Tag Archives: classes

Harold Perkin, Donald Trump, and the Age of Corporate Neo-feudalism

1 Jun 2026 By in History, Ideas Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Satirical cartoon from Puck's magazine in 1885, depicting a handful of powerful men carving up a continent and all its goodies.

It must have been in the late 90s. I was living in Hyde Park, and a friend invited me to a private lecture that Harold Perkin, a distinguished British historian, was giving. Perkin, who died in 2004, was pretty much the father of English social history. He was the very first person hired in the British university system to teach the history of society. His main scholarly work, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, established his interest in how industrial forces impact national characteristics such as class. Perkin’s passion for this subject had burned unabated since the book was first published in 1969.

The Perkin I saw was elderly, but his ideas were fresh and forward-looking. Now at the end of his career, his thoughts were trained on modern capitalism and its capacity to overwhelm political systems, impairing the enhanced freedom and power that individuals have enjoyed since the birth of market economies. Essentially, Perkin believed that contemporary global capitalism and its leaders represented an engrossing, trans-national system that no nation-state could match. He saw the rise of a hyper-wealthy elite as transforming society in ways that would impoverish and limit the majority. This was to be the subject of a book, one that Perkin get to write before he died.

The historical process whose implications Perkin had begun to lay out is now being felt across American society. The internet, the rise of real-estate investment “trusts,” the wealth gap, the economic dominance of a handful of monopolistic tech companies, the growth of cryptocurrencies, and, finally, AI: these developments and the people behind them are dictating the course of the United States. This new capitalist formation runs according to its own rules, which many of us lack the deep expertise to understand or discuss. Since Perkin’s time, this many-sided process has been given a name: corporate neo-feudalism.

Here are the hallmarks of corporate neo-feudalism, according to Google AI:

  • Extreme stratification, with a tiny elite commanding many essential resources and a majority owning nothing.
  • Rent-extraction and the development of a rentier class: corporations do not transfer ownership of goods or technology to individuals, instead requiring them to rent access to essentials such as software, information, and utilities.
  • Coercive legal agreements that blur and erode the individual’s rights of ownership, free speech, and privacy, such as the contracts that come with electronic devices, smart appliances, and cable TV.
  • A subversion of democratic power, whereby corporate interests pour so much money into lobbying and other forms of political patronage that citizens’ needs are irrelevant, their distinct interests ignored.
  • The privatization of essential “public goods,” such as information, health care, and household utilities, so that, to subsist, citizens must pay what corporations demand or go without, creating a perpetual dependence on self-interested capitalistic entities.
  • Arguably, these developments could reduce ordinary people to the status of serfs, by whittling away their capacity for truly “free” expression, upward mobility, or agency. Existence, independent of what corporations supply, becomes impossible, unthinkable. Essentially, tech is birthing new means of capital production–new, wealth-producing “tools” absorbing the resources of all for the benefit of a few.

The paradigm of corporate neo-feudalism is extraordinarily useful, even if it doesn’t hold true in all its details, and even if citizens remain convinced of their undiminished independence—for now. Corporate neo-feudalism gives a name to the changes Americans see taking place around them, as when local governments take the side of deep-pocketed corporations to create AI data centers; or when President Trump talks about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of respecting it as a Palestinian homeland.

In general, we can see how “corporate neo-feudalism” describes the types of people and interests that organize the president’s ambitions, policies, and world-view. He identifies with a hyper-wealthy elite who are birthing a new sort of mass society. He wants to be a respected leader among those “geniuses” intent on engrossing all the world’s goodies and creating new forms of wealth and money, without respect for niceties like Constitutional government, the health of the planet, or the people’s will. Trump is using the presidency not just to add to his fortune (initially based on old-fashioned real-estate), but to catapult himself upward into a nose-bleed social class, where his peers are not republicans but free (rogue) agents like Musk, Altman, MBS, Putin, and Xi. To Trump, enriching himself and cementing his position within this new world order matters much more than his fellow-citizens do. Trump consistently looks past the nation-state, and cares not a jot if, in the eyes of Americans, his actions are thoroughly corrupt. A trans-national miscreant, Trump knows he can easily transcend our rule of law.

This new economic profile of the US matters because our republican form of self-government pre-supposes widespread independence and prosperity. American government has a circular quality, in that a big part of its purpose has always been to create a populace that is educated, capable, and prosperous, because it is from the people that each generation of leaders must rise. Citizens must be autonomous, discerning, and well-informed to be self-governing; if they are consigned to a dependent, servile class instead, the future of American federalism will be bleak indeed.

When Trump promised the nation a “Golden Age” in his second inaugural, was it “corporate neo-feudalism” that he had in mind? This term, along with Trump’s fondness for tariffs and other grandiose qualities, recall the Gilded Age, that glitzy, vulgar period following the end of Reconstruction (1876) and the waning of the idealism of the Civil War. The late-nineteenth century was characterized by revolutionary innovations (think railroad empires, steel manufacture, the birth of oil, the use of telephone and telegraph, and the commodification of agriculture), which, in turn, generated great wealth disparities, political corruption, and a long stretch of low, lost politics. Captains of industry amassed unimaginable fortunes, running roughshod over flat-footed officials and callously exploiting the powerless with impunity. The political mind of America just couldn’t keep up. Will this be the case in the Golden Age, too?

