International Critical Thought
ISSN: 2159-8282 (Print) 2159-8312 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rict20
The New Ideologies of Eurocentrism: Neofeudalism, Techno-feudalism and Irrational Myths
of the Present
Matthew Herzog
To cite this article: Matthew Herzog (24 Sep 2025): The New Ideologies of Eurocentrism:
Neo-feudalism, Techno-feudalism and Irrational Myths of the Present, International Critical
Thought, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2025.2556993
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2025.2556993
Published online: 24 Sep 2025.
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INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2025.2556993
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The New Ideologies of Eurocentrism: Neo-feudalism, Technofeudalism and Irrational Myths of the Present
Matthew Herzog
Department of English Language and Literature, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
Western social theorists have begun positing the possibility of a
new feudal mode of production putting an end to capitalism.
Some of these writers have called this “neo-feudalism” and others
“techno-feudalism.” In contrast, this article posits that the neo- or
techno-feudal thesis represents a new ideology within the
Eurocentric worldview. By situating these new forms of thought
within broader Eurocentric intellectual practices, the article
analyzes their limits in regards to global class struggles. Using the
methods of historical materialism, the philosophical and
imperialist dimensions of these new ideologies are discussed. It is
argued that these new conceptions delight in the irrationalism of
the “wager,” neo-Kantian narrative tactics, as well as misleading
technologism and rupturalism. Far from a rigorous understanding
of the social world, the neo- or techno-feudal thesis employs
mythic comparisons to a selectively constructed feudal past as a
way to understand the present. Ultimately, this article reaffirms
that capitalism has, indeed, not ended and that these new
ideologies, which support the Eurocentric worldview, block the
possibility of a contemporary renewal of a core principle of
Marxism: internationalism.
Received 6 March 2024
Revised 6 April 2025
Accepted 12 April 2025
KEYWORDS
Techno-feudalism; neofeudalism; Eurocentrism;
irrationalism; historical
materialism
In one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, in so far
as we seek for closed shape, form, and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow
satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be sat­
isfied with itself, is vulgar and mean. (Marx 1965, 85; italics in the original)
The petty bourgeois sees and feels that he is heading for ruin. (Lenin [1913] 1968, 236)
Marx and Lenin were keen observers of the types of thinking that the modern capitalist
world produced. They astutely recognized how the dialectic of capitalist modernity’s tri­
umphant optimism produced its opposite: a fear of decline and a yearning for older
forms of social and cultural conditions. However, what if this desire for “closed shape,
form, and established limitation” (Marx 1965, 85) found its way into the realm of social
theory itself? The neo- or techno-feudal thesis1 provides such closed shape and form to
its adherents and functions as a new ideology within Samir Amin’s conception of Euro­
centrism. In this sense, this article seeks to engage with the neo- and techno-feudal thesis
CONTACT Matthew Herzog
mjherzogjbnu@gmail.com
© 2025 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
2
M. HERZOG
from the standpoint of historical materialism, specifically in regards to two areas: philos­
ophy and the critique of imperialism. The philosophical argument comes in the form of a
critique of neo-Kantianism, technologism, and rupturalism while the critique of the
imperialist dimension is related to Eurocentrism and irrationalism.2
It should be noted that the writers discussed in this article—Jodi Dean, Yanis Varou­
fakis, and Cédric Durand—present vastly different conceptions of supposed new forms of
feudalism. Dean focuses on “neo-feudalism” and Varoufakis and Durand on “technofeudalism.” While each writer is critical of the new feudal order they posit as having
come about, this article, however, questions the logic of conceptualizing a new feudal
order and the proposition that it has replaced capitalism or exists in some form alongside
it. Ultimately, the larger warrant of this article is, first, that global society is still very
much within capitalism—its forms of oppression and exploitation—and, second, this
only necessitates the importance of connecting rigorous Marxist analysis to its own
values and praxis.
Central to the founding principles of Marxism is internationalism, which today needs
to be renewed and has no room for unacknowledged forms of Eurocentrism. Indeed, it is
from this universalist value and the historical materialist commitment to universalism
that this article derives its core motivation. As Aijaz Ahmad (2011, 26) has written of
internationalism, “For progressive movements of the past—and for progressive move­
ments of the present or of the future—‘international’ is not only a ‘setting’; it is also
the name of a fundamental value.” In regard to maintaining a commitment to such
values, this article follows Prabhat Patnaik and his contemporary renewal of the con­
ception of internationalism, which for him must
entail a degree of delinking from the process of globalisation as it currently exists—that is,
from the hegemony of globalised finance capital. It must, therefore, entail some revival of
the inclusive anti-imperialist nationalism that had informed . . . earlier struggle[s] for
national independence from foreign rule. (Patnaik 2018, 10)
The Eurocentrism of the neo- and techno-feudal thesis reaffirms capitalist globalisation
through antagonism to nationalism and statism, and this is especially so in its libertarian
manifestations.
