Capitalism Is Dead This Is What Comes Next

TITLE: Capitalism is Dead. This is What Comes Next. CHANNEL: Tom Nicholas DATE: 2025-11-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- what the American authorities [music] and big tech worry about is something much bigger. This is the greatest fallacy uh that uh we [music] have labored under in the west uh since I was a kid. But he had them there to humiliate them because you know he’s a [music] very vindictive person Donald Trump as we all know.

There’s a sort of prediction of the end of American empire. [music] Um how sort of how do those two narratives to you kind of like uh sit together? Oh, very easily. Capitalism is dead. Swept aside by gargantuan monopolistic tech platforms which seek not just to dominate markets but to own them. The result being that the need to compete to earn a profit has been replaced by a model in which a handful of companies are able to demand rents, subscriptions, transaction fees, and we’re all increasingly just required to pay if we want to participate in modern life. I’ve been reading and writing about platformization and tech monopolies for quite some time now. And in that time, few people have been as keen to stress the importance of these trends as Janice Farafakis. Janice argues that this isn’t just business as usual. It’s not even just capitalism reshaping itself to a digital age. He argues it’s something else entirely. Technofudalism. When I saw that Giannis was here in the UK promoting his new book, Raise Your Soul, I leapt at the chance to arrange to meet him here at Penguin Random House in London to chat through his ideas and his new book. I wanted to ask him about this bold thesis about the coalition between big tech and the far right and how we should navigate these turbulent times on both a political and human level. This interview is part of a new format that we’re triing on the channel in which I’m keen to sit down with experts, power holders, and critics of power to ask them the big questions about where our world is headed. If you like it, then please do let us know down in the comments. And if you’d like to support myself and my team to experiment with new stuff like this, then I’d be super grateful if you’d consider supporting my work over at patreon.com/tomicholas. Janice, capitalism is dead. Uh, that’s been your sort of thesis for some time. That is like a bold statement. Not very long. Four years. Some a few years. Yeah. And it it really pisses off my fellow Marxist leftists [laughter] because you know we leftists we have this conception of ourselves as beings that descended upon the planet de capitalism. So here I am telling them that it’s already dead mate and we didn’t kill it. Someone else got that too. I I you know this book was I’m I’m a Marxist leftist unreconstructed gay socialist and yet it’s my side of politics that hated that book. Um as I knew they would. But my point is that um you know wherever you look you see the triumph of capital. Mhm. And I don’t dispute that. If anything I want to emphasize that. But for me, and this is the gist of my thesis, my hypothesis, capital became so triumphant like the Ebola virus killed off everything around it. So much so that it killed its own host, capitalism. So capitalism was killed by capital. Capital mutated like you know viruses mutate uh into something so toxic I call it proud capital. It’s whatever lives in your tablet, you know, on in the internet. uh it’s a new form of capital which is not productive. What it does is it bestows upon its owners incre incredible power to modify modify our behavior. You know machines did weren’t able to do that in the past. They were produced mis production. You know the machines producing machines or goodies or gadgets. Now they produce power directly to influence what we do and what we think and what we desire. And anyone who owns that power, Zuckerberg, B what I call the Calalists or technofido lords. Yeah. Um they are capitalists in the sense that they own capital. But this is no longer the capitalism is what I call technofism. And so I like I love like a timeline. I love like a date and a place. When when to you would you mark the moment or the I don’t know week, month, year that kind of capitalism’s time of death sort of Can you see my bulkhead? I wouldn’t like to say it’s don’t be kind. No, don’t dispute it. Yeah, kindly. Um, Gertu’s kindness is not necessary. Uh, there was not one hair whose demise rendered me bald. If you asked me which hair did you lose and then you were bald, the answer is who knows, you know. So, there’s a gray zone. Yeah, similarly if you were to ask a economic historian when did feudalism die and when was capitalism born? Who knows? We know that it happened sometime towards the end of the 18th century. But even by the middle of the 19th century, feminism was still around. So it’s yeah, this is dialectics. This is what we Marxist refer to as the dialectical change. But I I’ll give you some bullp the the gray zone right between capitalism [clears throat] and technoftheism. It begins uh in my view in 2008 with uh our generations or at least my generation you’re too young. My generation is 1929. the collapse of Wall Street to the city of London, the