I really don't think the technofeudalism theory makes much sense and I'm not really sure if Varoufakis has convincingly argued in its favor here...
"Q. Your analogy between feudalism and digital platforms has been criticized as excessive or merely metaphorical. Doesn’t your thesis risk obscuring, rather than clarifying, the real dynamics of power and exploitation in contemporary capitalism?
A. My critics often mistake my argument for claiming we have somehow returned to feudalism. That has never been my argument. My position is that we have moved to a new societal structure based on a mutated form of capital for wealth accumulation — unlike feudalism, which relied on land. The rise of this mutant capital, cloud capital, means that markets are replaced by cloud-based fiefdoms and profits by cloud rents. So, this new system shares some features with feudalism but is fundamentally built on capital, not land. Also — and this is crucial — because cloud capital is not productive, technofeudalism is parasitic and wholly depends on an ever-shrinking traditional capitalist sector, which, however, has lost its dominance in the distribution of income, wealth, and power. This is the best way to understand power and exploitation in today’s societies.
Q. To clarify, doesn’t the majority of the world’s workforce still operate within a capitalist system rooted in private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value from wage labor, as Marx described?
A. Yes. But that does not diminish my technofeudal hypothesis. Let me remind you that even in 1860, most people still worked under feudal relations of production, not capitalist ones. Yet feudalism was already dead and capitalism had taken its place."
#Technofeudalism #Capitalism #Marxism #CloudCapital #BigTech
