October 5, 2023 - 3:50pm
In his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis, the Leftist economist and former finance minister of Greece, suggests that the capitalist age has already come to an end. He argues that a new global economic and political system has stealthily replaced the old order, with the emerging dominance of tech monopolies like Amazon and Google. He spoke to UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers this week about the return of feudalism, the problem with globalism, and the ongoing European migrant crisis.
You can watch the full interview above.
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SubscribeI’ve come to realize that not all Socialist leaders are Machiavelian zealots. Some are true believers in “The Theory.”
Socialists are actually very good at diagnosing problems because they spend all their time critiquing power structures. They are terrible at solving problems because their solutions don’t correspond to reality.
Many Fabian Socialists and Traditional Marxists hate Identity Politics and Postmodernism (Intersectionality or Modern Progressivism). But Modern Progressivism is a reaction to Socialism not working and not the failings of Capitalism. It’s the ole Trotsky dilemma. The idea that Communism would have worked under a Trotskyite USSR is patently absurd. Any ideology that intentionally splits social groups into a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil is doomed to fail.
You will not find a Modern Progressive that wasn’t initially schooled on elements of Class Warfare. You don’t just go Woke. It’s a progression based on seeing the world through a Lens of Group Oppression and not Individual Rights.
I’m all for listening to this guy diagnose problems. Just don’t let him fix anything because they will conform to his balkanizing Theory of Group Rights.
He’s actually quite critical of identity politics in the book.
I’ve listened to him before. He’s a decent guy. I just find his empirical methods incomplete. If you’re going to diagnose a problem and then solve it, you can’t just ignore all the past failures of Socialism and chalk it up to Capitalist subversion. The record is pretty clear at this point that Socialism can’t sustain itself. It needs a host like Capitalism that can produce growth and stability.
At the very best, all Socialism is going to do is induce some synthetic middle ground like Stakeholder Capitalism where the State controls the means of production.
What if his slogan were Bring Back Capitalism, but properly, and he teams up with the likes of Bernie and Reich?
Haha I’m listening if you have more details
Stakeholder Capitalism … I believe Mussolini had a word for that, no?
Indeed.
This is the dingus who said that What’s-her-face ought to be kicked out of the UK because she had the temerity to say that, maybe, perhaps, at some level, borders matter, right?
He has maybe, perhaps, at some level, lost it a bit there 😉
Self goal I guess.
How can she be kicked out of a country if he doesn’t believe in borders.
If you don’t believe in borders, how would you expel anyone, they could just return at any time, no passports, no borders, no rules
Ah, you spotted the flaw in his logic. I think Taleb must have had dear old Yanis in mind when he came up with the notion of IYI.
The man is an historically illiterate fool. His assertion that millions of white Europeans decamped and flooded Africa, Asia and South America is absurd.
For example, the Indian Census of 1891, taken at the height of the Raj, documented that there were only 125,945 British residents out of a total population of 287 million people – 0.043%% of the population.
It doesn’t take much thought to work out that at a time when travelling even short distances was slow, expensive and dangerous, millions of mostly impoverished Europeans were not zipping across the oceans and flooding Africa and Asia
Certainly not to Asia and Africa, but they did zip to ’empty’ places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and subsequently became the majority population.
Agreed, but that happened over hundreds of years. First attempts to set up colonies on the east coast of Canada were in the 1500’s. Significant populations (ie: thousands) didn’t permanently settle until 1700’s, and didn’t really become dominant in many areas until 1800’s. In contrast, 1 million immigrants flooded into Germany alone in just a couple of years. If you do the math and extrapolate what that will mean in just 10-15 years, it is not at all comparable to the European colonization of the Americas.
Yanis had his chance in Greece. Pretty much bankrupted the place and ruined the life opportunities for young Greeks who are leaving in their droves. But hey, the government employees got early retirement and good pensions.
I finally managed to finish my review of his book: https://glitches.substack.com/p/are-we-living-in-a-cloudalist-dystopia