Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

by Yanis Varoufakis

As conglomerates and governments became reliant on a diet of interest-free loans, with companies in developing countries borrowing more than their governments, in excess of $2 trillion by the end of the 2010s, the central bankers faced an ugly dilemma: either switch off the money taps, which would mean blowing up financialised capitalism, having printed all that money to save it; or continue to pump money into the system, hoping for a miracle to intervene but, in reality, facilitating the replacement of profit as capitalism’s motivating power and lubricant. Unsurprisingly, they chose the latter. The central banks’ anguish was the cloudalists’ delight. It was in this period that intrepid and talented entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were able to build up their super-expensive, ultra-powerful cloud capital without needing to do any of the three things that capitalists traditionally had to do to expand: borrow money from some bank, sell large portions of their business to others, or generate large profits to pay for new capital stock. Why suffer any of this when central bank money was flowing freely? And so between 2010 and 2021, the paper wealth of these two men – meaning the total price of their shares – rose from less than $10,000 million to around $200,000 billion apiece.