In turn, the central argument of the article is as follows. The neo- or techno-feudal
thesis arises out of a set of social conditions in the present. These social conditions are
based in the West where social theorists have posited feudalistic technological domina­
tion as having usurped capitalist economic exploitation. The thesis is overgeneralized in
either of two ways: first as a phenomenon happening principally in the West, which is
leading the way into a new and ruinous dystopia; or second, it is seen as a global phenom­
enon applicable to center and periphery countries alike. In turn, one of the core Euro­
centric elements of this ideology is an abridged choice of parallels with Western
historical feudalism, sometimes as direct example and sometimes as metaphor. These
parallels are the result of misrecognition arising from limits, rather than theories devel­
oped from radical methods of understanding in the historical materialist tradition. Wes­
tern social theorists are turning to a supposed “European” past not as ideal or utopia, but
for their new dystopia. The “closed shape, form, and established limitation” of this con­
structed past provides the materials for social theories of the present.
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
3
Irrationalism and the Eurocentric Worldview
History is central to historical materialism not simply in terms of historical accuracy but
in terms of historical method. Consequently, as theories of the present, this article will
not be concerned with the historical “correctness” of the relationship between periodiz­
ing historical feudalism and periodizing contemporary feudalism, but rather with how
the neo- or techno-feudal thesis arises from irrationalist methods of understanding the
present.3 According to Georg Lukács ([1962] 1981, 10), the “disparagement of under­
standing and reason, an uncritical glorification of intuition, an aristocratic epistemology,
the rejection of socio-historical progress, the creating of myths and so on are all motives
we can find in virtually any irrationalist.” As will be shown, an aristocratic epistemology,
the rejection of historical progress, and the creation of myths are central to the neo- or
techno-feudal thesis. While Lukács focuses on right-wing manifestations of irrationalism,
Juan José Sebreli has developed how irrationalism took over the New Left in the post-war
period:
[There was] during the last decades—in supposedly progressive academic circles and in the
marginal cultural milieu known as “the counter-culture”—the ascendent hegemony of a
philosophy whose objective was the negation of modernity, reason and universal truth.
This unusual choice reflected an ideological characteristic of the epoch: the renunciation
by the New Left of its cultural tradition of enlightenment and its assimilation to irrationalist
theories consubstantial with the right. (Sebreli 2007, 16; translated from Spanish)
The neo- or techno-feudal thesis is at home in this post-war left-wing irrationalism. As
such, its approaches delight in Eurocentric myth-making rather than maintaining a rig­
orous commitment to objective and universal historical understanding.
Samir Amin has developed the Marxist concept of Eurocentrism, which situates the
critique of irrationalism in the context of imperialism. While Eurocentrism for Amin
is only one part of the dominant worldview of the hegemonic West, it is a powerful one:
It has replaced rational explanations of history with partial pseudo-theories, patched
together and even self-contradictory at times, but which nevertheless function admirably
in the construction of a myth that reassures Europeans, ridding their subconscious of any
complex about their responsibilities. (Amin 1989, 104)
Thus, Eurocentrism is an irrational and mythic worldview that arises from the limitations
of Western ways of seeing and understanding and the social and material conditions of
these forms of perception. Importantly, Eurocentrism is not simply an ethnocentrism:
If Eurocentrism does not have, strictly speaking, the status of a theory, neither is it simply
the sum of prejudices, errors and blunders of Westerners with respect to other peoples. If
that were the case, it would only be one of the banal forms of ethnocentrism shared by
all peoples at all times. (Amin 1989, 104)
While all cultures have their own forms of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism is a historical
and theoretical instrument that has both right-wing and left-wing manifestations. Euro­
centrism for Amin (1988, 6; translated from French) engages with “the truncated uni­
versalism of the propositions offered by modern ideology and social theory.”4 This
conception of “truncation” is crucial because it points to the fact that Eurocentrism is
a limited worldview, which then overgeneralizes its propositions to the rest of the world.
4
M. HERZOG
As a way of seeing, worldviews correspond to totalities. Thus, the relations between
worldviews and ideologies foster a better understanding of the relation between Euro­
centrism and the neo- or techno-feudal thesis. Lucien Goldmann ([1952] 1981, 112)
develops this distinction in a productive manner:
World views are historical and social facts. They are totalities of ways of thinking, feeling,
and acting which in given conditions are imposed on men finding themselves in a similar
economic and social situation, that is imposed on certain social groups.
Worldviews have wide-ranging manifestations in different realms across the social whole.
As Amin (1989, viii) writes,
Eurocentrism is a paradigm which, like all paradigms, functions spontaneously, often in the
gray areas of seemingly obvious facts and common sense. For this reason, it manifests itself
in a variety of ways, as much in common expression of received ideas, popularized by the
media, as in the erudite formulations of specialists.
