Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

by Yanis Varoufakis

‘What does it mean to be a proletarian, really?’ Costa continued, without waiting for a reply. ‘Let me tell you. From bitter experience. It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value into exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.’

Thatcher’s greatest triumph, in her opinion, was that she had made it impossible to imagine anyone doing anything unless there was something in it for them.

‘Capitalism and science fiction share one thing,’ he replied coolly. ‘They trade in future assets using fictitious currency.

‘My bosses understand,’ he explained, ‘that the best way to profit is first to establish a monopoly and then strategically to starve the market of the product they have monopolized.’

Costa took a job with a company developing digital implants intended to minimize pain by non-pharmaceutical means. But his hopes that Silicon Valley might be different were soon dashed when, once again, an update of his was put on hold by the company in order to extend the shelf life of existing products.

Socrates’ answer well: anyone who uses the power of the ring to get what he wants enslaves himself to his own appetites. Happiness, and not just morality, hinges on one’s capacity not to use the ring’s exorbitant power.

The problem with humans, Costa surmised, is the same in real life as in digital games: we crave the company of other minds, whose validation is meaningful because they are beyond our control even while control of them is precisely what we seek. When they do things we do not want them to do, we get upset. But the moment we control them fully, their approval gives us no pleasure. It is ever so hard to learn to appreciate that the pleasure to be had from such control is illusory, especially since people are prepared to sacrifice almost everything in its pursuit.

The Freedom Machine would reveal once and for all how empty, soul-destroying and joyless the satisfactions on offer are once we have been transformed from humans into consumers.

One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s stunning observations was that no private language is possible. By definition, language is something that can only be produced collectively.

In direct contradiction of the myth promoted by capitalists and rentiers that wealth is produced by individuals, only to be collectivized by the state through taxation, the reality, Iris argued, is that wealth, like language, can only be produced collectively.

Almost totally disconnected from actual profits, capitalism is powered by fictitious capital flowing from convoluted trades in profits that have not yet materialized – and may never do so!

They celebrated the Luddites as history’s most misunderstood figures, whose vandalism of machines was a protest not against automation but against social arrangements that used technological innovation to deprive the majority of their dignity and life prospects.

The East India Company was no aberration, though. It was the template for many subsequent corporations, such as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which in 1953 marshalled the British and American secret services to overthrow the last democratically elected Iranian government.

A true liberal, Eva disdained monopoly. And to her mind there could be no greater monopoly than ownership of a piece of land. In this respect, she was in good company. Her favourite dead Englishman, J. S. Mill, once wrote that landlords ‘grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking or economizing

French economist Léon Walras, had gone further. He argued that land must be publicly owned and the accrued rents paid to the public as a social dividend, either in the form of money or public services.

Antidosis was a legal suit. When the assembly picked, say, Crito to pay for a play or a religious ceremony, he had the right to argue that, say, Phaedo should have been picked instead because in Crito’s estimation Phaedo was better off. If Phaedo disagreed, he had the right to refuse but only if he was willing to accept that his whole estate would be given to Crito and that he would receive Crito’s in return. Thus Crito was given pause before claiming Phaedo was richer, and Phaedo thought twice before he disagreed.

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them … It counts napalm and nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities … Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry … It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Bobby Kennedy on GDP: 'measures everything except that which is worthwhile'

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.

When we reconfigure societies to put exchange at their centre, Thomas, we violate our nature. Humans thrived by hunting together, cooking communally, making music and telling stories around a blazing fire at night. Sure, the societies that replaced these communal practices with market exchanges unleashed great powers, allowing them to overwhelm others that did not. But there was a price to pay. Market exchange dissolves what makes us human. It is why our souls feel sick.