Technofeudalism has just arrived… Read the Preface here

Just laid my hands on the first copy of TECHNOFEUDALISM – What killed capitalism. Good feeling. There is no substitute for physicality. Below, I copy the Preface and Table of Contents to offer you a whiff of the argument and style. I believe it will be in UK bookshops at the end of the month. If in the UK, please join me at several events listed below:BATH on Monday 25th September – 19:30 Christ Church, Julian Road, Bath, Somerset BA1 2RHMANCHESTER on Tuesday 26th September – 19.30 Home Theatre, at 2 Tony Wilson Pl, Manchester M15 4FNEDINBURGH on Wednesday 27th September – 19.30 Greenside Church, 1b Royal Terrace, Edinburgh, EH7 5ABLONDON on Thursday 28th September – 19.30 at the Royal Festival HallELY on Friday 29th September – 19.30 at the Lighthouse Auditorium, Chapel Street, Ely, Cambridgeshire CB7 4EGPrefaceSome years ago, I decided to write a brief history of capitalism. To temper the task’s enormity, and force myself to focus on what capitalism boils down to, I decided to pretend I was narrating capitalism’s story to my then twelve-year-old daughter. So, without seeking Xenia’s permission (something she will never let me forget!), I began writing the book in the form of a long letter to her. Taking care to use no jargon (not even the word capitalism!), I kept reminding myself that whether or not my narrative made sense to a youngster was a litmus test of my own grasp of capitalism’s essence. The result was a slim volume entitled Talking to My Daughter: A brief history of capitalism. It took as its starting point an apparently simple question of hers: why is there so much inequality?Even before it was published, I was feeling uneasy. Between finishing the manuscript and holding the published book in my hands, it felt as if it were the 1840s and I was about to publish a book on feudalism; or, even worse, like waiting for a book on Soviet central planning to see the light of day in late 1989. Belatedly, that is.In the years after it was published, first in Greek, later in English, my weird hypothesis that capitalism was on the way out (and not merely undergoing one of its many impressive metamorphoses) gathered strength. During the pandemic, it became a conviction, which became an urge to explain my thinking in a book if for no other reason than to give friends and foes outraged by my theory a chance properly to disparage it having perused it in full.So, what is my hypothesis? It is that capitalism is now dead, in the sense that its dynamics no longer govern our economies. In that role it has been replaced by something fundamentally different, which I call technofeudalism. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first but which I hope to show makes perfect sense: the thing that has killed capitalism is … capital itself. Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host. What caused this to happen? Two main developments: The privatisation of the internet by America’s, but also China’s, Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis.Before saying a little more on this, I must emphasise that this is not a book about what technology will do to us. It is not about AI-chatbots that will take over our jobs, autonomous robots that will threaten our lives, or Mark Zuckerberg’s ill-conceived metaverse. No, this book is about what has already been done to capitalism, and therefore to us, by the screen-based, cloud-linked devices we all use, our boring laptop and our smartphone, in conjunction with the way central banks and governments have been acting since 2008. The historic mutation of capital that I am highlighting has already happened but, caught up in our pressing dramas, from debt worries and a pandemic to wars and the climate emergency, we have barely noticed. It is high time we paid attention!If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous – indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too – they just aren’t running the show any more. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud-rent.As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. As we shall see, they have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.Does all this matter to the way we live and experience our lives? It certainly does. As I will show in chapters 5, 6 and 7, recognising that our world has become technofeudal helps us dissolve puzzles great and small: from the elusive green energy revolution and Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter to the New Cold War between the USA and China and how the war in Ukraine is threatening the dollar’s reign; from the death of the liberal individual and the impossibility of social democracy to the false promise of crypto to the burning question of how we may recover our autonomy, perhaps our freedom too.By late 2021, armed with these convictions, and egged on by a pandemic that strengthened them, the die had been cast: I would sit down and write a brief introduction to technofeudalism – the far, far uglier social reality that has superseded capitalism. One question remained: Whom to address it to? Without much thought, I decided to address it to the person who had introduced me to capitalism at a ridiculously young age – and who, like his granddaughter, once asked me an apparently simple question that shapes almost every page of this book. My father.For the impatient reader, a word of warning: my description of technofeudalism does not come until chapters 3 and 4. And for my description to make sense, I need first to recount capitalism’s astounding metamorphoses over the preceding decades: this is chapter 2. The beginning of the book, meanwhile, is not about technofeudalism at all. Chapter 1 tells the story of how my father, with the help of some metal fragments and Hesiod’s poetry, introduced my six-year-old self to technology’s chequered relationship with humanity and, ultimately, to capitalism’s essence. It presents the guiding principles on which all of the thinking that follows is based, and it concludes with that seemingly simple question father put to me in 1993. The rest of the book takes the form of a letter addressed to him. It is my attempt to answer his killer question.TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 – Hesiod’s lament

Father’s friendsA child’s introduction to historical materialismFrom Heat to LightA most peculiar introduction to capitalismAn equally odd introduction to moneyFree to choose? Or to lose? Father’s question

Chapter 2 – Capitalism’s metamorphoses

Retrieving the irretrievableTechnostructureAttention markets and the Soviets’ revengeThe audacious Global PlanMad numbers The fearless Global MinotaurFrom uncontrollable discontent to controlled disintegrationThe Minotaur’s favourite handmaidens: Neoliberalism and the computerBack to your question

 Chapter 3 – Cloud Capital

Commanding capital

From Don to AlexaSingularitiesThe birth of the internet commonsThe New EnclosuresCloud capital: beginningsCloud-ProlesCloud-Serfs Wither markets, hello cloud-fiefsBack to your question

Chapter 4 – The Rise of the Cloudalists and the Demise of Profit

The secret of the new ruling class 2008’s unintended consequencesPoisoned money, gilded stagnationHow profits became optional for the cloudalistsPrivate InequitiesBack to your question

Chapter 5 – What’s in A Word?

What would it take for capitalism to die?Rent’s revenge: How profit succumbed to cloud rentCapitalism on steroids?The technofeudal method to Elon Musk’s Twitter madnessThe technofeudal underpinnings of the Great Inflation The case of German cars and green energyBack to your question: Is capitalism not back on track?

Chapter 6 – Technofeudalism’s global impact: the New Cold War

Technofeudalism with Chinese characteristicsTechnofeudal geopolitics: The emerging ‘threat’ of China’s cloud finance Technofeudal geopolitics: How Ukraine helped divide the world into two super cloud-fiefsThe spectre of technofeudalism over Europe, the Global South, the Planet Back to your question: who wins and who loses?

Chapter 7 – Escape from Technofeudalism

The death of the liberal individualThe impossibility of social democracy Crypto’s false promiseImagining Another NowDemocratised companiesDemocratised moneyThe cloud and the land as a commonsA cloud-rebellion to overthrow technofeudalismBack to your question, one last time

APPENDIX 1 – The Political Economy of Technofeudalism

APPENDIX 2 – The Madness of Derivatives

Influences, Readings and Acknowledgments

 

 

The post Technofeudalism has just arrived… Read the Preface here appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.