There are currently a diverse and wide-ranging set of arguments about a return to feud­
alism, but this does not necessarily mean the thesis is a worldview in Goldmann’s sense.
While a worldview is a totality with limits, an ideology is a set of ideas lacking full
expression across the social spectrum. For example, Goldmann ([1966] 1969, 153, italics
in the original) states, “reformism, however important it might be as an ideological
phenomenon, is not a world-view. There is indeed a reformist politics and sociology,
but there is no reformist ethic, aesthetic or epistemology.” The same can be said of the
neo- or techno-feudal thesis. Ultimately, following Goldmann, the neo- or techno-feudal
thesis is situated as an ideology operative within a larger Eurocentric worldview. Grasp­
ing the dialectical relationships between ideologies and worldviews reveals how many
left-wing writers can be attracted to an ideological position without grasping the full
implications of the worldview it sanctions.
The Eurocentric worldview of the neo- or techno-feudal thesis can be located in its own
historical comparative practices. Older forms of Eurocentrism were difficult to discern pre­
cisely because they provided the “closed shape and form” so many were searching for. In
this sense, one can contrast the old form of Eurocentrism with its “progressive” mythology
to the new Eurocentrism with a “regressive” mythology. The nineteenth-century construc­
tion of Europe contained a myth of progress: Europe arose out of a Greco-Roman literary
and philosophical tradition, which was developed in a mix of Aristotelian and biblical exeg­
esis in the Middle Ages, bloomed during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and rea­
lized its ends with fully industrialized capitalism. The new ideologies of Eurocentrism posit
a “regressive” myth. There has been regression to a new feudal dystopia: the rise of platform
companies has brought about a shift from traditional capitalist forms of labor exploitation
to new forms of domination via the extraction of rents in the form of collected data. Like
serfs tied to the land, users are tied to their platforms.
The Feudalist Wager or the Irrationalist Core of Neo- or Techno-feudal
Ideology
The proponents of the neo- or techno-feudal thesis display a telling hesitancy as to
whether they are describing a fully new mode of production, which at times their writing
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
5
seems to desire to articulate; yet at other times, they pull back from this larger claim to
state that they are only marking “feudal tendencies” reappearing within capitalism. This
seems to be what media theorist Jodi Dean (2020) refers to when she describes her
hypothesis as the “neofeudal wager” as well as a “thought experiment.” It is Cédric Dur­
and (2022), however, who has articulated the clearest warrant for the neo- or techno-feu­
dal thesis:
One should not be intimidated about thinking these novel developments afresh; there is no
reason why exploring the specific dynamics of the digital economy should result in white­
washing capitalism or enthusing about the productive virtues of competition. Importantly,
this is true whether or not the techno-feudal hypothesis is proved correct.
Indeed, Durand (2022) refers to the French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “As in Pascal’s
wager, ‘If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.’” This is armchair leftism5
that is not concerned with the relationship between theory and practice. Goldmann
([1964] 2013, 238; italics in the original) provides a corrective:
Dialectical thinkers do not say that statements about man and society are true or false, but
that they become true or false, and that this happens as a result of the encounter between
man’s social activity and certain objective, natural and historical conditions.
This is to say that dialectical understanding is not a matter of the “all or nothing” wager.
The Pascalian wager itself was limited by such an encounter between activity and histori­
cal conditions:
Static, foreign to any idea of “becoming,” dominated by the category of all or nothing, it
[Pascalian tragic thought] was never able to reach either the notion of degrees of objectivity
or that of a series of human actions which could spring from progress by transforming error
into truth and present truth into future error. (Goldmann [1964] 2013, 238)
Goldmann’s point here is that the wager is a non-dialectical form of thought that is his­
torically limited by the philosophic developments of its time. The wager is calculated irra­
tionalism: it starts with concepts and makes a wager on their truth, instead of starting
with the world, society and the dialectical movement of becoming, developing thought
in relation to historical conditions, and then returning to concepts to adjust their
truth content.
Dean argues that neo-feudalism is a matter of privatization and decentralization.
According to her, capitalism as a concept is too limited to explain the current situation.
Rather, as she tells us, “Neofeudalism allows us to see tendencies in the present that indi­
cate the limits of what capitalism can do and what capitalism can name, and how we’ve
got to understand our anti-capitalist struggle. That’s the general wager behind the pro­
ject” (Dean 2021). This is one form of “all or nothing thinking”: the wager that capitalism
as a concept is not flexible and limits anti-capitalist struggle. To struggle against capital­
ism, one needs to understand that it is no longer capitalism. It is here that neo-feudalism
as a concept comes into play: “Neoliberalism turns into neofeudalism because it effects a
change in social-property relations by destroying state ‘fetters’ or constraints on markets
—employee safety nets, corporate taxation, social-welfare provisions” (Dean 2022). In
this formulation, neo-feudalism occurs when the welfare state disintegrates. She writes
elsewhere that “extreme capitalism goes over into the radical decentralization of
6
M. HERZOG
neofeudalism” (Dean 2020). Thus, it seems that neoliberalism, in some ways, has always
been neo-feudalism.
