Yanis Varoufakis on What Comes After Capitalism

Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

Yascha Mounk: You have an interesting and distinguished political career and have also made a lot of forceful arguments in the public sphere. One of the interesting contributions you’ve made recently is to say that we live in a moment of “technofeudalism.”

To those of my listeners who think that’s a catchy phrase but aren’t quite sure what it means, what does that entail? What makes this moment an instance of technofeudalism?

Yanis Varoufakis: Well, to get to that point we have to agree on where we were. Capitalism, as far as I’m concerned, is a socioeconomic mode of production that came out of feudalism and what characterises it is that we shifted from a society where power stemmed from owning land, land ownership granting you the extractive power to amass economic rent from your peasants and from vassals and so on to a situation where power stemmed from owning not the land, per se, but the machines—the electricity networks, railway networks and so forth. And then your wealth accumulation took the form of accumulating profits, which is not at all the same as rents.

The point I’m making, to cut a very long story short, is that in the last 10 years after the 2008 crisis, we have now shifted to another socioeconomic mode of production where it is the ownership of a particular mutation of capital which I call cloud capital (it’s what lives in our phones, it’s algorithmic capital, digital capital) is a very different, very brand new, unprecedented form of capital.

More here.

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