By Juan Garces De Marcilla, Founding Member of Montesa Capital
There are two AI debates happening right now, and almost everyone is having only one of them. The first — whether AI stocks are overvalued in the next 18 months — is the one filling earnings calls and financial media. The second is the one almost nobody outside this firm is asking out loud: whether AI represents a phase shift within capitalism, the way the Information Age was a new stage within capitalism, or a genuine mode-of-production shift — the kind of structural break that took the world from feudalism to capitalism in the first place. That’s the question this piece takes on. We can ask it because Montesa Capital doesn’t treat economics as a single school of thought to defend. We take Keynes seriously on demand, Hayek seriously on prices and information, and Marx seriously on the mechanics of how value gets produced and captured — and we think the answer to where AI is taking the economy requires all three.
The Mechanism, in Two Languages
Standard economics models economic output as a function of two inputs: capital and labor (formally, Y = A·K^α·L^(1−α), the Cobb-Douglas production function — don’t worry about the notation, the point is simple: output depends on machines and people, not machines alone). If AI drives labor’s contribution toward zero, you are not just changing who has a job. You are changing one of the two variables the entire system runs on.
Marxian economics has a sharper way of naming what happens next: a realization crisis. Capital can produce a commodity, but it can only “realize” — actually collect — the value of that commodity if someone, somewhere, has the income to buy it. In plain terms: it doesn’t matter how cheaply or efficiently you can build something if nobody can afford to buy it. Roughly 68–70% of U.S. GDP is consumer spending. If AI hollows out wage income broadly enough, you don’t just strand workers — you eventually strand the capital that depends on those workers’ paychecks to generate a return. This isn’t a fringe theory; Marx anticipated a version of this scenario directly in an 1858 manuscript known as the “Fragment on Machines,” describing an economy approaching full automation as one where the entire logic of labor-driven value starts to break down.
To be clear about scope: nothing in the verified labor data points to this happening fast or completely. The most aggressive credible estimates — Goldman Sachs, MIT’s Daron Acemoglu — put workforce displacement in the high single digits over a decade, not a collapse in 18 months. This is a long-horizon structural question, not a near-term catalyst. But “long-horizon” doesn’t mean “not real” — it means the market isn’t pricing it, because markets are bad at discounting diffuse, decade-scale risks. That mispricing is exactly why it’s worth thinking through now.
Candidate Paradigm #1: Technofeudalism
The most prominent answer to “what comes after labor-driven capitalism” comes from economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in his 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. His argument: the defining features of capitalism — competitive markets and profit — have already been displaced by something closer to feudal rent. Platforms (Amazon, Google, the major cloud infrastructure providers) don’t compete in markets; they own the “land” — the digital infrastructure — and charge rent for access to it. Varoufakis estimates Amazon extracts roughly half of every dollar a third-party seller earns on the platform, which he likens to a feudal lord’s ground rent rather than a competitor’s profit margin. In his framing, even traditional capitalists become “vassals” — dependent on cloud infrastructure they don’t own or control, the same way medieval lords depended on land they held at the pleasure of a king.
In plain terms: instead of “the market decides who wins,” it becomes “whoever owns the pipes decides who gets to play, and takes a cut regardless of whether you win.” That’s a real and observable shift in how value is captured, even if you don’t accept Varoufakis’s stronger claim that capitalism is already fully dead. AI compute access — who controls the chips, the data centers, the foundation models — is arguably the newest and most extreme version of this dynamic: a tiny number of “cloudalists” control the infrastructure every other business increasingly has to rent in order to function
Candidate Paradigm #2: The Resource-Based Economy
The other serious answer — less mainstream in finance circles, but worth a fair hearing — comes from Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project and its associated Zeitgeist Movement: a resource-based economy (RBE), in which goods and services are allocated without money, credit, or debt, with resources treated as the common heritage of all inhabitants and distribution coordinated by technology rather than price.
The standard economic objection to this is Friedrich Hayek’s “knowledge problem” (from his 1945 paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society”): prices aren’t just cost tags, they’re a real-time information system that aggregates millions of people’s local knowledge and preferences. No central planner — human or algorithmic — has historically been able to replicate that without some price-like signal, and the most-cited failure case is Soviet “War Communism” (1918–1921), Lenin’s own attempt to abolish money and market exchange, which collapsed into shortages and spontaneous black markets within three years.
In fairness to the RBE position, that historical case is more confounded than it’s usually given credit for. War Communism wasn’t a clean experiment — it was implemented in the middle of a civil war, under an Allied economic blockade, using forced grain requisitioning (prodrazvyorstka) that destroyed farmers’ incentive to produce regardless of the money question, on top of infrastructure already shattered by World War I, using paper ledgers and telegraphs as the only available coordination technology. Attributing its failure purely to “moneylessness doesn’t work” overstates what the historical record can actually prove — it’s at least as plausible that war, coercion, and the total absence of any real-time information infrastructure did the damage, independent of the price question.
That matters because the RBE argument today isn’t “trust a Soviet bureaucrat to guess what people want.” It’s “let an AI system with real-time visibility into actual consumption, logistics, and inventory data allocate resources without needing a price signal to do it.” That’s a meaningfully different proposition than what failed in 1918–21, and modern logistics already does a limited version of this inside capitalism — Amazon’s own inventory and demand-forecasting systems route goods without waiting for price signals to clear at every node. Whether that scales to replacing markets entirely, rather than optimizing within them, remains genuinely unresolved — it is not disproven by the Soviet case, but it isn’t proven by Amazon’s warehouse algorithms either. This is a live, unsettled question, not a closed one.
What This Means, Practically
Both paradigms describe a world where traditional wage-labor stops being the organizing principle of the economy. They differ entirely on what replaces it: technofeudalism keeps private ownership and exchange but concentrates power in whoever owns the infrastructure (rent over profit); the resource-based economy removes price and ownership altogether in favor of algorithmic allocation. A third, less radical path — favored by most mainstream economists who take the labor-displacement problem seriously, from Daniel Susskind to various UBI proposals — doesn’t change the mode of production at all; it just redistributes capital’s gains back to displaced labor through taxation and transfers, leaving markets and money fully intact. That third option is the status quo’s self-correcting answer, and it’s the one with by far the most real-world precedent (it’s just a bigger version of unemployment insurance and progressive taxation).
For capital allocation today, the practical takeaway isn’t to bet on any one of these outcomes — it’s to recognize that the infrastructure layer (chips, cloud compute, data centers, energy supply) is the asset class that wins under either of the two more radical paradigms, technofeudal or resource-based, because both require someone to own and operate the physical and digital “pipes” regardless of how the output gets allocated. Betting on the rent-collecting layer of the AI economy is a hedge that works whether the next fifty years look more like Varoufakis’s cloudalism or like a more redistributive patch on capitalism as we know it. The one scenario it doesn’t hedge well against is the full resource-based economy outcome — which, for now, remains the most speculative and least empirically grounded of the three.
Montesa Capital research notes are for informational purposes and do not constitute investment advice.