Analogies and tendencies: A response to Ben Burgis

Jodi Dean

May 19, 2025

Historical analogies are one of the ways we try to make sense of the present. They can usefully illuminate unexpected continuities, the persistence of what we presumed to leave behind as well as the repetitions we’ve been unable to escape. Historical analogies can also obscure and mislead. What is the tragedy and what is the farce? What are the underlying dynamics, logics, or laws of motion? Cherry-picked similarities and differences between this time and that can substitute for critical analysis of where we are and might be going. Attachment to a particular past then diverts us from the task of understanding the present, which was the reason for the analogy in the first place.

In Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, I am concerned with the present. The book is not an extended analogy with some kind of mythic feudal past. It’s an explanation for the current resonance of the language of lords and serfs, loyalty and vassalage, “bending the knee” and “kissing the ring.” I use “neofeudalism” to name the combined effects of forty years of neoliberalism: the fragmentation of the state and privatization of public law (which I discuss as the parcellization of sovereignty); the social property relations producing and produced by tech lords and the sector of servants; the hinterlandization where thriving cores are surrounded by desperate and dessicated wastelands; and the affective environment of catastrophe, psychosis, and anxiety. Neofeudalism is not about reverting to a past. It’s a way to understand the tendencies unfolding in the wake of working-class and communist defeat.

Capital’s laws of motion are coming into contradiction with themselves and driving non-capitalist behaviors. As Ellen Meiksins Wood emphasizes, capitalist accumulation is compelled by strategies oriented toward competition, improvement, and profit. Our period is one of transition where accumulation is compelled by another set of strategies: hoarding, destruction, and rents, within a general setting of extra-economic coercion, privilege, and dependence. Processes long directed outward – through colonialism and imperialism – are turning in on themselves such that they undermine capitalist laws of motion and repeat accumulation strategies typical of feudalism: rent-seeking, plunder, and political control. Two sets of laws are operating as capitalist laws compel non-capitalist behavior.

Cédric Durand and Yanis Varoufakis emphasize the role of technology in moribund capitalism, viewing the present as technofeudal. I attend to an aspect of the present they overlook: the global rise of services. A broad and heterogeneous category, services span from unwaged and low-waged informal labor, through education, health, and managerial work, all the way to the highly-paid legal and financial courtiers enabling asset-holders to retain their class privilege.

Most jobs are in services, and services constitute the largest areas of expected job growth. In high-income countries, 70-80 percent of employment is in services. Most workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, and Brazil are in services. World Bank statistics for 2023 show that 54.6 percent of GDP in China comes from services, 49.8 percent of GDP in India, and 56.88 percent of GDP in Russia. Expressed regionally: 58.28 percent of GDP in East Aia and the Pacific; 65.33 percent of GDP in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 44.41 percent of GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa comes from services.

My argument about neofeudalizing capitalism rests on two premises crucial to Marxist theory. The first is that capitalism isn’t immortal. It will die. Its death can be slow (Lenin thought capitalism was dying a century ago), accompanied by various crises and adaptations. The transition to capitalism took centuries. Absent a revolution – and likely even with it – the transition out of capitalism will also take a long time.

My second premise is that different modes of production can – and do – coexist. Marx’s concept of formal subsumption rests on this fact, as Harry Harootunian emphasizes. Consider the opening line of Capital: “The wealth of societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production appears in the form of an enormous accumulation of commodities” (Paul Reitter translation). “Dominated” implies the existence of other modes, a point highlighted in theories of imperialism, colonialism, and uneven development. The neofeudal hypothesis is that capital’s dominance is diminishing. Rentierism, finance, and services are generating an accumulation regime increasingly disconnected from making, dependent on taking, and serving the takers.

Perhaps because he skipped the chapter on transition and temporality (which could be challenging to readers accustomed to skimming for quick takeways), Ben Burgis reads Capital’s Grave as an argument for reversion, as if I were saying that history is going backwards into feudalism rather than that capitalism is turning itself into something worse than capitalism. He likewise faults me for misunderstanding Marx and treating all service work as unproductive labor. Since I explicitly say that neofeudalism is not a historical “going back” and not all service work is unproductive, these points are easily addressed as flat out misrepresentations. The same hold for his quick dismissal of parcellated sovereignty with a gesture to strike-crushing Pinkertons, as if the privatization of public law was not a significant and well-documented dimension of our present.

Burgis uses these misrepresentations as a foil against which to present the nineteenth century as a compelling analogy for the present. For him, the present resembles the unregulated capitalism Marx described in the 1860s. With the loss of labor protections and the assault on the regulatory state, we are back where Marx started.

The problem with the analogy with the nineteenth century is its disavowal of capital’s tendencies. Industrial expansion and improvement are not primary characteristics of our time of combined deagrarianization and deindustrialization. Fewer and fewer people are employed in agriculture and manufacturing. Proletarian organization and power are not on the rise. No one sees the industrial working class as building a better tomorrow. Current trends point to the opposite: our AI future of fully automated factories and warehouses. Burgis treats the defeats of labor and socialist movement as if they were missing rather than as losses. Defeat is not the same as absence; losses leave a trace.

One of the benefits of the neofeudal hypothesis is its attention to the change in the working class that results from the rise of services. It’s been widely noted that class has lost its prior capacity as a political identity. Ethnic, racial, gender, religious, and national identities have entered to fill the gap, even as none can name a politics; none can tell us what the politics is of someone who speaks under that name. There has been much divisive and unsatisfying debate on the Left around class and identity politics, but the class side too often skips over why class lost its prior organizing power. The most common explanation is the capitalist class’s sustained attack on unions. This isn’t wrong, but there is an additional explanation tied to the rise of services: waged laborers no longer see their work as driving social production and building a collective future. They aren’t producers. They are servants attending to the consumption requirements of the ruling class.

I agree with Burgis that the future will be bleak without a powerful labor movement. The neofeudal hypothesis tells us where we can find it: service workers. Over the past decade, teachers, librarians, nurses, doctors, warehouse workers, trash collectors, transportation workers, baristas, adjunct professors, and graduate students have been leading the class struggle all over the world. Domestic workers in India, Indonesia, and the US have organized to demand basic labor protections. In the fall of 2023 alone, there were labor strikes of daycare workers in Ireland, baggage handlers in Italy, hotel workers in Los Angeles, and nurses across six US states. Increasing numbers of workers are in services and they are fighting back.

Organizing informal, unwaged, and domestic workers isn’t easy, especially when so many are spread out and isolated. But it’s a task communists have recognized as indispensable to building working class power (see, for example, the pieces written by Black communist women in the mid-century US collected in the volume Charisse Burden-Stelly and I co-edited, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, Verso, 2022).

On a warming planet, the future belongs to expanding services within a planned economy oriented toward care for people and the planet. Just as Marx and Engels merged the working-class struggle with the struggle for socialism, so must we knit together the economic struggles of service workers with the political task of building communism. Universal basic services such as health, education, transportation, housing, and environmental preservation and restoration need to be recognized as the core of a society based on meeting needs. With service workers as the vanguard, the working class can once again be seen as building the future.