banks of Frankfurt, the great financial crisis as it’s called that led to the stagnation which has created the society the toxic society we live in. So 2008 is a significant year since you wanted a year and more or less at the around the same time you had the phenomenon of the privatization of the internet because when the internet started I’m old enough to remember that was it was a commons people were on the internet there was not a marketplace you couldn’t buy and sell anything on the internet when it I mean even today when you send an email the somewhere in the code you will see the the letters S NTP in the address where your email uh uh app sent uses to send your email. That SMTP was a program that somebody created in the 1970s and that was given away for free to the community. It was a common like an open protocol like HTTP. You’ve seen HTTP in the URL uh code line. Well, that was a program that somebody created made not one pound adult. She was like a you know a realm of gift exchanges that started getting privatized and it started getting privatized because we didn’t have any opportunity to prove who we are on the internet. So we had to in the end subcontract to this day you cannot prove who you are on the internet. You have to beg your banker or Google or Facebook to prove who you are. So when whenever you register for something right it says you know sign in with Google. Yeah. Or use your banking credential. So essentially you’ve subcontracted to some capitalist company which I call technofido or cloudist to um to allow you to do things as you. So you have so that is the framework in which uh what I call cloud capital this new form uh of machinery which does not produce anything. It’s not a produced means of production but it’s a produced means of behavioral modification. started rising up and with why is 2008 important? Because in April 2009 in in this city, London, Gordon Brown, who was the prime minister at the time, convened the G20. They were all panicking. Uh they were themselves to be more precise. Uh because capitalism was collapsing, financialized capitalism was collapsing. So they started the process by which they printed 35 trillion uh dollars over the course of 15 20 years. You 35 trillion is 35,000 billion. 35,000,000,000 million, right? That’s a lot of dough. Yeah. and and and the idea was to pump it to the banking system to reflow to the bankers the criminals who had created the GFC, the great financial collapse. Yeah, that’s why you’ve heard about bailouts and all that all that criminality. I must have been like 16 or something. So there’s some elements of this thesis that are like quite um easy because I’m like of course it’s important. I was, you know, I was 16 or so and so like it kind of [laughter] Yeah. They created this 35 trillion which they gave to the bankers. The theory was that the bankers would then lend it to businesses. Businesses would hire people and employment would be showed up and the money would trick it down to the little people because rubbish BS never happened because at the same time they were practicing. Even the Labor Party before George Osborne they were practicing austerity. So austerity for the many means that there is not enough demand for goods and services. So they gave the money to big business. The big business people the CEOs and so on looked at looked outside the glass towers in the city of London wherever it is that they are in Frankfurt in New York and they saw impunious masses. So they say as if we were going to you know uh manufacture new snazzy uh high value added [clears throat] goods even they don’t have the money to buy it. So they took the money that the states had created and the central banks had created 35 trillion and they bought back their own shares. Mhm. So the share value went up. They were not not investing anything. They were not producing anything. They not were not hiring people but their share value went up and their bonuses were linked. Now the only capital disruption took that money and invested in machinery with the Zuckerbergs the basis the big tech ones and that’s how you know effectively we our states our organized society paid for the cloud capital that along with the privatization of the internet created what I call cloud capital and technofidalism and can you describe so you particularly named like a few kind of companies there sort Facebook, you’ve got your Amazon’s, you’ve got your um I guess sort of Elon Musk’s X and his various companies, Apple, Apple, Nvidia. Um can you these four seven companies by the way are more than half of the value of the capital value of the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, that’s why I’m talking about technof. They’ve taken over. Yeah, the kind of concentration of it, I guess. Can you can you explain to us a little bit about what exactly is it that some of these companies do that you know someone might log onto Amazon and it kind of feels like you’re still doing capitalism right you’re buying a product you’re maybe you’re selling something if you’re doing what is it that Amazon does that is that makes it technofudal rather than capitalistic it’s a brilliant question because indeed as exactly as you put it the moment you enter