Since his inauguration, the far-right US president has initiated a dizzying array of measures.
The privatisation of political power is the underlying project. Privatisation is at the nexus between neoliberalism and neofeudalism.
If we characterise political change since the 1970s as a shift from discipline to control, politics has been dominated by elites trying to shield themselves from the democratic state.
Neoliberalism is not new. The term dates back to the late 19th century.
The political philosophy took on its current form in the 1930s as a doctrine of pro-market state interventionism championed by Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, among others.
Attendees at the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann (Hayek among them) deployed neoliberalism as an antidote to political and economic disorders besetting the largest industrialised states.
Neoliberalism designated a strong, impartial state that would create a space for untrammelled free enterprise.
Seventy years later, economic and political conditions in Europe and North America were similarly parlous. Many in the mainstream media were willing to countenance the idea that liberal capitalism might be sick or dying.
Since 2008, there have been so many attempts to devise an unequivocal definition for neoliberalism that they are beyond even cursory assessment here.
One could do worse than Quinn Slobodian’s in The Globalists, the Canadian historian’s history of the origins and development of neoliberalism.
According to Slobodian, a central tenet of neoliberalism was “a blueprint for globalism based on institutions of multitiered governance that are insulated from democratic decision-making and charged with maintaining the balance between the political world of imperium and the economic world of dominium”.
While strategies for achieving this end varied over time, the goal itself remained a consistent feature of the neoliberal project.
Neofeudalism is a term of much more recent vintage. It comprises several variants (technofeudalism, feudalisation, etc.) that differ substantially in detail but retain some central concerns in common.
Once again, a vast body of literature has emerged that either supports or critiques these concepts. Evgeny Morozov published a remarkably thorough summary of these debates for those keen on delving into the topic. However, he ultimately dismisses the value of feudalism as an analytical concept.
The point is not so much to defend feudalism’s analytical value as to note that its use is increasingly common. This can be seen from the two general approaches that those who employ the term take.
On the one hand, feudalism is a rapidly expanding topic in literature on rentier capitalism. Although Brett Christophers, the leading figure in this approach, does not use it, others (Cedric Durand is one example) do so to highlight the transformation of capitalist reproduction.
Rentier capitalism is an economic formation based on owning rather than making things. It is analogous to the owners of feudal fiefs, who raked off the produce of their serfs rather than producing anything themselves.
A second take on feudalism, often overlapping with the first, has a more political flavour.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas argued that feudalism lacked the distinction between state and society, characteristic of modern mass politics.
More recently, some scholars (Sighard Neckel, Olaf Kaltmeier, and Alain Supiot) have argued that contemporary society is witnessing a process of “refedeudalisation” characterised by the privatisation of public resources.
This involves a fundamental change in the nature of political power in modern democracies.
The extent to which rentier capitalism approximates feudalism is open for this discussion, but the transformation of the bases of power is particularly important.
Even if one is not convinced that refeudalisation is an appropriate term, it is easy to see why it seems relevant and how such regression might synergise with the neoliberal project.
In the last two weeks, much of what Donald Trump and Elon Musk have undertaken is a wholesale attempt to dismantle the American government.
This project may not pass muster with federal courts, although given the far-right composition of the. Supreme Court, it can’t be ruled out.
As always with Trump, one must distinguish the effects of his actions from his intent to undertake them. There are no deep moats of knowledge behind the utterances from the top.
Instead, the president is punishing people he views as having thwarted him in his first administration. This includes practically every current employee of the federal government.
The prospect of personal profit is never something to be overlooked, such as Trump’s recently announced plan to redevelop the Gaza Strip once it is ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian inhabitants.
On the other hand, at least some of the deleterious effects of Trump’s tariffs were resolved by Mexico and Canada agreeing to take measures they had already agreed on with Biden.
One possible outcome of the president’s changes to the US government will be a more privatised state, based on Erik Prince’s offer to the first Trump Administration to privatise the military.
Privatising the US government has a great deal of appeal to the anarcho-capitalists of Silicon Valley.
One of the nostrums of the far right is that regulation acts as a brake on the economy.
The deep penetration of society by technology platforms presents an attractive opportunity for the Elon Musks of the world to rejig the structures of governmentality.
The older model sought to control society by embedding people in institutions that trained and corrected their behaviour.
For modern technofeudalists, the goal is a technologically mediated system of social control that ostensibly offers greater freedom.
This process is not inevitable, nor is it being undertaken with great guile or subtlety. Still, it presents a serious prospect of a fundamental change in how the United States and other societies will be governed.
It remains to be seen if we can resist being transformed from citizens into subjects. According to this American government (or what’s left of it), that time is quickly approaching.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
