We are sharing a translation of an article by Louis Delamangue from the new French theoretical journal Armes de la critique, associated with the far-left political party Révolution Permanente (formerly part of the NPA). Delamangue criticises the common assumptions and political orientation informing the ‘citizens’ revolution’ advanced by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise (LFI), as well as Cédric Durand’s theory of technofeudalism. Drawing on the French radical republican tradition, Mélenchon’s citizens’ revolution rests on the idea that democratic renewal led by popular mobilisation can challenge a renewed oligarchy and found a Sixth Republic based on national sovereignty, social democracy, and ecological planning. Durand responded to similar objections to his theory of technofeudalism raised by Evgeny Morozov.
At an event organised by La France insoumise’s think tank Institut La Boétie entitled ‘Must We Do Without Digital Technology to Save the Planet?’ Jean-Luc Mélenchon was invited to discuss Cédric Durand’s latest book of the same title (2025). After a brief introduction, one of the hosts turned to Mélenchon and remarked: ‘There are affinities between what you write and what Cédric writes’. ‘From that point of view’, he asked, ‘can we say that there is a proximity between [his] analysis of technofeudalism and [your] analysis of tributary capitalism?’ Mélenchon agreed without hesitation: ‘Yes, absolutely! Cédric Durand is one of the key intellectual references for the movement around Insoumis thought’. How are we to understand this alliance between technofeudalism and the révolution citoyenne advanced by LFI? In what sense do these two theoretical orientations share a common outlook on the present state of capitalism?
People, networks, and tributary capitalism
One can credit LFI, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in particular, with according theory a singular importance as a compass for action in the French political landscape: ‘Without such a tool, we can only act blindly. Without this understanding, we cannot learn from past experience, and it is impossible to set a political agenda’.[1] Even though one may disagree with LFI, the fact that the party formulates theories that guide its action makes rigorous debate possible. In an article published in Le Monde diplomatique and Armes de la critique, Frédéric Lordon criticised LFI’s misleading anticapitalism. He lamented the displacement of the category of ‘workers’ – and thus of the productive dimension of the capitalist mode of production – by LFI in favour of that of ‘the people’. While this subject has already been widely discussed, I will supplement this critique by returning to the conception of the people that undergirds LFI’s project for a citizens’ revolution and by disentangling the line of argument developed by LFI – especially in Mélenchon’s recent Faites mieux ! (2024) (translated into English as Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2026)) which conceives the current phase of capitalism in neofeudal terms.
The historical genesis of the people
In his book, Mélenchon places himself in a materialist lineage that seeks to identify the fundamental social relations, the conflicts that arise from them, and, ultimately, the historical subject of modes of production: ‘The materialist tradition has a lot to tell us here: and we should never lose sight of the material basis of the new forms of conflict in which the people is the key actor’.[2] According to this materialist conception, the fundamental social relation in the capitalist mode of production is the capital-labour relation. This confers upon the working class a distinct strategic status, insofar as it occupies the very centre of the relations of production. It is precisely this status that the citizens’ revolution denies, promoting instead the people as ‘a participant in the mode of production’ and ‘the agent able to overthrow this mode of production and collectively to take economic life back in its own hands’.[3]
In the Insoumis account, the category of ‘the people’ is understood as a social construction situated within a given time and space. It is within the city, Mélenchon argues, that one can discern the embryonic forms both of the people and of capitalism – the two being theoretically intertwined. To justify this connection, he draws on the theses of commercial capitalism, which locate the earliest forms of capital accumulation in the development of long-distance exchange. This leads him to write that ‘The cradle of modern capitalism lay in the city states of medieval Europe. These cities increasingly specialised in trade’, and to conclude that ‘The city provided for the construction, reconstruction and constant reconfiguration of this system – all decisive tools for extending its reach, and most importantly for overcoming its crises’.[4] Yet these theses of commercial capitalism are far from self-evident, and major historiographical debates persist over the origins of capitalism. Drawing on chapter 24 of volume 1 of Marx’s Capital, scholars associated with the tradition of Political Marxism have instead emphasised the agrarian origins of capitalism in England and France.[5]
For these authors, the genesis of capitalism is explained less by the development of commercial exchange than by the expulsion of the peasantry from the land – that is, by the separation of the peasantry from ownership of the means of production. In short, what is decisive in primitive accumulation, understood as the emergence of new capitalist social relations, is the transformation of relations of production rather than the extension of market relations. And it is precisely here that the flaw lies at the heart of the Insoumis argument. By making the extension of market relations the driving force behind the emergence of capitalism, the analysis of capitalism’s phases becomes irredeemably confined to the sphere of circulation rather than that of production. The analytical focus is thereby shifted away from workers and towards the people.
