Imperialism in its desperate final phase resorts to methods reminiscent of feudalism.
Monopoly capitalism still prevails, nevertheless.
We are not facing a new feudal mode of production, but monopoly capitalism in its most destructive form.
In his work 'Imperialism', Lenin showed how banking and industrial capital merge into a financial oligarchy that controls economic and political life under imperialism. This was – and is – the class dictatorship of the monopoly capitalists, in which the smaller capitalists must assent to playing second fiddle.
The first two points in Lenin's brief definition of imperialism are:
1) The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high degree that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
2) The fusion of banking capital with industrial capital, and the establishment of a 'financial oligarchy' on the basis of this 'finance capital'.1
A little over a hundred years later, this is obviously the reality, except that the concentration of capital and the dominance of the new finance capital have become far more extensive than was the case in the time of Lenin. Now this dictatorship appears in part in a new form and with a new elite stratum within the class of monopoly capitalist proprietors.
The era of the tech oligarchs
Tech oligarch was the new word of the year in 2025, according to the Norwegian Language Council. At the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States in January 2025, the VIP tribune was filled with the mightiest of these tech oligarchs. The direct link between the government apparatus and finance capital has rarely been more evident.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, etc. represent a technology industry that forces other capitalists, workers and the petty bourgeoisie into a unique symbiotic relationship. This is a new phenomenon and a new feature of the imperialist stage of capitalism that neither Marx nor Lenin could have imagined. For lack of a better term, we’ll call it techno-capitalism.
The personal union between the top echelons of finance, industry and the state apparatus is abundantly clear even in the most democratic countries. The representatives of monopoly capital walk in and out of the revolving doors between banks, finance, industry and government offices. This is also the case in Norway. It is a fiscal oligarchy that swaps hats and contracts between themselves.
Nevertheless, something new is happening with the technological AI revolution. The new oligarchs, especially in the US, do not even bother with revolving doors and role changes. They do not try to hide the fact that they have an iron grip on politicians, industry and financial markets. They boast about it.
Does new technology and artificial intelligence (AI) mean that we are entering a post-capitalist mode of production, i.e. a completely new type of productive social relationship that is neither capitalism nor socialism? Several "socialist" theorists and economists claim this to be the case.
If so, then Marx and Lenin were wrong, as they believed that socialist (communist) society was the necessary next step after capitalism. Admittedly, the qualitative leap to socialism and communism would undergo different forms of transition in different countries, but not with any intermediate economic systems or modes of production.
The former Greek finance minister and leader of Diem25, Yanis Varoufakis, is one of those who most vociferously argues that "capitalism is dead". According to him, we are entering into production relations that are replacing capitalism with something even worse, and which offer little hope for socialism at all. According to him, capitalism died in 2008 and its final funeral took place during the pandemic.
"Humanity is now being taken over by something I can only describe as a technologically advanced form of feudalism. A techno-feudalism that is far from what we had hoped would replace capitalism," he writes in his book Technofeudalism.2
The book deserves its own review, for which there is no space here. Varoufakis, who describes himself as a "liberal Marxist", makes many important and interesting observations. But his conclusion about the end of capitalism is wrong and premature – and therefore a dangerous distraction. He has no other answers to offer than "decentralised markets" and "self-management", which is to say a repetition of defeatism and reformist illusions.
The commons that disappeared
The Internet, the World Wide Web, digital platforms, artificial intelligence (AI); by the end of the 20th century, it seemed that humanity had gained a new commons available for all. Most of it was free, or almost free, and accessible to anyone with a PC and an internet connection. Ironically, the Pentagon contributed to the creation of a new global commons because of the opportunities it offered to obtain information as well as to share information for research purposes.
When something seems too good to be true, there is usually a catch. We are now seeing a repeat of what happened to the commons with the rise of capitalism in England and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Only in a far more sophisticated and partly "invisible" form.
What were once open and cultivable communal lands were fenced in and privatised. Poor farmers were deprived of their livelihoods and could now only eke out a living as proletarians in the industrial factories of emerging capitalism, or as agricultural labourers.
