By EMILIO CAFASSI*

Considerations on the newly translated book by Yanis Varoufakis

Every now and then, texts emerge that, without warning, open cracks in the certainties inherited about capitalism, especially throughout its history. I am particularly interested in those that examine analogies and differences with the fundamental theses of Karl Marx. I welcome all revisionism as a breath of fresh air for thought, even if its diagnoses are not always shared.

Yanis Varoufakis's book, Technofeudalism, has been gaining popularity and generating consistent controversy, inscribed in this intellectual attitude that goes back, without intending to be exhaustive, for example, to the theory of imperialism with Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg and Rudolf Hilferding in the first decades of the last century.

Or those that gained vigorous momentum in the last quarter with the crisis of the industrial Fordist model (Mandel, Aglietta, Braverman, Castells) and much of this century (Negri, Holloway, Lessig, Vercellone, Fuchs, Piketty, etc.).

The appeal to a past mode of production is also not necessarily new for the analysis of certain historical periods, as in the historiography of the colonization of Latin America and its feudal, capitalist or even slave-owning character in the 1970s (Bagú, Gunder Frank, Puigrós, Gorender).

The theoretical provocation

The Greek economist does not abandon his reading of Marx: he questions it, provokes it, pushes it beyond its certainties. His critique does not come from the opposite side, but from the very center of its theoretical architecture. Like someone who lives in an old house with solid foundations but with leaks and chips, he refuses to demolish it, but demands urgent reforms. He emphasizes that if the world has changed, the categories we use to interpret it must also change.

In very simple terms, the book's central hypothesis holds that we are not facing a mutant capitalism, but a new technological feudal regime. For example, with the category of social class, since in technofeudalism, power would not be organized only by the ownership of the means of production, but by privileged access to data flows and digital infrastructure. It would no longer be the industrial capitalist who would dominate, but the digital master who possesses a new territoriality mapped by interfaces, the cloud and the circulation channel.

The figure of the exploiter does not disappear, but is transformed, confused, and rubbed shoulders with that of the programmer, designer, and engineer. This implies a reconfiguration of the class structure: it destabilizes the centrality of wage labor as the core of value creation. If Marx revealed that surplus value emerged from unpaid labor time, technofeudalism — says Yanis Varoufakis — generated a form of extraction that does not require wages, working hours, or factories.

Surplus value has been replaced by access income. And the exploited subject is no longer just the worker, but the user, the consumer, the digital profile, which leads him to radicalize his critique of the very concept of capitalism. Not as an abolished system, but as an insufficient theoretical abstraction. For him, continuing to call this order “capitalism” is an act of short-sighted nostalgia. The rules of capitalism have been replaced by a rentier, closed, monopolistic and predatory logic.

What defines this new order is not the accumulation of capital, but the capture of digital territories from which income is extracted. Yanis Varoufakis is not content to simply describe capitalism (platform, cognitive, surveillance, informational, etc.); he considers it an old skin that no longer covers the changing body of the present. Without denying continuity, a qualitative leap is underway: the disappearance of the market as a space of regulation and the return of servile relations, mediated by technology, but similar in their logic of dependence, control and unequal access.

In its desacralizing aspects, it is something to be grateful for — as much as its connections with previous theses. The conflict is no longer explained solely by the means of production, but by connection, where exploitation is not only labor-related, but existential. It emphasizes that alienation no longer results from forced labor, but from imposed enjoyment. And that emancipation cannot be conceived without challenging the digital architecture of the world.

Its power is that of thought in motion, more than a manifesto. Its call is not to nostalgically recover the working class or the strength of the State, but rather to try to imagine forms of popular organization that regain control of the code, the network, the cloud, much more the product of alliances between technical knowledge and political consciousness: the artisans of the algorithm, the hackers of desire, the plebeians of data.

Let us remember that feudalism was a mode of production in which power was entrenched in the land and in the flesh of those who inhabited it. Its axis revolved not around wages or contracts, but rather around vassalage and personal dependence. The lord owned not only the land, but also the customary right to the lives of others: he administered justice, meted out punishments, and decided on the bodies and destinies of his serfs.

The economy had not yet experienced the vertigo of the market: it was agrarian, closed, self-sufficient, tied to natural cycles and to the tribute that the peasant had to pay — in kind, in labor or in submission — in exchange for the right to subsist. There was no mobility, but inheritance; there was no competition, but lineage.

Relations of production were, in essence, relations of extra-economic domination: the time of others was not bought, it was demanded; the bodies of others were not hired, they were retained. Thus, a structure was configured that reproduced, time and time again, the eternity of inequality as a natural landscape.

Yanis Varoufakis is not a laboratory economist, but an actor willing to face the political drama firsthand. In the turbulent July of 2015, as Finance Minister in the Syriza government, he engaged in a historic standoff with the “Troika” (ECB, IMF and European Commission), confronting debt blackmail with a proposal that he himself called “constructive disobedience”.

The Greek people supported their position with a resounding “no” in the referendum, but the epic soon turned into impotence: Alexis Tsipras gave in to external pressure, ignoring the will of the people. Yanis Varoufakis resigned with the bitter dignity of someone who refuses to accept defeat. I then devoted several articles to this new version of the Greek tragedy.

The experience left an indelible mark: the understanding that resistance cannot be limited to the confines of a besieged nation state. Thus was born DiEM25, his pan-European movement that aims to rebuild democracy from below, beyond borders, by confronting financial power with a new political imagination.

The Twilight of Capital and the Rise of Digital Lords

Some die like kings without subjects, wrapped in the rancid trappings of a power that no longer exists. They agonize for a long time, clinging to the categories with which they once described the world. For the author, such would be the case of capitalism, that illustrious corpse that dares to declare itself definitively lifeless, not with revolutionary jubilation or messianic prophecy, but with the somber serenity of a doctor who has confirmed the absence of vital signs.

But what follows this death is not liberation, but the birth of an even more fearsome creature: “technofeudalism,” an order in which the old factory chains have been replaced by invisible bonds made of data, interfaces, and protocols.

These new social relations of production are no longer based on the possession of the material means of production, but on the appropriation of the digital infrastructures that mediate all forms of life. What Marx identified as “capitalists”—investors, industrialists, bankers—have been replaced by an even more ethereal and omniscient caste: the cloud lords, modern feudal lords who do not need to own workers or manufacture goods.

They simply own the routes, the portals, the platforms, the programming languages ​​that translate the world for us. It is the return of lordship, but pixelated, global, omnipresent. They do not do business: they impose conditions. They do not trade: they tax each transit with an access fee.

Classical capitalism found its dynamism in the tension between capital and labor, in the struggle for the appropriation of surplus value. Here, however, there is no struggle or negotiation: there is capture. The wage worker is no longer the only figure of exploitation. Now we are also users, profiles, digital traces. Every daily gesture, a search, a “like”, a route traced by GPS, feeds a system that monetizes our decisions before we even make them. The factory has been replaced by the interface; the salary by implicit consent; effort by desirable attention.

In this scenario, the market, that idealized space where supply and demand intersect, has effectively been abolished. There is no competition within the closed-source environment. The big platforms do not compete for efficiency, but colonize digital territories that they manage like feudal estates. Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple are no longer companies: they are computer lords. They protect their own ecosystems, with proprietary rules, their own currencies and internal courts. The justification for openness has been supplanted by that of planned closure.

The logic of technofeudalism is one of absolute asymmetry: few design the world in which everyone lives. Yanis Varoufakis insists: we are faced with something that does not prolong capitalism, but rather negates it: a historical negation, not an update. That regime in which value was generated by human labor and circulated in relatively free markets has been supplanted by another in which value is extracted through the monopoly of access to and control of information flows.

Surveillance capitalism is not just another stage: it is something different. Those who insist on describing capitalism — platform, cognitive, informational — practice a nostalgic denialism, for Yanis Varoufakis.

This new order does not just redefine the economy: it reconfigures subjectivity. If the old proletarian knew he was exploited by his employer, the technofeudal user believes himself free as he walks happily through the dungeons of his own confinement.

He voluntarily surrenders to his vassalage. He produces himself as a commodity. He delights in his servitude. Alienation no longer arises from forced labor, but from codified pleasure. The working day does not end with the clock: it continues in bed, in free time, in monitored dreams. The Internet devours not only working time, but our entire lives.

In response, Yanis Varoufakis does not take refuge in industrialist nostalgia nor propose a reconstitution of classical nationalization. On the contrary, his proposal points to a democratic reappropriation of code, a kind of digital communalism in which technological infrastructure is governed collectively.

It is less about banning platforms than about decolonizing them; less about preventing innovation than about contesting their ends. Its political subject is not the Fordist worker, but the ethical hacker, the algorithmic craftsman, the informed community capable of breaking down the barriers of the fiefdom and rebuilding a digital “common good.”

There is a libertarian vein in his thinking—if we can continue to use that adjective after Javier Milei’s lumpenpolitical appropriation in Argentina—that intersects with the Marxist tradition without surrendering to it. He respects Marx, but does not canonize him. He draws on his critical impulse, but forces it to respond to new questions. If capital no longer reigns, if wage labor is no longer the center of the economy, if the market has ceased to exist, how can we continue to think with the same tools of the 19th century?

Yanis Varoufakis does not want to kill Marxism, but to strip it of its solemnity in order to force it to transform itself. Perhaps his most radical gesture is this: rather than inventing a new doctrine, he urges critical thought to move again, to recover its subversive power.

Technofeudalism thus presents itself not only as an analytical concept, but as an ethical challenge. It forces us to question who designs the world we live in, under what logics of power desire is organized, and whether there is still room for insubordination. Exploitation is no longer imposed by visible violence, but by the very architecture of the digital environment.

Emancipation will come not from the seizure of the Winter Palace, but from the symbolic occupation of cyberspace, from a political imagination that reinvents what it means to share, work, decide and enjoy together.

Yanis Varoufakis, in diagnosing this new order, does not decree its inevitability. His writing is also a form of resistance. Not as a slogan, but as a thought in motion. In the face of algorithmic servitude, he proposes an epistemic insurrection. In the face of digital confinement, a poetics of the commons.

In the face of the reign of the new masters, the persistent reminder that even the most invisible empires crumble when they encounter words that denounce them, theoretical constructions that unmask them and bodies that refuse to bow.

Echoes of criticism – interpellations of technofeudalism

Every ambitious thesis evokes, like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, a storm of objections. Yanis Varoufakis’s is no exception. His commitment to designating the current order as technofeudalism has sparked not only a renewed interest in the diagnosis of the era, but also a plurality of theoretical resistances, originating from diverse doctrinal geographies, ranging from orthodox Marxism to liberal technocracy, via decolonial critique, autonomism and classical political economy. This is not just a question of taxonomy: naming the present implies interpreting it, and in this interpretation lies the field of future political strategies.

From less disruptive Marxist perspectives, the critiques coalesce around a central accusation: that of dehistoricizing capitalism and obscuring its internal dynamics. Doesn’t capital accumulation continue to exist? Doesn’t living labor continue to be exploited, albeit in more sophisticated forms, by fixed capital? Do class relations not manifest themselves with brutal evidence in the Amazon strikes, the uberization of labor, and globalized precariousness? (Harvey and Wood).

From this perspective, technofeudalism would be nothing more than a new mask for the same god, a conceptual farce that risks dissolving the category of class, weakening the founding antagonism of the system. Criticism, then, does not deny the novelty of digital forms, but contests their capacity to establish a radically different mode of production. Platforms would not be feudal lords, but renewed layers of capital, shrouded in algorithmic mists.

A second line of criticism comes from the field of descriptive political economy (Brenner and Streeck), which objects to the lack of precise empirical delimitation of the concept. What structurally differentiates it from surveillance or platform capitalism? What relations of production, what legal forms, what regimes of accumulation define it?

It seems that Yanis Varoufakis uses the feudal metaphor more aesthetically than analytically, obscuring more than it reveals. For these critics, talking about technofeudalism can be misleading: there are no serfs tied to the land, there is no tithe, there is no legal vassalage. The logic remains that of the market, albeit distorted, and states continue to play fundamental roles in the reproduction of the system. In short, it would be a stylistic hyperbole, powerful in moving consciences, but weak as a theoretical category of historiography.

