We live in troubled times: inequality is on the rise, social fragmentation is deepening, democracies are backsliding, and ecological crisis is at our doorstep. Even the authority of global institutions (e.g., the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization) is weakening as states retreat to national competition and transactional power politics. But such turbulence is not simply an unfortunate, once-in-a-lifetime “perfect storm”; rather, it is symptomatic of a broader and long-lasting structural transition from neoliberal to neofeudal capitalism. Let me illustrate this by focusing primarily on the Bangladesh, India and United States cases.

The neoliberal age

Neoliberal capitalism, let us recall, is defined by market supremacy, deregulation, austerity, and globalised production networks. Bangladesh has been, in many ways, an exemplary illustration of the global reach of such a production regime. Since the 1990s, the country has become a major hub for export-oriented garment manufacturing, driven by foreign investment, low wages, and weak labour protections. But the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse exposed the human costs of this model, revealing the degree to which deregulated global supply chains externalise risks onto workers, while concentrating profits among multinational corporations and domestic subcontractors and factory owners.

Similarly, India’s neoliberal turn – accelerated since the early 1990s with structural adjustment reforms encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – brought about the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, and the promotion of foreign investment. But although India, like Bangladesh, experienced substantial GDP growth, this growth has been notably uneven, with increasing precarity in informal labour markets and persistent income and wealth inequality. The country’s post-2014 political economy has further deepened neoliberal logics through large-scale privatisation initiatives and a favourable environment for corporate conglomerates (e.g., the Adani, Tata, Bajaj, Hinduja, Mahindra, and Reliance Groups), even as labour protections have been weakened and rural distress – poverty, unemployment, ecological degradation – has intensified.

Many such features are also to be found in the US, which played a central role in institutionalising this neoliberal global order in the first place, especially through financial deregulation beginning in the late 1970s. The repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act preventing banks from speculative risk-taking, for example, as well as the expansion of global capital mobility, led to the ascent of finance-led accumulation, contributing to the 2008 financial crisis and consolidating the power of Wall Street over domestic economic policy. But like Bangladesh and India, the US model, with its emphasis on shareholder value and corporate tax cuts, has also engendered stagnant real wages and a sharp rise in inequality.

The rise of neofeudal capitalism

Whereas neoliberalism promised prosperity through deregulated markets, privatisation, and global integration, its long-term effects have hollowed out public institutions, empowered finance and multinational capital, and generated widespread labour precarity. Today, these dynamics have matured into a new and more troubling formation: neofeudal capitalism. The term describes an era of severe inequality in which an expanding lower stratum caters to the demands of a tiny ultra-rich elite, or as scholar Jodi Dean describes it: “a few billionaires, a billion insecure workers.” In country after country, a small class of uber-elites – tech titans, politically connected conglomerates, financial oligarchs – has amassed control over social infrastructures and economic and political power.

Billionaire domination: the new aristocracy

At the heart of neofeudal capitalism is the tightening grip of billionaires and multimillionaires over both markets and the state. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the US, where the wealth surge of tech and financial titans – made possible through neoliberal deregulation – has been unprecedented. Figures such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), and Larry Page (Google) have built private empires that now resemble sovereign powers – controlling communication networks, digital infrastructure, transportation systems, high finance, and labour platforms. Musk’s control over X (formerly Twitter), Starlink satellite networks, and Tesla’s global supply chains demonstrates how individual magnates can shape public communication, electoral discourse, and even military logistics. The US case is evidence of what some analysts see as “technofeudalism.”

In India, similarly, the rise of oligarchic business families has accelerated dramatically under neoliberal reforms, especially during the Modi era. Conglomerates tied to such billionaires as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, N. Chandrasekaran, Anand Mahindra, Kumar Mangalam Birla, and Sajjan Jindal dominate sectors ranging from ports, airports, power generation, and telecommunications to retail, defence, and digital infrastructure. The meteoric rise of Gautam Adani – whose wealth multiplied in tandem with major government contracts and regulatory favours – is widely cited as emblematic of India’s neoliberal-to-neofeudal transition.

Bangladesh, too, exhibits the consolidation of power among a handful of politically connected conglomerates. Only a few families and business groups have enjoyed privileged access to public contracts, credit lines, and state patronage.