Amazon it look it feels like a market there are you know hundreds of thousands or millions of sellers and there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions of buyers. Is this not a market? No, it’s not. Even though there’s a lot of trading, it’s not a market. Because a a market by definition needs to be somewhat decentralized. So if you and I walk into a farmers market Mhm. or a shopping mall for that matter, you and I for a start, we can talk to one another. Mhm. We can exchange views. We can uh you know ship uh window shop and say oh this look at this rubbish what they are selling here. Oh, this looks pretty good, right? And you can go in there and you can it you decide you are autonomous in deciding how how much more to search the marketplace, right? Uh but think of what happens when you are in Amazon. You go in there and it’s you and the screen. Behind the screen there is a search engine. There’s an algorithm. So um essentially through interacting with this algorithm you are training Alexa let’s say you know the interface you you can speak to as well to Alexa on behalf of Amazon you are training Alexa to train you to train her to know you better so that at some point she can give you good advice about basic things because it’s not just that you buy good Alexa you you know you say switch off the lights uh and and the m the machine you’re training it to know you and at some point it starts giving advice. I don’t know about you but when Amazon recommends books to me they’re always interesting. You know when friends of mine recommend books they’re not always interesting. You know when Spotify recommends songs for me it’s usually spot on. Yeah. When friends tell me oh listen to this album usually don’t like it. So this creates bonds of trust, implicit trust between you and the machine. So next time when you know you type electric bicycle because you want to buy an electric bicycle and Alexa says you buy that. Okay, then you help she recogn it recommended recommended uh uh good things in the past things that I enjoyed. Uh well, and you don’t have much time. You want to order an electric bicycle, you buy it. Now, if you and I were to walk into a shopping mall and find try to find an a bicycle shop, right? Um we would uh train our eyes towards the window of the shop and we would see the same things. Yeah. Yeah, but I tell you that if we had now laptops or tablets and we put we typed in there electric bicycles, you would get different recommendations from mine because what the algorithm does is this. It knows that each one of us has different spending limits, different behavioral patterns because it we have trained it to know us. And then because it belongs to Jeff Bezos who takes between 35 and 40% of the price you pay for this electric bicycle, he pockets it. It hasn’t produced electric bicycle. It’s a go between. So the algorithm is is um uh it is primed, it’s optimized to maximize the rent, not a profit of the bicycle, not your utility, but the rent of jet bases. So effectively Jeff Bezos has created this digital thief called Amazon in which we find whether it’s Uber, Airbnb, you know all those Alibaba digital thiefs in which the management case to lure buyers and sellers and to extract cloud rents from the service while at the same time extracting work from us because you know we review things we feed the algorithm we replicate the algorithm we um accumulate more crowd capital because that cloud capital is ma mainly the result of a lot of our labor. Every time you post something or you upload a video on YouTube like we’re doing now, right? You are adding to the capital of Google and you know and the dividends that you get have nothing to do with the dividends that they that they the cloud rents they they get. So to cut a long story short, the fundamental difference between markets and Amazon Mhm. or these cloud fees as I call them is that in markets you have a degree of very large degree of decentralization, right? People can talk to one another. They are autonomous to a significant extent. They can do their own research. They can find out you know is this potato better than that potato, right? uh whereas when it comes to the cloud to amazon.com like uh platforms you enter there you train the machinery to train you so that it knows how to input preferences consumer preferences and indeed passions and desires into your bosom and then what it does it bypasses the market and sends you that commodity directly to you charging the producer a rent and you use this use this term rent for anyone watching that uh isn’t kind of like off of with this like terminology. What do you mean when you refer to like Amazon’s cut or whatever the platform’s cut is as a rent? This is you know I used to be an economics professor. This is one of the hardest tasks of a professor of a lecturer [snorts] to help students or you know the audience understand the difference between profit and earn. Profit is what you get from entrepreneurial activity, from organizing production, from putting machines together with labor, wedge labor, exploiting the laborers, you know, um using the machines to produce something to sell it, pay your banker, pay your landlord, pay the worker, and then hopefully