My winters were spent in unbordered bush n snow drifts

n on The Hill

behind the school

where everyone would

slide.

A city of children, classless, kinda

cause no one had fancier coats

or thought they were better than anyone else

cause they weren’t:

everyone’s dad worked in the mines

n their moms at shops in town

or cut hair in their living rooms

to earn a few extra bucks.

Day n night the Hill would draw us

together on toboggans

or solo on a Krazy Karpet

n if you didn’t have either

you could use some cardboard

or even old

boots whose treads had worn out

(but not a sled: sleds were snow machines

in case ya didn’t know).

Maybe some bigger kids would push us smaller ones back down the hill

before we had scrambled back to the top

but ya just had to take it

you couldn’t be a suck in those days.

Later, when we had become jaded teenagers

we would still go sliding

drinking rye from the bottle

on the lip of the scary steep slopes of the gravel pit.

It was like falling over a cliff

drunk as hell.

Everyone crashed before the bottom

but that’s what made it fun

n the bottle waiting for us

back at the top

promised the illusion of warmth, even when it was wicked cold.

I never thought about it then

but I did the other day, that

probably there are classless cities of children

in the desert

n maybe they go sliding down sand dunes,

(but not in boots, obviously, but Krazy Karpets would work).

It’s probably hard to find a 40 pounder of CC

in the desert

but maybe they have other stuff to drink

but whether they do or not

I bet

if they are alone in their city of children

doing whatever kids do in the desert

they smile

cause they feel safe

n together

n even if the bigger kids push the little ones around

its all in fun

n you can’t be a suck

in the desert either, but ya learn to

laugh n take it

just like on our Hill.

I haven’t gone sliding in decades

but I can still feel

the dirty February snow spraying my cheeks

and freezing to my toque.

When I think now about what I have been doing

I guess I’ve mostly read:

philosophers n poets n novelists n historians n economists n political scientists,

I have thought up n down

over, under, n sideways,

in straight lines n spirals n circles,

even dialectically.

I have thought long, and I have thought hard

n me n all the serious people I have read

think we know what’s what

but whatever we think we know

it’s not been enough

to stop the same shit from happening

over n over n over.

Today I can’t say

that I know anything much fer sure,

so I could be wrong

but this much seems clear:

that babies who need to be in incubators

should not have to be wrapped in tin foil

because they had the misfortune

to be born into somebody’s war.

I really don’t know much for certain anymore,

so I could be wrong

but it seems clear to me

that if the price of whatever

is that tiny creatures

who don’t want anything except to be warm

have to be wrapped in tin foil

to survive the night

then that price is too high

and whatever it is

that caused people to destroy

the cocoon that those babies needed

is not worth it.

One more thing seems clear to me,

but I could be wrong,

still, I think that anybody

who– every cell vibrating with terror-

doesn’t run away

cause babies can’t wrap themselves in tin foil,

those people who stay behind and maybe tell those babies stories

about how they used to go sliding– on icy hills or sandy dunes

or whatever–

who stay close and promise them that they will get through the night

and grow up and go sliding

or whatever the citizens of the city of children will do in the future,

I think maybe those people should be leaders,

cause they don’t read and write about what should be done

in the future

but do what must be done.

right now.

There have been numerous attempts over the past twenty years to understand the mutations that contemporary capitalism has undergone. John McMurtry argued in 1998 that the world has entered “the cancer stage of capitalism.” Whereas capitalism was originally a productive system driven by the sale of physical commodities for profit (described by Marx’s formula M-C-M1) contemporary capitalism, according to McMurtry, devoured the public services and infrastructures past generations of struggle had created. Privatization schemes stripped societies of their public wealth while banks made money speculating on currencies and exotic financial instruments with no material reality save the damage the fluctuating value of currencies caused people still dependent upon the real economy. Instead of M-C-M1 the cancer stage, according to McMurtry, was best described by the formula M-M1-M2 …n.

McMurtry’s arguments were influential amongst critics of the speculative economy but did not make any impact with Marxist political economists. Thomas Piketty did capture the attention of Marxists, at least in so far as they have been motivated to criticise his attempt to construct a socialist but non-Marxist understanding of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Piketty too focuses attention on the outsized role that the financial sector plays in the twenty-first century. Piketty argues that capitalism has been replaced by ‘hyper-capitalism’ in which rent-seeking financiers profit from de-regulated money markets and tax cuts. Income and wealth inequality has exploded and reached levels not seen since the “gilded age’ that preceded the First World War.

Alongside of these systematic efforts there have been a host of books that have described contemporary capitalism through one or another qualifying adjective. Naomi Klein worried about “disaster capitalism” while Zuboff argued that we had entered the age of “surveillance” capitalism and Giblin tried to understand the dynamics of “chokepoint” capitalism. Newly entering the fray is former Syriza finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism he argues, in a popular tone but systematic fashion, that capitalism has been replaced by what he calls (following Cederic Durand) “technofeudalism.”

