Under the Cloud: Techno-Feudalism
13th March 2024
In Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, the former Greek minister of finance, Yannis Varoufakis, argues that wealth accumulation is no longer defined by capitalist relations. The book is at pains to address objections that current conditions represent a post-capitalist system because it assumes a Marxist audience disposed to understand capitalism as a pre-socialist rather than neo-feudal phase of history. Capitalism was supposed to mark the end of human exploitation before something better, not the antechamber to something worse.
Varoufakis’s argument for the global economy being post-capitalist is that it no longer principally relies on the pursuit of profits under conditions of market competition but on rent extraction, the way that feudalism did. He sees this as resulting from a recent de facto privatization of the Internet, like a new enclosure of the commons (despite 18th–century enclosures actually inaugurating capitalism).
Large platforms like Amazon, on which the capitalist has to sell his products to be competitive, or social media, where he has to advertise, would be new fiefdoms, and the capitalist paying rent to use them to make money would be a vassal.
There is nothing new under the sun. The hard part is coming up with new names for the same old shit.