"Technofeudalism" isn't enough
I have no problem whatsoever admitting that I am a fan of Yanis Varoufakis and a good portion of his books. Even his academic work is admirable, although he clearly approaches economics the way it ought to be approached: as a mere exercise in mathematical onanism in which the basic principles of the underlying subject are, on many occasions, disregarded in favor of getting a good message across before anyone stops to think about the unsolvable system of equations supposedly underpinning it.
It is also a sign of our (bad) times, however, that Varoufakis is one of the few people who manages to find not only the space but also the time to develop his philosophies and proposals for structural analysis. Because economists, no matter how hard they try, are rarely good writers.
I did not expect much from Technofeudalism to begin with, because the book is too lightweight to be much more than a pamphlet about a term Varoufakis coined to summarize the socio-political-economic system currently prevailing around the world. As a pamphlet, it works reasonably well. The chapters are repetitive in just the right measure for anyone unfamiliar with Varoufakis and the foundations of his work, and those foundations are themselves summarized in a very accessible way for readers who know little about them.
But for someone who says that John Kenneth Galbraith and one of his seminal works, The New Industrial State, were major inspirations, the prose leaves a great deal to be desired. And that is without even getting into the content itself, of which I am not much of a fan either.
The device Varoufakis uses in this book is a (long) answer to a question he imagines his now-deceased father would have asked him. Presumably a card-carrying Marxist who was imprisoned for political reasons during Greece's dictatorship, the author's father was one of the people who most inspired his worldview, particularly his need to question everything presented to him as "given" or "predetermined".
It is not a new device, either for the genre or for Varoufakis himself, who did the same thing in an earlier book that I admit I have not read, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy. I have little doubt that the device worked better in that book and, above all, that it remained more present in his notes while writing it.
The book's central thesis is that we already live in a post-capitalist world. While the capitalist system remains in place at its structural foundations, it has become hostage to "cloud fiefs" represented by the technology giants: Amazon, Google, Facebook, and so on.
Thanks to capitalism's underlying dynamics, particularly deregulation and the search for new means of obtaining or extracting not necessarily profit but rent - in the terminology long familiar to the left, "rent-seeking" - the system has been captured by a handful of companies that have managed to make their rents essentially self-generating, without the efforts associated with classical capital, such as investing in machinery and all those other romantic things that provided such nice targets for anyone dreaming of a modern Luddism. To the point that even the traditional capitalists, who helped perpetuate this new system, end up suffering because they themselves become "serfs" of these virtual fiefs.
The hopes of Varoufakis and his father were thus shattered. Two anarchists who dreamed of seeing the world become one vast network of cooperatives instead saw the exact opposite taking shape. And we have barely even talked about climate change, despite the fact that every damn year seems to bring us worse summers and winters in terms of temperature, rainfall, winds, fires, and the like.
At first glance, it is a theory worth listening to. A cursory look at the stock market is enough to see the bizarre concentration of capital in the companies representing the "fiefs" Varoufakis describes. Which means that the collapse of any one of them would throw the entire financial system into question for at least a few months.
Even the feudalism itself is difficult to deny, although in my view confining it to social media, cloud computing, and other elements of information technology is far too limiting. Speaking from my own professional field and area of expertise, beyond the fact that solutions can effectively be built only around the three companies belonging to the "fief" Varoufakis describes, there are very few companies that are not themselves under the control of a multinational belonging to yet another multinational corporation with revenues in the billions of dollars.
To my mind, it is very easy to draw a parallel between being a mere employee of a subsidiary of some megacorporation headquartered thousands of kilometers away - and everything that entails, from a lack of recognition for one's work to the eventual deflation of wages because you are nothing more than a microscopic cog in the parent corporation's enormous machine - and capitalism's regression into a new form of feudalism. One could argue that capitalism itself was already this, but I "feel" that it became considerably worse in the post-2008 years and especially after COVID.
In my view, the book also suffers because of its timing. It was published in 2023, and since then the world has borne witness to the old maxim that "there are weeks when decades happen".
It is very difficult not to mark October 7, 2023 as a major turning point in world history. A turning point whose implications have not yet been fully absorbed by the population at large, but which will have to be documented very carefully and eventually explained to future generations.
