Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

After 1991, two things globalised: financial capital, which could jump continents at the push of a button, and production lines, or chains, which made it possible for American iPhones, engineered by Indian developers in San Francisco, and built by a Taiwanese company in Zhengzhou, to be sold in Philadelphia. Around two and a half billion labourers, mainly from China, India and the formerly communist countries, joined this international value chain, lifting many of them out of poverty. But the headline-generating rises in measurable incomes were often bought at the price of sheer grief.[22] Chinese migrant labourers, working sixteen-hour shifts in abominable sweatshops to produce iPhones, saw their incomes quadruple but became almost as suicidal as Indian farmers whose livelihoods were destroyed when their crops became dependent on Bayer-Monsanto’s genetically engineered seeds.[23] Even in America, the greatest beneficiary of globalisation, millions succumbed to deaths of despair.[24] These contradictions were the direct consequence of the Dark Deal. By mobilising America’s trade deficit to turn China into a capitalist powerhouse, enriching capitalists and rentiers worldwide, underinvestment-induced misery migrated to the Global North while overinvestment-induced wealth migrated to the Global South.