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Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it
- slowhadoken 3y ago[flagged]
- becquerel 3y agoI resonate deeply with this comment. Except it's also true of most human endeavours...
- slowhadoken 3y agoIt’s not a popular opinion because I got down voted into oblivion
- toastercat 3y agoSo that means we need a Capitalism: The Good Parts to teach us to stay away from the bad parts!
- slowhadoken 3y agoThe good parts like open markets and the bad parts like monopolies
- anon25783 3y agoIt is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of JavaScript
- slowhadoken 3y agoJavaScript will eventually bring about the rise of ALGOL
- zaps 3y agoTLDR: It’s not.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoCapitalism is dead, long live Uber-Capitalism It has been distilled into a more pure form and thus is another step removed from its base ideology and has become its own justification. ie. Question: Why? Answer: Because capitalism Where it used to be: Question: Why capitalism? Answer: Because incentive structure to maintain a society eg. The prevalence of overt user hostile function and design choices. These are in servitude of capital, not in servitude of customers or function. Capital as the ends justfying any means.
- jklaewl 3y ago[flagged]
- _heimdall 3y agoI'm not sure about Italy, but capitalism is alive and well in the US for better or worse. Our political, economic, and social systems are all largely driven by an end goal of creating and hoarding capital for the sake of capital. We may not have free markets anymore, but we have capitalism in spades.
- keithnz 3y agoPretty much this, capitalism seems to have won out most everywhere. Not sure we really had free markets, free ish maybe. It's the ish that causes warping such that countries tends to put in place control levers. But they tend to be clunky patches and things change and adapt faster than we can legislate... what we need is better frameworks that capitalism can live inside of.
- jojobas 3y agoCapitalism is dead, says a millionaire on track to become a billionaire.
- defrost 3y agoHe'll be lucky to hit a billion. The million was media money, book returns, and he declared nearly half a million paid back in taxes. Near as I can tell the ire was generated due becoming rich from books describing the Greek plumment into very not rich, leading to calls of Yanis being a champagne socialist profiting from the misfortune of many. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/greeks-sneer-as-yanis-varoufakis-reveals-fortune-n3t523c6h https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/greeks-sneer-as-yanis-var... The full wiki on this Greek - Australian (became a citizen of Oz in 1991) is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
- jojobas 3y agoSo, he became rich by exercising capitalism (investing his time and insight in writing his books and getting handsome returns, owning a "substantial property portfolio" etc). Anyone would be lucky to become a billionaire, people already reporting ~1M euro annual income require much less luck.
- j_crick 3y agoRelated previous discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37934781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37934781
- narinxas 3y agocapitalism will live forever as a component of whatever it is the chinese do
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoHe's indicting the Chicago school and rightly so because the academic priesthood condoning vampiric, unrestrained, hyperindividualist capitalism sleepwalking civilization into existential threats of collapse is broken. Strong regulation, collective bargaining, employee ownership, and more nonprofit social ventures in lieu of for-profit so-called "public private partnerships" are some of the paths that must replace unrestrained, unregulated externalities being dumped on others because it's more profitable than doing the right thing™. One of the most pressing problems is private equity with too much money and too much power buying up everything and anything in order to rent it back to us for more money because they can and because of said too much money and too much power and nowhere else to park it.
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoDon't forget that those who sit at the top of what capitalism has provided are also able to thoroughly define the narrative that's applied to the rest of society. For example, many of the paths you've rightfully pointed out are, have been, and will be tarred with the socialism brush which, in (too) many corners of the US, is a synonym for communism. and maybe I just don't have a good enough imagination, but I can't see anything other than extreme violence being able to solve the concentration of power. I'm not promoting it at all, but my knowledge of humanity and history is such that that's where I think the percentages point towards. Those with power seem to be increasingly doubling-down on positions that my logic would deem untenable, and their calling to account by those aspects of society responsible for calling power to account seem to be increasingly failing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yterdy 3y agoAn important addendum is that the government/finance revolving door must end, because what is sitting at the confluence of the rent-seeking you describe and the regulatory capture I just alluded to is our current paradigm, where the public is constantly forced to bail out "wealthy" entities in the wake of their bad bets blowing up and taking out an institutional pillar of our economy or two. It has happened multiple times just this year, almost silently (on top of the high likelihood of a few additional instances happening completely out of view of the public, both here and abroad).
