A headline in today’s Guardian reads, “Tax expert worried Australia on path to neo-feudal society as housing wealth drives inequality”. The article opens, “One of the country’s leading tax experts says the explosion in housing wealth has put Australia on the path towards a neo-feudal society where your prosperity depends in large part whether your parents own land or property.” The tax expert, Bob Breunig, then explains, “I don’t think we are back to pre-French Revolution times, but I am worried about that”. We should all be worried. But what exactly is neo about neo-feudalism? Absolutely nothing.

Global, national and local economies never stopped measuring jurisdictional wealth by housing wealth, both individual and sectoral. Landlords, banks, home owners never stopped being landlords, banks, homeowners. The capacity of one sector to evict members of another sector in the name of “development”, though often challenged, has never been broken and has always been codified into law. So .. what’s so neo about neo-feudalism? Absolutely nothing.

A couple hundred years ago, someone wrote, “The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former. The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”

Expropriation is written in the annals of humanity in letters of blood and fire. What’s so neo-about neo-feudalism? Absolutely nothing. Look around. What do you see?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image credit: Thomas Hart Benton, “Casualty” /  State Historical Society of Missouri)