The people: what content?
In Insoumis theory, ‘the people’ does not refer to the population of a country as a whole, but specifically to those who live in cities. The people are fundamentally defined by their dependence on the networks – whether electrical, transport, pipeline, digital, or otherwise – that traverse and organise urban life. The network-form, which in a sense combines all networks into one, is thus theorised as ‘the set of infrastructures through which the circulation and distribution of material and immaterial necessities are organised. In each case, they are defined by three components: some material container, the information that commands action and their physical circulation’.[6] For Mélenchon, the principal social antagonism in contemporary capitalism stems from control over these networks. A struggle to the death pits the people, who depend on access to networks in order to ‘produce and reproduce their material existence’,[7] against the oligarchy, which, by virtue of its ownership of the networks, enriches itself through that dependence. Against Marx’s analysis in Capital, the fundamental social relation of capitalism is therefore no longer capital-labour but people-oligarchy: ‘Access to networks thus establishes the fundamental social relationship between each of us and the whole society’.[8] This is why LFI’s electoral strategy rests on winning the urban vote: it is in these territories, after all, that the people are said to reside – the only force capable of ending dependence on networks and carrying out the citizens’ revolution.
For ‘the people’ to become a fully-fledged political actor – the historical subject of their epoch – Mélenchon argues that subjectivities must be shaped around the ‘distribution of wealth and access to networks’.[9] Replaying the old distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself, this reworking of subjectivity aims to transform the urban population – a mass of people not yet aware that they share common interests – into a genuine people conscious of its own interests and ready to become politically active. The political task LFI sets itself thus leads almost inevitably to a hierarchy of sites for the formation of class consciousness: no longer the workplace, but the city itself. ‘The new social consciousness is developing in connection to the wider people with whom workers rub shoulders at every moment of their lives’.[10]
Tributary capitalism and the digital network
Pending the citizens’ revolution, the people remain dependent on access to networks. And that dependence comes at a price. Because the people require access to networks in order to secure their social production and reproduction, they are compelled to pay network owners a sum whose amount is determined by the concentration of ownership. In trying to grasp the historical specificity of contemporary capitalism, Mélenchon rightly identifies the increasing concentration of capital within the global economy as one of its defining features:[11] fewer and fewer multinational firms control more and more of the world economy.
In his pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin had already underscored the powerful tendencies towards concentration and monopolisation in the capitalist mode of production. As Mélenchon notes, these tendencies are even sharper in the case of networks:
Moreover, the economic laws governing the operation of networks show that the tendency towards monopolisation seems unstoppable. The larger a network, the more branches and connections it involves, the higher the cost of its creation and the lower its operating costs. In these conditions, it would be absurd and counterproductive to double the efforts of an existing network.[12]
This produces a monopoly in which the owner exercises exclusive control over a network that the population, in the absence of any viable alternative, is compelled to use.
If one follows Mélenchon in accepting that this monopoly allows the owner to set prices virtually at will, it is difficult to accept the supposed implication of this assertion:
The owner can impose a price of their choosing, without running any risk and without users having any alternative. The nature of ownership is changing. There is no longer any question of capturing free labour. The price is no longer a function of the amount of exploited labour needed for production. It is, rather, a right of access to use the network. It is paid by those who do not own it to those who do. It is a tribute payment (emphasis added).[13]
This should give us pause. Let us recall that, for Mélenchon, the fundamental social relation is no longer one of exploitation but one of dependence. This directly contradicts Marx’s argument that exploitation arises from the capacity of the owners of the means of production to extract surplus labour from producers. Under capitalism, capitalists exploit workers by paying them less than the value of the commodities they produce. In other words, part of the labour performed by wage-earners goes unpaid: this is surplus labour, the source of surplus-value. When those commodities are sold, they make their ‘dangerous leap’ into the market; it is at that moment that surplus-value is realised and appropriated by capitalists.
