10/18/2026
"Techno-Feudalism vs Prison Capitalism" by Voltaire De Cleyre (Anarchist)
The phrase 'techno-feudalism' is often used to describe the political economy of the post-covid era. The phrase is meant to evoke two things at once; firstly, the forces of international capital, and more specifically, corporations, are becoming more powerful than individual nation-states, akin in some ways to kings and queens in the way that their wealth and privilege reproduces itself hereditarily, and secondly, that the conditions of the working class are becoming more precarious as the concept of personal property is being slowly made obsolete by these same corporations.
But this term is inaccurate for multiple reasons, but primarily that it is obfuscating the primary contradictions of capitalism and the state. Frankly, techno-feudalism would be somewhat utopian compared to our current state of affairs - for starters, a feudal peasant had a connection to the land. Their primary struggle was not with the king or the merchant but with nature itself. When Marx described the French peasantry as 'potatoes in a sack' in the Eighteenth Brumaire, he wasn't saying it to be insulting; he was referring to specifically this struggle against nature. When we talk about contradictions in a Marxist sense, this is what we are referring to - what is the driving force of history at this particular moment? But the peasant had a very strong context for their being to exist in. Additionally, because of this primary struggle, the feudal peasant had far more leisure time than the contemporary laborer under capitalism. Peasants worked intermittently throughout the day with frequent rest periods - one single stretch of work lasting eight hours would be unthinkable. Their work day was technically longer because of this, but taking 16 hours to do roughly 7 hours of work is not the same as working 16 uninterrupted hours. They also famously spent about a third of their year not working at all between all of the holidays that the Church enforced.
By contrast, the working class in post-COVID America is expected to work a minimum of 40 hours a week. This has been the standard for a little over a century, and is actually a significant decrease from the 80 hours that were standard in earlier developmental stages of capitalism, though reactionary elements of both the capitalist class and the working class are pushing to erode these expectations. The contemporary laborer can expect to take a single day off or two for major holidays, and if they have a really good job they get perhaps a bit more than that as well as two weeks of paid vacation that they are heavily, heavily discouraged from ever using. This in spite of the fact that most jobs are proveably "bu****it" in the famous words of the late David Graeber, meaning that these jobs provide no meaningful benefit to society. Our living spaces, meanwhile, are not comparable to the medieval peasant at all. The American style house, with a front and backyard, is roughly the size of a medieval peasant's home and the land it sits on, but this is more and more becoming an obsolete fantasy due to speculation and investment from international corporations. Most of us will only ever know apartment living, where we rent a space from year to year and frequently have to move at the end of each term as prices increase. Even if you enjoy not having a yard to maintain, the fact that you don't have a permanent place to stay is psychologically exhausting. We work jobs that don't need to exist so that we can barely afford a place to sleep.
So 'feudalism' doesn't work to describe what we're currently living through. What then? Well, we don't need a different word to describe the political economy we are living in: this is the late stage of capitalism. Technology has become so efficient it is starting to replicate itself, and there is so little surplus value left to extract from the worker that international capital is growing beyond needing human labor. This is what Marx was talking about when he was describing the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as time progresses. Time itself is neutral - it does not inherently cause profit to decline in and of itself. The reason why the rate of profit has an overall tendency to decline is because surplus labor value is extracted from the labor of the worker. The more labor that machines can do, essentially capital itself, the less surplus value there is to extract from the worker. Without surplus value, there is no profit. Profit is a monetary expression of growth in a capitalist political economy. What market is there left on this planet that capital has not grasped in its iron grip? Hence, we can understand the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as time progresses to mean more accurately to be the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as production becomes more efficient through the advancement of productive technologies.
So what does it mean to be a capitalist without a working class? It means being a jailor. It is not a coincidence that we are seeing even more invasive surveillance technologies be imposed upon the public as AI Data centers are being constructed all over the country. These two phenomena are connected - they mean to replace you, and when they can offer you ownership of nothing, they will need to control you through power. Surveillance is a form of soft power - it is the threat of repression lingering around every corner as opposed to the jackboot of an ICE officer stomping down on your neck. They will turn society into a prison so that you don't protest being put behind bars. By the time you recognize it, your jailors will have long since thrown away the key. The platonic ideal of Foucault's panopticon is becoming material reality through mass surveillance and artificial intelligence. And so, we finally arrive at 'Prison Capitalism'. The primary contradiction has not reverted to an earlier pre-capitalist political economy, it has advanced to become a cage around the entire globe. The first ones to feel the boot of this new world order are the political prisoners being made right now by NSPM-7, the mandate of President Trump to disrupt 'political violence and domestic terrorism' even though groups like Patriot Front have resurfaced and are as strong as ever, perhaps stronger now that Gen Z men have become radicalized to the right by nearly a decade of fascist rule. At time of writing, the FBI conducted a raid against sitting senator Ilhan Ohmar, and a DSA candidate in Austin was briefly detained on completely manufactured charges of inciting a riot. They will not be satisfied with rounding up just the Marxists and the anarchists, they will not rest until everyone to the left of Mike Pence is in jail.
So we can retire this 'techno feudalism' meme - it is an illusion that hides the truth of what we are currently experiencing. Instead, we must point directly at the primary contradiction - 'Prison Capitalism', wherein the working class, dispossessed of all means to meaningfully intervene in or affect the productive processes, will see the rapid erosion of their 'civil liberties', which were all along privileges afforded to them by the capitalists that could always be revoked if the need arose, to match their growing discontent.
If you want to see the collapse of this system, you have to recognize it for what it is - an artificial construct. Your dollar is meaningless. No one being can physically defend a forest or a lake from the rest of humanity. Every business and every government building is a forward operating base of the enemy. They are not natural - they do not grow back if they are cut down. They can only be rebuilt through more exploited labor and stolen resources. We must look to the people who are connected to the land - Palestinians, the native peoples of Turtle Island, the Sami, the Ainu, the Maori, etcetera, and develop our own connections to it. Every successful revolution was not lead by atomized capitalist subjects but by peasants and slaves, people who worked the land and could live independently from the capitalist structures. A people who are connected to the land and connected to themselves cannot be controlled by an outside force. This is why every capitalist expansion begins with primitive accumulation - the violent ripping of the land from its people.
Do not ignore the prison bars forming around you. Do not ignore the chains being placed on you by your jailor. Do not confuse advancing the political careers of specific individuals with the larger movement that must be built. In the words of Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, become ungovernable.
