Capitalism is capitalism, not technofeudalism | Nicholas Gane
Capitalism is capitalism, not technofeudalism | Nicholas Gane
Because y'all shouldn't fall for this moralistic and anachronistic nonsense. The rentier bourgeoisie controls the servers and data centres (vulgarly called "cloud") like they did before with the railways, the shipping infrastructure, the airlines, energy, the production and redistribution of oil and gasoline, and even other forms of communications infrastructure.
Reframing the rentier bourgeoisie as some new unique stage of development beyond capitalism (and smuggling in liberal moralisms about "fiefdoms" and "feudal lords") is just yet another European attempt at reframing the current regressive nature of capitalism as not-capitalism in order to defend the status quo as a "democracy" at risk.
And this author doesn't even get into Imperialism in his critique.
I don't have my laptop with me right now or else I would have made that meme about the music which would have gone something like:
liberal on one side can pick between: fascism, neo-fascism, social democracy, anarcho capitalism, libertarianism, neo-feudalism, corporatism
socialist on other side
it's all capitalism
God and I want the other direction, where the leftist is picking between flavors of socialism, anarchism, and communism and the normies just see "liberal"
I feel like there has to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the social relations of feudalism to come to the idea that we have looped back around from capitalism to a "techno-feudalism" model. That relation being, Serfs living on land owned by their Lord and performing "rent in kind" in exchange for subsistence plots and housing. The product produced by the "subsistence plots" was taxed, and a large portion was given to the Lord of the Manor. The "rent in kind" took the form of Labor, which was performed on the farmlands of the Manor House. For most of Feudalism's run, there wasn't a monetary exchange happening between Serfs and Lords until the merchant heavy townships petitioned the monarchy for Town Charters that gave them independence outside the Feudal system in exchange for paying taxes to the monarchy.
You would have to really twist and reframe these relations to try and place "tech" inside "feudalism" since, last I checked, we do not "subsist" off the digital "land" provided to us "freely" in exchange for any form of "rent in kind". Do I think there is a portion of people who do subsist in this way? Sure. Most of those people, however, are doing some form of drop-shipping operation if they're not some top 1000 social media presence. Even still, those media influencers do not make the majority of their money from the platforms they participate in, many if not all of them have to seek out external forms of monetization either through direct corporate sponsorships or their own capitalist business ventures.
More importantly, though, for us to have transitioned into a "techno-feudalist" organization of the economy, the state would have to be so far diminished that the only governing and enforcement agent with power in our daily lives would be the techno-feudalist lord. Last I checked, the state currently still exists, it still has a monopoly on violence, and these supposed techno-lords have not successfully built their own townships where they control everything within its borders. Even if they did, we have a more recent historical analogy for this in the Company Town.
Global Capital in my measurement hasn't actually developed despite what people think. In order for there to truly be a Global Capitalist force, it would need to be elevated above state influence. However, this has clearly not happened, evident by the simple fact that all transactions that happen in the global market happen with national currencies, where their origin states have near total control over its value. What a Global Capitalist movement would want is high stability and decentralization of the currency all of their global transactions are based on, but that hasn't manifested yet.
I say yet because I think there is clear evidence that this movement is taking place, and that there is an effort to decentralize economic transactions globally. The aim of "stability" is a futile one, since, even with a decentralized foundational currency, you are still subject to capitalism's core contradictions. Regardless, you do not have to look hard to find the movement in question, that movement is cryptocurrency. From the Bitcoin white paper (Bitcoin.org, 2008), the first two sentences of the introduction read:
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust-based model.
We can see the framing here already. The issue with "commerce" is that you must place your "trust" in "financial institutions". This system, according to Satoshi, "suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust-based model." The "financial institutions" in question here, are state endorsed institutions, which the state "regulates" (I use this term loosely) and thus has direct control over. Naturally, in a capitalist state, this "regulation" happens in favor of the capitalist. Long term though, states are fickle things, one year you're a feudal monarchy, the next year you're a peoples' republic. Who knows what the future can bring. You could see your capitalist venture go up in smoke as weeks turn into decades, leaving your legacy in ashes and your head in a basket. This is what sits at the heart of the "weakness" of the "trust-based model", you have to place your "trust" in the state.
So what makes the cryptocurrency market the solution to this trust problem? Well, you can find that answer in the abstract of bitcoins white paper:
As long as a majority of [computational] power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers.
