In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:
Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.
A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.
The first capitalists hated rent.
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There is undoubtedly some feudalism. That’s what the record labels, movie studios and book publishers are pushing. Whereby we don’t actually own anything, we just manage it for them and they have the right to take it back or modify it at any time.
But in general, capitalism isn’t dead. I wish it was, but it’s not. It’s still going strong sadly.
We are living in real life 1984. You won’t even be able to wipe your ass without someone selling it on the cloud before too long.