- rubymancer 3y ago> Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”. This doesn't sound right to me, but if it is Varoufakis has a point. Our contract, such as it is, with traditional capitalists is they employ many, produce some sort of value and keep as much profit as they can manage after labor and expenses. If the Amazons and Googles of the world can generate their enormous revenues (and profits) without dispensing much of it to labor, essentially just collecting large rents in perpetuity, both traditional capitalists and workers are in serious trouble. That is a big shift. Techno Feudalism, indeed.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoHe probably doesn't include stock compensation which is a huge part of compensation for workers in tech.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoAnd downvoted for stating an obvious flaw as it goes against "Capitalism bad, Communism good" brainworm mentality.
- resolutebat 3y agoGoogle's revenue in 2022 was $280 billion. 1% of that would be $2.8 billion, and Google had 190000 employees at the time. I'm pretty sure the average wage of those employees is not $14,736, so Varoufakis would appear to be off by at least a factor of 10x. On the other hand, if Google did pay out 80% of revenues, the average Google paycheck would be a cool $1,178,947.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoThe average software developer's cost to Google is probably in the around $500k. But let us not get facts and numbers get in the way of a narrative.
- dhoe 3y ago[flagged]
- unethical_ban 3y agoHe makes a mistake equating Hamas with the broader concept of Gazan freedom. That is embarrassing. However, I agree with what I think his point is, that you put a pressure cooker on the stove long enough and it will pop. Likud and the Israeli hard right are second in line for responsibility of Oct 7 behind Hamas. All that aside, he is a thoughtful economist and I look forward to reading the article.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- keithnz 3y agohe could be pro Nazi, but that is not an argument against his reasoning around capitalism. That's an interesting sidenote, but doesn't mean he's wrong. I think its better if we just discuss why he's wrong or right on this topic.
- Lamad1234 3y ago[flagged]
- stuart78 3y agoThe Amazon case in this article seems to fall flat in the same way the Apple as Monopoly argument does. It works only if you ignore the fact of categorical choice (Android in the case of Apple). No seller is forced to sell on Amazon, as demonstrated by the thousands of Shopify and Etsy-hosted sellers out there. Yes, within the world of Amazon, Amazon sets the rules, but if the users leave, so will the sellers. Shopify, Instagram, TikTok, Magento and the dozens of other ways to sell goods online offer an alternate path, and while Amazon may dominate today, tomorrow is never certain. (Edit: spelling error)
- dangus 3y agoWalmart.com is another seller marketplace that does big volumes and works similarly to Amazon. Still, I think Amazon is doing some pretty anticompetitive things, and the FTC lawsuit against them seems like it has merit in my layperson’s eyes. Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours for any reasonable cost. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged shipping. That situation could be easily argued to be a monopoly. Apple vs. Google isn’t that much of a choice, either. There used to be so many smartphone options: BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian all existed at the same time as the iPhone and Android. Now it’s just two, and most governments don’t seem all that interested in curtailing some of their most anticompetitive practices. You don’t have to be a pure monopoly be in a small group of “lords” with a position of power that cannot possibly be overturned.
- TapWaterBandit 3y ago> Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged shipping. That situation could be easily argued to be a monopoly. Why do Amazon have a monopoly on this? Is it because they are engaging in anti-competitive practices preventing competitors from offering the same thing or do they just have the best logistics expertise and setup in the industry? That's a genuine question btw because it matters a lot for whether or not regulation/the state should attempt to resolve it.
- ekianjo 3y agoWho takes this guy seriously? He's been going from one rant to another over the years.
- mise_en_place 3y agoAll will be well, so long as you buy his book of course.
- senectus1 3y agofar lefties do.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoCan you name a major positive political change that wasn't lead by somebody who cared passionately about something for decades? Do you similarly right off Nelson Mandela because he was ranting about the same injustice for multiple decades?
