Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been tearing across the United States with their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies. This framing pairs condemnation of the Trump administration with a broader critique of inequality — a potent mix. Yet it isn’t without its critics. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) has criticized the turn of phrase, warning that ordinary Americans don’t know what “oligarchy” means. Trump’s critics, Slotkin says, should stick to the slogan “No Kings.”
Progressives arguing over whether we should only be talking about democracy and “kings” or the oligarchic power of the super-rich — that’s a stark reminder that our century is growing to resemble the 19th: a world of hyper-exploitation and overweening tycoons; trade protectionism and blatant imperial land grabs; constitutional instability and simmering class conflict. There is no better guide to such a juncture than the 19th century’s greatest dissident thinker, Karl Marx.
Marx’s value as a Virgil-like guide to the darker depths of our condition is highlighted by a pair of recent books: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold, which explores the role of republicanism in shaping Marx’s thought, and Capital’s Grave by Jodi Dean, which seeks to update Marx for a world that Dean thinks is starting to look less like the classical industrial capitalism he wrote about than a kind of high-tech feudalism. Though varying wildly in both style and substance, both books remind us that 19th-century debates about economic inequality remain all too relevant to 2025.
Polls suggest that Slotkin is, in fact, wrong about the limits of the public’s vocabulary. But the issue in dispute between her and Sanders and AOC goes deeper than semantics. Slotkin evidently wants to stick to what 19th-century radicals called the “political question” of democracy and authoritarianism, rather than broaching the “social question” of economic power and hierarchy.
Putting aside Slotkin’s concerns, the deeper problem with “oligarchy,” popularized by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, is that the term isn’t terribly specific. After all, most societies since the agricultural revolution have been “oligarchies,” in the sense of being dominated by one kind of elite or another. If we want to be precise, the better term hovering just offstage of most popular discourse is capitalism.
At the most basic level, capitalism is a system in which most economic enterprises are owned by private individuals (“capitalists”). The rest of the working-age population, in order to survive and reproduce themselves, are forced to sell their labor power like any other commodity in exchange for a price — wages. Nearly 160 years since it was first published, the most historically important analysis of what’s distinctive about this system remains Karl Marx’s masterpiece Capital.
In it, Marx argued that capitalism is similar to medieval feudalism, ancient slave societies, and so on in that “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or wage-laborers) have to perform “surplus labor” in addition to “necessary labor.” Necessary labor is the labor you do to meet your own needs and those of your dependents. Surplus labor is the time you spend laboring to enrich a ruling class, whether it’s made up of slave-owners, feudal lords, or modern capitalists.
Capitalism is dissimilar to these other systems in two ways, however. First, unlike feudal nobles who were just trying to extract enough for themselves and their families and retainers to live in luxury, capitalists are engaged in market competition with one another, giving them a bottomless incentive to squeeze every possible drop of labor from their workers. Marx memorably called this capital’s “vampire-like thirst” for surplus labor.
Second, unlike slaves or serfs who are legally bound to their masters, modern wage-laborers are “doubly free,” as Marx taught. They are free in the sense that they’re able to move around and make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them; they’re also “free” from any alternative means of supporting themselves.
As Marx documented in the last part of Capital, the British working class came to be “free” in this second sense through a long and brutal process of enclosures, whereby peasants were driven from their ancestral lands and forced into urban labor markets — a passage described in much greater detail by the Austrian economic historian Karl Polanyi in his magisterial The Great Transformation, first published in 1944.
Many non-socialist 19th-century radicals shared much of Marx’s diagnosis of the problems with capitalism. But they disagreed sharply with his proposed cure. They dreamed of reversing the process by which the working class had lost access to its own means of production. Bruno Leipold gives us a fascinating look at these debates in Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. The author, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, showcases the ways in which classical republican themes about freedom from arbitrary power influenced Marx’s own thought. Even so, Marx forged his own views in opposition to the leading “republicans” of his time (who played up the republican virtue of small farmers and small artisans and saw this as the basis of the society they wanted to bring about — or revive).
Nineteenth-century radical republicans were far from indifferent to the “social question.” But they worried that collective ownership by workers would turn into the subordination of workers by a tyrannical state. The experience of the deeply flawed and authoritarian experiments in state socialism that played out in the following century shows that this was indeed a valid concern, even if some of us continue to believe that better forms of socialism are possible.
Non-socialist republicans’ preferred alternative was to use various mechanisms, including leasing state-owned land to small farmers and establishing grants for artisans, to turn back the clock and restore small-scale production. Here, Marx’s side of the argument has been vindicated by subsequent economic history.
Factory and network effects involve increasing returns to scale, rendering mom-and-pop production simply irrational, not to say impossible, in the age of the machine. Rather, high-tech modern production involves the collaboration of vast numbers of people (often spread over a vast swaths of territory). There is no way to turn back that clock without a staggering reduction in the standard of living of working-class citizens of developed societies, and it’s difficult to imagine the workers of the world uniting to achieve less than they have under capitalism.
“It’s difficult to imagine the workers of the world uniting to achieve less than they have under capitalism.”
