Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?
&gt;Did anyone ever figure out what &quot;neofeudalism&quot; means and why it&#x27;s here now?<p>I&#x27;m gonna write out a notion before I actually read the article and get disappointed.<p>Feudalism was a mode of production in which value was chiefly produced from arable land via agriculture and mainly extracted in the form of rent or tax by force, with the ruling class being the most effective military force.  Merchants, traders, artisans, engineers, and bureaucrats weren&#x27;t really major players under feudalism, and their <i>rise</i> from tolerated skilled servants to a class for themselves, the asset-owning class of capitalism, was a major historical transition.<p><i>If</i>, hypothetically, we were transitioning into a form of &quot;neo-feudalism&quot;, it would be a mode of production in which efficiently producing valuable goods for market trade is no longer more valuable than the ability to just force other people to pay you not to plunder them by force.  It would indicate that society&#x27;s productive potential was either actively degrading, or being held hostage by a ruling class of rent-seekers on the limiting factors of production.<p>For instance, a society run largely by real-estate or oil tycoons who twist the law to bully their competitors and extract rents&#x2F;ransoms from anyone needing land or oil could (again, hypothetically) qualify.<p>The nasty question in this whole thing would be: what so strangled capitalism that feudalism was able to make a comeback?  The feudal-to-capitalist transition happened in the first place because the ruling class of capitalism was able to so steadily erode the economic, social, and even <i>military</i> relevance of the landed nobility that by the time of the French Revolution they could be executed en masse without anyone else complaining much, and the nobles of many other countries like England and Germany had to marry into <i>industrial</i> enterprises to keep their wealth!  Are we somehow so de-industrialized that we&#x27;re switching back to subsistence agriculture?