"The systematic theft of communal property was of great assistance in swelling large farms and in 'setting free' the agricultural population as a proletariat for the needs of industry." (Marx: Capital.)
Similar processes in the form of "land grabbing" and privatisation of common property have more recently taken place on a large scale in the former Soviet Union, particularly in Russia and Ukraine.
Today, something similar is happening with the commons we know as the internet, with its fibre cables, server parks, ISP providers, search engines, apps, streaming services, etc. The so-called "cloud", which holds millions of terabytes of data, i.e. physical data centres and server parks, is already in the process of being monopolized by companies such as Apple, Meta, Google and Amazon.
Many of the data centres are located in Norway due to the abundant power supply and favourable temperature conditions for the server parks. In August 2025, there were 73 such centres registered in Norway, according to the Norwegian Communications Authority (Nkom). This was an increase of 25 per cent from the previous month (58).
The processing power needed to meet the expectations of power- and data-consuming artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency in its many forms is enormous – and this has driven the share prices of companies such as Nvidia and Intel to astronomical heights on the New York Stock Exchange. This makes the already staggering investment costs in the new technology even greater.
AI investments alone now account for 40 per cent of total growth in US GDP. A full 80 per cent of all share growth in the US comes from the major tech companies investing in AI. A recent MIT study showed that 95 per cent of the 300 largest AI companies in the US have so far had a return of zero dollars.3 This sounds like a recipe for a bubble. But the investment rush continues for now.
Google is investing over NOK 6 billion to build one of the world's largest data centres and associated infrastructure in Skien on a 500-acre site.4 The centre is scheduled to be operational from 2026. Such leases usually last for a period of 20–30 years. The county council expects rental income of tens of millions per year, but the details are not public. The size of the investment, the annual rental costs and any tax liabilities give an indication of the income Google expects the facility to generate.
This is, in double sense, a form of privatisation of the communal property. Data centres are privately owned cloud storage facilities that you have to pay in order to store or access data in what was supposed to be the digital commons. In addition, they seize waterfalls and power that should also be the common property of the people, with the result that the spot price on the dysfunctional electricity market will be inflated throughout the relevant bidding zone (region).
A single facility in (the county of) Telemark will, when fully developed, absorb five per cent of Norway's electricity consumption.
Landowners and rentiers
Ground rent and profit are different economic categories, both derived from the surplus value created. They are Siamese twins in the "neo-feudal" version of imperialism. This is the new reality, not that capitalist profit is "disappearing". The massive investments in digital infrastructure in the form of cables and data centres are, in principle, no different from when British, Swedish and French companies bought into Norwegian waterfalls at the beginning of the last century. The aim then, like today, was to secure future ground rent and a head start on competitors. The same applies to the Norwegian "oil adventure", with huge capitalist investments in platforms and pipelines to reap a ground rent that increases tremendously as a result of the investments. A significant difference in Norway's case, however, is that the privatisation of water resources and the seabed was temporary in nature, thanks to concession laws and reversion rights. No such reversion rights have been set as conditions for the tech companies.
In many cases, municipalities are the formal landowners and can charge a certain amount of rent. However, shadow monopolists such as Google have secured guarantees in advance that the rental charge will be low, in exchange for promises of a handful of jobs and "business development". They have also often allied themselves with, or bought into, the energy industry, particularly the wind power industry, which also occupies huge areas of common land. Negotiations between municipalities and developers often take place in secret, allegedly to protect "competition-sensitive information". In Narvik, the agreements were concluded secretly in the midst of night.
A survey done by E24 shows that more than half of the data centres in Norway are foreign-owned. We have already mentioned Google. Aker, in collaboration with the British company Nscale, is planning a data centre outside Narvik at a cost of NOK 10 billion. This data centre for artificial intelligence (AI) is called "Europe's largest brain". It can consume as much power as the entire capital city of Oslo. The centre will use hardware from Nvidia, and OpenAI has already signed an agreement for capacity. Major expansions are planned. Aker Nscale has secured ten sites in Northern Norway, including in Fauske and Korgen. The motive is obvious. The "locked-in" electricity in Northern Norway (price zone NO4) costs far less than electricity further south in the country.