These wagers do not hold up to more rigorous historical and dialectical thought. As
Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik (2021, 267) have argued, neoliberalism is about a
change in the state and not its dismantling:
Neoliberalism entails not a retreat or a withdrawal of the state, not a shift from a regime of
state intervention to a regime of “leaving things to the market,” which is the way that neo­
liberalism would like to present itself, but rather as a change in the nature of state interven­
tion. Underlying it is a change in the nature of the state itself, which in turn reflects a change
in the nature of the classes and the correlation between them.
Neoliberalism does not destroy state fetters, rather it reorients them in a way that the
restraints on capital are reworked as supports for capital. The “essence of neoliberalism
consists in a dual change that comes about in a capitalist economy: a change in the class
configuration and an accompanying change in the nature of the state and its modus oper­
andi” (Patnaik and Patnaik 2021, 267; italics in the original). Dean, however, defines the
retreat of the state as the beginning of neo-feudalism. Yet, as Patnaik and Patnaik make
clear, this cannot be the case because neoliberalism is not a destruction of the state but a
change in its purpose, which is always a matter of international class conflict and not a
dramatic change in the mode of production.
Dean’s wager is also connected to a historical past. The privatization and decentraliza­
tion she discusses as central to neo-feudalism parallels the post-Roman history of Wes­
tern Europe:
Feudal society emerged as the imperial administration of the Romans [ended] . . . . Local
arrangements taking a variety of forms, including contractual relations between lords and
kings and lord and vassals, came to supplement regional administration . . . . Political auth­
ority and economic power blended together as feudal lords extracted a surplus from pea­
sants through legal coercion. (Dean 2020)
In this mythic comparison, the implied homology is between how the Roman adminis­
tration of Western Europe corresponds to the welfare state, and how the feudal arrange­
ments that replaced this Roman administration correspond to our contemporary postneoliberal moment of neo-feudalism.
Amin has already provided a critique of the issues of both feudalism in history and
Eurocentric conceptions of this history. Writing on the problem of conceptualizing tran­
sitions, he states, “I consider this formulation to be West-centered in its overgeneraliza­
tion of the specific characteristics of the history of the West and its rejection of the history
of other peoples in all its particularities” (Amin 2018, 2). For Amin, to discuss history is
always to discuss history in its totality as the global development of humanity. The new
ideologies of Eurocentrism maintain a willed ignorance of the totalities in which their
objects of comparison are situated. Feudal Western Europe is compared to contemporary
Western Europe. The Eurocentric move is to disregard the place that each of these his­
torical instantiations of Europe occupy in their global totality.
Western feudal history is only one instance of the development of feudalism and as
such cannot be taken as a theoretical model to understand world history. Consequently,
Amin (2018, 2) writes, “Choosing to derive the laws of historical materialism from uni­
versal experience, I have proposed an alternative formulation of one precapitalist mode,
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
7
the tributary mode, toward which all class societies tend.” The tributary mode is what
allows Amin’s Marxist historiography to move out of Eurocentrism and also understand
the place of post-Roman Western Europe in its relation to the global totality. In Amin’s
historical account, Western feudal Europe occupies a place in the global periphery as
other non-Western realms were able to obtain a solidified tributary mode and develop
global centers during the precapitalist era. Ultimately, the new ideologies of Eurocentr­
ism take their own peripheral past and try to posit it as the means for understanding their
hegemonic present.
Cédric Durand takes the opposite view to Dean in his work on techno-feudalism. He
states, “The wager I am making is that this identification of the characteristics of feudal­
ism will help us to better understand the mutations of contemporary capitalism” (Durand
2024, 170). For Durand, techno-feudalism is not the result of a removal of state fetters lead­
ing to decentralization. Rather, what defines techno-feudalism is the “objective socialisa­
tion of labor”: “In the twenty-first century, there is no involution of the division of labor
or retraction of social cooperation in production. On the contrary, techno-feudalism is
the result of what Ernest Mandel defined as the ‘growing objective socialisation of
labor’” (174). For Durand, techno-feudalism is a matter of the growth and use of digital
technological infrastructure. Durand (175) writes of the negative side of this development:
As digital assets and their users become inseparable, barriers are put up to the mobility of
individuals and organisations. This attachment breaks down the competitive dynamic and
gives those who control the intangibles an unparalleled ability to appropriate value without
any real engagement in production.
