Varoufakis and this author phrase the argument strangely. The gist is simple: technology will reduce the demand for labor, so we will no longer need to compete in a capitalist society. I think he's right to fear a society in which the elites control all technology, but it's a bit unfounded to fear a Matrix-style dystopia, wrt destructive AI or mind control or some misreading of Baudrillard's simulacra. The fear, in the short-term at least, should be about dealing with the jobs that technology eliminates.<p>For me, it's about people - when truck drivers are eliminated as a profession by self-driving technology, what will they do? And I'm not sure - we should come up with some way to return those profits/savings from lower labor costs to the people.<p>I think this article deals with the 'technology v capitalism' question in a better fashion, without delving into robots controlling our minds or whatever other nonsense Yanis meant this time: <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/automation-frase-robots/</a>
This is the funniest thing about historians and, more than any other, the Marxists: they believe in historical laws and historical processes. They think history has a purpose and a meaning. They believe we are in an unavoidable journey towards what they think is progress. And they think their "progress" is the only possible progress.<p>They look like those children laying in the grass and seeing images, forms and patterns in the clouds. But the patterns are not there, they are just imagined.
It only has an excerpt, but one point towards that is this:<p>In the past 10,000 years there have been five economic systems. 10,000 years ago the world were primitive hunter-gather bands living in primitive communism. Then the slave societies of Babylon, Egypt, Greece etc. arose. Then the Roman empire was replaced by feudal states - and while things in places like China were slightly different, there were definite parallels to feudalism. Then capitalism arose as the process of production. From the Paris commune, to the Bolshevik revolution, to the leftie society on one side of the Spanish civil war on, you might say there were the beginnings of a fifth economic system, the one Varoufakis talks about.<p>In this context, all of this makes more sense. Economic systems eventually outlive their usefulness and are replaced by something else. Marx said the new economic system would come out of the center of the world economy - in his day that was a place like Germany. If he was alive today he might say it would come from Silicon Valley, or some bio-industrial center, or maybe some up and coming economic center in East Asia.