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‘libertarian Marxist’ alternative that Varoufakis proposes in its place, which abdicates any interest in the regulatory powers of the state and, paradoxically, advocates consumer-based political action to damage the market position of big corporate entities
What could drive someone to make this claim? China is right there. Maybe he thinks big tech is too powerful and exploitative in China too?
Western Leftism™, he once boasted how consistently he has both sided every single geopolitical conflict, i.e. celebrates head choppers taking over syria but "raises concerns" about the future, celebrates overthrown of gaddafi but denounces NATO role, celebrates Hussein overthrown but denounces the invasion, etc... He would happily celebrate a fall of China but raise concern of US hegemony or smt. Never takes the antiimperialist side, pretends to oppose the imperialist side while living in the imperial core.
The ultimate "both sides"-er.
I don't have my laptop with me right now or else I would have made that meme about the music which would have gone something like:
liberal on one side can pick between: fascism, neo-fascism, social democracy, anarcho capitalism, libertarianism, neo-feudalism, corporatism
socialist on other side
it's all capitalism
Yeah, it comes across as another "crony capitalism", pretending that we can just get rid of the "bad apples" of capitalism and have good capitalism again.
Yes, that summarises the concluding chapter nicely
Thank you so much for posting this! I've always found the technofeudalism thesis grating because it tries to paint what is clearly capitalism as something else, but this paper argues it way better than I ever could.
I had a general positive overview about Yanis Varoufakis work since his first blog posts about his collab with valve (at that point I was just a lib), and even after becoming more familiar with Marxism and some of Lenin works (I’m still very green on theory overall) I’d still think that his points about the current euro economies were useful to understand.
But then about 10 months ago I saw him talking with someone online and explaining this “techno feudalism” rationalization and he completely lost me.
...Are we following the same economist?
Yanis has been very clear that this stage of capitalism could still be considered capitalism, but he's specifically meaning this period as technofeudal because the relationship of worker to the mode of production has meaningfully shifted with the owners of cloud capital
Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don't work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations
The workers under cloud capitalism (the other name for this shift) are better described serfs as they are not wage labor and will never be
This is extremely eurocentric or rather Global North centric. There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the "cloud". Real value is still created by workers mining minerals that go into CPUs, harvesting cotton, assembling smartphones, making sneakers in sweatshops etc.
The value of their labour is extracted by Western firms selling their products. Much of it is transferred to non productive employees in the Global North, influencers, content creators, marketing and PR people, you name it.
For Marxists, the fact that money flows to those people and not the ones making all the hardware necessary for their "content", doesn't mean influencers are actually more productive than sweatshop workers.
All the talk about technofeudalism, post-industrial economy, etc is only possible because the real production is removed from our sight (in the Global North) so it's easy to forget most of the world is still physically toiling to make all our shit.
There is no value (in the Marxist sense) in the “cloud”.
This is just wrong, there is a vast amount of dead and living labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud (data centers), every single piece of hardware in a server is a commodity itself, just like the software required does not develop itself. In order for them to have no value, they would literally need to pop out of nature. Same goes for data, there is a lot of dead and living labour involved in collecting and storing data, even if computers have made it infinitely easier to reproduce and distribute data than before. A single byte of data or row in a table is insignificant and near worthless, but we are talking about trillions of bytes of data handled by data centers, it's qualitatively different.
This does not mean i agree with Yanis, i dislike the man and his kind with every molecule of my body, but disregarding data is frankly absurd.
You are totally right but that's not what Yanis means by "cloud capitalism", which is what I was referring to.
"Cloud capitalism" is about collecting fees for access to digital markets, collecting your personal data, monetising user content without paying creators, actual content of user-facing platforms like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebok, not things you're talking about: labour involved in building and mantaining the cloud, server as a commodity itself, labour involved in collecting and storing data. This is why the user I was replying to referenced "unpaid labor", none of the things you mentioned are unpaid.
In https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-age-of-cloud-capital:
Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.
The exercise of capital’s power to command workers and consumers alike was handed over to the algorithms. This was a far more revolutionary step than replacing autoworkers with industrial robots. After all, industrial robots simply do what automation has been doing since before the Luddites: making proletarians redundant, or more miserable, or both. No, the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office—to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market.
