Did capitalism die with an evolutionary whisper?
Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
In the presentation of the ambitious "executive order" (see Start of 10 July) with which Joe Biden would like to restore competition in all sectors of the American economy, indeed, according to Axios , to change its characteristics, the US president says, a certain point, literally: “I want to be very clear, capitalism without competition is not capitalism. It is exploitation ".
Even if the emphasis of a president must be understood, even if anyone who has heard of a certain Karl Marx might reply that the economy without exploitation is not capitalism but the supreme pontiff of capitalism as a civil religion cannot pay attention to these details, despite all this, Biden would do well to find himself new ghost writers, because the joke that was suggested, however it may be, is objectively unhappy. The American public may be good-natured, but Biden has a profile as a global leader to defend.
Almost everyone has understood that talking about capitalism is nonsense by now, there is already someone who has decided to say it publicly in America and is not the last on the track, rather it is someone who throws a stone into the pond has certainly his good reasons.
“Thus capitalism dies: not with a revolutionary bang but with an evolutionary whisper. Just as it gradually surreptitiously took the place of feudalism until one day most of the relations between men found themselves dependent on the market and feudalism was wiped out, so today capitalism finds itself supplanted by a new one. economic mode: techno-feudalism. This is a statement anticipated by premature predictions, especially on the left, about the demise of capitalism. But this time it could be true ”.
This is said by Yanis Varoufakis, an old acquaintance of the global progressive "circle". Not a few will remember the highly spectacular numbers that, in the role of Greek finance minister, he had reserved for the unfortunate members of the Eurogroup struggling, in the first months of 2015, with the Greek insolvency, to whom to solve the problem of a debt public equal to over one and a half times the GDP, in addition to giving economics lessons to his fellow ministers at each meeting, he explained how he would solve the age-old scourge of tax evasion: paying some money to young foreign tourists to make them agents " undercover "of the Greek tax authorities so as to frame the shopkeepers who did not issue the receipt (all written in perfect English on the ministry's headed paper in a letter sent to Brussels, while the Hellenic state was unable to pay salaries at the end of the month and the Tsipras government was studying the possibility of materially appropriating money from the Bank of Greece).
Varoufakis, however, should not be underestimated, quite the contrary. Not only and not so much for the impudence worthy of a 5Stelle parliamentarian (how can one ever forget the priceless "that's what she says!" Addressed by Laura Castelli to Pier Carlo Padoan, who was then probably stunned by his own brief political experience?) . Varoufakis is a man of boundless self-referentiality and cynicism, but also a person of extraordinary intelligence and preparation, which he has also demonstrated in academic and consultancy-entrepreneurial activities (in the video game sector). It is also very well connected. He belongs to the ranks of intellectuals and Nobel laureates in general who promote the progressive verb from the pages of Project Syndicate but play as a free hitter, because he can afford it.
Not that in the article on the death of capitalism you can read extraordinary things: it is not the result of original research but the intelligent and orderly exposition (which is already quite a lot) of the last stages that led to the fatal outcome. For Varoufakis it is with the 2008 crisis (the subprime crisis, of which he modestly does not articulate the name) that the change that has been going on for decades turns into discontinuity: "Since in April 2009 the central banks joined together to global finance using their ability to print money, a profound discontinuity has emerged. Today the world economy works thanks not to private profits but to the constant generation of money by central banks. Meanwhile, the extraction of value has progressively moved from markets to digital platforms such as Facebook and Amazon which no longer operate as oligopolies but as private fiefdoms or as equity funds ”. Consequently, "the politics based on class conflict in which parties favorable to the capitalist class compete with those favorable to the working class is over".
As can be seen from this last obvious notation, there are no shocking revelations in Varoufakis' article. However, that what can be considered an authoritative ideologue of global progressivism writes, in one of the places dedicated to the promotion of this ideology, that capitalism is dead, politics as well while he is experiencing "techno-feudalism" and makes us all dance must make you think. Both because precisely this "techno-feudalism" recognizes itself in the ideology of global progressivism, so much so that it has placed itself at the forefront of the campaign for Donald Trump's damnatio memoriae from the beginning, and because it is obviously artificial to confine this new "economic modality ”To the proverbial Amazon and Facebook and to Big Tech in general. But this Varoufakis knows very well, it has already been noted that man is very intelligent; in fact, it circumscribes to the economy and the market what should be a discourse on power (Varoufakis prefers a more delicate "relations between men" to the word "power"), a discourse to be started not only before the 2008 crisis but also before the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (1971). Probably we should start from the decisive distancing, after World War II, of the great North American universities from the decisive influence of the great historical families of US capitalism and from that "managerial revolution" which sanctioned the separation of ownership from the control of large companies , analyzed in the early 1940s by former American Trotskyist James Burnham.
But to address this topic it is still, and perhaps always will be, too soon, because it is a complicated discourse that directly affects the bureaucracy, both from the point of view of the organization of large companies, and from the point of view of the evolution of markets and economic regimes in general over the last eighty years, in the light of Natalino Irti's clear teaching on their artificiality, juridicality and historicity (it should be borne in mind, to avoid misunderstandings that are always possible when appointing bureaucracy, that the university and central bank, to name just two, are bureaucratic bodies or, if you prefer, techno-bureaucrats).
But the bureaucracy is the only social class that in history has never lost any battle, precisely because it has never allowed anyone to recognize it as such. So it is better to follow the example of Varoufakis who prudently flies very high and concludes his writing by evoking the possible revolutionary bang of the "exploited of techno-feudalism (as to say billions of consumers all over the world, ed) with the shocking inequality" only that these find a "collective voice". Psalms must always end in glory.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-capitalismo-e-morto-con-un-sussurro-evolutivo/ on Sat, 17 Jul 2021 07:51:37 +0000.