Absurd, idiotic headline. Apart from being pure slander of the Soviets, the whole premise vulgarizes socialist economic theory and what economic planning even means. The more i read from Varoufakis the more i’m beginning to think he’s really a moron.
He thinks he’s so clever coming up with these comparisons, with nebulous concepts like “neofeudalism”, as if he’s just discovered something completely new that no one discovered before, when all it is, is just monopoly capitalism. All to avoid applying a good old fashioned Marxist analysis which is more than enough to explain these phenomena without resorting to estoteric theories about a new “feudalism”.
The more you read him and others like him the more you start noticing the conspicuous, Marxism-shaped hole in their analysis. Because of course we can’t be seen to be talking in Marxist terminology and applying dialectical analysis can we? That wouldn’t be respectable, our liberal academic peers would call us names…
The result of this Marxism-phobia is that he has to vomit up onto the page sentences like:
So, just as the Soviet Union generated one kind of feudalism in the name of socialism and human emancipation, today, Silicon Valley is generating another kind of feudalism — technofeudalism, I have called it — in the name of capitalism and free markets.
No, you pretentious wannabe, the Soviet Union was not “feudalism” and neither is monopoly capitalism.
Idk why anyone ever thought this guy, who is clearly an anti-communist radlib, had anything intelligent to say.
Okay, actually, at the risk of coming across somewhat paranoid, this is exactly how CIA people talk. And you can see how the reasoning works. Anne Pettifor made a similar kind of comparison when she was talking about the Green Belt Project in the Sahel (this was pre-coup (🫡), mind you) which would have been funded with Western retirement funds and state budgets.
The MMT wonks are convinced that they can use American policy debate to backdoor self-preservation into the psychotic, baby-defiling, cocaine inhaling cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. In their minds, all it will take is clever rhetoric about climate change, pollution, nuclear war, & how the economic ideology of fascism is internally inconsistent (by fucking design) + prone to risk Just like the international relations wonks think they can reposition national interest as the guiding economic logic like it’s WWI and everyone is an imperialist. Hold on, the KKE literally thinks that… In any case, the western left parties and the academics will have to direct all this criticism at each other because they’re certainly not interested in dealing with the elephant in the room (otherwise they wouldn’t entertain people who treat the enormous hoard of settler asset wealth as unimpeachable & to be protected from Klaus Schwab neo-Bolshevism. Anyone else remember when all these people were using the pandemic to scaremonger about the fourth industrial revolution and gassing up Meta’s claims of making everybody do their shopping in virtual Walmart? Anyone remember when this guy was using his comments on Team Fortress 2’s hat market to game credibility? It’s all so tiresome) & they won’t ever, ever, ever be heard out by the institutions they dream of fixing.