Green Mountain was originally Norwegian-owned by the family company Smedvig. It is now wholly owned by the Israeli Azrieli Group Ltd.5 and builds and operates data centres according to a business model where the company is also the landowner. Green Mountain builds and operates large centres in Rjukan, Østfold, Akershus and near Hamar. The entire OSL centre near Hamar is reserved for a single customer, the Chinese media platform TikTok.
What is happening in Norway is only part of a rapid international expansion. The technology giants (Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Google, etc.) are seriously conquering the digital commons, or the cloud, in the wake of two crises: the so-called subprime or ‘financial crisis’ in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020.
While these crises crippled industry or put industrial investment on hold, the digital aristocrats still managed to grow and thrive. How was that possible? Because central banks across the West were running the printing presses at full speed and pouring "free" money into the financial sector to save the banks and "keep the wheels spinning". This happened in parallel with drastic cuts in welfare and wages, which only exacerbated the impact of the crisis.
It was a time of recession, but nevertheless a bonanza on the stock markets after 2008 – a stock market rally that lasted for the next ten years. Since investors knew that central banks were constantly pumping out new (fiat) money, they could invest in completely meaningless shares in the certainty that the overabundant money would drive the paper value further upwards.
The digital giants managed to rake in billions. They used their interest-free loans to buy shares in their own companies. This allowed them to propel their market value and bonuses. The same companies also managed to attract some of the massive subsidies for the "green transition", both directly and in close collaboration with the wind-power barons in the power industry. What they additionally received in compensation for sharing so-called behavioural data with the intelligence services, as Edward Snowden revealed in his book System Failure, is unlikely to be reflected in the accounts.
Rent rather than profit
Hence the technology giants and their data centres must pay a certain ground rent – unless they have bought land where the data centres are located.
In return, they charge interest in the form of rent from all users of the storage services. It is a market that is growing exponentially as more and more takes place in "the cloud". Goods and services that we used to be able to buy, we now only get to rent access to. If you do not pay, the product is unavailable or unusable when the term expires.
The same cloud is increasingly being used by public authorities to store endless amounts of health and tax information about citizens. The storage space is far from free of charge. And it is no easy matter for a municipality to change storage provider when the rent is helping to scrape the bottom of the municipal coffers. Software suppliers, companies and public institutions must pay rent to the owners of the data centres – with or without intermediaries – in order for their systems to be operational.
They – and we – therefore only have a time-limited right to use the product or service. This allowance lasts as long as we pay this rent (or interest) for a day, month or year, without knowing whether the rent may be doubled at the next main due date. This is the case with a number of streaming services, films, music, applications and software.
Car owners are also now finding that they do not have unrestricted rights of use for the cars they have purchased and paid for. New electric cars require constant updates to the car's software, and locking, charging, etc. are controlled by an app on your mobile phone. It turns out that if the owner wants to keep a particular function of the car, she suddenly has to pay for an update to the application. This is probably just the beginning. Volkswagen has already taken the step of charging owners a monthly surcharge if they want full engine power.6 Everything is controlled through the app, allowing the manufacturer to restrict functions if the customer does not pay. This is one of the methods manufacturers can use to compensate for the ever-increasing base rent they have to pay to the sky barons and the data centres controlled by them.
This is not pure profit in the usual sense. Profit and ground rent, two completely different economic categories, merge to a certain extent as a result of monopolisation. This trend is not new. It has only intensified with the development of imperialism in the form of monopolistic capitalism.
"Speculation in land in the suburbs of rapidly growing cities is a particularly profitable business for finance capital," wrote Lenin. "The monopoly of the banks merges here with the monopoly on ground rent and the monopoly on means of communication, since the increase in land value and the possibility of selling it at a profit in plots, etc. mainly depends on good communications with the city centre, and these means of communication are in the hands of large companies linked to the interested banks through the holding system and the distribution of board positions." 7
What is highlighted in the above quote, about how the monopoly of finance capital in our era merges with the monopoly on ground rent, is key to understanding the enormous power of the new giants.