From factory owners in America’s Midwest to poets struggling to sell their latest anthology, from London Uber drivers to Indonesian street hawkers, all are now dependent on some cloud fief for access to customers. It is progress, of sorts. Gone is the time when, to collect their rent, feudal lords employed thugs to break their vassals’ knees or spill their blood. The cloudalists don’t need to deploy bailiffs to confiscate or to evict. Instead, every vassal capitalist knows that with the removal of a link from their cloud vassal’s site they could lose access to the bulk of their customers. And with the removal of a link or two from Google’s search engine or from a couple of ecommerce and social media sites, they could disappear from the online world altogether. A sanitized tech-terror is the bedrock of technofeudalism. Looked at in totality, it becomes apparent that the world economy is lubricated less and less with profit and increasingly with cloud rent.
Respectfully, I think you're missing a great deal of labor value in the cloud.
One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption
I don't know if you're in the tech industry or have exposure to the level of engineering as well as the value of processed data harvested from users, but the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator
Both of these forms of labor power create the underlying value of cloud capital (as well as the all of the upstream workers, but they are not novel forms of value to your point)
Secondly, there seems to be a meaningful incongruence regarding influencers. I think we agree that their form of labor pales in comparison to the other labor inputs noted above.
Technofeudalism isn't concerned with influencers at all, and it's a red herring to suggest so imho
But to your closing point, while I agree this comes from a global north perspective, its consequences are universal in that serfs from the global South are tilling the land of cloud capitalism for free just as much as folks from the global north
One branch is the developers who are creating the cloud infrastructure and the algorithms that keep us hooked, the other branch is us as users (or serfs more accurately) who are training these algorithms endlessly via social media consumption
The value of producing algorythms vs producing servers themselves is hugely overblown, there's value transfer from one part of the global population to another.
We don't create value by shopping online, algorythms training by observing our behaviour does not change that.
the massive valuation of tech companies in Western stock markets vs the rest of the society should be a reasonable indicator
It's not, that's the whole point. The money flows don't reflect actual value flows, thanks to super exploitation.
Say what you will about capitalists owning the railroads, utilities, etc., I and most people reading this don't work for these companies for free and therefore give these companies egregious valuations.
You probably pay for the bus, internet connection, phone, as well as the imposed value of transportation and infrastructure on your consumer goods, rather than get it for "free" in exchange for some valuable data. And your employer probably also pays that rent in their literal workspace rents, software licenses, security contracts.
And in the odd case your main income comes specifically from these social media corporations as a "content creator", you're still not a serf, you're more like an entertainer or a marketeer.
Historically, serfs are bound to the land, produce collectively for their own consumption and are "taxed in kind" on that produce for the lord, who wields absolute authority over that land, secures it through his own personal militia, and neither party significantly engages in commerce for their social reproduction.
Wage labourers work for a propertied employer for money, which they use to buy their consumption off of the market. The employer can buy and sell more property and the worker is "free" in the sense they can be fired and seek employment somewhere else. In capitalism, the absolute authority over that worker is the state, as well as the "security" force, and not only is the worker expected to rely on commerce for social reproduction, but every single aspect of society (like the aforementioned security) is tendentially reduced to commerce.
I don't see how any rigorous definition of serfdom would define corporations extracting surplus from their property of surveillance systems — as, if extracting your data cost no labour, it'd have no value — as somehow closer to feudal lords than landlords, or their targets as serfs.
It's just monopoly capitalism, A.K.A. imperialism, as it manifests in the core.
Please read this with the intentions of maintaining this as illuminative disagreement rather than another inane internet argument
Historically, serfs are bound to the land, produce collectively for their own consumption and are "taxed absolute authority over that land, secures it through his own personal militia, and neither party significantly engages in commerce for their social reproduction.
I think we can agree that all of these criteria are confirmed with my initial point except taxation.
Ex. your data is bound to the service provider, users produce content collectively for their own consumption, a private militia via security teams, and that users and the corporation do not use commerce for social reproduction (at least from each other in this case)
Imho, I'd argue that the taxation is in the form of attention, which is also commodified by the corporation to sell targeted ads as per your point about surveillance capitalism