Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

I speculated about what would have happened had James Watt invented the steam engine in ancient Egypt: The most he could have expected is that the ruler of Egypt would have been impressed and placed one or more of his engines in his palace, demonstrating to visitors and underlings how ingenious his Empire was. My point was that the reason the steam engine changed the world, rather than ending up a showpiece in some ruler’s landscaped garden, was the epic raid on the common lands that had preceded its invention: the enclosures. The singularity we now call the Great Transformation – the name given by the great theorist Karl Polyani to the birth of the market society over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – involved precisely this sequence: first the plunder of the common lands, made possible by brute state violence, and only then Watt’s splendid technological breakthrough.