Ground rent constitutes an increasing share of the three components of value (ground rent, profit and wages) at the expense of the other two. This is because rent paid to digital landowners comes at the expense of the profits of productive capitalists.
Not only that. Every time we as consumers interact with these services, we have to give up a greater or lesser amount of personal information, which is then used to tailor our behaviour and bind us more closely to one or other of the cloud giants. This is a form of 'voluntary' free labour that we perform, which perfects the algorithms and increases their exchange value vis-à-vis competing monopolies.
Tech giants such as Google combine large investments in research, development and fixed capital with monopolies that enable them to extort ground rent.
In some cases, ground rent occurs in combination with other interest and loan capital, making it difficult to distinguish between them. When a commercial data centre owns its own land and buildings (or mountain halls) with its own server park, it charges both ground rent and loan interest (rent) to its customers. The ground rent stems from the limited access to data centres with the necessary infrastructure, while the loan interest or rent stems from the use of storage space on the fixed capital in the form of servers and wear and tear on the machinery. If we disregard periodic technical maintenance operations and upgrades, there is minimal value creation through human labour. We cannot therefore talk about pure profit in the usual sense, but rather about ground rent, monopoly rent and money rent.
"Competition is for losers"
The founder of PayPal and the notorious spyware company Palantir, Peter Thiel, has said it bluntly: "Competition is for losers," he wrote in 2014.8 "If you want to create and secure lasting value, get a monopoly." This was several years before the AI revolution began.
Fundamental to capitalism is that there must be a market, and that competition for shares of this market is what creates profitable business for those who survive the competition.
Much can be said about old capitalism, but the drive to reap profits in a market has led to innovation, technological advances and increasingly rational working methods. This inherent urge for renewal, to overcome old barriers and create new things, made capitalism a historically progressive bulldozer compared to the stagnant feudal society.
When the market becomes monopolized, much of this motivation disappears. Ideas and patents are more about filling niches in existing monopoly structures in the hope of becoming a takeover candidate. We see this most clearly in the flora of mobile operators and electricity sales companies. Pricing models and varying degrees of customer service are what distinguish them from each other. It is a matter of slightly different packaging of more or less the same product and service, delivered on the infrastructure of monopolies such as Telenor and Telia, Lyse and Elvia.
Profit as a result of added value created in the production process, realised through workers' unpaid labour for a certain part of the working day, is characteristic of capitalism. This differs from exploitation under feudalism, where a tenant farmer or leaseholder had to pay the landowner in the form of labour rent, rent in kind or money rent. In the feudal system, exploitation was in the open and transparent, unlike under capitalist production conditions where workers are apparently paid for their work.
For industrial monopolies in various industries, we see that a decreasing share of profits comes from surplus value per mass-produced unit. A growing part of the increase in value occurs prior to mass production itself, i.e. relatively more surplus value is created in research and development of the product to be produced, and in instructions (algorithms) for the production process itself. In addition, the share of profits in the form of various types of interest income is growing. This is a trend that characterizes the age of modern monopoly capitalism. Hardly any industrial group is now engaged solely in industry. The industrial giant Siemens, for example, is said to be a financial company that also engages in industrial activities.
Cloud-based services create little new (exchange) value, as they involve little human labour. Apart from transferring part of their value through depreciation, they help to accelerate capital circulation and shorten the capital turnover time, i.e. the time that elapses from investment in means of production, raw materials and labour until the goods or services are realised on the market in monetary form and can be reinvested.
Adam Smith's old dream of a free market presupposes freely trading individuals and actors, where no one can manipulate purchases and sales – or the minds of market actors. That dream has never been entirely true. Now the dream is less true than ever.
This is because the new techno-capital is not content with manipulating the market using other methods and on a completely different scale than before (such as through advertising and product placement). They bind to themselves an army of voluntary and involuntary digital servants and "cloud proletarians", this however does not take place under normal market conditions. The market is no longer a market. The owners of these services and the land they stand on do not primarily reap profits, but interest and rent. And as we shall see, they collect this rent in several stages and from all social classes.