Like McMurtry and Piketty, Varoufakis believes that the continued growth of the financial sector signals a change within capitalism, but he goes beyond either in arguing that the change has now become qualitative. “The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness … by incubating a new form of capital, which has ultimately empowered its owners to break free of capitalism and become a whole new ruling class. … Yes, capital still exists, but capitalism does not.” (55) Varoufakis makes two interrelated arguments to support his conclusion that the global political economic system is now better understood as technofeudal. First, rent has replaced profit as the primary driver of the behaviour of firms, and second, wage labour has been supplanted (within what he calls the “cloud capitalist” sector), with the unpaid labour of “cloud serfs.” Cloud serfs are the ordinary people who willingly fill the internet with the content which media and distribution platforms like Facebook and Amazon subsequently monetise.

Varoufakis explains the differences between feudalism, capitalism, and technofeudalism in a technical (but not mathematical) appendix. “Under feudalism,” he writes, “the power of the ruling class grew out of owning land that the majority could not own, but were bonded to. Under capitalism, power stemmed from owning capital that the majority did not own, but had to work with to make a living.” Finally, “under technofeudalism, a new ruling class draws power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone.”(215) If Varoufakis is correct, the “cloud capitalists” like Jeff Bezos are a new ruling class because all other capitalists are dependent upon access to their networks in order to do any sort of business. The Amazons of the world do not earn revue from the profits of exploiting their own workers but by extracting rents from productive businesses who must contract with them to distribute their product or reach their customers.

Even if Varoufakis is correct that social media and distribution platforms make money by extracting rents from other capitalists rather than profit from exploiting their own workers, that fact alone would not entail the death of capitalism and the birth of technofeudalism. Rent and capital have always co-existed. Capitalists love rent because it is a form of income that yields returns above normal prices. As Varoufakis explains, ” rent is “any price paid by a buyer above the price which most closely reflects the exchange value of the commodity.”(220) Rent is a function of natural or artificial scarcity. A piece of land can only be used for one function at a time, works of art are unique. Their owners can therefore name their price when offering it for lease or for sale. While it is true that their surplus is a function of exploiting the scarcity of the resource or object that they own and not exploiting labour in the classic Marxist sense (unpaid surplus labour beyond the time necessary to pay for the reproduction of the labourer), that does not mean that they have ceased to be capitalists.

Piketty and David Harvey have also looked carefully at the role rent seeking plays in contemporary capitalism and neither have concluded that we have gone back to the future of technofeudalism. Ownership and control over land was essential to the feudal economy, but its fundamental difference from capitalism was the way in which labour was deployed. Peasants and serfs were tied, literally and figuratively, to the land that they worked, and they were paid in kind, not in wages. The immobility of labour meant that the productivity gains made possible by new techniques or bringing new land under cultivation were limited, because labour could not follow technical improvements or new developments. Capitalism replaced feudalism when those structural and ideological impediments were overcome and labour could follow investment (which followed profits). However, the development of capitalism did not eliminate ground rent, it simply introduced a new strata (which did become a new ruling class): the capitalist farmer who rented from the aristocratic landowner the farm that he worked with wage labour. The “triumph of rent over profit” is evidence of a structural crisis in the capitalist economy, but it does not prove that capitalism has been replaced by technofeudalism (118).

Although Piketty does not accept the (controversial) Marxist explanation of crisis as the result of a falling rate of profit, he agrees with Marxists like Michael Roberts that falling profits in the real economy have driven capital into the speculative economy in search of higher rates of return. My point is that we do not need to posit the existence of a new social formation and a new ruling class to explain the phenomena that Varoufakis is studying. A simpler explanation might conclude that capital seeks the highest rate of return. Downward pressure on profits will push capital out of the real economy into financial speculation. That outflow of capital signals a crisis of profitability and the wider social problems economic crises tend to cause, but is not proof that capitalism has been replaced by technofeudalism.

What about the other side of Varoufakis’ argument, the role of the labour of “cloud serfs” in the new economy? Varoufakis notes that “Big Tech’s workers … collect less than 1% of the firm’s revenues. The reason is that paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech relies on. Most of the work is performed by billions of people for free.”(84) It is a fact that platform users provide unpaid labour for social media firms, and I agree with Varoufakis that the entwining of leisure and labour on-line constitutes a novel form of domination. His argument is a necessary corrective to the overly optimistic celebration of “immaterial labour” and “prosumption” in the work of thinkers like Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. However, the fact that social media users provide content for free does not mean that wage labour has ceased to be essential to the capitalist economy.

While it is true that new communication technologies have changed the nature of work and created new forms of dependency linking consumers to producers through on-line platforms (now even other corporations are dependent on access to “cloud capital” while ever more people become psychologically and socially dependent on their on-line relationships) one must not forget that the hardware that these platforms use and the energy the networks require are still created using old fashioned wage labour to pay miners and manufacturers and network engineers. Other analysts of the changing nature of work in contemporary capitalism have acknowledged the increased complexity and further fragmentation of the working class without concluding that workers have become ‘cloud serfs.” Ursula Huws, Phil Jones, Nick-Dyer-Witherford, James Steinhoff, and Atle Mikkonen Kjosen have examined the composition of the contemporary working class in detail and concluded that it is increasingly super-exploited and dominated, but still a working class in the standard Marxist sense. No one makes their living shopping on Amazon. The fact that Amazon monetises their preferences and sells the information does not mean that those people are cloud serfs of Amazon. They have other jobs which pay the wages that they spend online.

