frankly I’ve been thinking, talking and more recently writing about the socioeconomic order I now call “neofeudalism” for a good deal longer than I’ve had a word to describe it; and certainly for longer than I’ve been able to explain precisely what that word would mean. Although I still couldn’t tell you exactly when I noticed that the effects of globalization, corporatization and bog standard neoliberal market fundamentalism had not only broken the “rags to riches” casino lottery at the heart of the American capitalist dream, but also replaced it with something far more insidious and yet still, altogether ancient; a new economic order and rapidly expanding way of life that resembles nothing less than a sort of domestic colonialism and old-timey debt slavery.

Today, five years later, I think I’m finally ready to establish a working definition of the socioeconomic gestalt that is not only transforming life in the “western world” but increasingly restoring the hoary desiccated corpse of colonialism, albeit a newly financialized and corporatized variation, to fashion throughout the rest of a dying world. Here goes:

“Neofuedalism is the application of extractivism (a particularly destructive form of anti-environmental capitalism typically personified by the fossil fuel, mining and deforestation industries) to individual human beings, en masse and increasingly globally.”

The word “individual” is important here because this is the new (and yet, old) frontier of capitalism; the old structures of globalized capitalism in the form of colonialism and neoliberalism exploit people by exploiting nations – but in this newly emerging system, only made possible by advanced data collecting, recording and surveillance technology, each individual person is essentially their own “profit mine” and the system has the means to survey how much cash, and at what rate, that “person mine” can be bled so as to maximize profits over term.

These means include of course the now ubiquitous “credit score” but as we learned from the ongoing Cambridge Analytical scandal and numerous deep dives into the behavior of online tech giants themselves, there is literally no limit to the ways we are being surveyed, assessed and targeted for “wealth extraction” by the mega-monopoly corporations that dominate the internet, their clients and increasingly a state that is wholly beholden to both of those forces – consequences to the labor class drone-beings be damned!

As for the methods of extracting that wealth from these “person mines,” they are both harder to disguise and largely ubiquitous; typically we think of obvious examples of obligatory and repeated expenditures like mortgages or rents, higher education debt, medical insurance fees, utility bills, and of course groceries. Truthfully however, in the increasingly corporatized capitalist “western world” even things like a phone service, internet access, transportation, banking fees and child care costs all fit into this same non-optional, reoccurring expenditure format that neofeudalism depends on. Despite all the free market fundamentalist rhetoric about “choices” the simple truth is that you can find an almost limitless number of examples of things you “choose” to purchase that aren’t really optional choices at all – indeed, the society we live in has been increasingly engineered to ensure we *need* to purchase, or rather “rent” numerous goods and services.

Take for example transportation and telephone services; if you are unable to reach your workplace from where you live you could lose your job, and if you lose access to a telephone, you’ll be hard pressed to find another one. Without a job, you won’t have the money to pay rent or a mortgage and you may well struggle just to feed yourself, trapping you in a poverty cycle that all too often ends in isolation, homelessness and premature death. There’s really nothing “optional” about any of these interactions either, because outside of the make believe world that exists in Ayn Rand novels people don’t simply “choose” one day to not be poor and not die a quiet death in financial desperation. And at every step of the way, during each of these functionally mandatory expenditures, there is a corporation or a privatized government agency waiting to extract an ongoing financial payment from an individual consumer – each of these represents a rent, a “tap” on our metaphorical “person mine.”

Now you might be tempted to say “Wait a minute Nina, isn’t that just regular old capitalism with a touch of Gilded Age heartless greed?” Furthermore, if you’re not aware of how hollowed-out and even non-existent government aid now is for the poor and marginalized, you might be inclined to wax on about public buses that no longer run in the poorest neighborhoods and “welfare state” programs that leave the elderly with shameful sub-poverty incomes in the range of $11,000 per year.

This is of course where we get to the more recent part of our tale and things like privatization, the rise of corporate monopoly power and the staggering influence of money in politics, particularly in America, comes into play. Through a combination of corruption (known as “lobbying”), bribery (known as “campaign finance,” “charitable foundations,” and “political action committees”), and propaganda (known as “corporate media,” “academia” and “think tanks”), private sector capital and corporate monopoly power have largely subsumed the regulatory and economic aspects of the state; effectively buying the political process to ensure that government continues to transform society in all sorts of (negative) ways that effectively force the labor class to participate, as a “person mine,” in this neofeudalist economy – whether they want to or not.

Often this mechanism to extract wealth from the labor class and deliver it to the private sector will be partially obscured due to the esoteric nature of taxation, government policy and financial instruments; good examples would include things like the privatization of education, outsourcing vast portions of the government (including the military and intelligence branches) to private contractors, Wall Street bailouts, public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects, corporate subsidies for companies that directly attack American labor (like say, Uber, Amazon or Walmart) and the establishment of “pocket colonialism” in the form of de-regulated “special economic zones” where labor laws typically do not apply.