Rent in various forms
Rent takes several different forms, depending on the industry and the nature of production. For the capitalist, (monetary) interest is added to the profit of enterprise and is included in the average profit. This is related to the advance payment of money capital to the production process and "salaries" to directors and supervisors who are not involved in the actual production. Here, we are interested in other forms of rent.
Ground rent is essentially a feudal remnant whereby landlords and landowners receive a completely unearned income by leasing their property to productive activities carried out by farmers or capitalists. Investments and improvements made by tenants on the property or land (irrigation systems, soil improvement, etc.) enable the landowner to demand more rent without having to lift a finger.
"Landed property has nothing to do with the actual process of production. Its role is confined to transferring a portion of the produced surplus-value from the pockets of capital to its own," writes Karl Marx in Capital (vol. III).
Marx goes on to explain differential ground rent:
"Wherever natural forces can be monopolised and guarantee a surplus-profit to the industrial capitalist using them, be it waterfalls, rich mines, waters teeming with fish, or a favourably located building site, there the person who by virtue of title to a portion of the globe has become the proprietor of these natural objects will wrest this surplus-profit from functioning capital in the form of rent."
In addition to the absolute ground rent, landowners can reap differential ground rent, i.e. an extra rent for particularly fertile land or plots in particularly attractive locations. The same would apply to the landowner of a server park with particularly favourable temperature conditions. Extremely fast processors and greater computing power than competitors would generate extra profits in addition to the ground rent, cf. Green Mountain's business model.
Furthermore, monopoly rent arises in certain industries, where one or a handful of oligarchs (or their transnational corporations) have secured exclusive rights to certain production processes, formulas or patents. We see this, for example, in the pharmaceutical industry. The same applies increasingly to digital supermarkets such as Amazon, Google Play and Apple Store.
In some cases, these trading platforms are necessary to sell the main product, and they are often indispensable for the product to be used effectively or to be as "user-friendly" as possible. The manufacturer must therefore relinquish part of the added value to Google, among others, in order for the product to be "functional".
Finally, we have what we might call brand rent. Skilful marketing, consistent design and integration between different products attract and captivate consumers into brand loyalty. Apple is a prime example of how your mobile phone, your iPad, all the photos you store in Apple's cloud services, etc. trap you in a synchronised digital enclosure of seamless services that eventually control your life. At the same time, you unconsciously feed the "jailer". Every time you stream something, send a message, upload a video, or feed in health data so that Apple can advise you to walk more stairs, reduce your calorie intake, etc., you are helping Apple perfect the digital net around you and make the mesh size smaller and smaller, free of charge.
Monopoly and brand capitalists reap the latter two forms of rent, while the first form – ground rent – accrues to the landowner.
"Rent then constitutes a part of the value, a special part of the surplus value of the commodity, which instead of accruing to the capitalist class that has sucked it out of the workers, accrues to the landowner who sucks it out of the capitalists." 9
This cost-increasing element is included in the final product price, but the capitalist must relinquish ground rent to the landowner at the expense of his own profit.
Vassals and tenant farmers
Tech companies have ostensibly become the new feudal lords, as Varoufakis, for example, believes, while the productive capitalists in certain industries are reduced to vassals and tenants. Industrial capital must submit to the tech giants. Car manufacturers such as Volkswagen, BYD, Toyota and Ford are increasingly at the mercy of tech companies such as Apple, Google and China's Baidu. The car is controlled by algorithms and the driver's actions are monitored by sensors and cameras. The software is updated wirelessly via the internet – for as long as the supplier wants or permits. The car owner controls functions such as locking, charging and remote parking via a mobile app. In most cases, this app must be downloaded from the Apple Store or Google Play. If the apps become unavailable, many of the car's operating functions are lost and its market value will plummet. Manufacturers compensate for the tech companies' skimming of profits by imposing extra charges on users in the form of creative usage fees.
