Is Capitalism coming to an end?

追加: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]what the hell is happening with capitalism.

[00:00:05]Some have suggested that we are seeing an emerging development that is something akin neo-feudalism. Uh Varoufakis in particular in his book Technofeudalism is noting the way that uh large tech companies in particular are building out these huge cloud infrastructures and then uh according to his argument extracting rents from other companies in the way that a a feudal lord would extract rents from from uh those who were were using the land.

[00:00:37]But I was just reading a Jacobin article by Steven Marr where he's suggesting no, it's not neo-feudalism, it's hypercapitalism. And the argument that he's making is that this is not a shift to something else. This is capitalism doing exactly what capitalism does. But suggests that there is this kind of separation happening where of course we have these huge tech companies uh Google, Meta, Amazon that are monopolizing logistics, cloud infrastructures, AI. And we're we're seeing a lot of competition there. It's always inherent to capitalism at that level.

[00:01:14]But that then in the infrastructures that they are monopolizing there is this um sort of secondary class of um merchant capitalist that do have to pay for access to those infrastructures. So I I think what's in some ways dangerous about that and maybe what we're beginning to see from a working class perspective is that there's perhaps an increasingly um widening gap between the the billionaire class and then the large tech companies on the one hand and what they're doing and the the realities of these sort of merchant firms in the middle that are then impacting the the workers throughout the system, but maybe most explicitly at the bottom of that system.

[00:01:56]And so, there's this disconnect of how that's happening. And this is most fully experienced in the idea of AI replacing human jobs and the disconnect of of thinking that capitalism and consumer capitalism can survive when there's a working class who has the inability to sell their labor and thus an inability to earn money and thus an inability to spend money, which begins to introduce a contradiction in the whole system that doesn't bode well for that system surviving.

[00:02:29]We are seeing capitalism doing capitalism. And until we um find ways to bring power to the working class and allow for the voices of those who create value within the system to have more say over uh what societies are going to look like, um we will continue to have capitalism doing capitalism.