Sometimes however, this forced wealth extraction arrangement is quite a bit more explicit – take for example the Affordable Care Act in America, colloquially known as “Obamacare.” Despite the enormous societal value in providing (often substandard) medical coverage for millions of poor Americans who could not otherwise afford health insurance, it is impossible to deny the fact that functionally the Affordable Care Act forces an additional millions of Americans to purchase private medical insurance directly from their own pockets. This objectively forced purchasing not only helps line the pockets of insurance company executives at the expense of the labor class, who must now negotiate as individuals with their own companies who in turn may or (more often) may not care to negotiate quality health coverage for their workers with the private insurance industry, but it also cements the insurance provider’s role in the market and thus its right to “tap” these “person mines” (aka customers) for profit over the long term. This is neofeudalism and to understand why that matters all you have to do is contrast this with various proposals for “Medicare for All” in America, where the government would employ its tremendous resources to ensure Americans had quality healthcare while the private medical insurance industry would simply disappear – why do you think medical insurance corporations spent so much money lobbying for the right to craft the bill that created Obamacare and lobbying again to stop demands for “Medicare for All” right up to our present day? Did you simply figure they had nothing better to do with the money?

More often than not however, this extraction of wealth through forced expenditure process is a mixture of both abstract public policy and overt extortion of the labor class by the private sector, typically operating with assistance from a wholly-controlled government; precisely how “overt” that extortion process is often depends on the pigment of your skin and how far down you go on the income scale. Take for example the city of Ferguson, Missouri where slashed budgets encouraged the municipality to undertake a predictably racialized “policing for profit” scheme in which the department disproportionately fined black residents from lower income areas for a variety of misdemeanor civil offenses (jaywalking, broken tail light, loitering, etc) to the tune of millions of dollars; all while only the barest of attempts were made to hide the fact that the millions of dollars in fines lined up almost perfectly with the millions of missing dollars in the city’s budget. While some of the more astute observers in the media readily pointed out that this situation represented a form of black and white colonialism, with the African American residents being fined to ensure that white voters could continue to pay a lower tax rate, nobody at all bothered to mention that the primary recipients of that missing budget money were big business and the ultra wealthy who now maintain an effective partnership with government and against the labor class – not just in Ferguson or Missouri but all over the country.

All of which brings us to the final ingredient that makes “neofeudalism” something we can define as “new” rather than just a particularly brutal form of neoliberalism – the increasingly all-seeing eye of technology that identifies, tracks, and evaluates the potential for exploitation provided by each “person mine” or as they’re more commonly known, people just like you and me. Through the inhuman alchemy of credit scores, sophisticated predictive algorithms, private sector online surveillance, a shrinking world connected digitally into a global economy where there is no place to run and yes, the horrifying Panopticon formed by the linkage of the American police and national security states, each of us are appraised by the machine for our value to the masters of the universe and the corporate neofeudalist project.

Once appraised and evaluated as a “person mine” we are then exploited accordingly – a third world laborer whose long term earning potential is negligent will be greedily devoured by the machine as quickly as possible, tossed aside broken and destitute when she can no longer provide quick profits from her blood and toil. By contrast a labor class American with a decent job and a good credit rating will find the extraction process strung out quite a bit longer over the course of his or her life, being forced by this process of “neofuedalism” to continue to provide profit for the corporatist ruling order over many decades until they too tap out, break down or otherwise become useless and must be discarded. Whether you’re a Haitian garment industry laborer, a Midwestern automotive line worker or a suburban office manager living what passes for the high life, this neofeudalist order is designed to keep extracting wealth from you until the exact moment it is no longer profitable; once you can no longer make the forced purchases and pay the rents, elite capital simply does not give a f*ck what happens to you and may indeed, at least from a bottom line perspective, actually hope you die – as evidenced by all the billionaires and mega-monopoly corporations constantly fighting against so-called “entitlement payments” and presiding over the complete destruction of social safety nets all across the Western world.

Of course the key difference here is that whereas in feudalism, the poor serf was bound to the land to allow the lord to exploit his labor, in neofeudalism all of western society is “the land” and rather than wheat produced by your forced labor in the fields, the masters of the universe consider you or at least your potential to earn money and amass credit, to be the crop that must be harvested – pruning the money from your branches and delivering it to the bank accounts of private capital by any means necessary and with no regard for the source of that income.

Literally none of this would be possible without powerful computers, the internet, and a constantly expanding online surveillance apparatus employed with ever-increasing commitment by both public and private sector operators. Always tabulating, measuring and quantifying, the eye never sleeps as it marks each of us out for exploitation and debt slavery in the service of constantly hungry monopoly corporations and their ruling class controllers; increasingly and ceaselessly we are “all watched over by machines” but there’s nothing that would resemble “loving grace” going on here – it’s a digital abattoir and if you have to ask “where’s the beef” there’s a pretty good chance you’re on the menu.

– Nina Illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

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