@@emanuellopez8578 Lololol, not on a pedestal, at least not for me. Zizek is a punching bag in philosophical academia imo. My comment is that he actually shut the hell up and deferred for a change.
Bc most of the time on camera he speaks at those conservative right wing events that use the fotage to create 19 videos of epic libs getting owned, thus most of the people he devated with audice and camera is bad
I’ve done gig work for over 5 years, and what he says about being a techno-feudal slave. He is SO damn right. He nailed it! “The complete collapse of the private space.”
@Horseshoe Party I don't think you were paying attention right around the 11 min mark he was addressing this kind of thing where young people are taking bullshit courses that they know are bullshit just to improve CV. Why do they do that, why do they feel they need to do that?
@@jareddunlop8411 Because the jobs they will get from those bullshit courses are bullshit too. The entire shit show has basically reached its conclusion. I don't know what will follow but we are in for an epic restructuring, or is that a 'great reset'?
And here we are giving ourselves away on a capitalist platform, supporting our techno landlord, contributing our two cents to salve the pain of always being outside, excluded. CZcams, mine .my data- please! A gift, now: choose a metal used in tech. Get the capital to build the infrastructure in - find African country where metal lies waiting -, mine said metal, get rich. This guy ain't saying anything new.
@@gloriouscontent3538 You must be old. Many young people today have no sense of purpose, and it seems clear that our "elected" "leaders" are actively burning our futures down to pay for Bitcoin. The species doesn't deserve to continue on it's current trajectory.
LOL, when i saw him i said oh no not this guy again. i stopped the video and came down here to see the comments, glad i did, i will watch. i listened to him 1 time then ran the next few times i saw him.
Wow it's almost like the guy he's talking to is saying a bunch of commie gobbledygook so the lumpenrole communist finally stops being contrarian for once in his entire life
He zoned out while thinking 'this guy musta smoked a doobie before coming out. Sounds like any liberal arts student in the kitchen at a party. This is easy work - wind him up and see him talk!'
The world needs a revival of the public square, where people dine out, and listen to people speaking openly amongst eachother,- discussing things they have no educational basis in just for the fun and social interaction of it.
You're talking about the pub. Taxes, big business, COVID, and various other factors have destroyed them. Convenient, perhaps, for Zucc with his shitty new project.
Varoufakis is absolutely right. Everyone who has been following unfilitered/non-maintsream news sources for the last cople of years has a sense of that. Central banks had trapped themselvs and you can't expect them to act any differently than they do right now. Inflation is the "withdrawal symptom" of globalized economies.
@@globalhumanism I assume it's something along the lines of exposure to fluctuating global markets and issuing capital to allow market recovery (quantative easing etc) leaves only manipulation of interest rates in the toolbox of reserve/federal banks.
@@powerdove They are not "issuing capital." They are stock splitting. Capitalism is based on savings and Equity. Our modern Feudalism is based on debt. A nation's currency behaves MUCH like a company's common stock. What is a stock? It is a claim on the aggregate assets + NPV of future revenues of that company. What is a currency? It is a claim on the aggregate assets + NPV of future production of that country. Whether the company diffuses that claim among 1000 shares or 1 million shares, does not change the nature of the land, building, and inventory. Same with whether a country is measured in Weimar Republic marks or Bitcoin. The central banks are not issuing capital. They are diluting the shares outstanding. In the short run, they always get first stock options and stock split received.
@@falstoffe Not quite issuing capital. QE is a transformation of M3 funds into M1 funds that are way more liquid. The funds are pre-existing, but were locked up. Money creation in the QE sense is made by private banks when bonds are negotiated for future currency. These can be either realized as payments or destroyed as defaulted debt. QE takes in those bonds and transforms them into liquid currency.
No he's wrong. Capitalism didn't evolve or devolve, it just stopped being capitalism when corporations got control over the government, it became crony capitalism, where the government, not the market, chooses the winners and losers. It stopped being capitalism when the government created and printed its own currency, instead of people using whatever they agree to use. Inflation is when you print money. Hello, do you not understand that currency is subject to the laws of supply and demand? The central banks could immediately cause deflation if they so choose; I'm sure the outcome would be rather disturbing, but they can destroy currency. Or cease the printing of currency and, well, it would certainly cease inflation. It's not the "withdrawal symptom of globalized economies"
Back in the 80s I was an electronics tech (BTW don't go into this field, it's really underpaid) and I went to work, worked, and went home. I could afford an apartment, a motorcycle, and to pay down my student loans. Now, it's work-work-work all the time, live in the building I work out of, and have a bicycle. It's just down, down, down even in tech.
@@yagruumbagaarn which means you like to stick your head in the snow and repeat verses from the bible of free movement, and cry about the consequence when you draw your head out
I feel you, mate. I am a highly qualified and experienced (30 years) translator, working from 10 languages (count 'em) into English, and the downward pressure on my earning power during this time has been savagely relentless. I was offered a project recently that demanded my level of qualifications and skills, but paid 1/3 of the US minimum wage (literally). I didn't take it, obvs, but presumably there are youngsters out there who would.
What Yanis is outlining here is something that I have seen coming for some time: we have reached the point where the link between accumulating fabulous wealth and needing to rely on actual working human beings to provide it has been well and truly broken. Money is literally conjured out of the air using stock market super-computers and compliant governments. This situation can't last indefinitely, surely - but it will last long enough for several generations of the "1% of the 1%" to live according to the medievalist philiosophy of "the divine right of kings", while literally the entire rest of the human population starves to death - being surplus to requirements.
has it been broken though? Are there not a lot of people working for amazon, uber, ifoods, facebook, google, etc? There are new forms of extracting value, both in production and in the financial sector, but I don't see how that link has been broken. One could argue it will trough automation - the future of AI and such might prove paradigm-shifting, but that's the kind of prediction that has been made for centuries and kept turning out wrong in no small part because capital found ways of incorporating these shifts in these new forms of extracting value, so I don't know.
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p Yes, there are a lot of people working for companies like the ones you mention: below minimum wage, not allowed toilet breaks etc., as unpaid interns, as "self-employed" drivers with no labour rights, and so on. A relentless drive back towards slavery. Your use of the phrase "extracting value" is highly illuminating: you clearly automatically accept that this is what economic activity has become. Not providing the majority of people with amenities and a decent standard of living - just "extracting value" for the owners of the means of production. Meanwhile, AI is indeed being pushed as a way to stop employing (and paying) people altogether, and ironically will create a double-bind: it will become the way our society is run, but it won't work properly, being shoddily manufactured by residual indentured labour in 3rd-world slums, and abysmally maintained because its owners won't want to "waste" money on doing so.
@@hugojames85 I agree with your two first paragraphs, I just disagree with the idea that this is some kind of fundamental "break" in the context of capitalism - at least if seen from the view of the radical critiques of capitalism. About AI, yeah, I can see that happening, I'm just cautious on how sure I am about that because a lot of predictions like these have been made in the past (and also with reason)
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p Ah - I see what you are saying. The nature of capitalism has not changed at any point: it started off as fascism (if workers complained about conditions during the industrial revolution era, bosses had them shot, hanged or transported to Australia) - then there was a short period during the 20th century where its controllers felt the need to pretend some degree of respect for worker's rights - and now technology is enabling them to return to full-blown fascism. Except instead of non-conformists to the system being killed, they are simply ignored. The super-rich in their castles, and everyone else cast into the outer darkness. So there has been no break - it is indeed a continuum. Thank you for this insight.
@Robert Leruyet The first part of what you say is certainly true, Robert. But will the elite bother expending resources on eliminating the superfluous population? Proponents of "Great Re-Set" type theories believe that they will, but I suspect that they will find it a lot easier (and cheaper) to retreat into their fortified, super-supplied citadels, and just allow everyone else to starve to death outside. The biggest vulnerability of the 1%, I would say, is their mania for including the vast manufacture and over-supply of fire-arms within their portfolios of economic activity. So the situation that we see in Africa today - where millions of people have virtually no access to food, but are armed to the teeth with the military-grade heavy weaponry that seems to be freely and infinitely available to them - will spread. The 99% will perish in the end - but they will literally die trying to take the 1% with them, and might very well succeed.
I don't blame the youth for making these "choices". I blame the system that punishes them form making choices they would prefer and rewards the for making rubbish choices. Individual agency is being rooted out of humanity.
Yeah, I agree, but also would say individualism is the driver of selling people consumerism, rather than considering their own role and impact on the whole. So here too individual agency is being rooted out already for many decades, replaced by fake agency.
Individual agency is having the ability to grow a field full of opium, build shit, fix shit, be able to work and be entitled to the full reward. Being able to set the parameters by which you live your life and achieve your goals. Nowadays labor and effort are totally unconnected to the reward you receive. An arbitrary amount of work with no ceiling set by someone else is necessary to achieve bare minimum survival. Gen Z workers have more in common with Bronze Age farmers than we do with workers of the last century.
Evgeny Morozov and Astra Taylor were writing excellent books on techofeudalism and big tech's use of its users since 2013, so incredible how accurate their work is even today
To summarize: - The stock market is no longer about profits; it's been dependent on central bank stimulus since the 2008 crash (even in the 1929 crash the government didn't subsidize businesses). - Our economy is dominated by Platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google) that are entirely controlled by private individuals, equivalent to futuristic dictatorships where an individual owns every building and can control what you buy, sell and even see. - Any user of these platforms is growing the platform's capital just by using it (i.e. by generating data that can be sold to advertisers). Compare to before when only the proletariat created capital during work hours; the traditional proletariat is shrinking and there is growing financial pressure to monetize our private life. - In conclusion, Capitalism is transforming into a different system that is interdependent with the government, and focused on expanding into all areas of life instead of profits.
Agreed though I don't think this new system is interdependent with the government. The government is just there to do these corporations' bidding and bail them out when they fail or struggle financially as we saw with COVID.
I see the platform issue as only partly bad. It could be much worse. At least those company are public companies that anyone can invest in and participate in their profits. If it were private companies or governments that take a 30% cut from every sale in the apple app store it would be much more difficult for regular people to participate in that. Not saying that I'm a friend of those "platform taxes" - in fact I think regulators should break down the fiefdoms and enforce more competition.
@@Martinit0 It could be a bit worse but not much worse. These platforms are already acting like self contained dictatorships. You have zero rights when you enter these platforms, you are expected to follow their code of conduct and you can never change the laws that govern you. If they find you guilty, you've no recourse. There are no judges, no legal process on these platforms. They own you and it doesn't matter if you can own their stock. You still don't have anything to say.
So capitalism is transforming into... capitalism. There is no market without government backing (which was literally always the case), and it's expanding into all aspects of life but not in spite of profits, but because of the pursuit of profits.
"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. "But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us." From "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
@@hugojames85 "A statement that something will happen in the future." That's what it was, a statement of what would happen in the future. It is a prophecy by definition. Whether you accept the meaning of the word won't change that, neither will the medium by which the message is conveyed. Novel, spoken word, film; any of these media and more can be used.
I was resisting this with a healthy lifestyle, until I lost my job in the pandemic. And now I have spent 18 months fighting the youtube algorhithm's pulls. If I resist, I feel absolutely horrible without youtube its scary how much power it has. I have noticed some fledgling movements around discomfort, like Wim Hof cold exposure, a re emerging of stoic thinking in how challenge and suffering have value. Do you see value in a new modern "religion" of a weekly get together to jump in cold water and do hard things as a way of breaking chains of algorhithm? The scary part is that the elite are also controlled by this dystopian pleasure system.
Mr. Varoufakis is simply the best teacher of global economics I have found anywhere. An amazing mind. His ability to encapsulate human economic history in so short a time, less than ten minutes, and make it comprehensible to just about everyone willing to listen, is freaking phenomenal.
this isn't true for the biggest economy in the world, namely China. It is true for declining Western economies. This is true precisely because when you're declining it will be true. You have no capital so monetary policy must do. Yuan replacing USD will set things straight (very long term). China has all the capital, we (US) have all the debt.
@@iakrelliK The connection is that doesn't matter Capitalism or Socialism. Great Filter applies to both, basiclally meaning both capitalists and socialists are completely capable of firing nukes ending the civilization. Not because they're capitalist or socialist but because they are homo sapiens sapiens. It is ingrained in our very DNA to destruct ourselves.
A million claps to Zizek!!! He made it! He was able to listen someone else talking, without interrupting. First time ever. Nice, Zizek, we love you even more for that.
And the winners are everybody? We've never been so many people on the planet and we've never been so rich in known human history. And by 'we' I'm including the poorest of the poor in the world. But yeah, some people got insanely rich through capitalism and abuse their power. So let's change the economic system, that will solve the problem of evil and weakness inside every human heart. smh...
@@fabiovenetz6779 Read Marx. The massive increase in production that capitalism brought about is a good thing *and an important step on the road to communism* , where that productive power will be more democratically controlled and put to humane use
@@fabiovenetz6779 what an absolutely stupid and reductive way of responding to the discussion actual intelligent people are having. Go back to the emotionally stunted man child table, the adults are talking.
From personal experience, his comment about leftists having the hardest time accepting this theory is so true - the idea that capitalism as Marx understood it might be over but the prediction of how and what would come next fell flat… well they definitely don’t like that. Ultimately we can quibble until the cows come home over what exactly is “capitalism” but it seems less and less helpful to use the same word to describe the economics of when Marx wrote and the world we live in today. Glad someone bright is trying to navigate this distinction in good faith.
Everyone is confused because they can’t differentiate between classical Socialism, Capitalism (as classical liberals would define it), and the welfare-warfare states the Fabians set up across the globe, the third way. If you don’t know the history of the Fabians, you’re gonna think we have capitalism if you’re a leftist or that we have socialism if you’re right wing. Everyone just talks past each other, there is no common understanding of what the fuck it is we have.
lol just sounds like capitalism with more steps. All the means of production are still controlled by a few capitalists, including the internet and digital spaces. The answer is the same we need to seize all the means of production and let the people control it instead of a few rich capitalist pigs
@@kingsugulleh The difference however is 'markets' as economists put it. (Free) Markets are an important element of capitalism according to rightwing/liberal economists. But in techno-feudalism according to Varoufakis, so many market failures have occurred that we cannot characterize it as a capitalist market except for the buying and selling of commodities.
Yeah, we have a categorization error on a massive scale. We need a new system, and I'm no fan of this techno or neo feudal approach. But how do we stop it? First of all, we need to resist this digital ID or passport nonsense. After that, it will be damn near impossible to challenge the system
Agree seems capitalism rather than the seeds of its own destruction contains the potential for mutation. Where Marx went wrong was ascribing the potential for agency possessed by the masses. They have none. No power, no capability, no interest, no intention.
We have similar discussions about platforms here in China, with several scholars suggesting that private firms should not operate platforms; you cannot be both the platform and a competitor within the platform. wanted to add that recently the government forced various platforms to share accounts and data with each other to break down their monopolies.
The problem with using government to moderate private platforms, is that the word "government" does not free an entity from the nature of the thing. Monopolies are bad, No? Well, empowering government only creates the largest monopoly of them all. Debt is bad, No? Well, governments are the biggest debtors of them all. I understand the goal here, is egalitarian power. Specifically in the eyes of a leftist - egalitarian ECONOMIC power. But when it comes to POLITICAL power, they go 180* and are in favor of consolidation. Using concentrated political power to achieve egalitarian economic power, is mathematically guaranteed to fail. Every. Single. Time. One cannot place more and more power into the hands of fewer and fewer people -- in the HOPE of spreading power. One needs to diffuse political power as well.
@@falstoffe Yup. In fact, political power and economic power are so intertwined that only the democratization of both simultaneously is feasible. So sad, cause in my own country political power is democratic in the law, but abducted by the economic powers.
@@falstoffe The western perception of political power is short-sighted and limited. If you look at political power over the course of human history--and not just from the limited perspective of an individual ---specifically a capitalist or middle class individual, it is clear that political power is a positive force that pushed humanity forward. The biggest problem under modern capitalism is that political power is essentially monopolized by the bourgeoisie and their representatives. If the CPC could maintain its current position---meaning it could resist the powers of financial capital, then on the whole they will continue to be a positive force for China.
@@skynet5828 You also live in a totalitarian dictatorship, except one more able to convince its subjects that they are in fact "free". In some ways its a worse form of totalitarianism, because as a slave, you cannot be freed if you don't think you are enslaved.
Great observations, learned so much. Baudrillard (in his own way) pointed to this decades ago in his description of the hallucinatory hypermarket and hypercommodities - "the role of the hypermarket goes far beyond 'consumption', and the objects no longer have a specific reality there: what is primary is their serial, circular, spectacular arrangement - the future model of social relations' (1981). It feels very much like what we're experiencing is the inevitable implosion of previous (industrial, consumer) modes of capitalism, but due especially to unprecedented technological advancements coinciding with outmoded recession fiscal policies, it now appears (practically speaking) impossible to develop a system capable of supporting further genuine growth within the time we have left. It feels like a few people have bought the last remaining lifeboats, and the rest of us have little left to do but place bets on who will drown first.
I'm glad Yanis specifically mentioned "the platform". There's a good, short read that I'm recommending to everyone here, since I presume we're (mostly) on the same page about this... "Platform Capitalism" by Nick Srnicek. Gives a nice overview, a nice summary of how capitalism is morphing into something else. Shoshanna Zuboff calls it "rogue capitalism". I like this label of "technofeudalism". We are just now becoming aware of what the hell is going on in the digital sphere, and the complete commodification (and control, and surveillance...) of the Internet.
Thank you Yanis; I love hearing you speak theories of truth! Right on the money, literally usually! My biggest issue is my hearing & if whenever possible if you could arrange for the captions options, I'd probably hear 20 - 30% more of the important messages you're patiently telling us! I wish for more sessions like The Gathering ( Bernie & Jane Sanders ).
Really mind opening and mindblowing. We are indeed in transitional times and Mr Varoufakis gave us a perceptive that makes total sense. Great point of view!
the simplest but most wild absurdity of the markets is that the price of housing going up is overwhelmingly viewed as one of the key signs of a strong economy. why? would we celebrate if food prices went up?
The world is still run by landowners. Who votes for the major parties? People who own homes. If you don't own land but you vote for an R or a D, you're a sucker.
Food and housing are really incomparable. Food is bought and consumed quickly. Housing is bought and held for as long as the purchaser wants to. When food increases in price, no one benefits and everyone suffers. When housing increases in price, homeowners benefit and those searching for homes suffer. The reason a rise in housing price is a sign of a strong economy (different from being a good thing in itself) is because it indicates that more people have reached financial stability. When people have financial stability, they'll want to buy a home, increasing demand for homes, increasing the price. Basic economics.
@@nobodynowhere21 The Founders ONLY wanted landowners to be able to vote because they are the most reliably motivated to know what the hell is really going on. Unscrupulous Politicians, however, know they can maintain power with the least amount of effort and risk if they have mostly low info voters that don’t bother to know anything of substance, and are almost never land owners. This has been the downward spiral since the beginning of Tammany Hall.
@@douglasmacarthur702 a reliable home provides a place for reliable food stores so you do not always have to eat it right away, and being able to buy in bulk saves money.
In a world dominated by Usery, constant inflation is the only thing that can truly be considered profitable. Of course, this is not healthy, because in such a world there is no such thing as a healthy economy. Just grift. Markets - just like mutual ajd, regulation, and everything else - our tools. Tools to be used in the service of a higher purpose, not divine principles to be worshipped. People forgetting this is why materialism is ultimately so tawdry and grotesque.
“It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
'It's friends recommended it as increasing equality' - are we talking about bourgeois social reformists? - no sense of class struggle in that statement.
@@hazelwray4184 imagine Morgan freeman being sarcastic Some have thought the utopia narrative and plot is really a technological one and a thing that always goes wrong is we get high on our own supply when it comes to how much slick shit we can do with our wits. They will let us down with the dunning Kruger effect essentially. Theranos, Nicolai electric semis... those weird plastic surgery twins... eventually the checks bauldrillards hyper reality writes are cashed by actual reality and bodies... It's essentially a story about nimrod the babylon towers and arrogantly playing God. Pinnacle archetype being Satan who thought he could do better and such. Sorry I watched transformers robot movie recently..
Absolutely brilliant analysis of very difficult and still emergent dynamics and structures. Mr Varoufakis is an outstanding communicator and teacher. As a teacher myself who has to work at conveying complex scenarios clearly to students, I really appreciate the clarity and the focus of his talk. I have subscribed to his Channel. Well.done, sir!
If you think his analysis is so clear, then why don't you explain to me the part where he talks about the two companies? Far from being clear, it sounded logically bizarre and make no sense. Perhaps I haven't understood it! So you can explain it! In the same breath, he says that the second company owes money to the first company, but then he says, that the first company makes no profit! So if the CEO and CFO of the first company are engaged in fraud, and they are not doing proper business with the second company, how exactly does that benefit their shareholders?! Remember, the bank gave a loan but the buildings and properties of the first company are collateral for the loan. On top of that, it's not clear exactly how this is supposed to be benefiting Google and Facebook? If, presumably, these people are benefiting by buying Google shares, then that just means that Google is profitable and doing well! It's not really clear how all of this is supposed to be a bad thing?! What is really surprising is that I'm looking at all these comments under this video, and so many people are upvoting without asking any questions! It's like, "anything bad that you say about technology and technocrats you must be right!"
@@RezaRob3 Share holders benefit on paper only. The share is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. They do not know their shares are worth the current price until everyone sells them all, or the company liquidates, then you discover what the true value was, since shareholders are at the bottom of the credit stack. This is why companies can survive for a long time when technically they might be insolvent. there is a widespread "don't ask, don't tell" policy, since regulators are fearful of collapsing the credit system if they look too closely at the balance sheets. But the fragile companies tend to be the financial corps, not the companies producing real goods who have physical capital that is always worth something non-zero. This is a lot like bitcoin: your btc might be priced at US30,0000 today, but if everyone sold them the price would drop to zero well before the last holder of a btc cashed up.
@@RezaRob3 It'd be very useful if you could provide some timestamps to let us know which parts of the video you're specifically referring to, because we'd have to remit to them to answer your questions more properly based on the video. Nonetheless, I'll try to explain to the best of my understanding, because although I do think that Mr. Varoufakis' point is pretty clear, it does revolve around some concepts which can be confusing in and of themselves. He's trying to explain the counter-intuitive fact that stock markets grow the fastest today when the economy is at its worst. This occurs because central banks have leaned towards an excessive reliance on issued liquidity whenever there's a significant downfall in production. As such, it seems like many stocks in the market are growing, even for companies that aren't profitable at all. Simply put, stock market speculators already expect there to be government issued liquidity, so they buy precisely at the moment at which the companies are generating the least amount of profits. Once the government bails out, speculators make huge returns and the markets seem to stabilize. Central bank or government issued liquidity usually comes in the form of bonds, loans or just straight up stock purchases. There is a concept which is not explicitly explained by Mr. Varoufakis, but is necessary to understanding this dynamic, which is the fact that government issued liquidity works in practice as a sort of tax, because the reduction in the value of the currency is a loss of money in real terms for people who have most of their assets in liquid form (or cash). So, the current market is one where the general population is in practice financing non-profitable companies in the stock markets, yet the owners of these companies are getting high returns, giving the illusion of profitability. Hence, why it resembles a techno-feudalism rather than actual capitalism. Another important point that Mr. Varoufakis explains is that there ARE some profitable companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon and other large internet platforms that work in practice as marketplaces. Today, it is almost impossible for smaller businesses to thrive if they do not sell or advertise their products through these companies, which unilaterally determine the criteria, through complicated algorithms, of which products the potential customer can see and which ones they can't. Hence, they basically own the market, which is therefore, not free. Yet again, it resembles techno-feudalism rather than capitalism. Lastly, I think you might've mixed up some of his assertions about private equity companies and publicly traded ones. The publicly traded ones, or the ones listed in the stock exchanges, are the ones benefitting from artificial liquidity (bonds, loans, public purchases) issued by governments. Private equity capital works in a different manner, because it operates outside of the dynamics of stock exchanges. Curiously, some of the largest private equity companies today (such as Uber, which is used as an example) are not profitable. So, why are they so large? Precisely because they finance themselves through private equity, drawing from what's called angel investors (or extremely wealthy investors or companies who can afford to take a lot of risk). Rather than making actual profit, these companies use the money from new investors to liquidate old ones, or what is essentially a ponzi scheme, in which they nonetheless manage to keep a lot of their capital from revenue and from convincing their investors to stay based on the promise of a supposedly brilliant business model that will *eventually* start making a lot of profit once it has scaled enough (something which, of course, cannot be guaranteed). In the example he uses about "the two companies" in the health service industry (7:05), it's important to understand that these two companies are owned by the same person (or people) and are essentially pulling off a of deceit to seem profitable for potential lenders and investors (as he explains), in order to maintain the ponzi scheme-like dynamic. In conclusion, we have largely non-profitable markets, driven by deceit and artificially created government liquidity, controlled by a few actors in the technology industry. This is what Mr. Varoufakis calls a Technofeudalism.
@@divagaciones1628 Your comment pretty much gets a "like" because it's mostly reasonable and you're just answering your own question. The conflict and problem that you're raising at the end is that people basically buy overpriced assets (companies that have no potential). The question of why the stock market goes up is pretty clear. You already basically mentioned that money printing lowers the value of the dollar, and that essentially raises the value of shares in comparison. The other reason why shares go up during bad times is precisely because people know that as the pandemic goes away, these companies will be basically involved in rebuilding whatever new economy emerges. For example, some tech companies have done well because they are involved in remote technologies which will be also potentially important after the pandemic. The fundamental question of whether money printing is good or bad is a separate question and a more complex discussion because it creates complex dynamics in the market and obviously certain libertarians don't like it! It's government's attempt to inject activity into the market when there is a need, and it's a hotly debated subject by the experts which is going to be difficult to resolve in this CZcams comment! It would basically mean not giving people loans and credit cards with the help of Central Bank money. The question of how to buy well in the stock market and buy things that are truly valuable is a fascinating one. Perhaps we should have AI that makes these complex decisions for people so that they won't have to! Obviously buying in the stock market should be based on reason and science, but unfortunately too many people don't have the knowledge to manage this complex system and understand which companies they should invest in. The free market system gives people the freedom to do it anyway. So, some level of "ponzi" is basically inherent in the system, as companies will tend to overpromise. As I said, the only solution to that problem is to better inform the public, for example through better financial AI. Yeah, tech companies can soon even manage your money for you a lot better than you, but if people are complaining now, imagine the complaining they'll do then!!! Actually, a world like that would be a lot less stressful on all those investors. Basically, it would be humanity, as a unified whole, investing in itself, and it would probably be a better world for everyone. As for deliberately fraudulent ponzi schemes, well, that's illegal! Look at what happened to Bernie Madoff! But what is still not clear is how the successful companies that are trying to run an honest shop are supposed to be responsible for this. PS: by the way, I didn't give a timeline into the video because it sounded like a very central point of his argument. Anybody who was listening to him should have picked it up.
Do you think people did not have to consider their reputation in the 70s or 80s? Seriously! The markets were then in different hands but were already quite monopolistic. Monopolism is after all intrinsical to capitalism and that's something Marx and Lenin knew but Yannis seems to have forgotten.
@@jeangingras4631 - I'm pretty sure that rising inequality was already a serious issue at the very least in the 80s. Remember that all this was kickstarted by Nixon and Reagan.
@@davidgough3512 - Meh, looks like the proverbial tree not allowing to see the forest. It's much bigger than the MIC, it's the Big Energy, the Big Pharma and very especially the Big Finance, the vulture funds and the TBTF banks. Nowadays it all seems concentrated under a single neo-corporation whose owners are their customers (and thus unknown): The Vanguard Group, even the infamous Black Rock is owned by Vanguard.
@@LuisAldamiz Very astute analysis, but for me, whatev; i don't buy what they're selling, nor does anybody have to. We're enculturated to avoid the physical life.. Not saying the System isn't relevant.. all the land could be fenced (which garantees local guerilla revolution). But meanwhile every suburban household lot is a potential minifarm and a means of workshop production. Fresh off the boat poor immigrants with intact cultures regularly prove such , but the physical world is but a myth to the rest of us. We are so diabetic and couch potato'd that any sustained effort or discomfort is considered a personal red-alert crisis.
It's still capitalism, but a further development of capitalism. Marx predicted that rates of profit would continue to fall and that monopolies would consolidate as the direct consequence of capitalism - the huge social media companies we have now are just a particularly sinister form of capitalist monopoly. Your points about the finance industry no longer relying on profit are very interesting, but this also fits pretty well with Marx's predictions. As capitalist power develops, capital takes over the state and sucks out all the state's resources to feed itself. I think to say we've surpassed capitalism is wrong, but the capitalism of today is certainly very different from any that's existed before.
IT is not Capitalism, it is exploitation of resources, it's theft, it's the opposite of capitalism, as a Capitalist myself, who wants everyone to be able to work their whole life to be able to feed themselves, to dress themselves, to enjoy themselves, to be able to spend quality time with their families, but this is what happens when your government joins hand with evil. Take a good look at Mark Zuckerberg, does he look trustworthy? Hell no, does he even look human, hell no. Capitalism in my eyes, is the farmer who produces his produce, and sells it enough for him to make a profit, then the grocer sells the groceries off for yet more profit, and then we the consumers, who do not have the time or space to make our own produce, can feed ourselves, my only qualm with all of this is taxes. Because it is stealing the profits of those who produce, manufacture, provide and retail. It saddens me deeply when a shop closes down, it saddens me deeply when I see poor kids on the street, because their parents can't afford to feed them, because they aren't allowed to open shop, because of government regulations, which massive corporations have enforced because it limits market rivalry, and market rivalry is the sole thing that pushes prices down. These companies aren't profit driven, there's no profit in these companies, the only profit is to some random douchebag, these companies rather lay off 10000 workers and run their companies into the ground rather than use the profit as a margin for the company as it should be, in case something bad would happen, so that it could keep at it. I'm not against owning stock in companies, it's a good thing, but when you demand that the profit margins that should be first and foremost in benefit of the company, to be handed over to the stock owners, instead of being reinvested into the company, then you've lost all credits for being capitalists. Now you're just greedy, and greed is a sin.
@@livedandletdie if you try to implement your ideal capitalist system it will only take (x) years to reach this point were in. the amount of years it will take to reach this point can vary but it will always end up in imperialism and then finally the fuckery we are in today. Imperialism and Corporatism are extensions of capitalism that are in inevitable. what you look for is a ideal that can be held up for some time but is not sustainable in the longrun
To add to the last words, and I think that´s something the left and the greens even less like, if they realize it at all: The capital has learned to play on both groups and does it extremely well!
Exactly. I’m a deleuzian. The problem with the modern liberal left is they are being assimilated into the system. They are being centralised into a kinda techno nanny state and it will end awful for many. It’s why I sympathise with some on the right who actually see this and are reacting. They are if anything the deadwood of the new capitalist system. The left need to realise it’s about decentralisation. That’s the radical change. Blockchain tech, open source software, alt tech. It’s the deleuze way of thinking.
This is the first time I've heard the situation in which we find ourselves articulated in such a cohesive manner. These observations have immediately effected my word view.
this technofeudalist concept is a huge element of sci-fi which is in turn a massive influence on the nerds who now own and to a alarming degree control the world
@Horseshoe Party Look , here´s a true skeptic : everything you have access to by extremely - well - payed - to - be socio/political/etc commentators = " Rubbish " . Anti and Pro , having the cake and eating it too . Cute , innit ?
@Horseshoe Party none of the things you are suggesting are relevant in that comment.... It seems to me you are predetermined to talk about those things and looking for anyone to potentially blame. Why not go complain straight to Yanis, he's the one giving the talk about this system?
It's not something new called corporate feudalism it's good old-fashioned capitalism it hasn't changed the requirements. It's just the end result of capitalism it's what happens to capitalism every time.
Me too, for quite some time. I believe that everyone who really thinks about it seriously will inevitably come to the same conclusion and it really doesn’t matter if you come from the moderate left or hardcore Marxist or the liberal or even hardcore capitalist/neoliberal side. The funny thing though is that as the fight between the progressive left and the conservative-neoliberal is raging and is even intensifying both are being outplayed by this corporate system that is leaching off both, the socialist initiatives and the neoliberal initiatives.
Maybe capitalism discovered socialism (too big to fail, injections from central banks, etc), but decided that socialism is only for the wealthy or the finance gurus, privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.
I had this though, a couple of months ago, that capitalism had slowly morphed into a more detached form, based purely on speculation and the hope of growth rather than actual growth. I thought of it as speculatisim, as the "value" becomes more and more detached from any real world measure. This makes so much sense and I agree with so much that is said in this vid.
The eloquence and beauty of the diagnosis almost justifies the disease and suffering - as if a doctor were to describe your disease in tear-drawing prose! - your arms still getting amputated, but Lord, such finesse!
This is great. As Prof. Yanis iterated, it's an issue stemming from a US decoupling of sorts. Or in many ways. All from within. But the crux of the issue is the decoupling within policy formation. The decline emphasises Monetary policy. What's being left to the self denying left (minus Prof. Yanis) here is Fiscal policy. The World is infected. But something far worse than Covid19. The US sneeze is indeed powerful. A socialism functioning purely off its predecessor (Or partner) Capitalism is indeed a blinding Feudalism.
Very true, but this technofeudalism is the most reasonable if not the only expected outcome of capitalism, not some avoidable mistake. Political power comes from economic power, as always, and who's in the position of power will do everything to secure his position and get rid of the competition. Kind of, we just shifted from an agricultural society where the basis of wealth, hence power, came from controlling land, to an industrial society where the basis of power is to control capital. But the two systems are indeed very similar and 'technofeudalism' is a good term to describe this. We had a honeymoon transitional phase, where we had the fleeting illusion that fair competition exists and everything is possible, but actually the whole concept of capitalism is faulty. At least if we expect freedom, chance and fair competition from it.
I've been tuning in to Varis's talks and comments just until recently, and he's truly interesting and profound commentator. I dont miss to hear any of his talks and opinions anymore.
He's really close, but I don't think that notion is entirely cohesive yet. But I think the general jist of what he's getting at could very well be true, and it's terrifying to think about.
Looking forward for his book. He could be getting at something, and it'll surely be very interesting to see if he manages to develop this idea properly.
Monopolies, and corporatism. Competition is what keeps people in check in a functional capitalist world, competition needs the right boundaries to work. The central governments have failed in their only necessary jobs, and overreached in areas they have no business
Small correction, but corporatism is the organisation of society into guild-like corporations representing the farmers, metalworkers, miners and so on. The word you're looking for, corporations in the kapitalist sense controlling the government is corporatocracy.
I only stumbled upon Yanis and the debates on capitalism and democracy by some CZcams algorithm and I am glad for this! I’m no economist nor a political scientist but know that the world is changing so fast and systemic changes are required but had no clue on how and what. So such discussions are very enlightening.
The Bank of International Settlements publication,"Implications for central banks of the development of electronic money". includes the assurance this is needed to ensure banking proftability, not linked to any nation's currency. This is about developing an elecronic funds transfer (like bitcoin) system only banks can use. "Who run Bartertown?"
That would be assuming we left feudalism at some point back in time. Which we never really did. Social structure has been exactly the same for 10.000 years or so since the appearance of the very first lords. People just get lured by the stories that are built around particular expressions of it, which is the only part that has been changing so far.
Profound, but I think once you are in the mode of human self-analysis of behavior, we have to differentiate the modes of production. Yes, if you are an alien analyzing us from space, we haven't changed much. But there's a serious distinction between a lord demanding money and a marketplace where labor can be sold that is essential to any discussion of economics and historical analysis.
People either live as self sufficient wolfpack families, OR as a braindead anthill where everyone is serving their single leader without question. The moment you allow the word of someone else to restrict your supply of independence, you become part of the anthill. This capitalist system is slowly devolving into an anthill because people are increasingly becoming dependent on the hive - meaning it's no longer capitalism, but socialism.
I want Yanis to talk with Byung-Chul Han, Han's books have detailed this emerging phenomenon for years, in his books like Pyschopolitics and the Burnout society.
Yannis your work is greatly appreciated. Your integrity as FM for Greece was absolutely stunning. For me one of the single most important economic acts by a minister throughout that crisis. Look forward to the book.
Janis , many thanks for perfectly summarizing what I only felt in the back of my head Far worse things lie ahead than free market exploitation and waste of natural resources.•°
It's been in the back of my head too for several years already. What set me off is when I saw software companies switching their business model from selling software to renting it instead. For professional users it effectively turns them into serfs, the software is the land of the fiefdom, they toil it and the lord gets a cut for the duration of their professional life. As more companies go on the subscription model people are left with the option of which fiefdom to live under, a designer, programmer, editor, etc, can no longer own the means of production; Veroufakis points to the irony, that it's leftists that ought to see that and scream bloody murder, but they don't. If anything they are entranced by the Big Tech Svengalis. Now that's software, which has the advantage of very little inertia, changes can be made at the push of a button, or less. But it's showing up in hardware too, that is why some people are fighting for the "Right to Repair", and socially epitomized by that sinister proclamation from the World Economic Forum a few years ago "You will own nothing and be happy". It's depressing to think of it.
Sir's before continue yammering , remember the workers digging holes for shitty Coltan . . . Do we want this ? Do we want more digital crap ? Has it helped so far ? Is it easy to work with ? Is it safe to work with ? (🔥 walls) I say it is a move in the wrong direction , increasing digital presence in the life of everyone .•°
The scary part is when the finally realeses ai that easily and fast can monitor us, emotionally, practically and control us by what we are allowed to see online or on your phone. The fact is your phone is already monitoring you, so much more than you actually dare to know. And it only takes a small effort to make it all go away, by force.
I really appreciate how eloquent he is and how he puts his point across....even though I do not agree with his points in a major way (but there aren't enough characters to go into it on here). Zizek just watching him admiringly is also very cute! Longest I've seen Zizek quiet!
Thank you for offering me the vocabulary to articulate the exact thoughts I was having. I used to hate economics. I was saying that I wasn't understanding them. The truth was they were teaching me falsehoods and I was simply couldn't accept the lies. You and educators like you have given me the motivation to look into economics and actually try to make sense of it.
Really interesting and I totally agree, the notions you brought up about the working class producing content mirror some of the things vanni codeluppi has said about this "new capitalism", I think it would be interesting to explore this further under the lens of how excessive aestheticization and mediatization contribute to our general acceptance of these changes.
Very gripping notion. He must be on to something. It seems likely that there is a connection between all these platforms growing and growing apparently despite having no viable sources of income and the increased reliance on state subsidy for different businesses.
I mean, define income. Most of the things he mentions, yes, don't produce anything and are simply accumulators of wealth like those private equity sharks he mentions. Alphabet and Facebook have plenty of income, and with where the national debt is at are probably more likely to subsidize the state than the other way around (scary). Their entire business model is, like he said, about extracting capital in every possible way from the population. Google hasn't actually made anything in 20 years: they buy a startup that monetizes some previously untapped part of human psychology, flip it, and stick their ad revenue/metadata needle into it, and boom new revenue stream.
I completely agree with the broad thesis; I've been saying the same sort of thing for over a decade, about competition being replaced with monopolies like the digital platforms and Big everything. I used to call it rentierism, which it also is. The productive and merchant bourgeois being eaten by the rentiers. We were talking about "Rip-off Britain" under the influence of monopolies and oligopolies even before the 2007/8 crash. My question is how does this thesis differ from the traditional post-WW2 Marxist Monopoly Capitalism analysis, and what does it do to relatively simplistic accounts of capitalist history producing working class organisation and consciousness leading to socialist parties and revolutionary potential such as the narrative Prof Wolff used to repeat endlessly? Where is techno-feudalism likely to lead in terms of working class mobilisation and socialist politics, and does it require a fundamental re-think about the trajectory of capitalist development and the kind of crises it produces? Secondarily, to what extent, if at all, is this a process limited to the Anglo-sphere and Europe, and does China offer an antithesis, or is it already tending toward a techno-feudalism with Chinese characteristics evolving from the present technocracy and managed capitalism?
I think one of the issues with your question about working class mobilization and socialist politics is that those ideas were created to respond to a very different time and economy - we need new solutions to new problems. The current platforms seem to be an easier thing to nationalize, for example (though this seems farfetched for now). The obscene wealth gap will always be a tactic for anti-status quo politics but perhaps we need to look past the idea of the "working class" as Yanis points out that we are all entangled in the system now beyond the work spaces. At least social media platforms give us an easy way to discuss the issues with social media platforms!
Great questions. We should all think about it, because it's not time to give up fighting as working class just because capitalism evolved. Maybe we just have more challenges now - we have to build strong offline communities, and people are not willing to do that; we need to find alternatives in tech, so we don't rely on big companies whenever we want to interact, buy, sell, search for stuff; maybe it's time to think about leaving big cities for good... There's a lot to be done and it's going to be hard.
Diomides Skalistis 19 hours ago The whole video can be found here: czcams.com/video/0ODuleYZwbs/video.html As for subtitles for our Italian Friend, we'll have to wait a little bit in order to get the automatic ones. After that, auto translation would be a good place to start.
i truly agree that it is a new time. i wonder though, what distinguishes this from a new phase? he has mentioned wonderful points as to why this is the case, but what new phase would we measure this against, to compare? if this isn't a new phase, what would it have displaced, if it displaced a new phase of capitalism?
Platforms are the malls of the information age. Retailers didn't pay outsized lease rates for mall space because there weren't location alternatives, they did so because the malls attracted the customers, so that the retailers could focus on serving the customers' needs, rather than getting them to their stores. Aggregators facilitate small business, they don't replace it. Online businesses are very low barrier-to-entry, specifically because such marketplace platforms exist. Amazon hosts over two million small- and medium-sized businesses, which they do not own, and from which they only derive profits in exchange for services provided.
Housing market in USA right now is example of this trend, with handfull of companies buying real estates left and right, inflating prices which common individual can not afford in the process, with end goal of owning of virtually all houses and residential buildings and rent it to individuals who could not be able to own them.
@@swordscythe Indeed we could. Lesson one, give religion ZERO political power. Lesson two - revive the pagan tradition of annually killing the king and getting a new one.
@@greyshah7947 Check out the background story in the manga Overlord, besides the RPG / VR game part, where it’s a dystopian world where the only thing people have left in a polluted overcrowded world is a virtual parallel world / metaverse where they use it to keep everyone happy and continue working. Also thing about it in analogy as the world we already live in as it keeps getting worst day after day and we immerse ourselves more into the internet and our devices. Last but not least it’s very important to think about how a few companies will control the metaverse and products and services will be facilitated there so these companies will establish a monopoly and charge you arbitrarily prices they seem fit… when something sounds too good to be true and free try to think about what you really give in exchange for it either directly or indirectly…
If possible, can you make subtitles (CC), available for your videos? In some parts, the audio is not clear. Also, some people don’t have English with an accent as something familiar.
Salve Yanis, sono italiano e capisco poco l'inglese. Cortesemente è possibile in qualche modo ricevere la trascrizione nella mia lingua di questo video che sarei molto interessato a poter comprendere? Grazie. Basterebbero anche solo i sottotitoli in italiano che forse renderebbe, anche in altre diverse lingue, maggiormente fruibile il contenuto.
Everyone rolls their eyes at me when I tell them how much of a stranglehold the corporations have over this country and then they call me an anarchist. But the more they increase my rent and the less I get paid, the more I sympathize with the anarchists.
I just heard Mr Varoufakis was hospitalized by a mob of some twenty people. I was very sad to hear this. I hope he recovers completely, and they find the organizers both of this attack, and the previous one. It sounds like he's getting under someone's skin. Getting close to the pulse can be dangerous. I think this means we should be paying close attention.
I've been saying this sort of thing for years but I'm afraid I'm not as generous as Yanis; I call it Corporate Fascism, lol. I feel so sorry for youngsters today who've been brought up with this invasive technology and can't go anywhere without their 'adult dummies'. At least I know that I can't be traced as I've never used a mobile, let alone smart phones. I'm not paranoid. I just want to be left alone when I'm out for a walk or doing errands and I don't want to give those companies more power and money than they've already got! And I can't be forced to use apps as I don't have anything to put them on. It's incredibly freeing. :)
@@staphylea1 Just watched that. It was really good; one I haven't seen before. I'd say thank you to the person who gave the link but I can't see his reply for some odd reason, but thanks anyway. :)
@@yongbobe478 Ah, there you are! I couldn't see your reply when I replied to staphyea1 but it's back now, lol. Yes, that was brilliant. And I see what you mean. Being aware is always a good thing though, and after watching that video on your link I can see there's more that I can do. As the professor said, it really needs a collective action, but at least us individuals can make our own stance meanwhile. :)
Metaverse is the next step, Zuckerberg doesn't control the whole internet of course but he can control the metaverse if he pumps a ton of money, that he has into it to make it useful and attractive to people with a lot of "free" services and get's other tech companies to join he will indeed control everything.
He's really not, at least in the sense that Zizek is probably one of the few sorts that genuinely seems to not really have an ideological tack or stake at all, and seems instead to simply be a provocateur to get people to rethink their position.
I think he is missing a big point. If interest rates are cut to near zero, where do people put their money? They buy stocks, or invest in housing. What we are witnessing is very low rates and huge levels of debt. There is no way to raise rates because debt is too high. So the cycle continues until the debt becomes unsustainable.
they start growing vegetables and food trees. In their gardens and on the streets. They stop and enjoy company of neighbours and all the while the food is growing around them. Their children start climbing the trees and they look out and see what is growing and what is dying. The people who are very very sick and brainwashed start joining in and the machinery and electricity is no longer so needed because people have power in their bodies to actually organise their own homes, shelter, food, birthing, healing and dying. The numbers on paper are not feeding us... they are feeding fear and distrust. Trusting relationships with nature, other people and animals is what grows life... growing money grows distrust and fake reliance on things we cannot eat, breathe, rest under. Remember our ancestors and still some folk know how to live with what is enough from nature. and this way of living has sustained us without wrecking the planet or other animals (for the most part regarding other animals) for thousands of thousands of years. There are still indigenous people in Australia where I live, who know where the water lies underground, which plants produce good food (way more nourishing than grown stuff) , which months to fish and catch what, which ways to orient and walk to find this and that... THAT is humanity. THAT is real life and the more we run away from the pain of trying to destroy the simple health of life, the more we run around in our heads with one idea after another but less and less actual connection with each other and with life. Millenia of simple life, knowing how to live, what the weather will be like, what the birds and other animals are doing... one big tree ... provides centuries of big bits of bark provides countless families shelter from rain or heat or cold.... Where I live there were trees as big as elephants at the base. One bit of bark.. thick and huge is a house... no need for power tools, plastic chemical crap to hold a load of machine made stuff together... put the bark up against a tree and there is a really good shelter. simple is enough... the rest is one big addiction... to a load of stuff we fundamentally don't need. We can unravel this any way we try, but nature knows best and we are best to drop our weapons, egos, machines, computers and walk again with nature. She provides if we respect this. Pure and simple.
@@karate4348 Yes. But you are currently connected to the internet and posting on CZcams. You use electricity and take advantage of all the technological and other benefits that capitalism has brought you. You might just find the utopia you seek is a living hell.
@@percy832 What are you talking about? THIS IS a living hell. The people living in socialist republics are much more satisfied with their leadership than in, say, America. I love capitalist's fear.
how amazing it is to have someone like Zizek interview someone like Yanis? Yanis is obviously literally a genius and so is Zizek, but his mind works a bit differently, which some could see as a flaw. I see it as an advantage, he is so brutally honest, that he’s asking the right questions, with the right amount of passion, to the one guy that is on his side and really wants to break the system (see his multiple references to movies like the Matrix), and he also has the social skills to do it, besides the will and knowledge. This means that we get the real deal here: Zizek is “pushing” Yanis into a corner right from the start, and Yanis realizes: ok, now I really have to make you understand what we’re all up against, and he explains it so well and in such an elegant way, that people genuinely get educated about how the world really works..from a financial point of view, which most people would otherwise never understand and which just happens to be the most important in today’s world. I genuinely don’t think any other interviewer could have facilitated this so well. everyone else would seem way too shallow in comparison... think of his interview right after his TedTalk
You know you're spittin' facts when Slavoj Zizek not only shuts up and listens for 6 minutes but asks you to explain and listens 6 minutes more.
HA
Well one of them is definitely spitting😅
@@wowtorben "what are you sssshslssshsayying?"
You guys have Zizek in a pedestal
@@emanuellopez8578 Lololol, not on a pedestal, at least not for me. Zizek is a punching bag in philosophical academia imo. My comment is that he actually shut the hell up and deferred for a change.
The irony of watching this on youtube because it was recommended by the algorithm
I've watched vids by both of them so not surprising in my case.
@Michael Stocker skip the court and hang them
Law of attraction works everywhere. Its a natural algorithm. But are you aware what is blocked from you?
@@ebrelus7687 Law of attraction? What is that?
It gets worse every year though
"Can you elaborate on this?" Never heard Slavoj conceding the word with actual interest and letting someone else talk for five minutes (love him btw)
Cause most his youtube apparences are from media itw/debates but at academic events he speaks on equal foot with fellow philosophers or researchers
i thought the same thing. you almost never hear him show genuine interest
Bc most of the time on camera he speaks at those conservative right wing events that use the fotage to create 19 videos of epic libs getting owned, thus most of the people he devated with audice and camera is bad
And so on and so on
And so on and so on
I’ve done gig work for over 5 years, and what he says about being a techno-feudal slave. He is SO damn right. He nailed it! “The complete collapse of the private space.”
@Horseshoe Party I don't think you were paying attention right around the 11 min mark he was addressing this kind of thing where young people are taking bullshit courses that they know are bullshit just to improve CV. Why do they do that, why do they feel they need to do that?
@Horseshoe Party I’ve heard human meat taste pretty good though
@@jareddunlop8411 Because the jobs they will get from those bullshit courses are bullshit too. The entire shit show has basically reached its conclusion. I don't know what will follow but we are in for an epic restructuring, or is that a 'great reset'?
And here we are giving ourselves away on a capitalist platform, supporting our techno landlord, contributing our two cents to salve the pain of always being outside, excluded. CZcams, mine .my data- please! A gift, now: choose a metal used in tech. Get the capital to build the infrastructure in - find African country where metal lies waiting -, mine said metal, get rich. This guy ain't saying anything new.
That’s because your kind of people SUE companies over everything and then it gets expensive for everyone…the end.
Everybody is a "brand" nowadays. What a sad thing we have become.
and kids dream of becoming famous for reviewing products on youtube
@@gunkwretch3697 Those opportunities weren't available to our grandparents. I see this as an absolute win.
Commodification of humans
Even Zizek and Varoufakis are brands
@@gloriouscontent3538 You must be old. Many young people today have no sense of purpose, and it seems clear that our "elected" "leaders" are actively burning our futures down to pay for Bitcoin. The species doesn't deserve to continue on it's current trajectory.
holy shit the lack of interruption from slavoj in this interaction is dumbfounding... uncanny even
LOL, when i saw him i said oh no not this guy again. i stopped the video and came down here to see the comments, glad i did, i will watch. i listened to him 1 time then ran the next few times i saw him.
it is edited, you can see the cuts clearly
Wow it's almost like the guy he's talking to is saying a bunch of commie gobbledygook so the lumpenrole communist finally stops being contrarian for once in his entire life
@@graalcloud Norm?
@@graalcloud oh you’re that guy who just yells when someone brings a good point, lol what are you doing on this vid?
Liberty nowadays has been more about liberty from responsibility rather than about personal sovereignty.
"Liberty from liability."
Well put.
Never heard more credible financial talk by two guys with Bond villain accents before!
Bahahahaha. Thank you for making my night.
@@bellingdog thanks for the appreciation bud! 😊
You must have not heard of a Real villain yet ( Swiss Klaus Schwab )
Ur not funny
@@easeroom ze German, not Swiss
Strange that Slavoj didn't interrupt, seems he really likes the guy
nah, simply he's getting old
He zoned out while thinking 'this guy musta smoked a doobie before coming out. Sounds like any liberal arts student in the kitchen at a party. This is easy work - wind him up and see him talk!'
you claiming hes deeply closeted?
Typical Greece-- talk too long , use too many words about something we already know. Those kind of people bore the shit out of me...
It IS edited... so
The world needs a revival of the public square, where people dine out, and listen to people speaking openly amongst eachother,- discussing things they have no educational basis in just for the fun and social interaction of it.
live music too
No way, man Facebook will bring the town square into you each of our brains directly! It’ll be tubular!
I feel this is so unbelievably under-valued today. Suburbs are the death of integrated communities
Although these two do have an educational basis in the topics discussed here...
You're talking about the pub. Taxes, big business, COVID, and various other factors have destroyed them. Convenient, perhaps, for Zucc with his shitty new project.
Varoufakis is absolutely right. Everyone who has been following unfilitered/non-maintsream news sources for the last cople of years has a sense of that. Central banks had trapped themselvs and you can't expect them to act any differently than they do right now. Inflation is the "withdrawal symptom" of globalized economies.
withdrawal from what? I really don't know what you mean by this. please tell me if you're still around. thank you.
@@globalhumanism I assume it's something along the lines of exposure to fluctuating global markets and issuing capital to allow market recovery (quantative easing etc) leaves only manipulation of interest rates in the toolbox of reserve/federal banks.
@@powerdove They are not "issuing capital." They are stock splitting.
Capitalism is based on savings and Equity. Our modern Feudalism is based on debt.
A nation's currency behaves MUCH like a company's common stock.
What is a stock? It is a claim on the aggregate assets + NPV of future revenues of that company.
What is a currency? It is a claim on the aggregate assets + NPV of future production of that country.
Whether the company diffuses that claim among 1000 shares or 1 million shares, does not change the nature of the land, building, and inventory. Same with whether a country is measured in Weimar Republic marks or Bitcoin.
The central banks are not issuing capital. They are diluting the shares outstanding. In the short run, they always get first stock options and stock split received.
@@falstoffe Not quite issuing capital. QE is a transformation of M3 funds into M1 funds that are way more liquid. The funds are pre-existing, but were locked up. Money creation in the QE sense is made by private banks when bonds are negotiated for future currency. These can be either realized as payments or destroyed as defaulted debt. QE takes in those bonds and transforms them into liquid currency.
No he's wrong. Capitalism didn't evolve or devolve, it just stopped being capitalism when corporations got control over the government, it became crony capitalism, where the government, not the market, chooses the winners and losers. It stopped being capitalism when the government created and printed its own currency, instead of people using whatever they agree to use.
Inflation is when you print money. Hello, do you not understand that currency is subject to the laws of supply and demand? The central banks could immediately cause deflation if they so choose; I'm sure the outcome would be rather disturbing, but they can destroy currency. Or cease the printing of currency and, well, it would certainly cease inflation. It's not the "withdrawal symptom of globalized economies"
Back in the 80s I was an electronics tech (BTW don't go into this field, it's really underpaid) and I went to work, worked, and went home. I could afford an apartment, a motorcycle, and to pay down my student loans. Now, it's work-work-work all the time, live in the building I work out of, and have a bicycle. It's just down, down, down even in tech.
and is that not because of open borders? rather than speculation by finance?
@@sacredsoma BORDERS lol. that's a non-sequitur if I've ever seen one.
yup
@@yagruumbagaarn which means you like to stick your head in the snow and repeat verses from the bible of free movement, and cry about the consequence when you draw your head out
I feel you, mate. I am a highly qualified and experienced (30 years) translator, working from 10 languages (count 'em) into English, and the downward pressure on my earning power during this time has been savagely relentless. I was offered a project recently that demanded my level of qualifications and skills, but paid 1/3 of the US minimum wage (literally). I didn't take it, obvs, but presumably there are youngsters out there who would.
What Yanis is outlining here is something that I have seen coming for some time: we have reached the point where the link between accumulating fabulous wealth and needing to rely on actual working human beings to provide it has been well and truly broken. Money is literally conjured out of the air using stock market super-computers and compliant governments. This situation can't last indefinitely, surely - but it will last long enough for several generations of the "1% of the 1%" to live according to the medievalist philiosophy of "the divine right of kings", while literally the entire rest of the human population starves to death - being surplus to requirements.
has it been broken though? Are there not a lot of people working for amazon, uber, ifoods, facebook, google, etc? There are new forms of extracting value, both in production and in the financial sector, but I don't see how that link has been broken.
One could argue it will trough automation - the future of AI and such might prove paradigm-shifting, but that's the kind of prediction that has been made for centuries and kept turning out wrong in no small part because capital found ways of incorporating these shifts in these new forms of extracting value, so I don't know.
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p Yes, there are a lot of people working for companies like the ones you mention: below minimum wage, not allowed toilet breaks etc., as unpaid interns, as "self-employed" drivers with no labour rights, and so on. A relentless drive back towards slavery.
Your use of the phrase "extracting value" is highly illuminating: you clearly automatically accept that this is what economic activity has become. Not providing the majority of people with amenities and a decent standard of living - just "extracting value" for the owners of the means of production.
Meanwhile, AI is indeed being pushed as a way to stop employing (and paying) people altogether, and ironically will create a double-bind: it will become the way our society is run, but it won't work properly, being shoddily manufactured by residual indentured labour in 3rd-world slums, and abysmally maintained because its owners won't want to "waste" money on doing so.
@@hugojames85 I agree with your two first paragraphs, I just disagree with the idea that this is some kind of fundamental "break" in the context of capitalism - at least if seen from the view of the radical critiques of capitalism.
About AI, yeah, I can see that happening, I'm just cautious on how sure I am about that because a lot of predictions like these have been made in the past (and also with reason)
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p Ah - I see what you are saying. The nature of capitalism has not changed at any point: it started off as fascism (if workers complained about conditions during the industrial revolution era, bosses had them shot, hanged or transported to Australia) - then there was a short period during the 20th century where its controllers felt the need to pretend some degree of respect for worker's rights - and now technology is enabling them to return to full-blown fascism. Except instead of non-conformists to the system being killed, they are simply ignored. The super-rich in their castles, and everyone else cast into the outer darkness.
So there has been no break - it is indeed a continuum. Thank you for this insight.
@Robert Leruyet The first part of what you say is certainly true, Robert. But will the elite bother expending resources on eliminating the superfluous population? Proponents of "Great Re-Set" type theories believe that they will, but I suspect that they will find it a lot easier (and cheaper) to retreat into their fortified, super-supplied citadels, and just allow everyone else to starve to death outside.
The biggest vulnerability of the 1%, I would say, is their mania for including the vast manufacture and over-supply of fire-arms within their portfolios of economic activity. So the situation that we see in Africa today - where millions of people have virtually no access to food, but are armed to the teeth with the military-grade heavy weaponry that seems to be freely and infinitely available to them - will spread. The 99% will perish in the end - but they will literally die trying to take the 1% with them, and might very well succeed.
It's amazing how insightful some people can be when their Soul is Not captured by an overwhelmingly powerful organization.
And yet by an overwhelming and lethal ideology.
@@FranciscoSmirsley True
@@MrClockw3rk explain
@@markwayne2655 no
Just parroting Karl Marx...
This is probably the most enlightening talk I've watched for a long time.
in theory everyone is great....
Nah, this is an okayish talk
I don't blame the youth for making these "choices". I blame the system that punishes them form making choices they would prefer and rewards the for making rubbish choices. Individual agency is being rooted out of humanity.
Yeah, I agree, but also would say individualism is the driver of selling people consumerism, rather than considering their own role and impact on the whole. So here too individual agency is being rooted out already for many decades, replaced by fake agency.
People can choose consumer products or their hairstyle. That's about the extent of actual individualism.
agree
Such a good point. I wish others could recognize the same capacity for understanding.
Individual agency is having the ability to grow a field full of opium, build shit, fix shit, be able to work and be entitled to the full reward. Being able to set the parameters by which you live your life and achieve your goals. Nowadays labor and effort are totally unconnected to the reward you receive. An arbitrary amount of work with no ceiling set by someone else is necessary to achieve bare minimum survival. Gen Z workers have more in common with Bronze Age farmers than we do with workers of the last century.
Evgeny Morozov and Astra Taylor were writing excellent books on techofeudalism and big tech's use of its users since 2013, so incredible how accurate their work is even today
To summarize:
- The stock market is no longer about profits; it's been dependent on central bank stimulus since the 2008 crash (even in the 1929 crash the government didn't subsidize businesses).
- Our economy is dominated by Platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google) that are entirely controlled by private individuals, equivalent to futuristic dictatorships where an individual owns every building and can control what you buy, sell and even see.
- Any user of these platforms is growing the platform's capital just by using it (i.e. by generating data that can be sold to advertisers). Compare to before when only the proletariat created capital during work hours; the traditional proletariat is shrinking and there is growing financial pressure to monetize our private life.
- In conclusion, Capitalism is transforming into a different system that is interdependent with the government, and focused on expanding into all areas of life instead of profits.
Agreed though I don't think this new system is interdependent with the government. The government is just there to do these corporations' bidding and bail them out when they fail or struggle financially as we saw with COVID.
@@NecroPyroLion government is complicit, it gets so much benefits...
I see the platform issue as only partly bad. It could be much worse. At least those company are public companies that anyone can invest in and participate in their profits.
If it were private companies or governments that take a 30% cut from every sale in the apple app store it would be much more difficult for regular people to participate in that.
Not saying that I'm a friend of those "platform taxes" - in fact I think regulators should break down the fiefdoms and enforce more competition.
@@Martinit0 It could be a bit worse but not much worse. These platforms are already acting like self contained dictatorships.
You have zero rights when you enter these platforms, you are expected to follow their code of conduct and you can never change the laws that govern you. If they find you guilty, you've no recourse. There are no judges, no legal process on these platforms.
They own you and it doesn't matter if you can own their stock. You still don't have anything to say.
So capitalism is transforming into... capitalism. There is no market without government backing (which was literally always the case), and it's expanding into all aspects of life but not in spite of profits, but because of the pursuit of profits.
We can hear Zizek physically agreeing at 04:07
the schniff of approval
I'd be worried when Zizek agrees, he's getting everything wrong as of late.
🤣😃
@@LuisAldamiz ?
@@lefenec - For starters he's been advocating medical fascism recently.
"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
"But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."
From "Amusing Ourselves to Death"
Perfect!
Spot on comparison. And horrifying.
"1984" wasn't a prophecy, mate. It was just a novel.
@@hugojames85 "A statement that something will happen in the future."
That's what it was, a statement of what would happen in the future. It is a prophecy by definition. Whether you accept the meaning of the word won't change that, neither will the medium by which the message is conveyed. Novel, spoken word, film; any of these media and more can be used.
I was resisting this with a healthy lifestyle, until I lost my job in the pandemic. And now I have spent 18 months fighting the youtube algorhithm's pulls. If I resist, I feel absolutely horrible without youtube its scary how much power it has. I have noticed some fledgling movements around discomfort, like Wim Hof cold exposure, a re emerging of stoic thinking in how challenge and suffering have value. Do you see value in a new modern "religion" of a weekly get together to jump in cold water and do hard things as a way of breaking chains of algorhithm? The scary part is that the elite are also controlled by this dystopian pleasure system.
Mr. Varoufakis is simply the best teacher of global economics I have found anywhere. An amazing mind. His ability to encapsulate human economic history in so short a time, less than ten minutes, and make it comprehensible to just about everyone willing to listen, is freaking phenomenal.
Man that whole part about monetary policy replacing profits as the "fuel" felt like an audible click in my head. This is such an insightful analysis.
this isn't true for the biggest economy in the world, namely China. It is true for declining Western economies. This is true precisely because when you're declining it will be true. You have no capital so monetary policy must do. Yuan replacing USD will set things straight (very long term). China has all the capital, we (US) have all the debt.
@@paulb7207 I mean that sounds awesome, just a bit worried about that dying empire with the nuclear capabilities to evaporate us all
@@iakrelliK could be true. China doing the same could be true as well. Ever heard of the Great Filter?
@@paulb7207 Yes, who hasnt. Not sure I see the connection here though?
@@iakrelliK The connection is that doesn't matter Capitalism or Socialism. Great Filter applies to both, basiclally meaning both capitalists and socialists are completely capable of firing nukes ending the civilization. Not because they're capitalist or socialist but because they are homo sapiens sapiens. It is ingrained in our very DNA to destruct ourselves.
A million claps to Zizek!!! He made it! He was able to listen someone else talking, without interrupting. First time ever. Nice, Zizek, we love you even more for that.
I think a better way to end this would be to say that capitalism has already determined it's winners and they've made a new set of rules for the game.
And the winners are everybody? We've never been so many people on the planet and we've never been so rich in known human history. And by 'we' I'm including the poorest of the poor in the world. But yeah, some people got insanely rich through capitalism and abuse their power. So let's change the economic system, that will solve the problem of evil and weakness inside every human heart. smh...
Nah, gov't has already determined the winners. Nothing wrong with capitalism.
@@fabiovenetz6779 Read Marx. The massive increase in production that capitalism brought about is a good thing *and an important step on the road to communism* , where that productive power will be more democratically controlled and put to humane use
@@fabiovenetz6779 what an absolutely stupid and reductive way of responding to the discussion actual intelligent people are having.
Go back to the emotionally stunted man child table, the adults are talking.
@@yeoldpubman You mean History determining the future? Hegelian Bunk!
From personal experience, his comment about leftists having the hardest time accepting this theory is so true - the idea that capitalism as Marx understood it might be over but the prediction of how and what would come next fell flat… well they definitely don’t like that. Ultimately we can quibble until the cows come home over what exactly is “capitalism” but it seems less and less helpful to use the same word to describe the economics of when Marx wrote and the world we live in today. Glad someone bright is trying to navigate this distinction in good faith.
Everyone is confused because they can’t differentiate between classical Socialism, Capitalism (as classical liberals would define it), and the welfare-warfare states the Fabians set up across the globe, the third way. If you don’t know the history of the Fabians, you’re gonna think we have capitalism if you’re a leftist or that we have socialism if you’re right wing. Everyone just talks past each other, there is no common understanding of what the fuck it is we have.
lol just sounds like capitalism with more steps. All the means of production are still controlled by a few capitalists, including the internet and digital spaces. The answer is the same we need to seize all the means of production and let the people control it instead of a few rich capitalist pigs
@@kingsugulleh The difference however is 'markets' as economists put it. (Free) Markets are an important element of capitalism according to rightwing/liberal economists. But in techno-feudalism according to Varoufakis, so many market failures have occurred that we cannot characterize it as a capitalist market except for the buying and selling of commodities.
Yeah, we have a categorization error on a massive scale.
We need a new system, and I'm no fan of this techno or neo feudal approach.
But how do we stop it?
First of all, we need to resist this digital ID or passport nonsense.
After that, it will be damn near impossible to challenge the system
Agree seems capitalism rather than the seeds of its own destruction contains the potential for mutation. Where Marx went wrong was ascribing the potential for agency possessed by the masses. They have none. No power, no capability, no interest, no intention.
We have similar discussions about platforms here in China, with several scholars suggesting that private firms should not operate platforms; you cannot be both the platform and a competitor within the platform.
wanted to add that recently the government forced various platforms to share accounts and data with each other to break down their monopolies.
The problem with using government to moderate private platforms, is that the word "government" does not free an entity from the nature of the thing. Monopolies are bad, No? Well, empowering government only creates the largest monopoly of them all. Debt is bad, No? Well, governments are the biggest debtors of them all.
I understand the goal here, is egalitarian power. Specifically in the eyes of a leftist - egalitarian ECONOMIC power. But when it comes to POLITICAL power, they go 180* and are in favor of consolidation. Using concentrated political power to achieve egalitarian economic power, is mathematically guaranteed to fail. Every. Single. Time. One cannot place more and more power into the hands of fewer and fewer people -- in the HOPE of spreading power.
One needs to diffuse political power as well.
@@falstoffe Yup. In fact, political power and economic power are so intertwined that only the democratization of both simultaneously is feasible. So sad, cause in my own country political power is democratic in the law, but abducted by the economic powers.
Well, I guess living under a totalitarian dictatorship solves these kinds of problems...
@@falstoffe The western perception of political power is short-sighted and limited. If you look at political power over the course of human history--and not just from the limited perspective of an individual ---specifically a capitalist or middle class individual, it is clear that political power is a positive force that pushed humanity forward.
The biggest problem under modern capitalism is that political power is essentially monopolized by the bourgeoisie and their representatives.
If the CPC could maintain its current position---meaning it could resist the powers of financial capital, then on the whole they will continue to be a positive force for China.
@@skynet5828 You also live in a totalitarian dictatorship, except one more able to convince its subjects that they are in fact "free".
In some ways its a worse form of totalitarianism, because as a slave, you cannot be freed if you don't think you are enslaved.
Great observations, learned so much. Baudrillard (in his own way) pointed to this decades ago in his description of the hallucinatory hypermarket and hypercommodities - "the role of the hypermarket goes far beyond 'consumption', and the objects no longer have a specific reality there: what is primary is their serial, circular, spectacular arrangement - the future model of social relations' (1981). It feels very much like what we're experiencing is the inevitable implosion of previous (industrial, consumer) modes of capitalism, but due especially to unprecedented technological advancements coinciding with outmoded recession fiscal policies, it now appears (practically speaking) impossible to develop a system capable of supporting further genuine growth within the time we have left. It feels like a few people have bought the last remaining lifeboats, and the rest of us have little left to do but place bets on who will drown first.
I'm glad Yanis specifically mentioned "the platform". There's a good, short read that I'm recommending to everyone here, since I presume we're (mostly) on the same page about this... "Platform Capitalism" by Nick Srnicek. Gives a nice overview, a nice summary of how capitalism is morphing into something else. Shoshanna Zuboff calls it "rogue capitalism". I like this label of "technofeudalism". We are just now becoming aware of what the hell is going on in the digital sphere, and the complete commodification (and control, and surveillance...) of the Internet.
Thank you
Thank you Yanis; I love hearing you speak theories of truth! Right on the money, literally usually!
My biggest issue is my hearing & if whenever possible if you could arrange for the captions options, I'd probably hear 20 - 30% more of the important messages you're patiently telling us!
I wish for more sessions like The Gathering ( Bernie & Jane Sanders ).
Really mind opening and mindblowing. We are indeed in transitional times and Mr Varoufakis gave us a perceptive that makes total sense. Great point of view!
the simplest but most wild absurdity of the markets is that the price of housing going up is overwhelmingly viewed as one of the key signs of a strong economy. why? would we celebrate if food prices went up?
The world is still run by landowners. Who votes for the major parties? People who own homes. If you don't own land but you vote for an R or a D, you're a sucker.
Food and housing are really incomparable. Food is bought and consumed quickly. Housing is bought and held for as long as the purchaser wants to. When food increases in price, no one benefits and everyone suffers. When housing increases in price, homeowners benefit and those searching for homes suffer.
The reason a rise in housing price is a sign of a strong economy (different from being a good thing in itself) is because it indicates that more people have reached financial stability. When people have financial stability, they'll want to buy a home, increasing demand for homes, increasing the price.
Basic economics.
@@nobodynowhere21
The Founders ONLY wanted landowners to be able to vote because they are the most reliably motivated to know what the hell is really going on. Unscrupulous Politicians, however, know they can maintain power with the least amount of effort and risk if they have mostly low info voters that don’t bother to know anything of substance, and are almost never land owners. This has been the downward spiral since the beginning of Tammany Hall.
@@douglasmacarthur702 a reliable home provides a place for reliable food stores so you do not always have to eat it right away, and being able to buy in bulk saves money.
In a world dominated by Usery, constant inflation is the only thing that can truly be considered profitable. Of course, this is not healthy, because in such a world there is no such thing as a healthy economy. Just grift.
Markets - just like mutual ajd, regulation, and everything else - our tools. Tools to be used in the service of a higher purpose, not divine principles to be worshipped.
People forgetting this is why materialism is ultimately so tawdry and grotesque.
“It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
I felt better when the Denisovians were Neanderthals and the Neanderthals were dumb
'It was decided'; 'people decided' - that requires some elaborating.
'It's friends recommended it as increasing equality' - are we talking about bourgeois social reformists? - no sense of class struggle in that statement.
@@hazelwray4184 imagine Morgan freeman being sarcastic
Some have thought the utopia narrative and plot is really a technological one and a thing that always goes wrong is we get high on our own supply when it comes to how much slick shit we can do with our wits. They will let us down with the dunning Kruger effect essentially.
Theranos, Nicolai electric semis... those weird plastic surgery twins... eventually the checks bauldrillards hyper reality writes are cashed by actual reality and bodies...
It's essentially a story about nimrod the babylon towers and arrogantly playing God. Pinnacle archetype being Satan who thought he could do better and such.
Sorry I watched transformers robot movie recently..
Absolutely brilliant analysis of very difficult and still emergent dynamics and structures. Mr Varoufakis is an outstanding communicator and teacher. As a teacher myself who has to work at conveying complex scenarios clearly to students, I really appreciate the clarity and the focus of his talk. I have subscribed to his Channel. Well.done, sir!
If you think his analysis is so clear, then why don't you explain to me the part where he talks about the two companies?
Far from being clear, it sounded logically bizarre and make no sense. Perhaps I haven't understood it! So you can explain it!
In the same breath, he says that the second company owes money to the first company, but then he says, that the first company makes no profit! So if the CEO and CFO of the first company are engaged in fraud, and they are not doing proper business with the second company, how exactly does that benefit their shareholders?! Remember, the bank gave a loan but the buildings and properties of the first company are collateral for the loan.
On top of that, it's not clear exactly how this is supposed to be benefiting Google and Facebook? If, presumably, these people are benefiting by buying Google shares, then that just means that Google is profitable and doing well! It's not really clear how all of this is supposed to be a bad thing?!
What is really surprising is that I'm looking at all these comments under this video, and so many people are upvoting without asking any questions! It's like, "anything bad that you say about technology and technocrats you must be right!"
@@RezaRob3 watch it again. Still don't get it? Slow it down and watch it again. You'll eventually get it ✊😉
@@RezaRob3 Share holders benefit on paper only. The share is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. They do not know their shares are worth the current price until everyone sells them all, or the company liquidates, then you discover what the true value was, since shareholders are at the bottom of the credit stack. This is why companies can survive for a long time when technically they might be insolvent. there is a widespread "don't ask, don't tell" policy, since regulators are fearful of collapsing the credit system if they look too closely at the balance sheets. But the fragile companies tend to be the financial corps, not the companies producing real goods who have physical capital that is always worth something non-zero.
This is a lot like bitcoin: your btc might be priced at US30,0000 today, but if everyone sold them the price would drop to zero well before the last holder of a btc cashed up.
@@RezaRob3 It'd be very useful if you could provide some timestamps to let us know which parts of the video you're specifically referring to, because we'd have to remit to them to answer your questions more properly based on the video. Nonetheless, I'll try to explain to the best of my understanding, because although I do think that Mr. Varoufakis' point is pretty clear, it does revolve around some concepts which can be confusing in and of themselves. He's trying to explain the counter-intuitive fact that stock markets grow the fastest today when the economy is at its worst. This occurs because central banks have leaned towards an excessive reliance on issued liquidity whenever there's a significant downfall in production. As such, it seems like many stocks in the market are growing, even for companies that aren't profitable at all. Simply put, stock market speculators already expect there to be government issued liquidity, so they buy precisely at the moment at which the companies are generating the least amount of profits. Once the government bails out, speculators make huge returns and the markets seem to stabilize. Central bank or government issued liquidity usually comes in the form of bonds, loans or just straight up stock purchases.
There is a concept which is not explicitly explained by Mr. Varoufakis, but is necessary to understanding this dynamic, which is the fact that government issued liquidity works in practice as a sort of tax, because the reduction in the value of the currency is a loss of money in real terms for people who have most of their assets in liquid form (or cash). So, the current market is one where the general population is in practice financing non-profitable companies in the stock markets, yet the owners of these companies are getting high returns, giving the illusion of profitability. Hence, why it resembles a techno-feudalism rather than actual capitalism.
Another important point that Mr. Varoufakis explains is that there ARE some profitable companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon and other large internet platforms that work in practice as marketplaces. Today, it is almost impossible for smaller businesses to thrive if they do not sell or advertise their products through these companies, which unilaterally determine the criteria, through complicated algorithms, of which products the potential customer can see and which ones they can't. Hence, they basically own the market, which is therefore, not free. Yet again, it resembles techno-feudalism rather than capitalism.
Lastly, I think you might've mixed up some of his assertions about private equity companies and publicly traded ones. The publicly traded ones, or the ones listed in the stock exchanges, are the ones benefitting from artificial liquidity (bonds, loans, public purchases) issued by governments. Private equity capital works in a different manner, because it operates outside of the dynamics of stock exchanges. Curiously, some of the largest private equity companies today (such as Uber, which is used as an example) are not profitable. So, why are they so large? Precisely because they finance themselves through private equity, drawing from what's called angel investors (or extremely wealthy investors or companies who can afford to take a lot of risk). Rather than making actual profit, these companies use the money from new investors to liquidate old ones, or what is essentially a ponzi scheme, in which they nonetheless manage to keep a lot of their capital from revenue and from convincing their investors to stay based on the promise of a supposedly brilliant business model that will *eventually* start making a lot of profit once it has scaled enough (something which, of course, cannot be guaranteed). In the example he uses about "the two companies" in the health service industry (7:05), it's important to understand that these two companies are owned by the same person (or people) and are essentially pulling off a of deceit to seem profitable for potential lenders and investors (as he explains), in order to maintain the ponzi scheme-like dynamic.
In conclusion, we have largely non-profitable markets, driven by deceit and artificially created government liquidity, controlled by a few actors in the technology industry. This is what Mr. Varoufakis calls a Technofeudalism.
@@divagaciones1628 Your comment pretty much gets a "like" because it's mostly reasonable and you're just answering your own question. The conflict and problem that you're raising at the end is that people basically buy overpriced assets (companies that have no potential).
The question of why the stock market goes up is pretty clear. You already basically mentioned that money printing lowers the value of the dollar, and that essentially raises the value of shares in comparison. The other reason why shares go up during bad times is precisely because people know that as the pandemic goes away, these companies will be basically involved in rebuilding whatever new economy emerges. For example, some tech companies have done well because they are involved in remote technologies which will be also potentially important after the pandemic.
The fundamental question of whether money printing is good or bad is a separate question and a more complex discussion because it creates complex dynamics in the market and obviously certain libertarians don't like it! It's government's attempt to inject activity into the market when there is a need, and it's a hotly debated subject by the experts which is going to be difficult to resolve in this CZcams comment! It would basically mean not giving people loans and credit cards with the help of Central Bank money.
The question of how to buy well in the stock market and buy things that are truly valuable is a fascinating one. Perhaps we should have AI that makes these complex decisions for people so that they won't have to! Obviously buying in the stock market should be based on reason and science, but unfortunately too many people don't have the knowledge to manage this complex system and understand which companies they should invest in. The free market system gives people the freedom to do it anyway. So, some level of "ponzi" is basically inherent in the system, as companies will tend to overpromise. As I said, the only solution to that problem is to better inform the public, for example through better financial AI. Yeah, tech companies can soon even manage your money for you a lot better than you, but if people are complaining now, imagine the complaining they'll do then!!! Actually, a world like that would be a lot less stressful on all those investors. Basically, it would be humanity, as a unified whole, investing in itself, and it would probably be a better world for everyone.
As for deliberately fraudulent ponzi schemes, well, that's illegal! Look at what happened to Bernie Madoff!
But what is still not clear is how the successful companies that are trying to run an honest shop are supposed to be responsible for this.
PS: by the way, I didn't give a timeline into the video because it sounded like a very central point of his argument. Anybody who was listening to him should have picked it up.
Brilliant! I am sending this to everyone I know, particularly my parents who still think things are basically the same as when they were young.
Do you think people did not have to consider their reputation in the 70s or 80s? Seriously! The markets were then in different hands but were already quite monopolistic. Monopolism is after all intrinsical to capitalism and that's something Marx and Lenin knew but Yannis seems to have forgotten.
@@jeangingras4631 - I'm pretty sure that rising inequality was already a serious issue at the very least in the 80s. Remember that all this was kickstarted by Nixon and Reagan.
@@LuisAldamiz go back to post WWII military industrial complex. Eisenhower warned us.
@@davidgough3512 - Meh, looks like the proverbial tree not allowing to see the forest. It's much bigger than the MIC, it's the Big Energy, the Big Pharma and very especially the Big Finance, the vulture funds and the TBTF banks. Nowadays it all seems concentrated under a single neo-corporation whose owners are their customers (and thus unknown): The Vanguard Group, even the infamous Black Rock is owned by Vanguard.
@@LuisAldamiz Very astute analysis, but for me, whatev; i don't buy what they're selling, nor does anybody have to. We're enculturated to avoid the physical life.. Not saying the System isn't relevant.. all the land could be fenced (which garantees local guerilla revolution). But meanwhile every suburban household lot is a potential minifarm and a means of workshop production. Fresh off the boat poor immigrants with intact cultures regularly prove such , but the physical world is but a myth to the rest of us. We are so diabetic and couch potato'd that any sustained effort or discomfort is considered a personal red-alert crisis.
It's still capitalism, but a further development of capitalism. Marx predicted that rates of profit would continue to fall and that monopolies would consolidate as the direct consequence of capitalism - the huge social media companies we have now are just a particularly sinister form of capitalist monopoly. Your points about the finance industry no longer relying on profit are very interesting, but this also fits pretty well with Marx's predictions. As capitalist power develops, capital takes over the state and sucks out all the state's resources to feed itself. I think to say we've surpassed capitalism is wrong, but the capitalism of today is certainly very different from any that's existed before.
IT is not Capitalism, it is exploitation of resources, it's theft, it's the opposite of capitalism, as a Capitalist myself, who wants everyone to be able to work their whole life to be able to feed themselves, to dress themselves, to enjoy themselves, to be able to spend quality time with their families, but this is what happens when your government joins hand with evil.
Take a good look at Mark Zuckerberg, does he look trustworthy? Hell no, does he even look human, hell no.
Capitalism in my eyes, is the farmer who produces his produce, and sells it enough for him to make a profit, then the grocer sells the groceries off for yet more profit, and then we the consumers, who do not have the time or space to make our own produce, can feed ourselves, my only qualm with all of this is taxes. Because it is stealing the profits of those who produce, manufacture, provide and retail. It saddens me deeply when a shop closes down, it saddens me deeply when I see poor kids on the street, because their parents can't afford to feed them, because they aren't allowed to open shop, because of government regulations, which massive corporations have enforced because it limits market rivalry, and market rivalry is the sole thing that pushes prices down. These companies aren't profit driven, there's no profit in these companies, the only profit is to some random douchebag, these companies rather lay off 10000 workers and run their companies into the ground rather than use the profit as a margin for the company as it should be, in case something bad would happen, so that it could keep at it. I'm not against owning stock in companies, it's a good thing, but when you demand that the profit margins that should be first and foremost in benefit of the company, to be handed over to the stock owners, instead of being reinvested into the company, then you've lost all credits for being capitalists.
Now you're just greedy, and greed is a sin.
@@livedandletdie if you try to implement your ideal capitalist system it will only take (x) years to reach this point were in. the amount of years it will take to reach this point can vary but it will always end up in imperialism and then finally the fuckery we are in today. Imperialism and Corporatism are extensions of capitalism that are in inevitable. what you look for is a ideal that can be held up for some time but is not sustainable in the longrun
To add to the last words, and I think that´s something the left and the greens even less like, if they realize it at all:
The capital has learned to play on both groups and does it extremely well!
finally some wise words.
capital has always been operating with both hands
deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation
Exactly. I’m a deleuzian. The problem with the modern liberal left is they are being assimilated into the system. They are being centralised into a kinda techno nanny state and it will end awful for many. It’s why I sympathise with some on the right who actually see this and are reacting. They are if anything the deadwood of the new capitalist system. The left need to realise it’s about decentralisation. That’s the radical change. Blockchain tech, open source software, alt tech. It’s the deleuze way of thinking.
@@spritualelitist665 If our times may be called anything, they may be called Depeuzian.
This is the first time I've heard the situation in which we find ourselves articulated in such a cohesive manner. These observations have immediately effected my word view.
this technofeudalist concept is a huge element of sci-fi
which is in turn a massive influence on the nerds who now own and to a alarming degree control the world
@Horseshoe Party Look , here´s a true skeptic : everything you have access to by extremely - well - payed - to - be socio/political/etc commentators = " Rubbish " .
Anti and Pro , having the cake and eating it too . Cute , innit ?
You know that film Revenge of the Nerds? The "Nerds" were not the good guys.
@Horseshoe Party none of the things you are suggesting are relevant in that comment....
It seems to me you are predetermined to talk about those things and looking for anyone to potentially blame.
Why not go complain straight to Yanis, he's the one giving the talk about this system?
Didn't know that nerds control certain non-profit organisations and banks.
I first sent this video to Russell, it will be a great dialogue between the two of you, looking forward!
Wow, I was just wondering if you had your own channel. Excited. Thank you for all your work.
I've been talking about this for the last 2 years I'm so excited to see it spoken on in this forum. I call it corporate fedualism!!!! haha
Since 2007 for me. XP
I feel like Yanis stole my slogan.
Corporate sounds much more suitable to me, since tech is just a detail of the manifestation.
It's not something new called corporate feudalism it's good old-fashioned capitalism it hasn't changed the requirements. It's just the end result of capitalism it's what happens to capitalism every time.
Me too, for quite some time. I believe that everyone who really thinks about it seriously will inevitably come to the same conclusion and it really doesn’t matter if you come from the moderate left or hardcore Marxist or the liberal or even hardcore capitalist/neoliberal side. The funny thing though is that as the fight between the progressive left and the conservative-neoliberal is raging and is even intensifying both are being outplayed by this corporate system that is leaching off both, the socialist initiatives and the neoliberal initiatives.
This needs captions in as many languages as possible! Please, somebody make them!
Maybe capitalism discovered socialism (too big to fail, injections from central banks, etc), but decided that socialism is only for the wealthy or the finance gurus, privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.
That's not socialism, you're thinking of welfare.
Aha!
I had this though, a couple of months ago, that capitalism had slowly morphed into a more detached form, based purely on speculation and the hope of growth rather than actual growth. I thought of it as speculatisim, as the "value" becomes more and more detached from any real world measure. This makes so much sense and I agree with so much that is said in this vid.
Baudrillard's map analogy becomes more and more pertinent. We're really just a society of images
lol wtf are you talking about
Capitalism never had a real world measure...its only about profit
@@Itsmespiv4192 and growth, don't forget growth.
@@joshsmyth130 Yes growth and profit are the same thing
The eloquence and beauty of the diagnosis almost justifies the disease and suffering - as if a doctor were to describe your disease in tear-drawing prose! - your arms still getting amputated, but Lord, such finesse!
This is great.
As Prof. Yanis iterated, it's an issue stemming from a US decoupling of sorts. Or in many ways. All from within.
But the crux of the issue is the decoupling within policy formation. The decline emphasises Monetary policy. What's being left to the self denying left (minus Prof. Yanis) here is Fiscal policy.
The World is infected. But something far worse than Covid19. The US sneeze is indeed powerful.
A socialism functioning purely off its predecessor (Or partner) Capitalism is indeed a blinding Feudalism.
Very true, but this technofeudalism is the most reasonable if not the only expected outcome of capitalism, not some avoidable mistake. Political power comes from economic power, as always, and who's in the position of power will do everything to secure his position and get rid of the competition. Kind of, we just shifted from an agricultural society where the basis of wealth, hence power, came from controlling land, to an industrial society where the basis of power is to control capital. But the two systems are indeed very similar and 'technofeudalism' is a good term to describe this. We had a honeymoon transitional phase, where we had the fleeting illusion that fair competition exists and everything is possible, but actually the whole concept of capitalism is faulty. At least if we expect freedom, chance and fair competition from it.
I've been tuning in to Varis's talks and comments just until recently, and he's truly interesting and profound commentator. I dont miss to hear any of his talks and opinions anymore.
He's really close, but I don't think that notion is entirely cohesive yet. But I think the general jist of what he's getting at could very well be true, and it's terrifying to think about.
Looking forward for his book. He could be getting at something, and it'll surely be very interesting to see if he manages to develop this idea properly.
Monopolies, and corporatism. Competition is what keeps people in check in a functional capitalist world, competition needs the right boundaries to work. The central governments have failed in their only necessary jobs, and overreached in areas they have no business
Small correction, but corporatism is the organisation of society into guild-like corporations representing the farmers, metalworkers, miners and so on. The word you're looking for, corporations in the kapitalist sense controlling the government is corporatocracy.
@@victorvandenbosch9313 ah, nice. Thanks for the info 👍
I only stumbled upon Yanis and the debates on capitalism and democracy by some CZcams algorithm and I am glad for this! I’m no economist nor a political scientist but know that the world is changing so fast and systemic changes are required but had no clue on how and what. So such discussions are very enlightening.
The Bank of International Settlements publication,"Implications for central banks of the development of electronic money". includes the assurance this is needed to ensure banking proftability, not linked to any nation's currency. This is about developing an elecronic funds transfer (like bitcoin) system only banks can use.
"Who run Bartertown?"
That would be assuming we left feudalism at some point back in time.
Which we never really did.
Social structure has been exactly the same for 10.000 years or so since the appearance of the very first lords.
People just get lured by the stories that are built around particular expressions of it, which is the only part that has been changing so far.
Profound, but I think once you are in the mode of human self-analysis of behavior, we have to differentiate the modes of production. Yes, if you are an alien analyzing us from space, we haven't changed much. But there's a serious distinction between a lord demanding money and a marketplace where labor can be sold that is essential to any discussion of economics and historical analysis.
People either live as self sufficient wolfpack families, OR as a braindead anthill where everyone is serving their single leader without question.
The moment you allow the word of someone else to restrict your supply of independence, you become part of the anthill.
This capitalist system is slowly devolving into an anthill because people are increasingly becoming dependent on the hive - meaning it's no longer capitalism, but socialism.
I want Yanis to talk with Byung-Chul Han, Han's books have detailed this emerging phenomenon for years, in his books like Pyschopolitics and the Burnout society.
Precisely what I was thinking about while listening.
yes! Just read both of those. A lot of overlap.
1Dime has a great video on that
Han is an extremely private person. I would love to hear him speak about *anything* at all.
Is that the post-Althusserian Korean guy? Got to check him out anyways
Perhaps the only time I have ever seen Slavoj Zizek so quiet!
Yannis your work is greatly appreciated. Your integrity as FM for Greece was absolutely stunning. For me one of the single most important economic acts by a minister throughout that crisis.
Look forward to the book.
Janis , many thanks for perfectly summarizing what I only felt in the back of my head
Far worse things lie ahead than free market exploitation and waste of natural resources.•°
It's been in the back of my head too for several years already. What set me off is when I saw software companies switching their business model from selling software to renting it instead. For professional users it effectively turns them into serfs, the software is the land of the fiefdom, they toil it and the lord gets a cut for the duration of their professional life.
As more companies go on the subscription model people are left with the option of which fiefdom to live under, a designer, programmer, editor, etc, can no longer own the means of production; Veroufakis points to the irony, that it's leftists that ought to see that and scream bloody murder, but they don't. If anything they are entranced by the Big Tech Svengalis.
Now that's software, which has the advantage of very little inertia, changes can be made at the push of a button, or less. But it's showing up in hardware too, that is why some people are fighting for the "Right to Repair", and socially epitomized by that sinister proclamation from the World Economic Forum a few years ago "You will own nothing and be happy".
It's depressing to think of it.
Sir's before continue yammering , remember the workers digging holes for shitty Coltan . . .
Do we want this ?
Do we want more digital crap ?
Has it helped so far ?
Is it easy to work with ?
Is it safe to work with ? (🔥 walls)
I say it is a move in the wrong direction , increasing digital presence in the life of everyone .•°
@Question Everything and Far Rider. You guys join us too!
The scary part is when the finally realeses ai that easily and fast can monitor us, emotionally, practically and control us by what we are allowed to see online or on your phone. The fact is your phone is already monitoring you, so much more than you actually dare to know.
And it only takes a small effort to make it all go away, by force.
What an amazingly articulated message and so accurate to the point that it even makes the most jaded and aware person say WOW.
I really appreciate how eloquent he is and how he puts his point across....even though I do not agree with his points in a major way (but there aren't enough characters to go into it on here). Zizek just watching him admiringly is also very cute! Longest I've seen Zizek quiet!
It's odd to see Zizek sitting still and not wiping his nose and tugging his shirt. Something is wrong if he's not up to his usual tics.
I call this Corporatism, age where big companies like facebook and amazon controll everything
What does _everything_ entail?
@@nammoo89 laws, media and economic systems are a good place to start
@@TirnanHealy So, they don't control everything?
corporatism has a meaning and that ain't it
they used to call it monarchy
Thank you for offering me the vocabulary to articulate the exact thoughts I was having. I used to hate economics. I was saying that I wasn't understanding them. The truth was they were teaching me falsehoods and I was simply couldn't accept the lies. You and educators like you have given me the motivation to look into economics and actually try to make sense of it.
Really interesting and I totally agree, the notions you brought up about the working class producing content mirror some of the things vanni codeluppi has said about this "new capitalism", I think it would be interesting to explore this further under the lens of how excessive aestheticization and mediatization contribute to our general acceptance of these changes.
All I had to do was see the title of your video, and I knew I would agree with you.
Janis Varoufakis.
Total Respect for his intelligence and analysis of the way the global systems function.
Very gripping notion. He must be on to something. It seems likely that there is a connection between all these platforms growing and growing apparently despite having no viable sources of income and the increased reliance on state subsidy for different businesses.
I mean, define income. Most of the things he mentions, yes, don't produce anything and are simply accumulators of wealth like those private equity sharks he mentions.
Alphabet and Facebook have plenty of income, and with where the national debt is at are probably more likely to subsidize the state than the other way around (scary). Their entire business model is, like he said, about extracting capital in every possible way from the population. Google hasn't actually made anything in 20 years: they buy a startup that monetizes some previously untapped part of human psychology, flip it, and stick their ad revenue/metadata needle into it, and boom new revenue stream.
@@googm You're right.
Allways a pleasure to follow Yanis Varoufakis brilliant explanations
F me, if this is not the most important video you’ll see this year, and the next…
and so on
@@basqye9 you
Isn't techno feudalism a reflection of the contradiction of capitalism, its tendency towards monopoly capitalism and its own ultimate demise?
It shows capitalism is not only incapable of forming monopolies but actively promotes
them, and its demise along with it
Well, this is hilarious, I am agreeing with a marxist. This talk is of extreme value and should be spread far and wide.
Wonders never cease.
Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that you aren't as smart as you think you are.
a lot of people agree but don’t want to admit it 🫣
This is why we need widely available free and open source information infrastructure that is independent from the influence of corporate entities
I completely agree with the broad thesis; I've been saying the same sort of thing for over a decade, about competition being replaced with monopolies like the digital platforms and Big everything. I used to call it rentierism, which it also is. The productive and merchant bourgeois being eaten by the rentiers. We were talking about "Rip-off Britain" under the influence of monopolies and oligopolies even before the 2007/8 crash.
My question is how does this thesis differ from the traditional post-WW2 Marxist Monopoly Capitalism analysis, and what does it do to relatively simplistic accounts of capitalist history producing working class organisation and consciousness leading to socialist parties and revolutionary potential such as the narrative Prof Wolff used to repeat endlessly? Where is techno-feudalism likely to lead in terms of working class mobilisation and socialist politics, and does it require a fundamental re-think about the trajectory of capitalist development and the kind of crises it produces?
Secondarily, to what extent, if at all, is this a process limited to the Anglo-sphere and Europe, and does China offer an antithesis, or is it already tending toward a techno-feudalism with Chinese characteristics evolving from the present technocracy and managed capitalism?
I think one of the issues with your question about working class mobilization and socialist politics is that those ideas were created to respond to a very different time and economy - we need new solutions to new problems. The current platforms seem to be an easier thing to nationalize, for example (though this seems farfetched for now). The obscene wealth gap will always be a tactic for anti-status quo politics but perhaps we need to look past the idea of the "working class" as Yanis points out that we are all entangled in the system now beyond the work spaces. At least social media platforms give us an easy way to discuss the issues with social media platforms!
Great questions. We should all think about it, because it's not time to give up fighting as working class just because capitalism evolved. Maybe we just have more challenges now - we have to build strong offline communities, and people are not willing to do that; we need to find alternatives in tech, so we don't rely on big companies whenever we want to interact, buy, sell, search for stuff; maybe it's time to think about leaving big cities for good... There's a lot to be done and it's going to be hard.
We should support libre-software, for starters.
I hope you post the rest. I'm in the soon to be snowy wastes of Canada and would love some cozy winter lectures.
Diomides Skalistis
19 hours ago
The whole video can be found here:
czcams.com/video/0ODuleYZwbs/video.html
As for subtitles for our Italian Friend, we'll have to wait a little bit in order to get the automatic ones.
After that, auto translation would be a good place to start.
i truly agree that it is a new time. i wonder though, what distinguishes this from a new phase? he has mentioned wonderful points as to why this is the case, but what new phase would we measure this against, to compare? if this isn't a new phase, what would it have displaced, if it displaced a new phase of capitalism?
Power is exceeded differently today then. Point blank. Gilles deleuze called this “control societies”
New? It sounds a lot like the 1920s, but cyberpunk rather than steampunk.
Platforms are the malls of the information age. Retailers didn't pay outsized lease rates for mall space because there weren't location alternatives, they did so because the malls attracted the customers, so that the retailers could focus on serving the customers' needs, rather than getting them to their stores. Aggregators facilitate small business, they don't replace it. Online businesses are very low barrier-to-entry, specifically because such marketplace platforms exist. Amazon hosts over two million small- and medium-sized businesses, which they do not own, and from which they only derive profits in exchange for services provided.
Housing market in USA right now is example of this trend, with handfull of companies buying real estates left and right, inflating prices which common individual can not afford in the process, with end goal of owning of virtually all houses and residential buildings and rent it to individuals who could not be able to own them.
that bubble might finally be popping. zillow was left bagholding trying to resell a few hundred million in homes they cant sell
Hooray! I feel a glorious revival of the middle ages coming on. Let’s hope they won’t be too dark.
The Dark Ages with LEDs.
@@con.troller4183 And with killer robots, the lords just send those out to but an end to any uprising from the peasants
The middle ages have a bad rep. We could learn from the middle ages.
I hope we get some cool armor sets at the very least
@@swordscythe Indeed we could. Lesson one, give religion ZERO political power. Lesson two - revive the pagan tradition of annually killing the king and getting a new one.
Honestly now with metaverse the concept of technofeudalism is even more relevant. It’s really scary !
Metaverse really isn't that scary. Its just second life designed for pensioners.
@@greyshah7947 Check out the background story in the manga Overlord, besides the RPG / VR game part, where it’s a dystopian world where the only thing people have left in a polluted overcrowded world is a virtual parallel world / metaverse where they use it to keep everyone happy and continue working.
Also thing about it in analogy as the world we already live in as it keeps getting worst day after day and we immerse ourselves more into the internet and our devices. Last but not least it’s very important to think about how a few companies will control the metaverse and products and services will be facilitated there so these companies will establish a monopoly and charge you arbitrarily prices they seem fit… when something sounds too good to be true and free try to think about what you really give in exchange for it either directly or indirectly…
Brillant analysis! This is gold 🔥
Extremely interesting discussion. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the world.
Yes feudalism is the goal. We need a Digital Magna Carta.
I'm sure someone has scanned a copy of it somewhere.
Thanks for this statement!!!
If possible, can you make subtitles (CC), available for your videos? In some parts, the audio is not clear. Also, some people don’t have English with an accent as something familiar.
this man continuously blows my mind
Salve Yanis, sono italiano e capisco poco l'inglese. Cortesemente è possibile in qualche modo ricevere la trascrizione nella mia lingua di questo video che sarei molto interessato a poter comprendere? Grazie. Basterebbero anche solo i sottotitoli in italiano che forse renderebbe, anche in altre diverse lingue, maggiormente fruibile il contenuto.
Well ... it demonstrates the necessity to learn English. It it unfortunate but a sad reality.
Zizek is Slovene and Varoufakis Greek - Encourage your children to become fluent in English! ... and possibly Chinese
Everyone rolls their eyes at me when I tell them how much of a stranglehold the corporations have over this country and then they call me an anarchist. But the more they increase my rent and the less I get paid, the more I sympathize with the anarchists.
I just heard Mr Varoufakis was hospitalized by a mob of some twenty people. I was very sad to hear this. I hope he recovers completely, and they find the organizers both of this attack, and the previous one. It sounds like he's getting under someone's skin. Getting close to the pulse can be dangerous. I think this means we should be paying close attention.
Pay close attention to how well he speaks of China. All you need to know. Whoever praises the Chinese Communist model = trash
I've been suspecting this for a long time and listening to this really confirms it
I've been saying this sort of thing for years but I'm afraid I'm not as generous as Yanis; I call it Corporate Fascism, lol. I feel so sorry for youngsters today who've been brought up with this invasive technology and can't go anywhere without their 'adult dummies'. At least I know that I can't be traced as I've never used a mobile, let alone smart phones. I'm not paranoid. I just want to be left alone when I'm out for a walk or doing errands and I don't want to give those companies more power and money than they've already got! And I can't be forced to use apps as I don't have anything to put them on. It's incredibly freeing. :)
But you use a computer... czcams.com/video/hIXhnWUmMvw/video.html
Thanks for this link. Recommend everyone watches it.
@@staphylea1 Just watched that. It was really good; one I haven't seen before. I'd say thank you to the person who gave the link but I can't see his reply for some odd reason, but thanks anyway. :)
@@yongbobe478 Ah, there you are! I couldn't see your reply when I replied to staphyea1 but it's back now, lol. Yes, that was brilliant. And I see what you mean. Being aware is always a good thing though, and after watching that video on your link I can see there's more that I can do. As the professor said, it really needs a collective action, but at least us individuals can make our own stance meanwhile. :)
Fascism is corporate by definition.
so he’s basically predicting Meta.
Metaverse is the next step, Zuckerberg doesn't control the whole internet of course but he can control the metaverse if he pumps a ton of money, that he has into it to make it useful and attractive to people with a lot of "free" services and get's other tech companies to join he will indeed control everything.
I have never seen Slavoj keeping quiet for so long at a time
this makes so much sense. I'm glad it's being said
Fantastic communicator! For me at least, Varoufakis is almost the opposite of Zizek which is hard to follow
He's really not, at least in the sense that Zizek is probably one of the few sorts that genuinely seems to not really have an ideological tack or stake at all, and seems instead to simply be a provocateur to get people to rethink their position.
I think he is missing a big point. If interest rates are cut to near zero, where do people put their money? They buy stocks, or invest in housing. What we are witnessing is very low rates and huge levels of debt. There is no way to raise rates because debt is too high. So the cycle continues until the debt becomes unsustainable.
When Central Bank leaders keep saying the economies are in good shape but won't/can't raise interest rates even a quarter percent... 🤔🤔
they start growing vegetables and food trees. In their gardens and on the streets. They stop and enjoy company of neighbours and all the while the food is growing around them. Their children start climbing the trees and they look out and see what is growing and what is dying. The people who are very very sick and brainwashed start joining in and the machinery and electricity is no longer so needed because people have power in their bodies to actually organise their own homes, shelter, food, birthing, healing and dying. The numbers on paper are not feeding us... they are feeding fear and distrust. Trusting relationships with nature, other people and animals is what grows life... growing money grows distrust and fake reliance on things we cannot eat, breathe, rest under. Remember our ancestors and still some folk know how to live with what is enough from nature. and this way of living has sustained us without wrecking the planet or other animals (for the most part regarding other animals) for thousands of thousands of years. There are still indigenous people in Australia where I live, who know where the water lies underground, which plants produce good food (way more nourishing than grown stuff) , which months to fish and catch what, which ways to orient and walk to find this and that... THAT is humanity. THAT is real life and the more we run away from the pain of trying to destroy the simple health of life, the more we run around in our heads with one idea after another but less and less actual connection with each other and with life. Millenia of simple life, knowing how to live, what the weather will be like, what the birds and other animals are doing... one big tree ... provides centuries of big bits of bark provides countless families shelter from rain or heat or cold....
Where I live there were trees as big as elephants at the base. One bit of bark.. thick and huge is a house... no need for power tools, plastic chemical crap to hold a load of machine made stuff together... put the bark up against a tree and there is a really good shelter.
simple is enough...
the rest is one big addiction... to a load of stuff we fundamentally don't need.
We can unravel this any way we try, but nature knows best and we are best to drop our weapons, egos, machines, computers and walk again with nature.
She provides if we respect this.
Pure and simple.
@@karate4348 Yes. But you are currently connected to the internet and posting on CZcams. You use electricity and take advantage of all the technological and other benefits that capitalism has brought you. You might just find the utopia you seek is a living hell.
@@karate4348 8 billion _growing vegetables and food trees._ ...?
@@percy832 What are you talking about? THIS IS a living hell. The people living in socialist republics are much more satisfied with their leadership than in, say, America. I love capitalist's fear.
Two great minds on one stage. It is a good day.
I'd like to see this from start to finish.
how amazing it is to have someone like Zizek interview someone like Yanis? Yanis is obviously literally a genius and so is Zizek, but his mind works a bit differently, which some could see as a flaw. I see it as an advantage, he is so brutally honest, that he’s asking the right questions, with the right amount of passion, to the one guy that is on his side and really wants to break the system (see his multiple references to movies like the Matrix), and he also has the social skills to do it, besides the will and knowledge. This means that we get the real deal here: Zizek is “pushing” Yanis into a corner right from the start, and Yanis realizes: ok, now I really have to make you understand what we’re all up against, and he explains it so well and in such an elegant way, that people genuinely get educated about how the world really works..from a financial point of view, which most people would otherwise never understand and which just happens to be the most important in today’s world. I genuinely don’t think any other interviewer could have facilitated this so well. everyone else would seem way too shallow in comparison... think of his interview right after his TedTalk
Sería genial que tengan subtítulos en español para que llegue a Latinoamérica estos mensajes de importante conocimiento de las condiciones actuales
Why did it cut off at the end like that? Would like to have heard more.
Glad to hear somebody gets it. When people discard their cell phones things may improve. A leash is not freedom.