Consequently, it is not a socialisation of labor but rather a socialisation of material con­
ditions, which for Durand is a matter of nonmaterial digital services.6 Yet, in a wager
similar to Dean’s, Durand sees production itself, a central Marxist concept, disappearing:
“In this configuration, investment is no longer directed towards the development of the
forces of production, but rather, towards the forces of predation” (175). Durand’s wager
is that the predators of the techno-feudal order are not engaged in production and are not
investing in production. They parasitically control nonmaterial digital services, but as he
recognizes, this is only possible via access to material technology: “Strategies for conquer­
ing cyberspace rely on the control of data flows: they need access to our telephones and
computers, the sensors in machine tools and vehicles . . . and even in our homes” (175).
Durand posits “control” and “access” as the central elements of oppression, missing, in a
Eurocentric move, how control and access would be impossible without the material
digital commodities themselves, which are manufactured by workers in mainly periph­
eral countries, often with minerals and resources mined by workers from other periph­
eral countries. Durand sees material production and nonmaterial services as two separate
structures, not connected to one another. Once a data collection system is set up, it runs
at almost “zero cost” and with “infinite increasing returns” (176–178). However, compu­
ters, smartphones, cloud storage facilities, etc., are material technologies that do not last
forever: they become obsolete and go into disrepair.
In the early 1980s, Henri Lefebvre was already dealing with claims by information
technology optimists hailing a “new mode of production.” His criticisms apply as
much to progressive optimism as to the contemporary pessimism of regression of the
new ideologies of Eurocentrism:
8
M. HERZOG
Supporters of these technologies, their theoreticians—or, rather their apologists—go so far
as to claim that they will constitute a new mode of production. . . . Essentially, this mode of
production would consist in the production of immaterial goods, supplanting the pro­
duction of material products, as well as the ever more complete predominance of services
over other activities. (Lefebvre [1981] 2005, 137)
The techno-feudal thesis does not function as an apology for such ideas but rather posits
them as left-wing critique of a new dystopia. Durand shifts away from the central pre­
mises of historical materialism, production, labor, and material conditions, towards
the act of feudal predation of nonmaterial digital services. A central aspect of the neoor techno-feudal thesis is that it disregards global totalities and specifically the ongoing exploitation of peripheral countries by the imperialist core. Indeed, as Amin
reminds us, there is a dialectical relation between the center/periphery and material/non­
material production:
Growth in the dominant centers’ nonmaterial activities is inseparable from how the division
of labor is unequally shared between centers and peripheries. That material production is
outsourced to the peripheries aggravates, in the centers, the growth of the nonmaterial
activities involved in controlling it—for example, by concentration in the centers of the
means of control over technologies, of globalized finance, and of communications. (Amin
2014, 13–14)
On the one hand, ignoring these dialectical relations allows for the logic of “wagering” on
technology; on the other hand, it provides cover for stigmatizing the Global South, which
any Marxist concerned with international solidarity should resist. Indeed, recent political
developments in West Africa with the ousting of French troops in Niger, Mali, and Bur­
kina Faso make it difficult to disregard the global dialectical relationships between
material and nonmaterial production. It is Nigerien uranium that fuels France’s nuclear
reactors which power the French electric grids and networks of nonmaterial production.
As Vijay Prashad (2023) has written of the recent coup in Niger, “The new government
announced that it would stop allowing France to leech Niger’s uranium (one in three
lightbulbs in France is powered by the uranium from the field in Arlit, northern
Niger).” The center and the periphery as well as material and nonmaterial production
cannot be disconnected, or seen as autonomous from one another. The lack of awareness
of this fact is indicative of Eurocentric idealism, one of the central forms of which is neoKantianism.
Neo-Kantian Narratives: The Storybook World of Techno-feudalism
One of the core operative mechanisms of the neo- or techno-feudal thesis is a neo-Kan­
tian conception of Marxism. Neo-Kantianism in its broader sense is employed here as
defined by the neglected French Marxist Michel Clouscard. His critique of neo-Kantian­
ism centers on its return to the subject-object and phenomena-noumena problems in
Kant and its disregard of the work of those who have overcome this divide:
Neo-Kantianism needs to prohibit the philosophy of praxis, that of the immanent rationality
of the process of production (that of the absolute consciousness of the materiality of social
practices, that of the mastery of these mechanisms), to profit from an idealism (subjective or
objective) which reduces the world to its representation. (Clouscard 2020, 32; translated
from French)
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
9
To say that neo-Kantianism “prohibits the philosophy of praxis” is to say that it denies
the centrality of the philosophical achievement of positing labor as the central ontological
core of human social being. Hegel’s objective idealism is able to overcome the Kantian
epistemological binary of phenomena and noumena via the concept of labor, and
then, Marx and Engels develop and go beyond Hegel to historical materialism. The sub­
ject is connected to the object via labor. The denial of materialist thought, specifically the
discovery of labor as social-ontological condition, only leads to the subjectivism of phe­
nomenology, or the false objectivism of structuralism.
