The power of tech and finance, alongside the growing sense that the system is ruled more by brazen predation than by good old-fashioned labor exploitation, has thinkers from the Marxist left all the way to the neoliberal and even neo-reactionary right convinced that we’ve left capitalism entirely and entered an era of neo-feudalism. In his New Left Review essay “Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason,” writer Evgeny Morozov argues that this bleak period that we’re living through is in fact still a thoroughly capitalist one.

Some scholars argue that capitalism is no longer the competitive and innovative force that secures surplus value through what appears in mystified form to be voluntarily contracted labor exploitation. Instead, they contend, capitalists increasingly rely on raw political power to coercively secure capital through everything from rents to cheap government-provided capital — a means of extracting the surplus that looks a lot more like feudalism. But Morozov argues that forms of political dispossession and expropriation, as well as coercive acts like rent terrorism, are central features of capitalism rather than aberrations or departures from it. Ultimately, Morozov writes, it’s only an overly narrow conception of what comprises capitalism and its rules of reproduction that might lead us to the erroneous conclusion that we’re entering something like neo-feudalism.

Evgeny Morozov has written several books and essays about technology and politics. He holds a PhD in the history of science from Harvard and is the founder of The Syllabus, a knowledge-curation service. His podcast The Santiago Boys, about the radical history of computing and cybernetic planning in Latin America, will launch later this year. Morozov sat down with Dan Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig, to talk about the “neo-feudal thesis” and the endurance of capitalism. You can listen to the conversation here. It has been edited for length and clarity.