For Marx, the sale price of commodities thus rests, in the last instance, on the exploitation of labour. The degree of concentration within a given sector merely changes how that surplus-value is divided among firms. In a monopoly situation – in which network firms increasingly operate – or where a firm enjoys some special advantage, it may capture a super-profit, that is, a profit above the average rate. Yet, in the citizens’ revolution’s account, the price relation established between the people and the oligarchy no longer reflects exploitation, but, rather, a simple right of access. Farewell exploitation; welcome access barriers! Has materialism become a customs officer?[14] How can Mélenchon justify this departure from Marx’s argument while preserving his materialist credentials?
But let us allow Mélenchon to continue: ‘In the age of networks, capitalism has revamped an essential practice of the feudal era’: tribute. ‘The private management of motorways does indeed function as a tribute in the sense of feudal society, and it mirrors its practices’ (emphasis added).[15] Feudalism within capitalism? Here, we reach the logical endpoint of the theory of the citizens’ revolution – and the point at which it intersects with the thesis of technofeudalism.
That convergence is all the more pronounced because the citizens’ revolution grants a privileged place to the digital network, where ‘Over the last fifteen years, companies in this sector have seized power globally’.[16] As we have seen, Mélenchon defines the network-form by three components, one of which is information that orders action. From the standpoint of the citizens’ revolution, the digital network has become the dominant network:
The Internet has become the essential network, the one that increasingly integrates the others. So the networking of all human activity is a constantly developing phenomenon, and it is becoming ever more central to society in general.[17]
The centrality of this network is reinforced all the more by the fact that:
Today, the most important desired value is the permanent collection of information about everything – and everyone. Of course, here the aim is to gain detailed knowledge of individual behaviour, such as will in turn allow for all manner of commercial offers.[18]
Hence:
Digital globalisation thus allows for a transformation of the process of capital accumulation itself. The extraction of surplus value is no longer essentially centred on raw production, but on the circulation between the different moments of its realisation. In this context, access to the means of this circulation becomes crucial. Here we can see the capacity of network capitalism to draw on a new source of accumulation: the tribute levied on this right of access.[19]
Capitalism thus increasingly takes on feudal garb as the digital network extends its hold, deepening the tribute extracted. The marriage between Mélenchon’s citizens’ revolution and technofeudalism is complete.
Technofeudalism or monopoly rent? Digital lords or imperialism?
Among the authors who have brought the concept of technofeudalism to prominence are Cédric Durand, Mariana Mazzucato, and Yanis Varoufakis – three economists with genuine political sway on the radical left.[20] In France, the thesis has gained acute visibility through a recent exchange in the press between Evgeny Morozov, in Le Monde diplomatique, and Cédric Durand in Contretemps, following a debate initiated in the pages of New Left Review. According to the technofeudal thesis, Big Tech has instituted a logic distinct from capitalism proper. The title of Varoufakis’s book is revealing in that respect: Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. By focusing on the dynamics of the digital sector, and, above all, its concentration and monopolisation, Varoufakis seeks to identify the dynamics of the world economy as a whole. In the technofeudal imaginary, the owners of digital monopolies have become digital lords, acting in ways broadly analogous to rent-extracting lords of the medieval period. But, this time, rent takes the form of a payment owed to digital lords as the price of access to digital platforms – what the citizens’ revolution calls tribute. Three lines of argument, corresponding to three core notions in the technofeudalism thesis, are mobilised in support of this claim: digital serfdom, the fusion of the economic and the political, and predation.