Neo-Kantianism is inherent in almost all neo- or techno-feudal theorizing. Indeed, it
can be traced back to the early work of one of the central proponents of the techno-feudal
thesis, Yanis Varoufakis. It is given full expression in his book Rational Conflict (1991). In
a chapter on “praxis,” Varoufakis turns to dialectics via Hegel and Sartre. In a series of
twists and turns, Varoufakis goes from Hegelian-Sartrean dialectics to a naive theory
of narrative. As Varoufakis (1991, 205) states, “it is only the dialectical variant [of reason]
that allows individuals to interact and change their perceptions of the meaning of ration­
ality.” Here dialectics is about perception (phenomenology). Indeed, dialectics for him is
not an objective movement of history but rather a rational way of understanding histori­
cal narratives. As Varoufakis tells us, “For Hegel a person contemplating a commodity, a
strategy, a ‘thing’ in general is absorbed by it and loses sight of her self-consciousness”
(210). This is Hegel via Sartre with a phenomenological focus on consciousness. He con­
tinues, “Sartre wished for a dialectical perception of the individual as at once determining
and determined. The instrument of this two-way process of determination was to be
human praxis, through which the individual satisfies existing desire and simultaneously
overcomes it” (211). The focus on consciousness and the individual point to the neoKantianism inherent in Varoufakis’s thought. This brings us to his conception of society
and history as narrative: “The fact that we understand the world through stories, and that
these stories cannot be neutral in the conveyance of meaning does not necessarily lead us
to conclude that meaning is no more than a sequence of fragmented stories” (219). For
Varoufakis, the world is representation, but a representation that can be rationally under­
stood via his Hegelian-Sartrean dialectics. The social world, for him, is a world of stories:
“For it is not so much that we make up the stories which we then use to build social the­
ory, but that the world comes to us in the shape of stories anyway” (219). Varoufakis’s
dialectics remains idealist insofar as it stays within the realm of narrative, and cannot
move into the realm of the external world.
Years later, Varoufakis would bring this understanding to bear on Marx himself and
proclaim that he himself was an “erratic Marxist.” In his 2015 piece for The Guardian,
Varoufakis (2015) sees Marx as an economic and historical Shakespeare: “What caught
my eye was Marx’s mesmerising gift for writing a dramatic script for human history,
indeed for human damnation, that was also laced with the possibility of salvation and
authentic spirituality.” Varoufakis figures Marx as a wordsmith and nothing more.
The claims of historical materialism to understand the objective world are nowhere to
be found: “Marx created a narrative populated by workers, capitalists, officials and scien­
tists who were history’s dramatis personae” (Varoufakis 2015). Varoufakis’s neo-Kantian
Marx was a myth-maker, a playwright of history, and, ultimately, a phenomenological
storyteller.7 He dresses Marx in Kantian robes, while handing him a Shakespearean
quill. The philosophical development from Hegel to Marx of understanding the full
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M. HERZOG
implications of social conditions as defined by labor is occluded. Indeed, Varoufakis has
gone from being an “erratic Marxist” to the title he now claims, namely a “libertarian
Marxist.” He writes now of how the international press “were baffled by my claim to
be a libertarian Marxist” (Varoufakis 2023, 19). This irrational delight in the play of con­
tradiction hides an anti-statism that conflicts with real political goals of people outside
the Euro-American West.
In turn, Varoufakis is at the forefront of techno-feudalists, who also see themselves as
theoretical narrators. This neo-Kantianism allows techno-feudalists to employ their feu­
dal terminology of lords and serfs: they are the characters of their stories. Varoufakis’s
techno-feudal story, in his recent book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
(2023), revolves around the “cloud,” or the machines that store digital data which algor­
ithms search and use. Varoufakis (2023, 85) differentiates between two new social groups,
“cloud proles” and “cloud serfs,” the latter being the distinguishing factor between capit­
alism and techno-feudalism. “Cloud proles” are essentially workers whose jobs are now
infiltrated by cloud-based technology; “cloud serfs” are any person, including cloud
proles, who use a platform and create data to be harvested.
The unpaid labor of the “cloud serf” engaged in Internet shopping is vital for Varou­
fakis. It is such a radical development that he claims: “Enter amazon.com and you have
exited capitalism” (Varoufakis 2023, 85). This is a distillation of his conception of the his­
torical development of techno-feudalism. According to Varoufakis (90),
the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the
factory, the shop or the office—to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud
serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.
Cloud serfs’ use of platforms is “unremunerated” labor that creates data, which is then
profitably used by companies. All that was solid in the “brick and mortar” era of the con­
sumer society—privacy, choice, self-expression—melts into air in the era of the digital
consumer society.
