Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

Simply, while they may wish to protect themselves from its shifts and shocks, they have no actual desire to be free of their pact with the US, which allows European capitalists to profit from the demand generated by America’s trade deficit and to turn these profits into US assets. Could anything worse afflict a Europe dependent on the Dark Deal than the Dark Deal’s demise? Yes, there is something even worse: the gradual, worldwide shift of money and power from the capitalist to the cloudalist sphere. If my hypothesis is right, that cloud capital is overpowering terrestrial capital, sucking cloud rent increasingly out of the global value chain, then Europe is in deep trouble. Because Europe is not China. It lacks a single Big Tech company that can compete with those of Silicon Valley and its financial systems are wholly reliant on Wall Street. Europe’s lack of cloud capital means that the New Cold War, along with the energy shock[17] that the war in Ukraine inflicted upon its manufacturers, has already rendered Europe geostrategically irrelevant.[18] At least Europe is still rich and, in theory, able to look after its weaker citizens. The same cannot be said for Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, most of Asia and the whole of Africa and Latin America. The rising price of food and fuel caused by the Great Inflation has pushed the Global South into a debt crisis as gruesome as that of the 1970s and 80s. Having been encouraged for decades to borrow dollars to import raw mate...