Here the framing is lay bare once again. "As long as a majority of [computational] power is controlled by nodes that are not... attack[ing] the network" then "control" of the network is maintained by those with "a majority of [computational] power". The way you gain "a majority of... power" is through expending more capital than the "attackers", in the form of server farms. Some nation states have attempted to curtail the influence of crypto in their economic affairs, from China's numerous regulatory crackdowns on both transactions and mining operations (Coindesk, 2021), to the SEC's own flimsy attempts at regulation (Investopedia, 2024). Others seek to legitimize them as assets or currencies, such as Japan and Australia recognizing them as "legal property", Brazil passing a law legalizing cryptocurrencies as payment methods, to wild extremes such as the failed experiment of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador (The Tico Times, 2025), or Argentina's Bitcoin Rental Agreements (DailyCoin, 2024). In our most recent timeline, states across the US are looking to create "Bitcoin Reserves" (CNN, 2025):
Missouri, South Dakota, Kansas, Indiana, and Montana have become the latest states to push for Bitcoin adoption, each introducing legislation to establish a Bitcoin reserve.
With these additions, 19 states have now proposed measures to either create a strategic Bitcoin reserve or allocate a portion of state funds toward BTC investments.
This embrace of the state and Bitcoin is not unlike the embrace of the US Dollar and the state. First, Bitcoin needs to be legitimized in the eyes of the state, then the national currency needs to be delegitimized in the eyes of its citizens. We have seen, in places like Argentina, that when there is widespread instability in domestic currency, Bitcoin sees a surge in adoption (Forbes, 2023). In the Forbes, 2023 article, and the Tico Times, 2025 article above, you'll notice an interesting theme, which is, opposition to crypto from the IMF in the form of policy requirements. The IMF, who's loans are issued in the form of USD, and expected to be paid back in USD, has "take[n] a strong stance against crypto" and tied their loan deal with Argentina to "creating new regulations... around the cryptocurrency industry". In the case of El Salvador, their failed experiment with Bitcoin as legal tender comes in the wake of accepting an IMF loan which required the state to delegitimize Bitcoin as a condition of the loan.
We know that the IMF has a history of making their loans conditional pending implementation of austerity measures to liberalize and privatize the state's economy. We know that their goal in this regard is to allow foreign (USD backed) investment to dominate and extract surplus value from the state's citizens. However, this delegitimizing of Bitcoin, to me, illustrates the "threat" crypto plays in the world's geopolitical economy. Crypto poses a similar threat to "dollar hegemony", in the same way BRICS is a threat to "dollar hegemony". It isn't simply a defense of "dollar hegemony" it is also a defense of the statist organization of the world's economic relations. It is a clear example of the materiality of states, and their role in the global market economy.
It is no wonder then that Argentina's new president, Javier Milei, a self-identified anarcho-capitalist, has embraced crypto assets under his administration (ID Times, 2025). With inflation skyrocketing to nearly 300%, the citizens of Argentina have turned to cryptocurrencies to hedge their bets against the domestic currencies' depreciation.
Anarcho-capitalists would want nothing more than to institute bitcoin or some other form of crypto asset as the backbone of a truly globalized capitalist movement. This could usher us into a kind of "techno-feudalism" environment, where the "withering state" is aided by destabilizing events that drive up the legitimacy of these crypto solutions in the eyes of everyday citizens. What would remain, is the means of producing a decentralized monopoly on violence. The way I see it, the old world monetary system is slowly engaging in combat with this decentralized monetary force.
As long as a majority of ... power is controlled by [those] that are [collaborating] to attack the [old means of exchange], they'll generate [hegemony] and outpace [its] defenders.
‘libertarian Marxist’ alternative that Varoufakis proposes in its place, which abdicates any interest in the regulatory powers of the state and, paradoxically, advocates consumer-based political action to damage the market position of big corporate entities
What could drive someone to make this claim? China is right there. Maybe he thinks big tech is too powerful and exploitative in China too?
Western Leftism™, he once boasted how consistently he has both sided every single geopolitical conflict, i.e. celebrates head choppers taking over syria but "raises concerns" about the future, celebrates overthrown of gaddafi but denounces NATO role, celebrates Hussein overthrown but denounces the invasion, etc... He would happily celebrate a fall of China but raise concern of US hegemony or smt. Never takes the antiimperialist side, pretends to oppose the imperialist side while living in the imperial core.
The ultimate "both sides"-er.
good post, Yanis is a hack and his thesis is sensationalist vulgar nonsense that serves to distract from real root causes, doubt he could define imperialism at gunpoint
Yeah, it comes across as another "crony capitalism", pretending that we can just get rid of the "bad apples" of capitalism and have good capitalism again.