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago"write" Passion is not enough, logical/ethical correctness is needed too. Mandela had that. Mao didn't have that in his passionate battle against sparrows.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoSo you criticize Mao for his lack of logical/ethical correctness, not his passion.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoI think the original post was not obvious: passion w/o logical/ethical correctness is useless
- tracerbulletx 3y agoThis whole dichotomy stops us from having productive conversations. Organic price setting is better and more effective than central price setting, monetary coercion is the lesser of two evils compared to coercion by force, which as long as there are shit dangerous jobs like mining and being an electrical lineman to do will there WILL be some kind of coercion. These are good things about "capitalism". But capitalism is organic, it's amoral, it's also vulnerable to systemic disease like all organic systems. If we can do medicine on our bodies, we can and should do medicine on the economy. Our moral definition of "thriving" should be allowed to trump the natural outcomes of the free market. To think the outcomes of the free-market are automatically desirable is to make the naturalistic fallacy.
- _oghd 3y agocapitalism is private ownership of property and the exchange of labor for wage to produce commodities with said capital. capitalism is not just "free market economy," where the natural opposite as you supoose being "centrally planned economies" this is essential to understand what varoufakis presents as a new relation to production: technofeudalism.
- tracerbulletx 3y agoThat's what I'm referencing with "monetary coercion". And anyways my comment's not exhaustive or particularly great, I'm just saying the whole family of related things we call capitalism has good and bad parts that we ought to be mixing together and open to criticizing specific parts without throwing away every part that makes sense compared to the alternative. Plenty of people DO do that, but it's not all that common in the public discourse.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago> capitalism is private ownership of property Not only is that not my personal definition of the term, but that isn't how it's defined in the linked article; nor is Yannis Varoufakis even remotely advocating eliminating the notion of private property ownership. > capitalism is not just "free market economy," where the natural opposite as you supoose being "centrally planned economies" That depends entirely on who you ask. You'll get very different, but equally sincere and well-justified, definitions from your local college's student socialist societ compared to the parents of the members of the lacrosse team. Once anyone conversation starts using either C-word it inevitably turns into "Capitalism is anything I don't like" vs. "Communism is anything I don't like" and it's all downhill from there.
- oraphalous 3y agoConversations about capitalism have become pointless... I'd rather eat mud. When people start arguing one way or the other about the goods or ills of capitalism, both sides inject definitional or theoretical aspects that include an entire mountain of pre-supposition, that I barely understand what anyone is talking about. It would take hours to unpick what the hell they mean by the term... which I thought generally should be quite simple: the right to own property, and to trade it without coercion. So when someone claims that capitalism is dead - what the hell do they actually mean? I can still own property and trade it. The vast majority of people in Western countries can. No - they think capitalism is something more, some ideal that we had and lost presumably. What that ideal is I have no clue.
- jcranmer 3y agoI've held for several years now that any -ism term generally does more to obfuscate than it does to elucidate. And capitalism and feudalism are among the worst terms in that regard, as the former can mean anything from "money exists" to very specific ideas about how the government should regulate the economy (or more accurately, how it shouldn't), while the latter is generally a vague reference to Medieval Europe without recognizing that there was actually quite some diversity in political and socioeconomic conditions across time and space in that 1000-year period.
- injeolmi_love 3y agoThe term capitalism was invented as a prejorative, and in its original meaning had nothing to do with free markets. Instead it referred to a system of oppression where industrialists partnered with the state to create an underclass of cheap labor. Various policies were used to impoverish peasants, force them off their traditional lands, and legally require them to get a job in a factory or face prison. Something similar happening now is where only big tech companies are able to afford compliance with censorship, money laundering, and other state regulations. This allows big tech to abuse their relationships with their customers, who are a wide group of industrialists, consumers, and labor. Criticism of capitalism is fundamentally criticism of the state.
- djrobstep 3y ago
- refurb 3y agoAhhh... he's trying to sell a book. Now the headline makes sense.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y agoit's available on Amazon =)
- jcranmer 3y agoAIUI, this is a book review article.
- rainonmoon 3y agoAre you familiar with the concept of a book review or is it always this confounding when the release of a thoughtful cultural artefact is responded to with discourse?
- refurb 3y agoI'm not talking about the article, I'm talking about the author (which the headline is based on).
- tempsy 3y agoThere's a couple lawsuits going around aimed at hotels and apartment rental companies using centralized software to effectively engage in legalized price fixing. Probably happening in many industries and we don't know about it at all. Would generally agree that antithetical to free market capitalism and an example of how capitalism is not really capitalism.
- darthrupert 3y agoLeftist thinks (=wishes) capitalism is dead. Here's Jeff with the weather. Nothing new: this has been a thing since socialism was invented. Perhaps they should try to work within the system that has been shown to work better than any pther system, instead of advocating its mindless destruction.
- CamperBob2 3y agoI know when I need economic advice, I turn to experts from Greece.
- mig39 3y agoIt seems the goal of today's corporations is to avoid competition and a free market.
- jrm4 3y agoHere's the thing I've come to realize; there's literally no point at all in mentioning Capitalism because it means SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS to people. Step 1. Let's define "commerce." You know, people buying and selling things, making favorable trades and such. Let's agree that we recognize that this is a thing that has happened for a long time and is likely to happen for a long time. You might say it's "good," or you might just sort of accept it -- and perhaps if you're not willing to accept it, you at least understand that you have a ton of work ahead of you if you're going to get rid of it. Now, how is "capitalism" different from the above? And again, note that even if you have an elegant and clear answer, others don't. I'm literally asking this question because I don't think we've come remotely close to STARTING a good definition here, collectively.
- JDEW 3y agoIndeed, and it’s one of the most powerful tools in propaganda: slather on additional context so that it become indiscussible (as there is no common language anymore). Capitalism is a power system where capital and not creation dictates ownership. If you define it like this, people are often more inclined to see it as unethical. Which is exactly what the ruling class (aka the owners of capital) doesn’t want.
- Chiba-City 3y ago[dead]
- mise_en_place 3y ago[flagged]
- somethoughts 3y agoJust in case you want to read more, his book - Technofeudalism - published by PenguinHouse - is available for pre-order on Amazon as a paperback for $17.99 and $30.99 for the hardcover. It is also available as an E-book on the Kindle via Apple Books and also as an audiobook on Audible. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there will be any open e-book PDF versions available - perhaps as a testament about how the means of electronic distribution of information are too tightly held by the capitalists. Sorry couldn't resist!
- frozenport 3y agoTechnofeudalism is super catchy but is poorly differentiated from Capitalism proper. It seems the geist is about the monopolistic abusesses of large tech companies, which reminds us back to the Gilded Age's trusts. Both then and now are products and manifestation of the same Capitalism.
- Chiba-City 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- emporas 3y agoI have listened a lot of Varoufakis's speeches some years back, in Greek as well as in English, when i had no idea of economics. Varoufakis was always very critical of the tendency of capitalism and market forces to create powerful companies and wealthy individuals. Lately he is all about Amazon, Google etc. In my opinion, it is a mistake to try and understand what's the purpose of money, by focusing on the consumption, rather than the production. Varoufakis falls into this trap. I have written in the past a relevant comment [1]. A recent example to illustrate what's the importance of money, is the production of CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, QubitPUs and so on. What's the more important processing unit, in the year of 2023? GPUs of course! How do we know? The price of Nvidia is going up and up. The consumers send a signal to the company which produces the most important processing unit, to increase production. So, money is an automation. It automates the answer to the question: "Which one of the processing units do we need to increase the production of?" [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636591
- Exoristos 3y agoMeaning we should focus on money as a tool of coercion, rather than as a means of permission?
- emporas 3y agoMeaning, we should focus on our desires and what products or services satisfy them better. Money is an automation of what desires need to be produced more in the future, so as to be offered in bigger quantities and/or cheaper. Edit: Nvidia by receiving higher evaluations of money lately, tries to expand production and increase the volume of GPUs produced. So now they are tackling the problem of lithography [1], which is a long standing problem many chip companies tried to solve in the past and failed. It is an expensive problem, but as soon as an abundance of our money is given to Nvidia, they try to solve the hardest problem imaginable. i.e (Money given -> Production increased) , in an automated way using money. Money is an automation. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxyM2Chu9Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxyM2Chu9Vc
- kouru225 3y agoI feel like capitalism has gotta be the most misunderstood word in the English language. Is it a financial system where you can own capital? Then it’s capitalism.
- ibobev 3y agoWhy exactly this article is flagged?