Under feudalism, the serf was bound to the land on which he was exploited by the lord. Unlike wage-earners, who are, at least formally, free to change employers, serfs cannot simply change lords; and, if they attempt to flee the land, the lord may pursue them and make use of violent coercion. The relation binding serf to lord thus takes the form of political servitude, of dependence. The technofeudal thesis argues that an analogous social relation now binds those inhabiting the digital domain to the owners of Big Tech. A relation of dependence has arisen, producing a form of algorithmic governmentality. By harvesting users’ data and curating content on that basis, Big Tech holds its users captive: ‘it is in this sense that we speak of digital serfdom: a reality marked by the omnipresence of these platforms in our daily lives and in business activity. As individuals, as consumers, as workers, or even as firms, we are in some sense captive, in a world closed off by the power of the spaces organised by the algorithmic governmentality of Big Tech’.[21] On this reading, intellectual monopolies extract value from their digital fiefdoms by virtue of their monopoly over their platforms. Under the technofeudal thesis, Big Tech is said to be capable even of subordinating states, undermining their capacity to pursue public policy autonomously.
Deepening the comparison with feudalism, proponents of this view argue that the specificity of Big Tech lies in its break with one of capitalism’s defining features: the separation between the economic and political spheres. In the capitalist mode of production, after all, direct producers – the wage-earning class – are exploited by the ‘dull compulsion’ of capital. Ordinarily, it is not necessary to deploy violence or explicit political subordination in order to set labour to work. It is ‘the spur of hunger’ that drives people into employment and exploitation in order to earn the wages needed for food, housing, and clothing.
In other words, the economic sphere remains primary in the process of capital valorisation. But, for the theorists of technofeudalism, that distinction is now collapsing. Because of the centrality of Big Tech and the rise of algorithmic governmentality – thus of a particular technique of power – we are supposedly witnessing a fusion of the political and the economic. Big Tech would thereby revive traits characteristic of feudalism, where serfs worked the land held by their lord. This time, the serfs who make up the digital serfdom would find their mobility constrained, since the more one uses a platform, the more costly it becomes to leave it.[22] Better, for example, to leave X collectively than to move alone to Bluesky.
The final key notion in technofeudalism is predation, which, in some sense, follows from the first two: ‘the hypothesis of technofeudalism holds that the dimension of profit appropriation becomes hegemonic. It takes precedence over the primary creation of profit’.[23] Intellectual monopolies would no longer invest primarily for the purposes of exploitation and the realisation of surplus-value, but, rather, in order to appropriate value already realised by their digital fiefdoms. ‘In this configuration, investment is no longer directed towards the development of the forces of production, but rather, towards the forces of predation’.[24] According to the defenders of the technofeudal thesis, the secular stagnation affecting Western economies, particularly European economies, is explained by precisely this mechanism. Instead of driving a dynamic of accumulation in which competing capitalists undertake productive investment to keep pace, intellectual monopolies would seek merely to control and appropriate part of the surplus. The result would be a zero-sum game, as under feudalism, in which the remuneration of intellectual monopolies is variously described as a ‘toll’ or a feudal rent. Thus, ‘The big digital services are fiefdoms from which there is no escape. This situation whereby subordinate subjects depend on the digital glebe is essential, because it determines the ability of the dominant to capture the economic surplus’.[25]
Theoretical slippages in technofeudalism’s account of rent
The conceptual crux of technofeudalism lies in the equation it draws between rent and feudalism: ‘The reference to feudalism refers to the rentier, or non-productive, nature of the mechanism for capturing value. This idea of rents prevailing over a properly productive logic can again be found in the case of intangible-intensive firms, and particularly platforms’.[26] But to treat rent as equivalent to feudalism is a mistake. Rent persists under capitalism despite the fact that it changes character in novel social-property relations. The theoretical vagueness of technofeudalism on this point has already been discussed elsewhere.[27] What follows is a reconstruction of the main elements of that critique.
Under feudalism, the exploitative relation between lord and serf takes the form of surplus labour appropriated as rent, by virtue of the lord’s title to the land. Under capitalism, by contrast, exploitation takes the form of surplus-value arising from the capitalist’s ownership of the means of production. From this standpoint, rent is not primary in the capitalist mode of production. But it has by no means disappeared. Rather, it appears only at a second moment, after surplus value has been realised. Rent is, therefore, a deduction from surplus-value, and dependent upon it. In other words, under capitalism, rent is a secondary relation involved in the distribution of surplus-value. Its secondary character makes capitalist rent qualitatively different from feudal rent, which was a primary relation because it directly constituted the exploitative relation itself. The term may be the same, but the content is not. One therefore cannot simply assert rent = feudalism, as both theorists of technofeudalism and the citizens’ revolution do.
One must, moreover, distinguish between the different forms of rent under capitalism: ground rent and monopoly rent. In the case of ground rent, the owner of a scarce, non-reproducible asset – for instance, cultivated land or an exploited mine – receives rent by virtue of holding title to it. Monopoly rent, by contrast, is temporary and may disappear once barriers to entry cease to keep competitors out. A patent, or some other form of legal protection, is one such barrier to entry and tends to produce a ‘natural’ monopoly. Firms that hold such patents thereby enjoy a temporary monopoly whose persistence depends both on legislation – and therefore on political support from states – and on the state of technology. One might think here of the French national railway service – the SNCF – which ceased to hold a rail monopoly once competition was introduced, underscoring the fact that even where ‘natural’ monopolies emerge – and rail is one of the classic examples invoked to illustrate monopoly rent – they remain dependent on decisions made by public authorities. Incidentally, this is also a shortcoming of the technofeudalism thesis, which imagines states as vassals of digital lords supposedly ruling digital territories to which states merely attach themselves.[28] Firms must, therefore, continue making productive investments, financed in part through monopoly rents, while also securing public support if they wish to become and remain monopolies.
When intellectual monopolies do receive rent, it is monopoly rent – temporary in character – not ground rent, despite what the technofeudal thesis suggests when it describes data generated through platform use as an ‘absolute scarcity’. One cannot, therefore, theorise the operation of Big Tech as the advent of a new logic, a new mode of production, one supposedly destined to endure and displace capitalism. Indeed, a recent OFCE study showed that Big Tech spending on R&D – a form of productive investment in national accounting – accounted for €127.5 billion of the €876.7 billion spent across the entire US economy, or nearly 15 per cent.[29] The dominant logic within intellectual monopolies thus appears not to be predatory appropriation but investment. To liken Big Tech’s revenues to ground rent makes it easier to invoke feudal analogies, with their language of serfdom and territorial conquest in digital form. But the evidence points in the opposite direction. Intellectual monopolies belong squarely within the logic of capitalist monopoly rent, not feudal rent, however formidable the barriers they erect against new competitors may appear.
The political power of capitalist firms
As we have seen, one of the claims made by proponents of technofeudalism is that the economic and political spheres have fused. That claim, it seems to us, is open to serious objection. For Cédric Durand, algorithmic governmentality and the absence of any public counterweight are said to produce ‘a displacement of the power of social organisation, which is handed over to Big Tech’ and, with it, ‘the extraordinary and growing capacity of these private actors to influence individual and collective behaviour’. This would, ultimately, lead to ‘this same movement to take political power further away from public institutions’ (emphasis added).[30]
The error committed by the thesis of technofeudalism with regard to the supposed fusion of the political and the economic lies in the meaning it assigns to the political itself. The theoretical shift characteristic of technofeudalism – from relations of exploitation to relations of dependence – seems to us to be at the root of this error. As with proponents of the citizens’ revolution, the thesis of technofeudalism posits a relation of dependence binding the digital peasantry to its new lords. It is the inability of this digital serfdom to escape the grip of those lords that is said to confer upon them enhanced political power, further reinforced by the vassalisation of states by digital platforms. The result, in this view, is the growing influence of intellectual monopolies. But is influence over the organisation of social life sufficient grounds for seeing this as a rupture with the logic of capitalism, under which the political and economic spheres remain relatively autonomous? We do not think so, for the history of capitalism is replete with instances in which monopolistic firms have exercised political power.[31]
More generally, the firm is by its very nature a political force whose effectiveness depends, in particular, on its weight within the economy – the local pétanque club plainly carries far less influence than employers’ organisations such as the Mouvement des entreprises de France (MEDEF) or the Association Française des Entreprises Privées (AFEP).[32] More fundamentally still, capital exercises political power everywhere and at all times. In a recent article, Benjamin Bürbaumer and Nicolas Pinsard have highlighted both the existence of a structural power of capital over the state and its strengthening in France since the 1990s.[33] In Book III of Capital, Marx characterises the capitalist state as a ‘relation of sovereignty and dependence’. In its modern form, the state controls a territory and thereby exercises sovereignty; yet it remains dependent on economic activity and on capital accumulation, and capital also wields political influence. It seeks to induce the state to organise a social order aligned with its immediate interests, or at least with the way capital understands those interests.