Image: Fred Opper’s 1882 illustration for Puck,
“Monopoly Millionaires Dividing The Country,”
from this source.

A Touch of Covid Immobilizes

14 Oct 2022 By in Autobiographical Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

It’s my turn to have a covid infection.  I developed a cough on the eve of an appointment to get the bivalent vaccine.  Just a little cough.  So I took a home test and was surprised when it showed a faint positive line.  No bivalent vaccine for me.

So, the immobility.  I retreated to the guest bedroom Wednesday, where I’ve been since, except for venturing briefly (in a mask) to other rooms for necessities.  No TV.  If I stay here for five days, the minimum period of self-isolation that the CDC recommends to anyone who tests positive or has covid symptoms, it will represent an immobility utterly new to me.  Never have I been confined to one room for days at a time.

The utter absence of bedside companionship makes it strange.  No one to come in with chicken broth or sit in the corner to pass the time.  My going out to lie on the sofa in the living room is out of the question, too.  If I had an ordinary flu or cold, such would be my choice for seeing it through.

The isolation covid requires is elaborate and severe.  It’s no wonder that household infection rates are so high (50% or more).  Most families lack the room that the authorities say a self-isolating covid patient requires.  Not every household has a bed and bathroom to devote to self-isolation. Also, the goal of keeping the covid patient isolated from others at meals is attainable only if eating schedules can be staggered or someone else can wait on the covid patient in his or her room.  This is impossible if a household is cramped or its members have other obligations.

No wonder many Americans dismiss or ignore the official guidelines.  For thousands, these guidelines are impracticable, outlandishly so.  Space considerations aside, many workers can ill afford to stay home for so many days; those without sick leave forfeit their pay.

Global forces have found their way into my guest room via my lungs.  Large events, such as covid, the January 6th insurrection, and the war in Ukraine, define our times historically.  These vast, complex dramas, which are too large for any ordinary person to influence or control, have powerfully and lastingly transformed the tenor of our milieu.  Yet, even as covid sweeps over society and every one of us individually, its effects on us are isolating.  Just as covid’s dangers have jeopardized the institutions and customs that define society, so masking divorces us from one another.  Being sick with covid not only removes us from society; it disrupts our households and families.  Official policies regarding covid estrange people from one another and challenge individuals to live according to scientific standards at the expense of their own time-honored ways.

The nation’s response to covid is not necessarily objectionable.  It can be defended on humanitarian grounds.  At the same time, I get why segments of the population view the fight against covid as quixotic and ineffectual.  Even as I adhere to prevailing guidance (which I need my doctor to interpret for me), I’m aware of its byzantine, hieratic qualities, which make compliance a kind of luxury.

Society

20 Dec 2012 By in Reading old photographs Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

A street in Ireland, 1907 (Courtesy National Library of Ireland via the Commons on Flickr)

Among the hundreds of historical photographs I’ve looked at this week, this one stands out, jarring my sensibilities, its everydayness so strikingly at odds with ours.  Whereas many historical photographs appeal because of their near-resemblance to the life we know, others are fascinating in their strangeness, in their capacity to demand independent consideration.

So it is with this photograph from the National Library of Ireland.  It shows a muddy street in the port city of Waterford, where teamsters are conveying several carts of live turkeys up from the wharves.  Their destination may be a local poultry store, where the turkeys were likely to be sold to customers live, then kept at home and butchered by those in the kitchen for the holiday meal.  The date is December 16, 1907.  To have a rich turkey feast was then, as in Dickens’ time sixty years earlier, a singular joy and a sure token of prosperity.

There was a different appearance to a street.  The bricks of the gutter are evident, but the rest of the paving is scarcely visible beneath a thick layer of mud and animal waste, which night crews may have periodically combed smooth.  The only conveyances in sight are carts and wagons, though elsewhere, we know, automobiles were beginning to appear.  Besides teamsters hauling goods away from the harbor, the only other traffic is a pair of ladies in decent hats, driving themselves on their calls and errands.

The real point of interest, though, is along the curb, where we see a barefoot boy standing in the road.  He and his friend may be hoping to earn a few coins by helping the teamsters unload the turkeys.  Just a few feet away are a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and behind them are a trio of poorer, working-class women known as ‘shawlies.’  Whereas the lady has a proper overcoat or wrapper and a fur hat, the other women go about with their heads and bodies unceremoniously wrapped in shawls for warmth.  They carry baskets.

Class was different then, as clothing and shoes and manners marked out very visibly just how different one type of person was from the other.  Though the classes rubbed elbows much more intimately than they do today, the gulf between rich and poor was more evident and less was done to ameliorate it, to ease the suffering of the barefoot and hungry.

Image from this source.
Click on the image to enlarge it.