Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it https://theconversation.com/is-capitalism-dead-yanis-varoufakis-thinks-it-is-and-he-knows-who-killed-it-213992 November 8, 2023 “now computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?” Varoufakis’s new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society; capitalism has morphed into a “technologically advanced form of feudalism”.
Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” – the Big Tech companies – who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved – what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” – and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”.
Markets have been “replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets”.
Access to the “digital fief” comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% “on all their revenues”, while Amazon charges its sellers “35% of revenues”. This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs’ produce because he owns the estate and everything within it.
2,745,570 views May 17, 2018
In is address to the Cambridge Forum in Massachusetts, Economist and fierce EU critic Yanis Varoufakis considers the need for a radically new way of thinking about the economy, finance and capitalism.