For a genuinely new mode of production to emerge, one that truly fuses the political and the economic, it would not be sufficient for firms – even monopolistic ones – to wield political influence. Rather, the relations of exploitation themselves would have to be simultaneously political and economic. Only under those conditions could one properly speak of a new mode of production.
Non-aligned movement of the digital age: a new convergence between technofeudalism and the citizens’ revolution
In a recent article, Cédric Durand warns of the dangers facing the progressive camp if it fails to confront head-on the question of intellectual monopolies:
By underscoring the hybrid character of tech firms, the concept of technofeudalism brings to the fore the destruction of administrative capacities as an imminent threat to any emancipatory political project. If nothing is done swiftly to counter the monopolisation of knowledge and coordinating capacities by the technological giants, political institutions will soon be stripped of all relevance, and the anticapitalist left of any strategic horizon.[34]
One cannot but be struck by these lines, and with good reason: in his most recent book, the author advances a strategy of class conciliation aimed at dismantling these intellectual monopolies, a strategy that has since been taken up by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In this respect, the argument harks back to the heyday of the French Communist Party, which in the 1970s called for political energies to be concentrated on breaking up monopolies. Today, similar appeals are being made for a non-aligned movement of the digital age:
We are aware of the consequences that must be monitored as a result of the already very real internationalisation of digital networks. It is therefore necessary, in our view, to work towards the creation, on an international scale, of a ‘non-aligned movement of the digital age’. The aim is to foster cooperation among states in order to develop digital solutions emancipated from Big Tech.[35]
In Durand’s own terms, the objective is to constitute an ‘anti-techno-feudal front’.[36]
These political proposals seek to revive the project associated with the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, where formerly colonised countries gathered in 1955 to assert their independence from the two superpower blocs, the United States and the USSR, and to condemn colonialism. In so doing, proponents of the citizens’ revolution and of technofeudalism advocate a form of national unity in order to initiate a project of digital national liberation. European countries, including France, caught in a relation of dependence on Big Tech, would thus have to unite with the other countries of the world – excluding the United States and China, which stand at the forefront of Big Tech – in order ‘to escape the process of digital colonisation’.[37] While this analogy with decolonisation movements strikes us as misplaced, it nonetheless appears as the political translation of their theoretical analyses. For technofeudalism is said to entail the fusion of the political and economic spheres, in which Big Tech would control digital territories analogous to the colonial conquests of the imperial powers, thereby reducing states dependent on access to these digital networks to a condition of vassalage.
Confronted with the digital peril, the decisive task of the citizens’ revolution would, ultimately, be to overturn the fundamental social relation. In Insoumis discourse, this is the relation between the people and the oligarchy; in that of technofeudalism, it is that between digital serfs and digital lords. The terms differ, but the citizens’ revolution and technofeudalism are, in fact, describing essentially the same relation. The dominated are users and consumers: those who require access to the networks but do not control them and must pay for the right of access. From this follow far-reaching political implications: consumers constitute a broader category than workers, and, therefore, Durand specifies the composition of the anti-techno-feudal front: ‘Such a front must include not only leftists but also other democratic forces, including fractions of capital at loggerheads with Big Tech. […] This strategy of sovereignty simultaneously implies a form of digital protectionism […] and a new technological internationalism’ (emphasis added).[38] This is a new internationalism in the form of an alliance between labour and national capital – and under the aegis of the capitalist state, no less. Durand even proposes using the tactic of the shareholder state: ‘if the nationalisation [of Big Tech] proves impossible, then at the very least representatives of the state must sit on their boards of directors’.[39] What the citizens’ revolution and technofeudalism ultimately propose, then, is that we abandon class struggle and the anticapitalist perspective in favour of a cross-class alliance aimed at dismantling intellectual monopolies. Bernard Arnault[40] – damned by the digital networks – on our side?
