The idea that we are entering an era of techno-feudalism that will be worse than capitalism is chilling and controversial. We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.
No that’s still capitalism. Capitalism is still the problem. To call it anything else is apologetics, the core issue is that the private ownership of the means of production leads to a concentration of power in the hands of precisely the wrong kind of people after selecting for and reinforcing the most selfish behaviors in them. It then allows them to essentially usurp whatever form of government exists.
There is a difference however. The techno feudalists are no longer about the means of production. Instead they increasingly show rent-seeking behaviour. Businesses looking to own “market places” and becoming brokers of other people’s services is a techni feudalist trend. Take Amazon for example. They sell top spots in their search directly to business customers. An app store monopoly is more akin to land ownership than classic factory capitalism.
okay but land ownership and rent seeking are inherent, inevitable parts of capitalism. Even Smith talked about how rent-seeking is an unavoidable outcome of a system where one person can own what another needs, and about how in order to succeed capitalism will require some way of discouraging or taxing rent-seeking. “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” This isn’t a new phenomenon and it’s not a return to pre-capitalism, it’s capitalism doing what we all new it was going to do from the beginning.
Problem I have with calling this a feudal arrangement is a lot of serfs actually had family rights to their land/means of production under land tenure agreements. It’s more the notion of private ownership of land and production that has led to these private technology increasingly mediating more of our lives. I’ve seen the concept of technofeudalism used in good ways but the overall thing is capitalism and they are more elements of feudal type arrangement within that.
Precisely this. The few rights that feudal peasants did have are being ferreted out as “inefficiencies”
While I appreciate the funny critique of Varoufakis, this is the same point that another Jacobin author makes against the idea of techno-feudalism.
https://jacobin.com/2023/10/cloud-capitalism-technofeudalism-serfs-cloud-big-data-yanis-varoufakis