Critique: It’s Not Neofeudalism, It’s Hypercapitalism

Source: jacobin
Authors: ByStephen Maher
URL: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/neofeudalism-hypercapitalism-tech-production-economy

What the article reports

Stephen Maher argues in Jacobin that left-wing analyses characterizing contemporary capitalism as "neofeudal" or "rentier" are empirically and conceptually mistaken. Drawing on Marxist value theory, he contends that tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon earn commercial profit rather than rent, and that capital mobility and competitive equalization remain operative. The piece is a direct response to Dylan Riley's essay in Sidecar and, by extension, to the broader rentier-capitalism literature associated with Robert Brenner.

Factual accuracy — Adequate

The article's verifiable claims are sparse rather than falsified. The central empirical assertion — "the major tech firms … have not persistently earned above-average profits" — is attributed to "a recent paper in the Review of Radical Political Economics" co-authored by Maher and Scott Aquanno, which is real and checkable. The characterization of Dylan Riley's argument as appearing "in Sidecar" is accurate and specific. Attributions to Marx (the theory of rent, the equalization of the profit rate, "commercial profit") and to Anwar Shaikh ("war among firms") are consistent with those thinkers' published positions.

What holds the score below 9 is that the empirical linchpin — the profit-rate data on major tech firms — is asserted by summary reference rather than presented. A close reader cannot evaluate whether the paper's findings generalize beyond the studied period, which firms were included, or what "around the average" means quantitatively. The claim "research and development spending has grown" and "corporate investment remains high" are stated without any figures or citations. These are vague in the way the rubric penalizes even absent outright error.

Framing — Measured

1. "One of the most persistent left shibboleths" — Opening with "shibboleth" characterizes the opposing view as orthodoxy maintained by tribal loyalty rather than evidence. The word is evaluative, not neutral, and appears in authorial voice before any argument is made.

2. "conceptually confused and unsupported by the evidence" — A strong verdict on Riley's claims is asserted directly before the case for it is made. This front-loads judgment, though the piece does eventually substantiate the charge with argument.

3. "that is precisely the problem" — The closing line is the clearest opinion-coded moment: productive, competitive capitalism is itself the dystopia. This is an ideological conclusion stated as authorial voice. However, because this is Jacobin and the piece is clearly analytical-polemical in genre, the framing is contextually appropriate rather than disguised.

4. The piece is fair in one important respect: it grants Riley's foundational point ("the important point often associated with his coauthor, Robert Brenner") before disputing his conclusions, avoiding strawmanning at the definitional level.

Source balance

Ratio: 1 voice challenged; 4 voices marshaled in support of the author's thesis. No scholar who defends rentier-capitalism arguments (e.g., Brett Christophers, whose book Rentier Capitalism is the most cited recent treatment) is engaged directly. No economic data source independent of the author's own paper is cited. This is a recognizable genre — theoretical rebuttal — but the imbalance is real.

Omissions

1. Brett Christophers and the broader rentier literature. The piece treats Riley as representative of the neofeudalism/rentier thesis but does not engage Christophers, Mariana Mazzucato, or other scholars who have developed the argument with different empirical bases. A reader cannot assess whether Maher's rebuttal applies to the full body of work he implicitly dismisses.

2. The profit-rate data itself. The empirical core of the article rests on a single finding ("profits have gravitated around the average") from the authors' own paper, with no figures, no time range, no methodology summary. Readers cannot evaluate the claim independently.

3. Counterevidence on market concentration. The article asserts competition remains operative but does not address FTC or academic concentration indices (e.g., Herfindahl-Hirschman scores in digital advertising, cloud computing, or mobile OS markets), which critics would cite as showing barriers to entry that Marx's own framework would classify as rent-generating.

4. The political extraction dimension. Riley's argument (as summarized in the article) also involves "political extraction." The piece addresses rent and monopoly at length but largely drops this strand, leaving the strongest version of the opponent's case unanswered.

5. Historical context on prior debates. The article references "monopoly-capital" arguments without noting that this debate (Baran and Sweezy vs. competition theorists) has a 60-year literature that would help readers calibrate the novelty and stakes of the current dispute.

What it does well

• Internal theoretical coherence. The chain of reasoning from value theory to the rent/profit distinction to the equalization of profit rates is laid out step by step; the piece "shows its work" in a way that invites engagement rather than demanding assent.
• Engages the opponent's strongest premise. The article explicitly grants that Riley's foundational "all-round market dependence" point is correct ("the important point often associated with his coauthor, Robert Brenner"), which is intellectually honest and raises the quality of the critique.
• Specific definitional precision. The sentence "income derived from specific market advantages that can't be competed away" gives readers a testable definition of rent rather than a gestural one, which is a genuine analytical service.
• The closing inversion is rhetorically clear. "We are not facing a capitalism that is falling apart … And that is precisely the problem" announces its ideological stakes rather than concealing them — appropriate for the venue and genre.

Rating

Overall: 6/10 — A theoretically disciplined rebuttal that makes its case coherently within a Marxist framework but asks readers to accept a single self-cited empirical finding as the decisive evidence, while leaving the broader rentier-capitalism literature largely unengaged.