Thus, it is only partly true that “cloud capital … has revolutionized its own reproduction. The true revolution that cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of the owners.”(85) The truth is that users willingly contribute to the reproduction of the web-based interface through which they access the platform, but the existence of the platform itself presupposes the material labour of the workers who extract the minerals and manufacture the machines on which the platform runs. Capitalism has constantly reconfigured the working class in light of changing technologies without ceasing to be capitalism. Varoufakis might be correct that workers have been replaced by cloud serfs if social media users made their living using these platforms. As I noted above, they do not, but spend a portion of their earnings on-line as they formerly would have in traditional concrete and glass stores. Just as the landlord would have charged the owner of the business rent for use of the physical space, so too cloud capitalists charge rent for access to a portion of cyberspace. That change is significant, but, I would argue, still understandable as a change within capitalism rather than a change to technofeudalism.

While I was not convinced by his general conclusions, novel analysis of the changing dynamics of global capitalism is always welcome. The book contains an excellent explanation of the new forms of rent which the digital economy has made possible, a concise history of financial markets and monetary policy from the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, through the global response to the 2008 crisis up to today, and a clear, de-mystifying explanation of derivatives and the way they radically destablised the global economy. Varoufakis sets these explanations in the context of the rise to prominence of the American dollar and how its use as the global reserve currency has served the interests of American, European, and Chinese capital. “Shortly after the dollar was decoupled from gold, Europe’s currencies were decoupled from the dollar. Once they lost their fixed exchange rate, the dollar value of European and Japanese currency began fluctuating wildly … The dollar became the only safe harbour.” (45) As America’s manufacturing industry declined, its economy was kept afloat by the repatriation of the dollars in which European, Japanese, and Chinese profits were denominated. America “gobbled up everything produced in Japan and, later, China. In return, the foreign (and often American) owners of these distant factories sent their profits, their cash, back to Wall Street to be invested– an additional form of tribute, which enriched America’s ruling class, despite its deficit.” (44)

The global power of the American dollar also contributed to the hypertrophied growth of the financial sector. Dollar denominated profits flowed into wall Street to be invested by banks which grew larger and larger. As these banks grew, they started to invent the exotic new investment instruments whose sale generated monstrous profits but ultimately de-stabilised the global economy and led to the 2008 crisis. Cloud capital consolidated its hold on the global economy in the wake of the 2008 crisis. According to Varoufakis, the vast sums that governments poured into the economy to stablise the banking sector were not put to productive use but instead used to fuel another speculative cycle. The low-interest rate policy of central banks- given an extended lease on life by the pandemic– addicted firms to free money.

We are now exiting that era. Interest rates continue to rise at the same time as economic growth is slowing in most of the world. The Ukraine War has shaken much of the world’s confidence in the American dollar, but no one can say what might replace it or what the overall consequences for the global economy might be. The polarization between the Global South and the Global North, already tense in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has reached a crisis level in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. These spectacular political clashes are playing out against a backdrop of intensifying economic competition between China and the United States (153, 159, 161). While I was unconvinced by his characetrisation of the global economy as technofeudal, I agree that 2008 marked the beginning of a long term structural crisis that has not yet been solved.

Unfortunately, the socialist and social democratic left has not been able to translate the crisis of capitalism into a politically and economically unified movement. Varoufakis was one of the victims of the failure of the socialist left when Syriza was undermined by the intransigence of the European Central Bank. He concludes his book with a rough sketch of an alternative economic system, one of many that can be found in the books of socialist intellectuals. Like Michael Albert’s Parecon and Pat Devine’s negotiated coordination economy, Varoufakis argues that an alternative must begin with collective ownership of universally needed resources (including information resources) and democratic planning of economic priorities and processes. The real problem that the left faces (aside from the identity politics that he also appropriately criticises, 183,184) is that these models float in the air without a coherent political movement to carry them forward. One can construct any model of an alternative economy one wants, but in order to start building it, governments have to establish control over their own economic resources. Unfortunately, the financial system– as Syriza found out– cannot be controlled by any one government. Since the financial system controls people’s savings and pensions, its threats have to be taken seriously by even the best left wing governments. Syriza was armed with a referendum victory in which the Greek people rejected further austerity. However, when the bankers merely scoffed and threatened to destroy the Greek banking sector, Syriza had to give in or risk watching its citizens savings and pensions evaporate.

Hence the biggest problem the left faces- whatever we calls the society we are trying to change– is not how to sketch plans for a systematic alternative, but re-establishing credibility with workers. No transitional program will get off the ground if it cannot protect workers’ short term interests in secure work for a living wage. Syriza’s unfortunate defeat and the political ascension of the far right in numerous European capitals stresses just how difficult this problem will be to solve.