The rent paid to cloud capital (those who own and operate servers and infrastructure) is collected from users or directly from manufacturers and app developers, who, to the extent that they have the power to do so, demand compensation from the industrial group.
But this is only one side of the coin.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence contributes to product development for industrial companies, and they contribute in return. Swedish-Chinese Volvo has integrated closely with Alphabet (the owner of Google) and is the main developer of car-related software on the Android platform.10 Such product development is obviously productive creation of value.
Ideally, from the point of view of monopoly capitalists, the optimum is to gain control over all links in the chain, as Elon Musk is trying to achieve. Competition is for losers, to cite the Palantir boss once more. But the dream of competition disappearing completely, remains a pipe dream for the monopoly bourgeoisie. On the contrary, competition is becoming even more aggressive, for example between technology companies in the US and China.
The robbery of the digital commons seems in some ways to be the opposite of the robbery of communal land during the original accumulation of capital. Back then, the tenants became proletarians; now the proletarians are also becoming a kind of tenant. Even software developers are gradually being reduced to platform workers or cloud proletarians.
The individual users of the technology – from Spotify listeners to car owners – have become unpaid tenant farmers who feed vassals and monopolists in ‘the cloud’ with the personal data they must relinquish in order to access the various services. This data is fed into the algorithms as unpaid product improvements. In spite of this, users usually have to pay rental fees to make use of these services – at least if they do not want to be interrupted by advertisements every minute. If they do not pay the rent, they lose the right to use their "digital plot of land", much like the tenant farmers of old.
These terms of use affect all individuals in society, regardless of class. The working class is hit hardest because paying for these subscription services hurt them the most. Some of these services can be opted out of, but not all.
Capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie are feeling the pinch, too. The many digital cloud services are mandatory if the company is to have any hope of positioning itself, securing logistics and remaining relevant in the market. Even a farmer or peasant is gradually becoming a tenant farmer subject to the digital barons, as he has to buy seeds from or sell cucumbers to wholesalers via digital services and algorithms over which he has no control whatsoever.
Tenants used to pay the landowner in the form of either labour rent, rent in kind or money rent. Today's tenant farmers pay both labour rent and money rent.
It gets even worse with the new AI agents that are baked into operating systems for mobile phones and PCs. While AI of the ChatGPT type is under a certain degree of user control, i.e. it is the user who gives a command or prompt for action, the roles are reversed with AI agents. Now it is the AI agent that takes the initiative and asks the user to confirm. It continuously collects information about what you are doing and where you have been by taking screenshots of your screen every few seconds. An innocent example could be; "Isn't it time you sent a picture of your grandchildren to your elderly mother and gave her flowers? Would you like me to arrange that?"
That may sound practical and convenient. It is just as easy to imagine what other calls to action you might receive, based on what you once thought was your private life.
Capitalism or techno-feudalism?
Are we living in what Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism, a new oligarchic system of oppression based on a post-capitalist mode of production? Have we left capitalism behind only to end up in a new and worse nightmare that makes socialism even more distant and unattainable? On the surface, it may seem that way, but that would be a dangerous and erroneous conclusion that would derail the struggle for a different social system.
If we are to believe Elon Musk, working will become optional in the near future. "In less than 20 years – maybe even in just 10 or 15 years – advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will take us to a point where working becomes optional," Musk said in an interesting podcast with People by WTF on 1 December 2025.11
What he does not explain in detail in the long interview is how people will make a living if they do not have income-generating work. He also sidesteps the delicate problem that without human labour, no new added value and profit will be created for Musk & Co.
This is what Marx called the falling rate of profit. Since only living labour creates new (added) value, fewer workers and more machines mean that the amount of profit per unit produced is declining. Capitalists take a number of countermeasures to slow down this trend, but the trend itself is irreversible.
"The increase in labour productivity consists precisely in that the share of living labour is reduced while that of past labour is increased, but in such a way that the total quantity of labour incorporated in that commodity declines; in such a way, therefore, that living labour decreases more than past labour increases." (Capital.)