Varoufakis’s political program is to save the old consumer society from ruin. He calls
for a coalition of cloud serfs, cloud proles, and vassal capitalists to engage in “peaceful
guerilla strikes”:
To stand any chance of overthrowing technofeudalism and putting the demos back into
democracy, we need to gather together not just the traditional proletariat and the cloud
proles but also the cloud serfs, and indeed, at least some of the vassal capitalists. (Varoufakis
2023, 207)
This coalition is meant to engage not so much in “strikes” as what might be more prop­
erly termed “boycotts.” Varoufakis himself has engaged in such divestment campaigns
specifically against Amazon and now theorizes them as “cloud mobilisation” (see
DiEM25 2020, November 27). This is where the game theorist in him creeps back into
his theory. He claims that these campaigns of refusing to pay bills and use Amazon
require “minimal personal sacrifice delivering large and collective gains” (Varoufakis
2023, 209). It is certainly debatable whether these “gains” were delivered in Varoufakis’s
2020 attempt to organize a boycott of Amazon for one day (see Gayle 2020).
Nicholas Gane (2024, 13) has aptly summarized and critiqued the consumer-based
orientation of Varoufakis’s anti–techno-feudal political program:
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
11
Varoufakis’s political strategy is for consumer action and payment strikes that dent the
income and market position of large corporations. This, however, effectively pushes the
responsibility for political action downwards to individual consumers, many of whom are
already vulnerable, indebted and face serious consequences for non-payment, including dis­
connection from essential services and, potentially, the forced collection of any outstanding
debts.
Western social theorists like Varoufakis cannot help themselves but to understand the
contradiction between a past consumer society and our contemporary automated one
via a new mythology. What Varoufakis’s narrative functions to do, willingly or not, is
to occlude labor and class struggle, which Gane rightly points out above, and instantiate
the society of consumption as the site of contemporary oppression and Western consu­
mers themselves as the oppressed. Varoufakis’s praxis requires sacrifice from Western
workers, and for those in the Global South it is simply untenable. Returning to Prashad’s
reporting on the Sahel, France’s military was not thrown out of the region by targeted
campaigns of consumer boycotts or by concerted action between French “vassal capital­
ists” and the governments of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. French nuclear reactors run­
ning off Nigerien uranium power the companies of French “cloudalists” and “vassal
capitalists” alike: whether you are a vassal capitalist running decentralized small machin­
ing shops or the “lord” of a techno-feudal “fiefdom,” you have a shared interest in the
imperialist exploitation of the resources of the Global South.
Technologism and Rupturalism
Running through the neo- or techno-feudal thesis is the view that new technologies have
brought radical change to society and by doing so have made a break with the past and
inaugurated a new mode of production. The first phenomenon falls under what Amin
has called technologism and the second is described by what French philosopher Jacques
d’Hondt has termed as rupturalism. Indeed, the contradiction of neo- or techno-feudal
theorists is that instead of historicizing the technologies which they claim have brought
about or “may” bring about a new mode of production, they turn to mythic historical
comparisons from one thousand years prior. In this mythic use of history, the harbingers
of new techno-dystopias reveal just how ahistorical their approaches really are.
First, let us clear the ground with Amin’s conception of technologism and then turn to
how irrational conceptions of rupture play into this new Eurocentrism. The concept of
technologism designates any theory or approach that starts from technological changes
and posits social changes occurring because of new changes in technology:
[This] dominant discourse confounds the potential and the real. In this sense, it reproduces
a very old characteristic of the ideology of capitalism: “technologism.” I intend by this false
idea that “technology” and its “progress” determine social evolution. The thesis obscures the
decisive effects of social relations in which technological progress unfolds, thus ignoring the
directions that it takes and the limits that it imposes on social transformations. (Amin 2008,
110; translated from French)
Technology does not guide our social relations, rather social relations guide technological
innovations. New technologies are imbued with capitalist values and enter into an
already existing capitalist order. More to the point, any rigorous history that traces the
developments of technology should, in its rigor, resist technologism. However, without
12
M. HERZOG
the aid of the historical materialist method, given to the seductions of neo-Kantian nar­
rativisation, neo- and techno-feudal theorists are awash in technologism.
Rupturalism is a common counterpart of technologism. Rupturalism, according to
Jacques d’Hondt, fetishizes and absolutizes “breaks” in historical understanding. Cen­
tered in structuralism, historical periods as structures are studied internally rather
than as a historical dialectic of human development between human agents and the
objective world they live in:
The problem is that such philosophers of rupture, benefiting from the contributions and
gains of structuralism, threaten the very intelligibility of the course of events, even if they
reinforce internal understanding of a historical period, of a political-economic system, of
a particular culture, or of a particular language. (d’Hondt 1986, 352)
Positing information technology and data as the dominant “narrative” sites through
which one can understand a new mode of production, neo- and techno-feudal theorists
are led astray into an ahistorical claim of the end of capitalism. As d’Hondt (349) tells us,
such is the nature of the philosophy of rupture:
The complex of problems characterizing any given era owes nothing to the one which marks
a previous era, and there is no becoming or progress from one to the other, only a vast gulf
opening up between them. An inexplicable catastrophe has struck.
