Amazon is much worse than a monopolist it's not just a monopolist it's not a market it is not a capitalist it is like think of it as a digital version of a fdom yeah sure in which vasel capitalists are laboring for the Lord along with the peasants who may even love the Lord so you mentioned before that you know these gadgets are all very convenient I can't live my life without techn feudalism what killed capitalism is the new book from the bestseller Janis varu fakis the hugely recognizable Greek Economist who was his country's Finance Minister
in 2015 vacus thinks there is a new power reshaping the world and reshaping all of our lives so what is techn feudalism who is driving it and is it bad for us and bad for democracy Janis farus welcome to times radio thank you so much for having me Hugo great pleasure to have you here look this idea the idea of techn feudalism the idea that we've sort of reverted to a feudal situation but with tech bosses as the new overlords it's a fascinating idea tell us about it it's based on this hunch that I developed
some years ago that um you know I come from the left we are The Losers of History we leftist as you very well know we used to believe that organized labor would overthrow Capital capitalism or takeover Capital it never happened but what has happened instead is a delicious irony the capital became so triumphant that it mutated like a stupid virus that creates a varant that kills its host so this is my hypothesis that Capital has become so successful and so powerful and so toxic that it has killed capitalism now in practice what does this mean
and why should people care it means that whereas uh profit was the fuel and the lubricant of the socio economic system known as capitalism and markets where the mechanism that uh synthesized all our efforts uh brought together producers consumers uh organized economic activity infected our culture the whole thing now we are moving away from profit back to rent mhm which is the feudal form of wealth accumulation to me to to to give people a sort of very concrete idea of what you're talking about you're talking about for example the way I don't know on a
really uh basic level the way we would have a Netflix subscription rather than buy DVDs the way we rent on music The Way We less likely to ear our homes I mean what level do we do all this actually iow me to put it slightly differently sure right Once Upon a Time such and such the great advertisers would create a poster or TV ad they would put the idea in your head that you wanted to buy something then you went out to a shop and you bought it from the actual uh shop that gets it
from the producer directly and the producer the capitalist would make a profit out of it and profit would run the system today Alexa sitting on your desk or Siri or whatever some interface with uh the net mhm uh you are training it to train you to train it to impress upon you how good it is at giving you advice on what to buy I don't know about you but Spotify really is spot on regarding you know what I actually like yeah and once it gets this power over you on the basis that it serves you
and it gives you good advice then it can recommend things for you to buy and not only that but this is the astonishing thing you don't need to go to the shop to buy it the same piece of what I call Cloud Capital that Capital that lives in on the cloud sells you the stuff directly through Amazon.com which is the same um agglomeration of capital Cloud Capital as the Alexa that talks to you and interacts with you that's not a market anymore it's not capitalism what happens is Amazon charges 40% 40% to the capitalist who
produces the stuff that you buy Amazon doesn't produce anything so it's not just that you do not own stuff that and you rent it it is that you have the complete bypassing of markets mhm and and the replacement of profit with a new form of cloud rent or rent which I call Cloud rent H and why does this matter it matters because our society becomes increasingly unstable as a result why does it become unstable because you because I mean some people would say this is this is great I get what I get what I want
I don't need to do so much work about it I don't care whether my money is going to some to one company I don't know or another company I don't know so it goes to Amazon how's that my problem because rent is waste right unlike profit when a producer of bicycles of binocular of cars Whatever Gets a profit they have to invest a large part of it uh in order to maintain competitiveness so this goes back into the economy uh if you are a rener you collect rent in your sleep Jeff pesos doesn't need to
do anything uh capitalist work for him and when he gets uh this 40% mhm he just puts it away he uses it to speculate in financial markets doesn't go back into investment into anything but I mean but for the for the consumer this sort of thing has feels like it has made life easier right it's made life cheap but it's made life cheap I use it I can't live without but it's made life cheaper as well of course uh and so the the waste is the waste is is feels intangible it feels intangible but it
really does poison Our Lives because here go if you think about it when let's say a large chunk of national income is withdrawn from the uh cirular flow of income and is stashed away in some Financial circuit and simply feeds this financial game and comes out of people people's wages let me give you a very striking example General Motors Ford Motor Company zans Volkswagen they pay all those corporations old style capitalist corporations pay 85% of their revenues as wages salaries and so on Facebook 1% yeah Amazon 1.5% what happens to the rest is withdrawn the
result is that the people out there suffer permanent austerity not necessarily you know George Osborne's hostility but hostility in the sense that there isn't enough money going around that's why we have what David Graber so scientifically described as jobs because there are there's no good investment in in jobs this is why central banks like the bank of England cannot stop printing money even if when they when they're trying to you know quantitatively tighten because there's not enough money going around so the state has to keep producing money feeding even inflation so if we feel today
that uh there's a poly crisis as Adam Tu has described it that you know have multiple crisis including the climate crisis that in my estimation has to do with that with the fact that after 2008 governments tried to save the banks and by printing something like 30 to35 trillion right remember Gordon Brown April 2009 bringing together the G7 central banks they started the printing presses now that money was never invested in anything except Cloud Capital by the B in big Tech and the other big Tech uh conglomerate revolution of course took place in China yeah
in my book I tried to explain the new cold war between the US and China I ignore issues of Taiwan and so on that I think this is absolutely relevant uh just a red heading it's the clash of the two forms of cloud Capital that are taking over the world the American and the Chinese and we here in Europe and in Britain are becoming increasingly sad irrelevant entities well that's I mean that's a that's that's another cheery point that we'll come on to in just a moment but um as a look as a as a
figure of the left um does this make does this make you want capitalism back I mean does this make you nostalgic for capitalism does this make you think we need to rescue capitalism because that's a very uh counterintuitive position for you to find yourself in I'm nostalgic about poetry about uh drama about art I'm never nostalgic about a dead socioeconomic system so if this was the 1770s 1800s would we be nostalgic of feudalism which was dying no let's move on uh I I'm just nostalgic of the idea of the liberal individual and that I'm saying
as a leftist yeah because the idea of you know of a nice ring fencing between your work life and your leisure that's all gone now but so so does this make what you're talking about this techn feudalism this move from capitalism towards towards the situation that you've very eloquently described does that make it harder does that you're basically saying that makes it much harder if not impossible to then move towards socialism social democracy in the manner that you would have always wanted to do that's that's become a harder task now you're right in in an
important sense social democracy's bank is finished right um I say this without any Glee I'm not a social social Social Democrat but I do believe that social democracy played a very important civilizing role in the 1960s and70s so you know Harold Wilson in this country willly brand in Germany Bruno KY in Austria what they did was they played the role of referee they uh brought into one large room uh the captains of industry leaders of the Auto industry of Steel making and so on on one side and the TU organized labor on the other and
they cut a deal between them uh whereby a chunk of the surpluses of the capitalist would fund the state NHS and so on and wages and that cannot happen now you'd think that would be easier to do now cuz you now it is absolutely utterly impossible but you'd think like the I mean it's it's for for relatively small small countries in Europe it's hard in the United States You' think they could more easily cut a deal the government could cut a deal with Amazon to reincorporate some of the money no is that not I mean
well look at what happening in the United States today Lima KH KH who is the chair of the FTC the Federal Trade Commission is starting I think she's very well-meaning and she's a very smart woman and now wish her very well she's starting a law um a legal battle against Amazon yeah but I think she's uh doing it the wrong way because she's treating Amazon in the way that Teddy ruselt treated Standard Oil and Rockefeller back in the 1920s as a monopolist that needs to be broken up Amazon is much worse than a monopolist it's
not just a monopolist it's not a market it is not a capitalist it is like think of it as a digital version of a fom yeah sure in which vassel capitalists are laboring for the Lord along with the peasants who may even love the Lord so you mentioned before that you know the these gadgets are all very convenient I can't live my life without them yeah sure so we are voluntary servants voluntary Cloud serves to these people so and you know Lima Khan has her work cut out for her that's yeah that's makes s sound
huge look for a quick recap you were you were the the Greek final Minister for for eight months in in 20 five and a half forgive me five and a half five and half terrible exaggeration um just felt like longer in in 2015 uh having just been elected to Parliament with your your country in deep recession and your party was promising to renegotiate Greece's debt and Cil its austerity measures and ultimately you you resigned from your position and then from Parliament having not been able to to achieve what you what you'd set out to do
um hopefully that's that's a very quick summary of a big time and hopefully it's reasonable um perfectly reasonable does the kind of do the kind of developments you're talking about in this book make you think differently about that time no not at all because that was very brutish and unquit kind of clash right um Greece for 20 years after we joined or we started the process of joining the Euro Zone uh we became uh um the typical the archetypal case of vendor financing so to put it in crude but not misleading terms you know Mercedes-Benz
or Volkswagen were giving us the money to buy their cars uh that's ventor financing um it was their way of getting rid of surplus products and surplus money and it was the way of the Greek bouris ruling State ruling class state to pretend that we were growing uh and of course this was never going to end well the moment lemon Brothers went under Deutsche Bank went under the financing stopped you know the bubble burst and then we were bankrupt and then the European Union in it in its infinite wi wisdom and our ruling class in
its uh cruelty decided to cover up the bankruptcy by taking all more loans to pretend that we could repay our previous loans which we couldn't on conditions of austerity of harsh austerity I unbelievable austerity which was depleting the incomes the little incomes That Couldn't repay the previous Lo and I stepped in there for one purpose to cut this process dead to stop this to say we need to embrace our bankruptcy we need to suffer the consequences of our bankruptcy uh but no more loans no more credit cards pretending we're repaying the previous credit cards and
that is the only way of rebooting and restarting and you don't need to be a left Winger to believe that that's why I had a lot of support amongst the Tories in this country how quite yeah how do you look back on your that period do you look back on that period as um as you did the best you could do do you look back that you that you succeeded in some way or or or that you entirely failed I entirely failed entirely failed yeah but I don't regret for a moment I I have to
say that I have certain amount of pride in the sense that I went in there to do the right thing I was prevented from doing the right thing by my own prime minister especially on the night of the 5th of July 2015 when the Greek people very heroically uh gave us a 62% referendum mandate to do the right thing the Prime Minister succumbed surrendered and I resigned and I think that there is something to be said about politicians who resign when they realize they cannot do what they promised their electorate they should do well generally
they'd have to resign an awful lot if that was if that was the norm wouldn't it your your old party Sera has just elected as leader Stefanos celus who has no sort of real political career to date at all and no parliamentary seat and lived in Miami until earlier this year and he's now the the leader of the Greek opposition um where does this leave sort of the left in Greece when you you need a figure like this to come in and and lead in this right there's no left left there's no left left really
I mean we have I have started the party some time ago we managed to get elected to Parliament we got nine seats in 2019 we lost our seats last June and instead there are three fascist parties sitting where we used to sit uh the gentleman that you mentioned I'm sure he's a very very nice person uh and I don't mind the fact that he lived in Miami I used to live in Texas who am I to judge him on that but I don't know him nobody had heard of him until this was the nearest you
can get to a hostile takeover of a political party within 3 weeks by an unnown sutor yeah um but look the night of that that referendum that I mentioned before when my colleague and prime minister effectively betrayed the Mandate of the people was the end of that party and of the left of that party had managed to encourage to reinforce and so on now what we have is a logical conclusion of that depoliticization of the Left Right understood look Janis vacus I'm afraid we've got to leave it there but thanks very much great pleasure to
speak to you techn feudalism who killed capitalism is I believe it's out now it's out already yes it was out two days ago out two days ago wonderful Janis farus thank you very much indeed thank you [Music]