Even so, by the time he was doing his most mature work, Marx had absorbed much of the radical republicans’ point. In the historical sections of Capital, he praised England’s population of independent small farmers as “the proud yeomanry of which Shakespeare speaks,” who became the “backbone of Cromwell’s strength” during the short-lived British republic of the 17th century. But he argued that the only way to recover republican freedom under industrial conditions is for working people to collectively take over and democratically run the factories and large farms that were already becoming prevalent in his era.
Today, parts of this analysis are directly applicable to us. Other parts of Capital, though, can give a contemporary readers the same feeling they might have reading Charles Dickens novels: that they’re getting a lurid glance at an alien world that has, quite fortunately, receded into the past: only think of his harrowing accounts of child workers chained and flogged to keep them going into the 13th and 14th hour of labor, and other horrors of the kind.
The historical successes of the labor movement and the regulatory state in curbing such abuses are so enormous, in fact, that when we see a return of labor practices without these protections, we temporal natives of the 21st century are tempted to take up far older reference points. Discussing proposals for labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.”
Rendon is no economic historian, and he may have been simply reaching for a vivid way of evoking unjust forms of power and domination. But Jodi Dean takes the analogy seriously in her new book, Capital’s Grave: Neo-Feudalism and the New Class Struggle. In it, she argues that capitalism is in the process of giving way not to the collective ownership and workplace democracy Marx envisioned, but to a high-tech form of “neo-feudalism.”
Dean, a political theorist at Hobart and Smith Colleges, doesn’t go as far as to claim that our society today is already neo-feudal. But she does think that’s the direction in which we’re transitioning, and that the capitalist or semi-capitalist order around us already has many neo-feudal elements.
Feudalism and other pre-capitalist forms of class society involved a whole lot more direct, non-economic coercion than capitalism: witness the fate of the Hebrews under the Egyptian yoke. Although early capitalism did involve some brutalities of this kind, capitalism for the most part relied on what Marx called the “dull compulsion” of hunger to goad workers into the factory. This was progress, of a kind. Meanwhile, the imperatives of competition at least forced the exploiters to constantly innovate and make production more efficient.
Today, Dean sees the dialectic of history going into reverse. Rather than doing productive labor, the workforce of the 21st century is increasingly concentrated in the service sector, and capitalists are increasingly turning toward “accumulation strategies” that rely not on out-competing other capitalists through greater efficiency, but hoarding wealth through political corruption, rent-seeking, and predation. She sees an analogy to medieval kings enriching themselves through conquest, for example, in the process of “blitzscaling,” whereby wealthy investors pour money into companies like Uber with the understanding that they’ll be unprofitable for years as they undersell and obliterate the competition.
One problem with all of this is that, in seeking to update Marx’s analysis, Dean shows that she misunderstood it. Marx emphatically doesn’t exclude “service workers” in toto from the commodity-producing working class. In explaining the distinction between productive proletarians and unproductive servants, for example, Marx uses the examples of a cook in a hotel and a cook in a private home. The former is helping to generate the revenues out of which his capitalist is paying him. It’s hard to imagine that Marx could have picked an example closer to a Starbucks barista (the archetypal “service worker” in our time) without access to a time machine.
And a deeper problem is that so many of the trends Dean is talking about are reversions not to the pre-capitalist Middle Ages, but to the very form of capitalism Marx was writing about in the 1860s. What is Uber if not a high-tech application to the transportation sector of exactly the kind of casual and insecure labor practices previously tamed by organized labor and the regulatory state?
Nor did the monopolistic robber barons of the 19th century restrict themselves to accumulation strategies that would meet the approval of libertarian economics professors. Andrew Carnegie had no more scruples than Elon Musk about calling in political favors.
Dean sees “parcellated sovereignty” as loosely analogous to medieval practices of vassalage in everything from the rise of private security contractors to national sovereignty being limited by international treaties. But the Pinkertons that robber barons like Carnegie would bring in to crush strikes were far less hesitant about spilling blood than contemporary security contractors (at least in developed nations); and the most salient shift in recent geopolitics has been the collapse of the postwar system and the re-emergence of the kind of spheres of influence and land-grabs that defined the military and diplomatic histories of the 19th century. We even have a land war where one of the most hotly contested issues is the status of Crimea.
Finally, the 21st century increasingly resembles the 19th in the role of antitrust politics as a popular solution to the problem of economic oligarchy. Witness the enthusiasm of the mainstream American Left (and even portions of the populist Right) for the Biden administration’s crusading antitrust czar Lina Khan. In conditions where the logistics of production have made a quantum leap from those of 19th-century capitalism, though, the limits of this approach are more obvious than ever.
Antitrust may well deliver enough benefits to ordinary people as consumers to be worth the candle. But it can’t do much about the conditions in which the vast majority of the population spend their working lives. We can make firms as small as they can be consistent with the conditions of modern production, and it would still be mathematically impossible for most adults to make their living as owners, rather than workers. If the republic of labor Marx wanted can feel impossibly utopian given the current state of the Overton Window, a republic of small farmers and small artisans has long since become a technological impossibility as a matter of cold fact.
Whether a powerful workers’ movement of the kind that emerged around the world in the 19th century will coalesce in 21st-century conditions is an open question. The future isn’t settled. What’s certain is that, if labor doesn’t find new ways to assert itself, whatever comes next is going to be bleak.