For neo- and techno-feudalists, this impending ruin is the platform technology that has
possibly instantiated a completely new form of production.
Neo- and techno-feudalists, though, do not simply satisfy themselves with declaring a
break with the past, rather they mythologize the break itself through their Eurocentric
comparisons. This is inherent to rupturalism. As d’Hondt (1986, 350) states, rupturalists
“extend the validity of their conclusions to all domains and aspects of human life.” The
mythologization of the break allows opportunistic neo-Kantian narrative tactics to
exploit new advances in technology as the site of a fetishized rupture with the whole
of capitalism itself. As if speaking of neo- and techno-feudalists, d’Hondt (352) writes,
“Notions of temporality, causality, chronologies, and interdependence in history have
been abandoned.” The past can be selectively used (irrationally mythologized) to call
into question the capitalist present (neo-Kantianism), present Marxism as limited
(opportunism), and declare the beginning of a new mode of production (rupturalism).
Thus, technologism and rupturalism go together allowing neo- and techno-feudalists
to posit that new technologies have created a fetishized break with the past and, more
importantly, a completely new mode of production.
Conclusion
This article has endeavored to show that contrary to the neo- or techno-feudal thesis,
capitalism has not ended; it continues, exploiting workers around the world. Moreover,
it has sought to clarify how those who make such ideological claims are participating in
the Eurocentric worldview and, indeed, continue its legacy. The ideologies renewing
Eurocentrism have excelled at creating a dystopian neo-Kantian narrative about a rui­
nous shift in the mode of production resulting from new technologies. Opposing this,
the methods of historical materialism have been used to show how neo- or techno-feudal
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
13
ideologies are an ahistorical and mythic form of irrationalist, Eurocentric theories of the
present. Neo- or techno-feudal theorists serve a larger master, willingly or not, namely
the Eurocentric worldview. In doing so, they go against the core tenet of Marxism, inter­
nationalism, and specifically a contemporary renewal of its anti-imperialist dimensions.
Notes
1. By this thesis, this article intends both the conceptualization of a new feudal order and the
criticisms that accompany this conceptualization. For brevity, “the neo- or techno-feudal
thesis” will be used to indicate this combination of conceptualization and critique stemming
from the leftist ensemble of writers discussed.
2. Other critiques of the neo- or techno-feudal thesis have come from a sociological perspec­
tive (Gane 2024) and an economic perspective (Morozov 2022).
3. Two contemporary critics of the neo- or techno-feudal thesis, Evgeny Morozov and Nicho­
las Gane, concern themselves with this very issue, Morozov from the standpoint of the
debate between Robert Brenner and Immanuel Wallerstein, and Gane from the perspective
of Max Weber on feudalism. As Gane (2024, 6) correctly surmises, “Each of these aspects of
feudalism distinguish it from the capitalism that replaced it, and it is hard to identify them,
equally, with anything found in what Varoufakis calls our ‘technofeudal’ present.” The key
historical point is not the correct identification between feudalism and techno-feudalism,
but rather how the neo- or techno-feudal thesis uses historical comparisons in a mythic cre­
ation of irrational and Eurocentric ideologies.
4. A translation of this passage has been provided because the English editions of the book do
not seem to contain this section with the conception of “l’universalisme tronqué” (Amin
1988, 6).
5. Walter Rodney (1989, 48) has provided a definition of this term:
From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen, who have attempted to deny or
denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is true. There are Marxists who
have become legal or armchair Marxists, who would like to see Marxism as merely
another variant of philosophy and who treat it in a very eclectic fashion, as though
one is free to draw from Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equival­
ent, without looking at the class base and without looking at whether an ideology is
supportive of the status quo or not.
6. “Nonmaterial” is used instead of “immaterial” as per Amin (2014, 11). He speaks more
properly of the “output of services” as “nonmaterial.”
7. Varoufakis (2023, 191) claims that Marx only made “vague” references to socialism and
communism because he was among smart “middle-class intellectuals working in the British
Library reading room or chatting in their posh living rooms.” While this seems to be an
attack on Marx for his supposed “lifestyle,” no doubt Varoufakis conceives of Marx’s con­
ceptions as vague because he does not grasp how they are grounded in social and historical
ontology that functions as a critique of political economy.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
Matthew Herzog holds a PhD in comparative literature. He is currently a lecturer in the Depart­
ment of English Language and Literature at Jeonbuk National University in the Republic of Korea.
His research and teaching interests include French philosophy (Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Goldmann,
14
M. HERZOG
and Michel Clouscard), aesthetics and literary criticism (Georg Lukács, Christopher Caudwell, and
Juan José Sebreli), European history (Annie Lacroix-Riz, Jacques R. Pauwels, and Julián Casa­
nova), the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and French novel, global realist cinema,
and comparative medieval studies. He has published articles in journals such as English Studies
and Marxism 21.
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