Feudalism - Capitalism - Communism

I've written on this before, but Musk's $tn pay deal gave me cause to reinforce the theme.

Feudalism didn’t collapse because of a revolution – it collapsed because it couldn’t keep up with its own offspring. For centuries it plodded along quite happily, lords lording, peasants ploughing, monks counting tithes, and everyone convinced that hierarchy was ordained by God. Then someone invented the market stall. From that humble plank of timber began the slow, unstoppable corrosion of divine order by common sense.

Trade did what theology couldn’t – it made obedience unprofitable. The moment a serf could sell a bushel of wheat in town and earn cash instead of scraping a living under a lord’s “protection”, the social contract cracked. City air, as the saying went, made you free – and it also made you solvent. Towns multiplied, merchants flourished, and lords, unable to collect a percentage of every market transaction, began to look suspiciously like parasites. They couldn’t expand their land holdings except by marriage or murder – their wealth was finite, their imagination static.

The rise of money was the real heresy. Feudalism was built on obligation, not currency. But coins and contracts didn’t care for lineage or divine right – only for whether you could pay. Once the Church itself started lending at interest (while denouncing usury, naturally), the whole pious edifice of mutual duty was reduced to a ledger entry. The knight’s sword gave way to the banker’s quill, and the quill was far sharper.

Then came the Black Death – God’s very own economic reform. With half the workforce gone, labour became valuable, and the peasants, smelling opportunity, began demanding wages instead of favours. The ruling class, being as shortsighted as ever, tried to legislate against reality with the Statute of Labourers. It failed, of course. You can’t pass a law against leverage. Revolts followed, serfdom cracked, and by the time Wat Tyler was cut down in 1381, the writing was already on the manor wall.

Feudalism lingered on, zombie-like, for a couple of centuries – long enough for monarchs to centralise power, bankers to invent credit, and merchants to colonise half the world. But its contradictions were fatal. It relied on a peasantry that no longer existed and an economy that had outgrown the manor. The market had escaped its chains, and the sword-arm of the nobility was now just a decoration at court. In the end, feudalism didn’t die in battle – it was outcompeted. Capitalism was its natural successor, born from its inefficiencies, baptised in its blood, and armed with the one thing the old order could never understand: compound interest. The world had moved from “who serves whom” to “who owns what”, and once that question was asked, the divine right of kings didn’t stand a chance.

But now capitalism stands where feudalism once stood – rich, powerful, complacent – and like its predecessor, it’s starting to creak under the weight of its own contradictions. The lords of data have replaced the lords of land. The vassal is now a “sovereign individual”, labouring not in the fields but in the feed, each of us tending our little digital strip under the watchful eye of an algorithmic landlord. Feudalism tied men to the soil; capitalism ties them to the screen.

And here lies its mortal flaw: speculation has replaced production. Once, profit came from building or making. Now it comes from betting. Value no longer emerges from the workshop but from the spreadsheet. Every dollar of speculative gain implies someone, somewhere, lost — a pensioner, a wage earner, a taxpayer footing the bill for the next bailout. Speculation has become the system’s theology: wealth without work, profit without purpose. When Musk can be awarded a trillion-dollar “performance” bonus for the market’s belief in his myth rather than for material output, we’ve crossed the Rubicon. Capitalism no longer manufactures goods; it manufactures faith.

Artificial intelligence is simply the final refinement of that detachment – the machine that eliminates the worker entirely. Capitalism’s crowning achievement is a system so efficient it no longer needs the people who created it. In its zeal to cut costs, it’s neatly sawn through the very branch on which it sits. The great capitalist loop – wages to spending to profit to reinvestment and back to wages again – only works if someone’s earning a wage. But AI doesn’t buy groceries, doesn’t need heating, and doesn’t go to the pub. It just sits in a server farm somewhere, churning out “efficiency” while the rest of us wonder why our savings app now sends us job adverts for delivery riders.

The “sovereign individual” was supposed to be capitalism’s hero. Instead he’s become its parody – a one-man brand fighting algorithms for visibility while pretending he’s free. His sovereignty exists only at the pleasure of the platform. He’s the new peasant, tilling data instead of soil, paying rent to the algorithmic landlord. And when his work is replaced by the very machine he helped train, he’ll discover that sovereignty without income is just solitude.

AI is capitalism’s mirror – it shows the system what it truly values, and it’s not people. It’s profit, purified of empathy or obligation. Yet this is the moment the game turns. When wealth creation no longer requires labour, the old moral justifications evaporate. You can’t say “I earned it” when your fortune is made by a cluster of GPUs. The fiction of merit collapses, leaving only power. And power without purpose doesn’t last.

Feudalism fell when its hierarchies couldn’t contain the new forces of trade and money. Capitalism will fall when its pursuit of profit destroys the very consumers who sustain it. The machine doesn’t revolt – people do. And when the surplus population realises it has nothing left to lose and everything to say, the next mode of production will be born, just as the last one was.

The manor gave way to the market. The market will give way to the algorithm. And when that, too, collapses under its own contradictions, the question will no longer be “who owns what” but “why own anything at all?”