Inequality: the widening chasm

The accompanying neofeudal characteristic is the surge in global inequality, which has reached levels unseen since the late 19th century. This pattern is particularly acute in the very places where neoliberal reforms were most aggressively pursued.

In India, inequality is now so severe that studies show it surpassing levels during British colonial rule. A small elite enjoys unprecedented wealth, while hundreds of millions work in informal, insecure, and low-paying sectors. In Bangladesh, the garment industry has generated extreme wealth for factory owners and middlemen, while keeping millions of workers, especially women, trapped in low-wage, precarious, and sweatshop employment (as Rana Plaza tragically exposed).

And in the US, the top 1 percent now owns more than one-third of national wealth. Tech CEOs, hedge fund managers, and private-equity magnates accumulate riches at unprecedented rates, even as real wages stagnate and basic needs – housing, healthcare, childcare, education – become unaffordable for millions. The gig economy has replaced stable employment with algorithmically managed insecurity and deepening income and wealth inequality.

Coercion: the authoritarian turn

But inequality becomes self-reinforcing: concentrated wealth needs and buys political influence, which in turn helps further enrich elites. The third pillar of neofeudalism, then, is a shift towards more coercive, authoritarian governance. This is indeed necessary to sustain the extreme profits and political dominance of today’s billionaire class.

Neoliberalism relied on the ideology of choice and competition. Neofeudalism relies on suppression, surveillance, deregulation, and the erosion of democratic accountability.

In the US, Trump’s second administration exemplifies this trend, assembling a “billionaire boys’ club” that, initially at least, included Elon Musk, Howard Lutnick, Vivek Ramaswamy, and other ultra-wealthy figures tasked with slashing regulations, weakening environmental protections, and hollowing out public oversight through a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” These efforts appear clearly designed to help consolidate neofeudal corporate power, while undermining US public institutions (including the gutting of USAID) and removing regulations deemed to get in the way of corporate accumulation and market dominance.

India has experienced a comparable authoritarian drift as the state aligns itself with corporate titans like Ambani, Adani, and Jindal. Land acquisitions, deregulation, and privatisation often proceed with minimal consultation or dissent. Crackdowns on journalists, activists, and opposition figures reflect the coercive apparatus required to maintain the “billionaire raj” that has consolidated under Modi.

Bangladesh, likewise, has shown increasing displays of political pressure to safeguard elite business interests – from the crackdown on labour organising in the garment sector to favouritism for regime-connected conglomerates, most especially under the rule of the just-ousted Sheikh Hasina. Maintaining low wages and suppressing dissent has been integral to preserving the export-driven model that has so benefited powerful industrial oligarchs.

The growing fusion of corporate and state power, and the corresponding rise in coercive governance, is thus not a deviation from neoliberalism – it is its logical culmination. When profit and capital mobility are prioritised above all else, political and labour coercion becomes the mechanism that allows the system to reproduce and aggrandise itself.

Neofeudal governance: the political form of our age?

Taken together, billionaire domination, inequality, and coercion constitute the architecture of a global neofeudal order. As democratic mechanisms weaken and billionaire-led conglomerates increase their control of digital platforms, ports to energy grids, and agricultural land, the social contract fractures. Hence, public disillusionment and polarisation, as much as authoritarian drift, are not momentary crises but structural symptoms of an emerging world-system.

Until recently, plutocratic rule seemed characteristic of authoritarian capitalist states such as Russia – where oligarchs such as Yuri Kovalchuk, Gennady Timchenko, and the Rotenberg brothers shape policy – or China, whose Communist Party presides over a thousand-strong billionaire class, including figures like Zhong Shanshan and Ma Huateng. But today, liberal democracies are increasingly starting to resemble these cases.

If neofeudal capitalism continues its expansion, the question is not whether democracies will survive, but what kind of political order they will transform into. The gig and platform economies that now govern economic life appear to require hierarchical, billionaire-dominated, and coercive forms of governance. So the uncomfortable truth may be that Russia and China are not outliers, but versions of where liberal democracies may be heading.

Ilan Kapoor is Professor of Critical Development Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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