Conclusion
This critique of the citizens’ revolution and technofeudalism is necessary because their theoretical positions give rise to very concrete political proposals: national unity that would suspend – for how long, one wonders? – the class struggle between capital and labour. First, dismantle intellectual monopolies, and, only afterwards, confront capitalism.
This strategy leads to a dead end, because it allows those who hold power – the owners of the means of production and the capitalist state – to prolong their hegemony. The state is not neutral, either with respect to capital or with respect to the working class. As the Marxist Claus Offe argued in 1974, the capitalist state is marked by a structural selectivity that drives it, on the one hand, to support capital accumulation and, on the other, to weaken the self-organisation of the working class. To call, then, for a non-aligned movement of the digital age on the basis of a cross-class strategy under the aegis of the state, as both the citizens’ revolution and the thesis of technofeudalism do, is, in reality, to undermine any revolutionary strategy.
It is all the more necessary to reconnect with the political grammar of class struggle given that the share of wage-labour in the economically active population has never been greater in French capitalism. In 1960, wage-earners made up roughly 70 per cent of the workforce; by the early 2020s, wage-earners accounted for around 88 per cent. The task of unifying our social class has never been more pressing. To do so, and to make sense of the contemporary phase of capitalism, it is better to rely on materialist analyses. The search for some supposed reactivation of feudalism within capitalism, and thus for the advent of an improbable and obscure mode of production, only clouds both our understanding and our ability to identify potential political forces. For it is neither among ‘the people’ nor among digital serfs that such forces are to be found. The working class, understood in its inclusive sense,[41] alone is capable of freeing itself from the domination of the capitalist state and from capital’s exploitation – provided, however, that it transforms itself into a hegemonic subject and develops a strategy of self-organisation capable of overthrowing capitalism.
[1] Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, trans. David Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2026), 3.
[2] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 163.
[3] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 163.
[4] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 119–20.
[5] See in particular Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present 70, no. 1 (1976): 30–75; Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002); and Nicolas Pinsard, “The Absolutist Origin of Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation and Rent in France (14th–17th Centuries)”, Revue de la Régulation – Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs 36 (2024), Varia.
[6] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 139.
[7] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 163.
[8] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 149.
[9] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 151.
[10] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 159.
[11] A recent study by Matej Bajgar, Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris, Chiara Criscuolo, and Jonathan Timmis (2025) demonstrates empirically that both the American and European economies have undergone a process of concentration since the beginning of the millennium. See Benjamin Bürbaumer and Nicolas Pinsard (2025) for the French case.
[12] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 222.
[13] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 222.
[14] To be entirely fair to Mélenchon, he is at one point seized by a theoretical impulse that leads him to speak of super-profits in the case of these monopolies, thereby cutting against his own theory of the citizens’ revolution, only to abandon the notion again immediately in the remainder of the book: “This is why we can see super-profits in these sectors.” Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 223.
[15] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 222–23.
[16] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 224.
[17] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 135.
[18] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 136.
[19] Mélenchon, Now, the People!, 216.
[20] Cédric Durand holds the chair in economics at the Institut La Boétie, the La France insoumise think tank devoted to the critique of digital capitalism. Mariana Mazzucato occupies advisory positions with various nation-states and international organisations, including UNESCO, the WHO, and the United Nations on economic and social affairs. Yánis Varoufákis, for his part, served as economic adviser to Giórgos Papandréou, Greek prime minister from 2009 to 2011, before being elected deputy under the SYRIZA banner and becoming minister of finance in the government of Aléxis Tsípras in 2015.
