Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

Focusing out of our present circumstances for a moment, so as to grasp the larger picture, it is worth recalling how, soon after it was born, and despite its youth and vibrancy, capitalism demonstrated an inherent inability to generate domestic markets sizeable enough to absorb all of the goods that local capitalist industries were producing.[13] The result was aggressive expansion overseas – a new type of imperialism motivated not so much by an urge to plunder faraway lands but to secure and corner faraway markets for the commodities produced domestically. As several capitalist nations competed for the same turf, in Africa, Asia and the Americas, these neocolonialist conflicts led to the repulsive blood-letting of the late nineteenth-century in Europe and ultimately, in the first half of the twentieth, to two world wars. Capitalism’s rise, in short, inspired industrial-scale carnage at a planetary scale.