Rent, Modes of Production, and the Debate on Technofeudalism

Is rent-extraction a category internal to capitalism — or does its dominance signal that capitalism has given way to something else? That question runs beneath every recent claim that Big Tech has ushered in a new "technofeudalism." Red Mole Guide No. 6 answers it from the ground up, in four connected parts. Part I rebuilds the classical apparatus. What, for Marx, individuates one mode of production from another? The mechanism by which surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producer — which is why feudal rent and capitalist ground rent, though they share a name, are opposites. Feudal rent is the surplus itself, seized by extra-economic coercion from a producer who holds his own means of subsistence. Capitalist ground rent is a share of a surplus value already produced by wage labour and merely redistributed. Rent under capitalism is, in short, a thoroughly capitalist category; Marx's critique of the "trinity formula," with its ghost-walking Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, is the standing warning against mistaking it for anything else. Part II maps the contemporary debate without collapsing it — from Yanis Varoufakis's "capitalism is dead" and Jodi Dean's neofeudalism, through Cédric Durand's more careful "mutation within late capitalism," to the critics who refuse the feudal name outright: Evgeny Morozov, Brett Christophers, Cecilia Rikap and Ugo Pagano, Riley and Brenner's "political capitalism," Frédéric Lordon and Nicholas Gane. It reconstructs the live 2025 exchange between Morozov, Durand and Lordon. Part III takes the strategic questions a Trotskyist cannot dodge. If the enemy is a "feudal" rentier caste, four dangers follow: a popular front of "productive" against "parasitic" capital; a materialism that runs history backwards; democratic demands counterposed to socialist ones, reviving stageism; and a reactionary "feudal fascism" whose capitalist class content the label conceals. Each is weighed against Trotsky's Transitional Programme and his distinction between fascism and Bonapartism. Part IV is a dossier: the annotated primary exchange, a consolidated reading list, and a frank statement of what is verified and what remains contested. Analytically rigorous, primary-source grounded and written from within the Fourth International tradition, this is a working guide for anyone trying to think clearly about rent, monopoly and digital capitalism — without losing the thread that the enemy has not changed its mode, only its manners.