Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

But as power shifted from industry to finance after the death of Bretton Woods in 1971, European social democrats and American Democrats alike were lured into a Faustian bargain with the bankers of Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt and Paris. The bargain was crude and simple: social democrats in government freed bankers from the shackles of regulation: ‘Go crazy! Regulate yourselves,’ they told them. In return, financiers agreed to hand over the crumbs from their substantial table, in the form of a small portion of their gargantuan gains from rabid financialisation, to fund the welfare state.[5] In Homeric terms, the social democrats had become the era’s lotus eaters. As they gorged themselves on financialisation, they became intellectually soft and morally complicit in its practices.