From decolonial thought and dependency theory, criticism shifts to the geopolitical axis. Is technofeudalism a global phenomenon or is it restricted to the centers of digital capitalism? What place do peripheral countries occupy, those where exploitation is not algorithmic but directly physical, violent and extractive?

Here, Yanis Varoufakis’ thesis seems Eurocentric (Marini and Quijano). He ignores — or underestimates — that in vast regions of the world capital continues to operate in the same way: dispossession, plundering of resources, super-exploitation of labor, subjugation of indigenous communities. There are no digital lords in the lithium fields of Bolivia or the coltan mines of Congo. Nor among the ruins of Gaza, but only scorched earth and colonization.

There, the fiefdom is not an algorithm but a backhoe guarded by paramilitaries or an occupying army. For these critics, technofeudalism is a kind of narrative from the North, incapable of capturing the combined and uneven forms of capital in its global deployment.

There is also no shortage of objections from within Marxism, such as Italian autonomism, which, although it recognizes the technological mutation of capital, does not subscribe to the idea of ​​a rupture in the mode of production (Negri-Hardt and Lazzarato). For them, digital transformations do not establish a new feudal regime, but rather intensify the biopolitical character of capitalism: production is no longer limited to commodities, but extends to subjectivity, desire, language and the body.

Instead of feudalism, what we would see is an unlimited expansion of capital into all spheres of life. The true subsumption is no longer just of labor, but of existence. Yanis Varoufakis would then be excessively taxonomic, stuck in the logic of historical categories, when what is required is a critique of the ontological productivity of capital.

Even within progressive liberalism, there are those who raise objections. Not so much because they disagree with the diagnosis of concentrated power, but because of the way Yanis Varoufakis seems to undermine any possibility of democratic innovation in the technology sector. Platforms, they argue, are not, by definition, undemocratic: their governance can be challenged, regulated and transformed (Mazzucato and Morozov).

Feudalism, on the other hand, refers to a closed, immutable and essentially regressive structure. To speak of technofeudalism would imply resigning oneself to a scenario with no way out. Where, then, are public policies, antitrust legislation or digital sovereignty? For these critics, Yanis Varoufakis exaggerates the dystopia and narrows the scope of action in the present. His conceptual apocalypse could lead to strategic paralysis.

But perhaps the most suggestive critique comes from a less disciplined area: that of contemporary political poetry, where language is measured not only by its precision but by its capacity to mobilize, by its performative character. From there, some suggest that technofeudalism is a powerful image, but one that may serve better as a provocative artifact than as an analytical framework (Jameson, Byung-Chul Han).

It is not required that he explain with precision or typological rigor, but rather that he incite, agitate and challenge common sense. In this reading, Yanis Varoufakis's proposal fits into the long heretical tradition of critical thought, which prefers to exaggerate rather than acquiesce, to shout rather than whisper. It could therefore be read as a gesture that is more literary than doctrinal, more situationist than scientific. And in this gesture perhaps lies its greatest value.

Ultimately, critiques of technofeudalism should not be read as final refutations, but as frontier dialogues, productive tensions that push thinking beyond its comfort zones. Yanis Varoufakis does not need to be right in every detail for his proposal to have force.

It is enough that it disturbs us, that it forces us to revise our maps, that it robs us of the comfortable certainty of continuing to call everything that oppresses “capitalism.” In times of semantic domestication, inventing new words is an act of rebellion.

And although technofeudalism is not the definitive name for our present, it certainly points to a crack, a fissure through which another possible reading of the implacable and hellish world we inhabit infiltrates. Perhaps the question is not whether we live in a techno-feudalism, but rather whether there is still room left to rebel and redesign the future.

*Emilio Cafassi is senior professor of sociology at the University of Buenos Aires.

Translation: Arthur Scavone.

Reference

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism. Campinas, Editora Crítica, 2025, 240 pages. [https://amzn.to/3I3KOAG]

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE