Techno-Capitalist-Feudalism


Book Description

With blunt unvarnished realism, it is high-time anarchist-communism steps out from amongst the shadows and finally asserts itself as the most viable revolutionary option and antithesis to totalitarian-capitalism, that is, techno-capitalist-feudalism. After its 150 year long-march, through dense theoretical jungles, voluminous analyses, and multiple pragmatic interventions, anarchist-communism has reached the point where it is now able to throw-off the theoretical muck and political chains of past eras and assertively establish itself on firm ground. Its own firm revolutionary ground, devoid of any crutch. Despite many historical detours, anarchist-communism can now affirm with confidence its own political economy, possessing its own rules, its own logic, and its own terrain of study and method of attack, separate of Marxism. In short, scientific anarchist-communism is the vanguard of radical political economy. That is, scientific anarchist-communism is the new cudgel and information-bomb of the new post-industrial, post-modern anarcho-proletariat, namely, those post-industrial, post-modern proletarians dying on the front-lines of socio-economic transience, poverty, and unrecognition. No longer beaten-down, scientific anarchist-communism now takes its first steps into the new world, dodging bullets, criticisms, and the old clichés. Knowing it can always bend thought and action from now on, it blasts away any counterpoints on its own terms with rigor and certain iron will, since it is today the real proletarian revolutionary force. It is the anarchist power to be reckoned with, structural-anarchism. Make no mistake, we are inescapably immersed in granular trench-warfare against totalitarian-capitalism in and across a litany of micro-fronts. These granular power-struggles are constant, disorderly, and continuously changing their stripes and/or constructs. Consequently, workers have to adapt and change plans, since totalitarian-capitalism is well-equipped to absorb direct conflict into its logic of operation, which always invariably guarantees the accumulation, extraction, and centralization of profit, power, wealth, and private property in service of a ruling capitalist aristocracy. In consequence, we must fight, fight conceptually and fight materially, fight any way we can, since we are fighting for our lives, regardless of the ballot box. Thus, we attack. We attack from the polarities of theory and praxis forever locked in power-struggles. Now open, now hidden, we are caught in a long drawn-out war of attrition, trench-warfare against the logic of capitalism, ad infinitum. This is our destiny. Power resides on the streets. And there on the streets, power is found, picked up, and dusted-off when the ruling aristocracy drops it in haste when it is inadvertently forced into a calculated retreat by the strategic onslaught of the general strike and rampant demolition. Subsequently, this text is a power-tool able to shred through the complex entanglements of capitalist ideology. The text unburdens the reader of the heavy ideological baggage and workload crushing him or her into a lifetime of subservient obedience and docile compliance. Capitalism is totalitarian. It inundates everyday life like 1930's fascism. Thus, the capitalist aristocracy will not give up its ruling supremacy willy-nilly, without firing a shot. The capitalist aristocracy will have to be dismantled piece by piece, street by street. And only the purifying benediction of anarchist revolution, universal and permanent, can exorcize the demon pestilence called, totalitarian-capitalism. Tearing it out finally from the sickened womb of socio-economic existence, so as to cast it down from where it came, pure nothingness. Capitalism does not need workers. It is its own gravedigger. And already, it digs its own baroque grave, six feet deep. All it requires now is a bullet to the head. And it falls in.




The Structural-Anarchism Manifesto


Book Description

This book explores the complications and the complexities of the basic fact that we are increasingly living within the confines of a disciplinary surveillance society, where privacy is really based on an individual's ability to expose the surveillance mechanisms monitoring his or her private life. The assumption is that surveillance and discipline is now total and that most surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms never attain the light of public knowledge and scrutiny. As a society, western democracies have moved beyond democracy into a new socio-economic formation, the framework of the soft-totalitarian-state, i.e. democratic-totalitarianism.




Another Now


Book Description

What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson The year: 2035. At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!” That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets. So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative reality. Another Now tells the story of Costa, a brilliant but deeply disillusioned, computer engineer, who creates a revolutionary technology that will allow the user a “glimpse of a life beyond their dreams” but will not enslave them. But an accident during one of its trial runs unveils a cosmic wormhole where Costa meets his DNA double, who is living in a 2025 very different than the one Costa is living in. In this parallel 2025 a global hi-tech uprising, begun in the wake of the collapse of 2008, has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratized. Banks have been eliminated, as well as predatory, data-mining digital monopolies; the gig economy is no more; and the young are free to experiment with different careers and to study ”non-lucrative topics, from Sumerian pottery to astrophysics.” Intoxicated, Costa travels to England to tell Iris, his old comrade, and her neighbor, Eva, a recovering banker turned neoliberal economics professor, of the parallel universe he has discovered. Costa eventually leads them back to his workshop in America where Iris and Eva meet their own doubles, and confront hard truths about themselves and the daunting political challenge that "the Other Now" presents. But, as their obsession with the Other Now deepens, time begins to run out, as the wormhole begins to deteriorate and hackers begin to unleash new attacks on Costa’s technology. The trio have to make a choice: which 2025 do they want to live in? Varoufakis has been claiming for a while that we already live in postcapitalist times. That, since the 2008 crisis, capitalism has been morphing into technofeudalism. Another Now, a riveting work of speculative fiction, shows that there is a realistic, democratic alternative to the technofeudalpostcapitalist dystopia taking shape all around us. It also confronts us with the greatest question: how far are we willing to go to bring it about?




A People's Guide to Capitalism


Book Description

A lively, accessible, and timely guide to Marxist economics for those who want to understand and dismantle the world of the 1%. Economists regularly promote Capitalism as the greatest system ever to grace the planet. With the same breath, they implore us to leave the job of understanding the magical powers of the market to the “experts.” Despite the efforts of these mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many of us have begun to question why this system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory. “Thier’s urgently needed book strips away jargon to make Marx’s essential work accessible to today’s diverse mass movements.” —Sarah Leonard, contributing editor to The Nation “A great book for proletarian chain-breaking.” —Rob Larson, author of Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley “Thier unpacks the mystery of capitalist inequality with lucid and accessible prose . . . . We will need books like A People’s Guide to help us make sense of the root causes of the financial crises that shape so many of our struggles today.” —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership “Ranging from exploitation at work to the operations of modern finance, this book takes the reader through a fine-tuned introduction to Marx’s analysis of the modern economy . . . . Thier combines theoretical explanation with contemporary examples to illuminate the inner workings of capitalism . . . . Reminds us of the urgent need for alternatives to a crisis-ridden system.” —David McNally, author of Blood and Money




The Origin of Capitalism


Book Description

How did the dynamic economic system we know as capitalism develop among the peasants and lords of feudal Europe? In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the relationship between humans and nature.




Platform Capitalism


Book Description

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of ‘platform capitalism’. This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy." Also available as an audiobook.




Rethinking Capitalist Development


Book Description

In this book, Kalyan Sanyal reviews the traditional notion of capitalism and propounds an original theory of capitalist development in the post-colonial context. In order to substantiate his theory, concepts such as primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalist formation are discussed in detail. Analyzing critical questions from a third world perspective such as: Will the integration into the global capitalist network bring to the third world new economic opportunities? Will this capitalist network make the third world countries an easy prey for predatory multinational corporations? The end result is a discourse, drawing on Marx and Foucault, which envisages the post-colonial capitalist formation, albeit in an entirely different light, in the era of globalization.




Capital as Power


Book Description

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.




The Coming of Neo-Feudalism


Book Description

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.




Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism


Book Description

David Harvey examines the foundational contradictions of capital, and reveals the fatal contradictions that are now inexorably leading to its end