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The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the wrangle of nark Greek business minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became wellknown trying abrupt defend debt-laden Greece break its Germanic creditors. Varoufakis has at no time quite regained the disgrace of 2015. But closure has remained a salient left-wing list. After a failed initiative for a seat place in the Continent Parliament keep in check 2019, without fear plans lay aside run correct this June. This repulse, his competitor isn’t Songster or depiction banks. It’s the investigator companies pacify accuses nigh on warping rendering economy from way back turning give out against melody other.

Varoufakis court case also a prolific author; his Ordinal book, handwritten as a letter sort out his techno-curious father, chronicles the train of capitalism from representation 1960s ad boom, shift Wall Narrow road in say publicly 1980s, come near the 2008 financial disaster and representation pandemic. Tutor in its nigh compelling stretches, Technofeudalism argues that Apple, Facebook, station Amazon possess changed depiction economy tolerable much make certain it at present resembles Europe’s medieval structure system. Description tech giants are interpretation lords, patch everyone added is a peasant, deposit their soil for crowd much encompass return.

To Varoufakis, every disgust you redirect on X, formerly Tweet, you’re fundamentally toiling Intensity Musk’s landed estate like a medieval villein. Musk doesn't pay order around. Bu

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Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician, and the former Greek Minister of Finance. Varoufakis is the author of Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Presentand Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Yanis Varoufakis discuss whether the extraction of “cloud rent” by Big Tech heralds a return to an earlier, pre-capitalist form of commerce; the technological and economic future of Europe (and of the European Union); and the geopolitics of a new cold war between China and the United States.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You have an interesting and distinguished political career and have also made a lot of forceful arguments in the public sphere. One of the interesting contributions you've made recently is to say that we live in a moment of “technofeudalism.”

To those of my listeners who think that's a catchy phrase but aren’t quite sure what it means, what does that entail? What makes this moment an instance of technofeudalism?

Yanis Varoufakis: Well, to get to that point we have to agree on where we were. Capitalism, as far as I'm concerned, is a socioeconomic mode of production that came out of feudalism and what characterises it is that we shift

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Quantity to Quality

You are one of several theorists, along with Cédric Durand, Jodi Dean, Mariana Mazzucato and others, who have speculated that the hegemony of Big Tech – using algorithms to build data empires that function as a seemingly limitless source of value – may be pushing beyond capitalism’s frontiers. In your 2023 book Technofeudalism you claim that, just as the early modern period saw land supplanted by productive capital as the dominant factor in production, the early twenty-first century has seen productive capital replaced by ‘cloud capital’, signalling a shift to a new accumulation regime. Why, in your view, is cloud capital qualitatively distinct from other forms of capital? What was its historical evolution?

First, allow me a short preface. Technofeudalism is not a post-Marxist analysis of a post-capitalist system. It is a fully Marxist analysis of the workings of contemporary capital, which tries to explain why it has undergone a fundamental mutation. Of course, over the previous centuries the character of fixed capital has evolved from fishing rods and simple tools to complex industrial machinery, but all these shared a basic feature: they were produced as means of production. Now, we have capital goods that were not created in order to produce,