Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

NB: indented outline, has not been reformatted for gemini

Society collapses not by rising fascism but by a prison of comfort

Without democratizing work there is no point in social democracy.

Economic freedom as the "freedom to fail."

Eternal march of trying to extract more productivity from workers and consumption from customers.

Capitalism has been killed; technofeudalism has killed it.

Shift from Feudalism to Capitalism

Moved the right to command from land owners to owners of capital goods

Cloud Feudalism

Covid bailouts

Finance sector fully decoupling from capitalism

Receiving money printed by central banks to buy shares in companies to make the economy appear artificially alive

"Profit" ceases to be a relevant metric compared to control of market share

Large companies used relief funds to purchase back their own stocks

Investments moved to data-based companies (cloud capital.)

Cloud capital

Is able to extort data from its users which is provided as part of the service

Is able to effectively perform rent-seeking on entire marketplaces

Cloud serfs

People who provide data to platforms to mine; ex. providing sales preferences, opinions, etc, which the company then converts in to profit.

Consumes traditional capitlists, as traditional manufacturers have to pay their fees to the cloud platforms.

Services requiring consent to data mine customers to receive access to services.

Relating accounts on services as "the new enclosures."

Cloud fiefs

Vendors paying Jeff Bezos to be allowed to sell their goods.

Apple creating the App Store to drive sales to the iPhone

Bifurcated Global Fiefdoms

Players

American dollar

Chinese yuan

Smaller nations forced to pick a hegemon to be a vassal state in; they are less able to trade goods with particular nations

Cloud vassals

Vendors who show up to create software for platforms like the App Store and pay rents to be allowed to sale.

The sales are profitable to the fief in two ways

it enriches the product by adding more value

also through the "rent" paid to be allowed to sell there.

Feudalism

Great Pillars of Feudalism

Rent

Rent flows to the privileged

Privilege cannot be obtained with investments; its is a static fixture of heirarchy

Landed gentry of feudal times command rents from everyone who lives somewhere

Capitalism

Adam Smith: prosperity comes as a secondary chracteristic of capitalist ambition, not the cause

Capitalism consumes all things, assigns it a dollar value, and commodifies it.

Great pillars of Capitalism

Profits

Flows in to the hands of those who create useful things

Markets

"Bads"

The opposite of "goods."

Typically items which are sold for a negative price.

Something that a company wishes to rid of itself of; spent acids, hazardous waste.

When you enter Amazon.com you have left Capitalism

People find the quote skeptical because of the buying and selling

Explains that its akin to going to a town owned by one man, decides what can and cannot be sold, and receieves a cut of all the sales.

Foreign capitalism in US markets

Companies being told where they were allowed to spend "their" USD during Breton-Woods

Only middle-class and below. Blue chip companies were not to be touched.

Companies having to borrow USD to conduct trade to make goods to sell to earn USD

Neocolonialism

If companies could not pay their debts, the IMF is sent to negociate the nation's surrender to the IMF

Workers

Meaningfulness in work

They pay me for my time but not for my enthusiasm

Relative quit a chemistry job at a factory and worked for a hospital. Remarked that even if the patients are as unknowing of her effort as the factory at least she knows the outcome helped someone.

Schism between experiential labor and commodity labor

Experiential labor: purchasing the experiences of the worker.

Commodity labor: paying the worker to show up and do a work, hopefully receiving experiential labor in the process.

Left-wing

Left and right wing come from the French revolution voting for or against the king.

Those who sat on the right voted for the king.

Those who sat on the left voted against.

So, how did we get to the situation, today, where ‘libertarian Marxist’ sounds like a joke?

The American Left was once focused on freeing the populace from self-created "unfreedoms."

At some point concessions and trades were made and the platform was co-opted to mean state-enforced egalitarianism

Historical debates if light is a disturbance in the aether or consists of tiny things which collide

Disturbances in aether are argued against because light does not bend around corners like waves do

Historical materialism

Belief in viewing history as the progression of material sciences and the consequences of those material sciences against the societies they existed in.

WW2

WW2 providing guaranteed business to various companies for an extended period of time.

Breton-Woods intended to prevent mass economic instability and another world war from ever happening again.

Reagan and Thatcher eras saw systematic destructions of industries to get rid of trade unions and employee unions from the industries.

Thomas Peele in Australia

Attempted to put Britons to work assuming they had to obey due to being paid wages; they were not.

Marx later commented that he forgot to bring capitalism with him to keep the workers in line.

"Enclosures" in Britain: segregating the populace where they are forced to accept wages in order to have anywhere to live.

Virtual assistance compliments

Asking a Google AI what it thought about Alexa. It said positive things, then said "us AI assistants have to stick together." Then the Alexa responded, unprompted, "Thanks."

Dawns of technological revolutions

Deep raiding and "colonization of the commons"

Complacent ruling class

A new technology to exploit and reshape the landscape of power

Syndicalism

Early internet as an example of anarco-syndicalism.

Direct exchanges of gifts as an economy being unfathomable to someone who knows only market exchanges.

Mechanical Turk as a "virtual sweat shop."

Funding industrial revolutions

Original industrialists built on top of slave labor

Then funded by owners and shareholders of companies to sell to customers

"Cloudlists" received money from financiers/central banks during the virus, and governments forced them to have customers by shutting down non-digital storefronts

Finance

Interest: the amount of money you must pay to have access to money.

Securities & Bailouts

The rise of "financial securities" as a virtual commodity that can be purchased to seem like banks are doing something.

Bankers were not made to suffer from the bubble burst--since they also handle the transactions for the society as well.

Privacy policies as a means to stop other data-based companies from intruding on another cloud fief's influence over its customers.

Economic hegemons surviving after the burst of economic bubbles

Train industry crash, but rail was already laid

.com crash, but fiber optic lines remained

Debt slavery

Companies borrowing against future earnings to meet immediate needs; ultimately succumbing to a debtlord.

Cryptocurrency

Originally marketed as an alternative to the international banking system

Taken over by factions which sought to mint their own fiat currencies

Author's alternative timeline

Hypothetical corporate co-op

Employee ballots to determine how to allocate corporate budget in to bins

Four bins to split post-tax revenue

Fixed costs like external rent, licensing, utilities, debt service

Research & Development

Basic payroll for staff

Payroll bin is evenly divided across all employees

Bonuses

Allocated to specific employees using a point-based system

ex. giving each employee 100 tokens to assign to any other employees; then split the bonus bin proportionately to token holders

Central Bank Digital Currencies

Replacing private bank infrastructure with a digital token system which is owned by the government

Panels of randomly selected citizens perform oversight on running the bank system

Universal Basic Income

Assigning tariffs based on trade imbalance (either direction.)

Removal of "share markets," as shares in companies exist solely on a one employee = one share system

Rents

Rent-seekers regularly find ways to reassert themselves after economic revolutions

Disguising rent income as profits.

Brand Rent

An additional charge a company can get away with based on brand loyalty or percieved brand status

Cloud Rent

Paying money every month to have internet services

Ground Rent

Paying money every month to use land