[21] Cédric Durand, Faut-il se passer du numérique pour sauver la planète ? (Paris: Amsterdam, 2025), 41.
[22] Cédric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy, trans. David Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2025), 175.
[23] Cédric Durand, Faut-il se passer du numérique pour sauver la planète ?, 48.
[24] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 175.
[25] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 182.
[26] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 184.
[27] S. Lebayle and N. Pinsard, “L’économie numérique : une involution du mode de production capitaliste ?,” Revue de la régulation. Capitalisme, institutions, pouvoirs 30 (2021); K. Saito and R. Sasaki, “Rentier Capitalism, Technofascism and the Destruction of the Common,” Area Development and Policy 0, no. 0 (2025): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/23792949.2025.2557911.
[28] Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (London: Bodley Head, 2023).
[29] S. Bock, A. Elewa, L. Nesta, and E. Salies, “L’Europe sous contrainte : des coûts maîtrisés, des gammes entravées”, OFCE Policy Brief 148 (2025).
[30] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 204–5.
[31] The magnificent and horrifying documentary film A Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, directed by Johan Grimonprez and constructed from historical archives, offers a chilling illustration. Although the young Republic of the Congo secured political independence from Belgium in 1960, with Patrice Lumumba as its first prime minister, the immediate postcolonial period was marked by the return of Belgian power and by the intervention of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga in the coup that brought Mobutu Sese Seko to power from 1965 to 1997. Union Minière, which continues to operate today under the name Gécamines, was at the time extracting copper, cobalt, and uranium, among other resources, for export to the United States, where they were used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. It was a Belgian firm based in the Katanga region, in the south of the young republic. Only one month after the proclamation of independence of the former Belgian Congo, Katanga seceded from the republic governed by Lumumba. Union Minière financially supported the secessionist government, paid Belgian, French, and South African mercenaries to maintain a social order favourable to the interests of the former colonisers, transferred mining tax revenues to the government of Moïse Tshombe, and provided logistical support through its own infrastructure. No small matter. Were one to speak of political influence, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga exercised a decisive influence over the social order within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and thus over individual and collective behaviour. But does this make it a case of techno-feudal logic? Certainly not. It is, in unvarnished form, a case of imperialism. Closer to home, one might also think of the Dassault family, which has occupied, and continues to occupy, positions of political responsibility. Serge Dassault, former CEO of the Dassault Group, was for instance placed under formal investigation for vote-buying in the municipal elections of Corbeil-Essonnes in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Here, again, we have a direct and perfectly unambiguous influence over social organisation and over individual and collective conduct. Did Serge Dassault behave like a feudal lord? No: like a capitalist industrialist.
[32] AFEP stands for Association Française des Entreprises Privées, a lobbying organisation representing the employers of CAC 40 companies. This employers’ association is more hard-line than the well-known Mouvement des entreprises de France (MEDEF).
[33] B. Bürbaumer and N. Pinsard, “The Corporate Welfare Turn of State Capitalism in France: Reassessing State Intervention in the French Economy, 1945–2022”, Economy and Society 54, no. 2 (2025): 283–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2025.2506268.
[34] Cédric Durand, “Où le numérique nous emmène-t-il ? Réponse à Evgeny Morozov,” Contretemps, October 2025.
[35] Jean-Luc Mélenchon, “Pour que la pensée artificielle reste sous protectorat humain,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, le blog.
[36] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 209.
[37] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 209.
[38] Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism, 209.
[39] Durand, Faut-il se passer du numérique pour sauver la planète ?, 91.
[40] Translator’s note: Bernard Arnault is a French capitalist and chief executive of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate.
[41] That is, workers who sell their labour-power in order to live and who do not participate in capital’s chain of command. The working class therefore includes industrial workers, employees, the unemployed, and part of the managerial and intermediate professions that have undergone proletarianisation. See Emmanuel Barot and Juan Chingo, “La classe ouvrière en France. Mythes et réalités,” Révolution Permanente (2011).