It was the moment when whatever remained of the "West's" moral superiority was finally flushed down the toilet. A moral superiority that was already little more than a crumbling ornament, and which finally met the fate it had always deserved.
Almost three years later, and Donald Trump is once again occupying the position of the most powerful man in the "free world". So powerful that, because of Israel's wishes, he decided to throw himself into a confrontation his predecessors had gone to great lengths to avoid, because they at least understood that a war with Iran would become a quagmire in which, at the very least, the attacked side would drag the attacker down into the swamp with it.
But Trump, full of himself after the events that led to Nicolás Maduro's fall in Venezuela - events driven largely by internal forces rather than direct US action - apparently believed that his fate would be different from that of the many others who had already damned themselves in similar circumstances. A grave mistake, judging by what we can already see.
It is quite likely that, in a new edition of Technofeudalism, Varoufakis would rewrite a great deal of the book to account for everything that began after October 7. Including the fascistic crescendo sweeping across the world, propelled by the "cloud fiefs" and producing a degree of alienation far worse than anything Marx and co. could have imagined when thinking about the capitalist mode of production.
Because what I see in the world is an economy that seems increasingly "fake". Perhaps this is precisely an effect of the "fiefs" and the enormous concentration of global capital in their shares, on top of the aforementioned alienation generated by their products. But it does not stop there.
It is like the old metaphor of the frog that remains inside a bucket as the water gradually reaches boiling point because it was already there when the temperature was still comfortable. In a world broadly affected by cost-of-living crises, the collective response seems to be little more than a shrug.
So the term technofeudalism, while well intentioned as a way of summarizing what Varoufakis sees as the post-capitalist system, is no longer enough. And I do not even know whether I could come up with something that properly combines all these underlying elements - technological feudalism, neo-neo-fascism, an economy based on companies possessing enormous intangible value and not much else, a global population being comfortably boiled alive thanks to the conveniences of social media and food delivery, and so on.
Varoufakis would quite probably agree with this point of view. My problems with the book, however, do not end there.
Like other leftists, Varoufakis is, above all, an incurable optimist. Personally, I go in precisely the opposite direction. Especially when the proposed way out of this spiral is a kind of digital anarchism that requires people to engage with the world in a genuinely active manner rather than merely en passant, as they do today.
This is also one of my great dilemmas whenever I think about what might reverse our current situation - assuming such a reversal is even feasible and, more importantly, actually desired by the "masses". Because I cannot see the world of direct democracy envisioned by Varoufakis in the final chapter as something achievable either now or at any distant point in the future.
His proposal is, as I mentioned, a world of direct democracy at every level. From labor relations to the political sphere, everything would be determined through the direct vote of all citizens and of the participants in the small communities created by this new ideal and non-technofeudal world. Some centralized institutions would remain for regulatory purposes, but initiative would always rest with citizens and their peers rather than with the government.
This is grounded in the view held by Varoufakis and similar authors regarding human beings, whether individually or collectively. For them, the human being is always a creature capable of reaching its fullest potential, or at least on the verge of doing so if the proper conditions are placed before them. My own view is quite different.
As a student of history and of History, I have considerable difficulty believing that unregulated human beings are capable of preserving the benefits promised by Varoufakis and other anarchists for very long. Even in anarchist or cooperative initiatives where politically aligned people come together, the balance between merely keeping the initiative alive and tearing the whole thing down over one petty dispute or another is extremely fragile. I say this from direct and continuing experience.
That is why I invariably end up on the side of "Hobbesian Marxism", something that unfortunately has not yet been developed particularly well but which summarizes my own line of thought rather nicely. One could argue that this is essentially what the Soviet experience amounted to, and there is a good chance that it was. Though obviously with far fewer rough edges if we were talking about an ideal world.
Despite all these reservations, particularly regarding the presentation of its ideas and its prose, the book was very much worth reading. It is, at the very least, an excellent introduction to Varoufakis and a fairly reasonable summary of the current state of affairs, at least as far as the structural organization of the world economy is concerned. I do not see much use for the rest of it, though.