Technofeudalism Quotes

“You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.

First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.

Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract.

Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made.

So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home.

What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit.

By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class.

A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan.

A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them.

And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way.

But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Brilliant and flawed, combining rare engineering talents with ridiculous public displays of ostentation, Musk is our era’s Thomas Edison – the man who, you may recall, electrocuted an elephant in order to discredit a rival.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“It was nothing short of a coup. Imagine getting the world's richest capitalist states to print money that alllows you to build a new type of capital stock. Imagine this type of capital stock comes with the inbuilt superpower to get billions of people to reproduce it on your behalf for free. Imagine further that this capital, funded by state monies and reproduced by citizens free labor, intensifies your power to extract surplus value from proletarians who are working for shrinking wages under worsening conditions--but also from capitalists forced to remove their wares from traditional markets and to sell them via your cloud capital. You wouldn't even need to laugh all the way to the bank since you would be much wiser to keep your stupendous gains stowed in some digital wallet with your cloud capital empire rather than in an account with a pathetic banker”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“The irony is that the liberal individual was snuffed out neither by fascist Brownshirts nor by Stalinist guards. It was killed off when a new form of capital began to instruct youngsters to do that most liberal of things: be yourself! (and be successful at it!)”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Remarkably, as with all historic transformations, no one planned it. No capitalist imagined becoming a cloudalist. No central bankers aimed at funding the cloudalists. No politicians saw the damage cloud capital would inflict upon democratic politics. In the same way that capitalism came about against the will of everyone, including the kings and bishops as well as the peasants, the rise of the cloudalists happened out of sight and behind the back of the vast majority, including the most powerful of historical agents.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“the Big Three own, which include America’s major airlines (American, Delta, United Continental), much of Wall Street (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup) and car makers such as Ford and General Motors. Together, the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90 per cent of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. As for the dollar value of the Big Three’s shares, it has too many zeros to mean much. At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion and State Street $4 trillion. To make sense of these numbers: they are almost exactly the same as the US national income; or the sum of the national incomes of China and Japan; or the sum of the total income of the eurozone, the UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“The financial press called it an ‘everything rally’. It went on for more than a decade. With shares in companies skyrocketing independently of whether the companies themselves turned a profit or not, the wealthy got immensely wealthier in their sleep. Then came the pandemic, giving the everything rally another almighty boost.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“warning us that every new age forged by some revolutionary technology yields a generation ‘who never rest from labour and sorrow by day or from perishing by night’, Hesiod”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Assuming, wrongly, that capitalism’s only serious threat was the rise of organised labour, I missed completely the epic transformation of our times: how the privatisation of the internet commons, aided by the 2008 crisis that led central banks to open the floodgates of state money, would beget a new, super-powerful type of capital.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“with profit-seeking consigned to the aspirant petty bourgeois while the truly rich gleefully whisper to one another that profit is for losers.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“after 2008, and in the name of saving capitalism, central banks snuffed out capitalism’s dynamism and advantage.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“This could not have happened before 2008 because until then the ultra-rich simply did not have access to enough cash with which the Big Three could buy a significant chunk of the New York Stock Exchange.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“That changed after 2008. With central bank money replacing profit as the fuel of the economy and with the ‘everything rally’ driving the price of PropCom-like subsidiaries ever upwards, private equity could take over and successfully asset-strip as many capitalist firms as it could lay its hands on all at once.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“The private equity firm that cost Gillian her job has practised straightforward asset-stripping, with financialisation providing the necessary smoke and mirrors. Looters, who have created no new value, have simply ransacked a pre-existing care provider. To”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“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?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“an environment where profit had become optional, the cloudalists seized upon the central bank money to build a new empire.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Enter amazon.com and you have exited capitalism. Despite all the buying and the selling that goes on there, you have entered a realm which can’t be thought of as a market,”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect less than 1 per cent of their firms’ revenues. The reason is that paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech relies on. Most of the work is performed by billions of people for free.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“kinds of capital, for the cloud metaphor is just that: a metaphor. In reality, it is comprised of vast data warehouses, containing endless rows of servers, connected by a globe-spanning web of sensors and cables.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“The War Economy experiment was an unqualified success. Production quadrupled in less than five years. Inflation was kept on a leash, unlike what had happened during the previous world war. Unemployment disappeared, and was kept at bay even after the soldiers, sailors and airmen returned from the front. To Big Business, it was a dream come true that compensated them handsomely for the subjugation of Big Finance to the government’s plans and strictures.
Beneath the surface, however, the heat of war had transformed American capitalism at a molecular level, just as the heat of our fireplace had transformed iron into steel. By the war’s end, American capitalism was unrecognisable. Business and government had become profoundly entwined. Indeed, the revolving doors between government departments and corporations saw to it that the same crowd of mathematicians, scientists, analysts and professional managers populated them both. The heroic entrepreneur at the helm of the corporation and the democratically elected politician at the head of the government had both been usurped by this new private- public decision-making network, whose values and priorities – indeed its survival – boiled down to one thing: the survival and growth of the conglomerates now that the war, with its infinite demand for stuff and technologies, was over.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“We evolved on the surface of a planet that is minuscule in comparison to the universe out there. In our limited realm, we can get by quite nicely with our senses’ helpful illusions; for instance, the belief that the grass is green, straight lines exist, or that time is constant and independent of our motion. These beliefs are false and yet helpful to the extent that they enable our architects to design safe buildings and our watches to coordinate our meetings at pre-agreed points in time.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“Nevertheless, neoliberalism delivered the necessary ideological veneer to legitimise the assault on organised labour and to promote the so-called ‘deregulation’ that let Wall Street rip.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“The controlled disintegration of the old planned system and its replacement with the recalcitrant Minotaur was always going to hurt American workers.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“We are flawed because we want so much more. We are ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan. A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages: cheaper labour makes for lower costs makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working-class earnings languish, on average, below their 1974 level.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“But once it was gone, the bankers were free to run amok – again.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“These instruments, known as options, had been available under Bretton Woods, but it was only once Bretton Woods had died that bankers, liberated from their New Deal chains, were allowed to bet on the stock exchange, first with other people’s money and, later, with money – effectively conjured from thin air – lent in astronomical sums by the banks to…themselves.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“In 2002, thirty years after the Nixon Shock, humanity’s total income approximated $50 trillion. In the same year, financiers around the world had wagered $70 trillion on a variety of bets. I remember your eyes popping out when you heard this outrageous number. Like most people, you refused to wrap your mind around it. Used to thinking of money in terms of things that made sense, like tons of steel or the number of hospitals it could build, you could not see how Earth was large enough to contain that $70 trillion number.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“From a peacock’s feathers to a Roman emperor’s triumphal march to the fashion industry of today, competing for others’ attention is about as old as sexual reproduction. But it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the process of attention-grabbing was commodified. Once again, it was electromagnetism that achieved this revolutionary feat – not by killing an elephant but by allowing for the invention of the radio and, even more importantly, the television”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism