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.
Good point. i recently witnessed someone living through a cruel breakup and they broke down. dialectical materialism helped a little but liberalisms foothold was very strong.
With liberal tendencies I catch with my own thinking, I shudder to think how many I don’t catch.
Yeah, same. I often catch others and self crit over it a lot. But i think its the devotion to find and eradicate it that counts in the end. Progressivism (so to speak) knows no end. Otherwise it becomes conservatism.
I try to view it as a marathon, not a sprint. I hope you give yourself some grace and compassion when you self-crit. You deserve and are worthy of the same care and compassion you extend to others.
Thank you very much. :) same goes for you of course.
And for the reader! Please be kind to yourself while growing.
Thank you, my friend! It goes for all of us!