Joel Kotkin. The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. New
York: Encounter Books, 2020. 274 pp.
David
A. Kopp (davekopp@dakopp.com)
In
today’s parlance, Feudal is the pejorative term of choice when
deprecating a modern economic or political situation by analogizing it with an oppressive
and stratified society of the medieval past.
In his recent book, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the
Global Middle Class, Joel Kotkin adopts the term to describe what he sees
as a disturbing concentration of wealth in the high-tech economy that has
created a modern serfdom “with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most
of the population.” If left unchecked,
argues Kotkin, this new feudalism threatens Democracy and Liberal
Capitalism.
Kotkin
defines medieval feudal structure using Marc Bloch as his guide: “a strongly
hierarchical ordering of society, a web of personal obligations tying
subordinates to superiors, the persistence of closed classes or ‘castes,’ and a
permanent serflike status for the vast majority of the population.” Kotkin’s new feudalism looks different (“no
knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords”) but has produced
the same economic result. Today’s nobility
are the tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft which control
more and more of the job opportunities in the modern technology and “data
landscape” much as the nobility of the medieval past controlled the agricultural
means and land of the enfeoffed peasant laborers. Collectively, these tech companies represent our
modern First Estate, and like their medieval parallels, they work to control
cultural messaging to their advantage through their manipulation of media
content. In this effort, they are aided
by the new Second Estate – the modern clerical class.
Kotkin
borrows from S. T. Coleridge for an updated term for the medieval clergy – in
modern times they are the “clerisy” of intellectuals. Their numbers include university professors,
scientists, public intellectuals, and heads of charitable foundations. Kotkin calls them the “cognitive elite” and “legitimizers”
of the agenda of the new nobility. Like
their medieval counterparts, they issue the “correct” worldview and can “excommunicate”
those who hold a heterodox opinion. New
faiths replace old. In the Middle Ages,
Christianity was the accepted ethos with its emphasis on the afterlife and the
Last Judgment warning of the grave consequences for those who sinned. Now there is the “green faith” predicting the
impending doom of the planet caused by human activity. It is literally a new apocalypse. Like St. Norbert in the twelfth century who
predicted the end of the world in his lifetime, “the environmental movement –
whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from
human materialism to looming catastrophe.”
Kotkin believes that the burden
of this new green orthodoxy to be borne principally by the working and middle
classes. Much like the wealthy prince
bishops of the Middle Ages who lived in luxury while preaching austerity, the
modern clerisy “urge everyone else to cut back on consumption, while the ‘green
rich’ buy a modern version of indulgences through carbon credits and other
virtue-signaling devices. This allows
them to save the planet in style.”
The
clerical elite and the nobility shared power in the medieval feudal era, just
as the nexus between the modern clerisy and the tech oligarchy share the power
in today’s Neo-Feudalism. They attend
the same schools. “On the whole, they
share a common worldview and are allies on most issues.” Their joint mission as the First and Second
Estates is to secure the submission of the Third Estate – the middle and
working classes. This they do by causing
an erosion in the faith of Liberal Capitalism or Liberal Democracy. “They seek to replace the bourgeois values of
self-determination, family, community, and nation with ‘progressive’ ideas
about globalism, environmental sustainability, redefined gender-roles and the
authority of experts.” An ensuing
pessimism within the Third Estate is the result of this effort, and, argues
Kotkin, it can be found in advanced economies worldwide.
According
to Kotkin, wealth stratification over the last ten years has accelerated
exponentially in nearly all the developed economies of the world – U.S.,
Europe, Japan, China, and India. It is undoing
the centuries of gains made by the middle class (who Kotkin calls the new Yeomanry)
when they emerged as the merchant and artisan guilds “to challenge the
aristocracy and even the clergy to drive democratic reform.” Homeownership rates are down among younger
generations across the globe, particularly in high population densities, where
more and more middle-class and working-class residents now live in tiny rental
spaces, in some cases created for them by the tech companies who want to keep
their employees on campus as the medieval peasants were kept on the demesne
of their overlords. The “green faith”
helps cultivate this “rental generation” by preaching against the “material
trap of suburban living and work that ensnared their parents.” Loss of data ownership is another sign of the
encroaching new feudalism. By handing
over large amounts of personal information to the big tech firms in exchange
for free services, the Yeomanry are becoming “digital serfs” living and working
in a world of data without any assets of their own.
The
working class (the “New Serfs”) is also suffering in Kotkin’s Neo-Feudal dystopic
vision. The original high-tech pioneers – Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and IBM – who
were praised for the treatment of their lower-level workers have been replaced
by a newer generation of feudal tech giants like Amazon which have turned the
proletariat into the “precariat” with
limited control over their working hours, forcing them to live on barely
subsistence wages. Kotkin sees in the
working class a simmering revolt as the bulwarks of their life are eroded by
the new left of the clerisy who care more about immigrations, globalization,
and green-house gases than the plight of the working class. Deteriorating family values, the influx of
migrant workers, lower education achievement of children, decline of
unionization, and lack of upward mobility are all contributing to a modern rebellion. In a chapter titled “Peasant Rebellions,”
Kotkin links the current times with those that led up to the noteworthy uprisings
of the Middle Ages. “Democratic
capitalist societies need to offer the prospect of a brighter future for the
majority Without this belief, more
demands for a populist strongman or radical redistribution of wealth seem
inevitable.”
Throughout
his book, Joel Kotkin brings evidence from global sources to support his claim
that the entire civilized world is facing the same threat. The breadth of his undertaking is impressive
and his knowledge of the history of class struggles in China, Japan, India,
South America and Europe helps to support his belief that wealth stratification
caused by super powers in the tech economy is reshaping the global
workforce. It is an interesting and
well-annotated read (there are end-notes for each chapter) for the student of medievalism
as applied to the modern social and economic landscape. The primary weakness in the book is what
appears to be a confusion by the author as to whether he believes Feudalism to
have been a one-time historical occurrence that is now “revived” or a continuum
of practice that persisted in various forms after the end of the Middle
Ages. Though he posits at the start, “Feudalism
is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited into
the historical dustbin;” he also acknowledges “the persistence of feudal
attitudes” in the Modern Era which continue to undermine democracy and
freedom. In this, he seems to agree
with Voltaire that “Feudalism is not an event; but rather a very old form
which, with differences in its working, subsists in three-quarters of our
hemisphere.”
David
A. Kopp, Drew University