Yes, that summarises the concluding chapter nicely
Thank you so much for posting this! I've always found the technofeudalism thesis grating because it tries to paint what is clearly capitalism as something else, but this paper argues it way better than I ever could.
I had a general positive overview about Yanis Varoufakis work since his first blog posts about his collab with valve (at that point I was just a lib), and even after becoming more familiar with Marxism and some of Lenin works (I’m still very green on theory overall) I’d still think that his points about the current euro economies were useful to understand.
But then about 10 months ago I saw him talking with someone online and explaining this “techno feudalism” rationalization and he completely lost me.
...Are we following the same economist?
Yanis has been very clear that this stage of capitalism could still be considered capitalism, but he's specifically meaning this period as technofeudal because the relationship of worker to the mode of production has meaningfully shifted with the owners of cloud capital
Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don't work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations
The workers under cloud capitalism (the other name for this shift) are better described serfs as they are not wage labor and will never be
This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the "cloud". Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.
The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.
For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their "content", doesn't mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.
All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it's easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.
There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”.
This is just wrong, there is a vast amount of dead and living labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud (data centers), every single piece of hardware in a server is a commodity itself, just like the software required does not develop itself. In order for them to have no value, they would literally need to pop out of nature. Same goes for data, there is a lot of dead and living labour involved in collecting and storing data, even if computers have made it infinitely easier to reproduce and distribute data than before. A single byte of data or row in a table is insignificant and near worthless, but we are talking about trillions of bytes of data handled by data centers, it's qualitatively different.
This does not mean i agree with Yanis, i dislike the man and his kind with every molecule of my body, but disregarding data is frankly absurd.
Respectfully, I think you're missing a great deal of labor value in the cloud.
One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption
I don't know if you're in the tech industry or have exposure to the level of engineering as well as the value of processed data harvested from users, but the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator
Both of these forms of labor power create the underlying value of cloud capital (as well as the all of the upstream workers, but they are not novel forms of value to your point)
Secondly, there seems to be a meaningful incongruence regarding influencers. I think we agree that their form of labor pales in comparison to the other labor inputs noted above.
Technofeudalism isn't concerned with influencers at all, and it's a red herring to suggest so imho
But to your closing point, while I agree this comes from a global north perspective, its consequences are universal in that serfs from the global South are tilling the land of cloud capitalism for free just as much as folks from the global north
Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don't work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations.
You probably pay for the bus, internet connection, phone, as well as the imposed value of transportation and infrastructure on your consumer goods, rather than get it for "free" in exchange for some valuable data. And your employer probably also pays that rent in their literal workspace rents, software licenses, security contracts.
And in the odd case your main income comes specifically from these social media corporations as a "content creator", you're still not a serf, you're more like an entertainer or a marketeer.
Historically, serfs are bound to the land, produce collectively for their own consumption and are "taxed in kind" on that produce for the lord, who wields absolute authority over that land, secures it through his own personal militia, and neither party significantly engages in commerce for their social reproduction.
Wage labourers work for a propertied employer for money, which they use to buy their consumption off of the market. The employer can buy and sell more property and the worker is "free" in the sense they can be fired and seek employment somewhere else. In capitalism, the absolute authority over that worker is the state, as well as the "security" force, and not only is the worker expected to rely on commerce for social reproduction, but every single aspect of society (like the aforementioned security) is tendentially reduced to commerce.
I don't see how any rigorous definition of serfdom would define corporations extracting surplus from their property of surveillance systems — as, if extracting your data cost no labour, it'd have no value — as somehow closer to feudal lords than landlords, or their targets as serfs.
It's just monopoly capitalism, A.K.A. imperialism, as it manifests in the core.
Please read this with the intentions of maintaining this as illuminative disagreement rather than another inane internet argument
Historically, serfs are bound to the land, produce collectively for their own consumption and are "taxed absolute authority over that land, secures it through his own personal militia, and neither party significantly engages in commerce for their social reproduction.
I think we can agree that all of these criteria are confirmed with my initial point except taxation.
Ex. your data is bound to the service provider, users produce content collectively for their own consumption, a private militia via security teams, and that users and the corporation do not use commerce for social reproduction (at least from each other in this case)
Imho, I'd argue that the taxation is in the form of attention, which is also commodified by the corporation to sell targeted ads as per your point about surveillance capitalism
in what way are modern workers not part of a wage labour relation?
I don't think I suggested they weren't, but please clarify if I did
