I. Definition
The New Middle Ages
The "New Middle Ages" (also neo-medievalism) is the claim that the modern era, defined by the nation-state, industrial capitalism, liberal democracy, mass citizenship, and Enlightenment rationality, is giving way to a social formation that structurally resembles the European Middle Ages, but with 21st-century technology.
The concept emerges from several sources. Umberto Eco, in his essay "Ten Little Middle Ages" (1973), argued that the Middle Ages serve as the West's unconscious. We constantly project our contemporary fears onto that period. Alain Minc's
Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (1993) saw the post-Cold War world as a return to pre-modern chaos: the disintegration of states, the rise of private violence, overlapping jurisdictions. Jan Zielonka applied the term to the European Union itself, a system of overlapping authorities, soft borders, and multiple levels of governance that more closely resembles medieval Christendom than the modern nation-state.
Techno-Feudalism
"Techno-feudalism" is the economic dimension of the New Middle Ages. The term has been developed most systematically by Cédric Durand in
Techno-Féodalisme: Critique de l'Économie Numérique (2020) and by Yanis Varoufakis in
Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023).
The argument is that the digital economy has produced a new mode of production that is no longer capitalist in the classical Marxist sense. The key shift is from profit (surplus value extracted from labor through the wage relation) to rent (tribute extracted from access to the network). The platform does not produce commodities; it
tolls every transaction that passes through it. Amazon takes a cut of every sale; Apple takes 30% of every app purchase; Google extracts your data and sells it. This is not surplus value — it is digital rent.
Durand identifies the following features of techno-feudalism:
- Monopoly by network effects: Winner-take-all markets where the value of the platform increases with the number of users, creating natural monopolies that function as private fiefdoms
- Extraction of data as tribute: Users generate the raw material (data, attention, social relations) which the platform appropriates without compensation
- Algorithmic governance: The platform's code functions as law, governing access, visibility, and opportunity without democratic oversight
- The end of the market: Competition is replaced by platform-directed allocation; price signals are replaced by algorithmic curation
Varoufakis adds that "cloud capital", the algorithms, networks, and server infrastructure of the platform economy, etc, has become the dominant form of capital. The "cloudalists" (platform owners) are a new ruling class that does not exploit labor in the Marxist sense; they extract rent from everyone — workers, consumers, small businesses, even the state itself.
II. How We Are Moving Toward the New Middle Ages
1. Economy: The Death of Labor as the Source of Value
Marx famously argued in the
Grundrisse "Fragment on Machines" that when "general social knowledge" (technology) becomes the main productive force, "labour in the direct form ceases to be the great source of wealth" and "production based on exchange value breaks down." Marx saw this as the condition for communism. Instead, it has become the condition for a new form of serfdom.
The evidence:
- AI is automating cognitive labor, programming, design, translation, accounting, legal research, medical diagnosis
- Robotics are automating physical labor, warehousing, manufacturing, delivery, agriculture
- The global labor participation rate is falling; the "reserve army of labor" is becoming a permanent surplus population
- Platforms extract rent from users who are not employed by them, the user is the serf, not the worker
What remains is pure algorithmic governance: the platform decides your value, your visibility, your opportunities, your desires.
2. Politics: The Dissolution of the Liberal Democratic State
The modern state (the product of the Peace of Westphalia and the Enlightenment) had three defining features: territorial sovereignty, the rule of law, and universal citizenship. All three are eroding.
The evidence:
- Overlapping jurisdictions: The WTO, the IMF, the EU, international arbitration tribunals, and the platforms themselves all exercise sovereign powers that cut across state borders. No single authority has full sovereignty, just as in the medieval arrangement where king, pope, duke, city council, and guild all had competing claims.
- Corporate sovereignty: Amazon's terms of service govern more daily interactions than most national legislation. Meta's content moderation is a form of jurisprudence. Google's algorithm is a form of administrative regulation. These corporations do not just influence the state; they are states in function.
- Private jurisdictions: Gated communities, corporate campuses, algorithmic curfews (China's social credit system), de-platforming as excommunication, these are private jurisdictions that apply to some people and not others, exactly like medieval liberties and franchises.
The liberal democratic state assumed that citizens were autonomous, rational agents capable of forming opinions and making choices. The New Middle Ages assumes that subjects are programmable, their desires can be manufactured, their attention directed, their behavior modified. The liberal state governed through law and persuasion. The neo-medieval state governs through algorithm and addiction.
3. Military: Elite Warriors Replace Mass Armies
The modern military was a mass army of citizens, the
levée en masse of the French Revolution, the nation in arms, total war. This is being replaced by a military structure that is functionally medieval.
The evidence:
- Elite professional warriors: Special forces, drone operators, cyber-warriors, expensive, highly trained, small in number
- Private mercenaries: Wagner Group, Blackwater
- The irrelevance of the population: The mass of the population is not armed, not trained, and not needed for defense. They are the civilian population , the terrain over which wars are fought, not the participants
The modern nation-state's monopoly on violence is fragmenting. Corporations have private security forces. Platforms have "trust and safety" teams. The line between public and private violence is dissolving.
4. Social: The Shrinking Middle Class and the Manufacture of Desire
The modern social order assumed a growing middle class, a public sphere of educated citizens, and autonomous subjects capable of collective action. All three are collapsing.
The evidence:
- The precariat replaces the proletariat: Permanent employment, stable careers, and the social safety net are replaced by gig work, intermittent labor, and debt dependency
- The two-class society returns: The platform owners and financial elites (the new aristocracy) and the mass of precarious, dependent users/serfs — with the middle class hollowed out
- Algorithmic manipulation of desire: This is the deepest parallel to the medieval church. The church controlled salvation — the ultimate desire. The platform controls social existence — access to recognition, information, and opportunity. The church had the confessional; the platform has surveillance. The church had excommunication; the platform has de-platforming. The church shaped the inner life of believers; the algorithm shapes the inner life of users. This is what Marx could not think of, but some later Marxists has touched this, combining classical Marxism and Lacanian psycho-analysis.
III. The Flaws of Marxism
Marxism is a product of the 19th-century Enlightenment, and it suffers from fundamental flaws that make it unable to analyze, let alone overcome, the present conjuncture.
Flaw 1: The Labor Theory of Value Is Obsolete
The entire edifice of Marx's critique of capitalism rests on the labor theory of value: only labor creates value; profit is surplus value extracted from labor; exploitation occurs in the wage relation. This theory fails in the age of techno-feudalism for two reasons.
First, value is no longer primarily produced by labor. AI, networks, and algorithms are the main productive forces. The user generates value (data, attention, social relations) without being employed. The platform extracts rent, not surplus value. The categories of Marx's
Capital — constant capital, variable capital, surplus value, the rate of exploitation, cannot capture the economics of the platform. Durand shows that we need new categories: data rent, network tribute, algorithmic surplus.
Second, the working class is no longer the primary exploited class. The proletariat (those who sell their labor power for a wage) is shrinking. The surplus population is growing. They are not exploited in the Marxist sense; they are excluded. They do not produce value; they generate data. They cannot strike (they have no jobs to strike from); they can only riot. But rioting is not revolution.
Flaw 2: The Theory of Crisis Is No Longer Valid
Marx predicted that capitalism would suffer from increasingly severe crises of overproduction: too many commodities, not enough purchasing power, leading to the system's collapse. This crisis theory assumes that the surplus must be realized through consumption. But the New Middle Ages has found alternative outlets for surplus that Marx did not fully theorize:
- War: Military spending absorbs massive surplus without producing commodities for consumption. The US spends ~$900 billion/year on the military — a sink for surplus that creates demand without overproduction.
- Entertainment and spectacle: The global elites need entertainment to calm their nerves. entertainment industry is >$2 trillion/year. Streaming, gaming, tourism, sports — these absorb surplus without creating the realization problem.
- The state apparatus: The modern state consumes 30–50% of GDP in OECD countries — health, education, welfare, bureaucracy. This is unproductive consumption in Marx's terms, but it stabilizes the system.
- Debt and financial speculation: The global financial system is orders of magnitude larger than the real economy. Debt allows consumption to be advanced against future surplus, delaying the day of reckoning.
Marx's prediction of capitalism's imminent collapse was a product of 19th-century conditions that no longer apply.
Flaw 3: The Revolutionary Subject Has Disappeared
Marx's theory of revolution depends on the proletariat as the universal revolutionary subject: they are the majority, they are concentrated by production, they have structural power (the strike), and exploitation creates the conditions for class consciousness. In the New Middle Ages, every element of this is undermined:
- The proletariat is no longer the majority. In the Global North, the industrial working class is a shrinking minority. The precariat, the service sector, and the permanently unemployed are the majority, but they lack the concentration and discipline of the factory.
- The strike is no longer effective. When a few thousand factory workers strike, production stops. But when a few million users stop using a platform, the platform continues. the network effects protect it. The user has no structural power.
- The surplus population cannot organize. The excluded are atomized, isolated in their devices, addicted to algorithmic feeds, and divided by identity. They have no collective discipline, no shared experience of production, no union, no party. They are a mass, not a class.
- False consciousness is built into the system. Marxism always assumed that capitalism's contradictions would eventually produce revolutionary consciousness. But the New Middle Ages has manufactured consciousness itself. The algorithm does not just sell commodities; it produces desires. The user does not experience exploitation as intolerable; they experience it as normal. Addiction is not false consciousness; it is manufactured desire.
Flaw 4: Marxism Inherited the Enlightenment's Faith in Progress
This is the deepest flaw, and the one that connects all the others. Marxism is the child of the Enlightenment. It inherited the Enlightenment's faith in:
- Reason and science: Marxism claims to be a science of history
- Progress: history moves forward through the development of the productive forces
- The autonomous subject: the working class can come to know its interests through reason and experience
- Universal emancipation: the revolution will liberate all humanity
The New Middle Ages is the death of the Enlightenment. The faith in reason is replaced by algorithmic irrationality. The faith in progress is replaced by the permanent present of the feed. The autonomous subject is replaced by the programmed user. Universal emancipation is replaced by global fragmentation.
Flaw 5: Marxism Has No Theory of the Transition to the New Middle Ages
Marxism theorized the transition from feudalism to capitalism (primitive accumulation, the expropriation of the peasantry, the rise of the bourgeoisie). It theorized the transition from capitalism to socialism (the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away of the state). It has no theory of the transition from capitalism to the New Middle Ages.
Yet this transition is happening. The platforms are the new feudal lords. The users are the new serfs. The data is the new land. The algorithm is the new law. Marxism has no categories for this. It can only say: "this is still capitalism" (denial) or "this is the final crisis" (wishful thinking). Neither is adequate.