In the foregoing, we have seen how digital oligarchs and cloud barons are today the most powerful and influential people in the world. They have direct access to presidents and government offices and power that surpasses that which the old nobility and petty princes had in relation to the church or royal power. A man like Musk comes and goes more or less freely in President Donald Trump's office. He grants himself a "salary supplement" of ten billion dollars. The board members of Tesla accept this without batting an eyelid.
Feudal traits have also re-emerged in certain industries. Over the past twenty years, hired labourers from other countries have become new serfs, completely at the mercy of temporary staffing agencies or contractors in return for poor wages, food and shelter. With their passports confiscated and no rights, they are in a more vulnerable position than serfs, with no right to leave the estate without first asking the landowner's permission. The capitalist freedom to sell one's labour to whomever one wants has been taken away from tens of thousands of workers.
The new so-called (digital) platform workers are a separate category of their own. They have complete "freedom" to perform delivery and transport services on behalf of digital capitalist "contractors" such as Foodora, Wolt, Uber, Bolt, etc. Platform workers are more like itinerant labourers, employed when they are most needed and at times when the algorithms (piecework) provide more than the usual starvation wages. On their part, the contractors (e.g. Wolt) must pay 15-30% of the transaction amount to the App Store or Google Play Store, as well as transaction fees to banks and credit card companies. The relatively modest remaining amount, after deduction of the actual value of the goods and transport service, is divided between the profit for the contractor and the remuneration of the "independent" platform worker.
In this form, we see that capitalism in its imperialist era is reintroducing structures with feudal characteristics in several areas – structures that the young capitalist bourgeoisie had to break down in the past.
Imperialism persists
This paradox does not refute, but rather confirms, that imperialism is dying, parasitic and decaying capitalism. In its death throes, imperialism is suffocating and reversing all the progressive and democratic ideals of capitalism's infancy, when the young bourgeoisie emerged in struggle against medieval despotism and stagnation.
The capitalist system and mode of production still remain. What is new is that the monopoly bourgeoisie has induced a new, dominant faction of techno-capitalists and techno-oligarchs who are displacing other factions. For decades, commercial capital has managed to wrest a larger share of surplus value from industrial capital. Now the techno-capitalists are in the process of displacing parts of the old commercial capital and gaining an iron grip on industrial capital. All this in symbiosis with banking and finance.
Modern technology is being used to maintain and defend a system in decay
What we are experiencing and being oppressed by is not a new system and a new mode of production. It is decaying capitalist imperialism (monopoly capitalism) in its most destructive form. Modern technology is being used to maintain and defend a system in decay. It is on a trajectory that leads straight towards fascism, total control – and devastating wars.
Does this mean that we should lose all hope and renounce any dreams of socialism? Must we content ourselves with demanding influence over how technology is used and wealth distributed, hoping that the oligarchs will sooner or later listen to reason?
The answer is no. Artificial intelligence and other new technologies offer fantastic prospects for a social system without capitalists and exploiters. A society where the necessary working time is reduced to a minimum and the "realm of freedom" is within sight.
In the hands of the monopoly bourgeoisie, however, the leap in the development of productive forces threatens to put an end to all civilisation. Revolution and socialism are therefore on the agenda. What is lacking is the subjective awareness of what is needed. The working class faces new challenges and demands in terms of political education, mobilisation and organisation.
We will return to these highly pressing issues in a later article.
Notes
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
- Varoufakis, Yanis. 'Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.’
- '$30 billion down the drain? MIT says 95% of companies see no returns from Generative AI.’ The Economic Times, August 2025.
- https://telemarkfylke.no/no/aktuelt/gigantinvestering-til-telemark/
- 'Israeli company signs billion-kroner deal in Norway’, TV2.no 31 December 2025.
- https://elbil.no/vw-krever-manedlig-betaling-for-full-motoreffekt/
- Lenin: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
- Peter Thiel: ‘Competition Is for Losers.’ Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014.
- Karl Marx: Capital, third book.
- ‘Google, Volvo Cars deepen partnership to develop Android software for vehicles‘ Reuters, 21 May 2025.
- People by WTF 1 December 2025. t.ly/Ln2SH
