Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the Social Manor

If not communism, what comes after capitalism?

The fact that communism did not prevail does not mean we are still in capitalism. In Capital’s Grave, Jodi Dean outlines how capitalist relations and forces of production are undergoing systemic transformation and transitioning into a different mode of production.

After forty years of neoliberalism, society has been afflicted up parcellated sovereignty, power distributed between new lords and serfs, and a process of hinterlandization. This has resulted in the everyday psychosis of catastrophic anxiety.

Bringing together analyses from different fields--law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis--Jodi Dean shows how the contemporary world’s different elements comprise a single tendency marking the direction capitalism is heading: neofeudalism. Feudalism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present. The question is: in a society of serfs and servants, how do we get free?

Jodi Dean teaches political, feminist, and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written or edited thirteen books, including The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party and COMRADE.