what you are left with is profit. And you know so if if if that’s if that’s how you live if it is how you function you’re constantly worried about the market because the more competition there is the lower your profit margin you need to have the best product the best service rent is exactly the opposite it’s payments you receive for doing better for effectively owning stuff so you know you own this building right off you go to the kajour you know to cost solve somewhere and you get rich in your sleep. Mhm. And the more competition there is, the richer you get because the more compet this building is going to have, you know, this company here, another company there. They’re all engaged in competition with other companies in the sector in which they manufacture goods and services. the more competition there is, the lower their profit margin, but the higher your rent because you know they’re bidding up uh rents and house prices or apartment prices, office block prices. So uh rent is a kind kind of leakage from the capitalist flow of income. Uh and the more leakage there is, the [snorts] richer the rent is. Yeah. And the nearer the capitalist system comes to crisis because it’s like you know think of an escalator. Yeah. And imagine that there is an electricity leak somebody stealing electricity from it. You know when that leak becomes substantial the escalator would stall. Mhm. That’s an economic crisis when rents exceed a certain threshold. So it’s like Amazon is kind of renting out spaces on its website as much as it’s making profit from it. No, it’s actually worse than that. Yeah, it is renting space and it is predatory in the manner in which it extract extracts rents. So for instance um Amazon, Google at the beginning they were really kind to users, customers and to senders. Mhm. So Google for instance when it came to publishers uh they would say to the Guardian to the New York Times and so on look give us good some of your stories and we will post them and send it to people and then they can link themselves to your page and you can sell them on advertisements and you know the publishers love that. users liked it because they got free stories and it all worked brilliantly. And then when we were all hooked on [snorts] Google, especially the publishers, then what happened was whereas once upon a time, you know, I would uh type um you know, give me a story about what Trump said today, right? If I didn’t care about my psychological equilibrium, um, it would give me the New York Times in the first five, it would go to number 50. Yeah. Yeah. And then Google would say to New York Times, you want to go up, pay me, give me a higher rent. And Cory Doto, a great um commentator on the internet and a good friend has coined the term for this. He calls it enitification. Mhm. So we are lured into these cloud fifs and then the services and the um all the benefits that we get uh go to Janice’s book on technofudalism was first published back in 2023 and since then we’ve seen some pretty massive shifts in the political sphere. Donald Trump is back in the White House and has forged a closer alliance than ever with the tech barons that Yannis writes about. Bezos Zuckerberg and their peers sat pride of place at Trump’s second inauguration. And yet, that relationship hasn’t always been an easy one. Most obviously, Trump’s friendship with Elon Musk quickly went from bromance to bitter divorce. I was interested in how Yanis interpreted this relationship between big tech and the far right and what he thought about where it might go in the future. Can we talk a bit about the the politics of all of this because you’ve mentioned there all this is political. Well, I mean all of this as much as we can sort of um draw a line between the two. Um you’ve talked there about Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, um thinking Elon Musk, you know, Google, um you know, earlier this year, Donald Trump came back for his second go at the um US presidency and kind of pride of place there were all of those figures, these um these sort of tech baronss that that you write about. Um, is there a connection between that rise of the far right, not only in the US but across the world, and the rise of this kind of new business model, this new economic structure? Well, I need to be nuanced about this. The rise of the right of the altar right of the fascist, let’s be clear about it. They’re, you know, they’re neofascists. uh and some of them not that new was on the cards since 2008. That’s why um Sheen to alert people regarding the significance of that year. It was our generation’s 1929 just like 1929 Wall Street collapse. They watch it collapse spearheaded the economic crisis, the rise in unemployment, the stagnation which created discontent. the left fade to put forward a convincing platform. So the discontent was essentially harvested by the fascists and we had the second world war. Similarly the if I’m right in my analysis that 2008 was our generation 1929 this rise of the altar right xenophobia misogyny um uh was was on the cards since 2008 um especially that policy of uh socialism for the bankers. Mhm. And harshest ter for the many that started in this city under Golden Brown in April of 2009. So that was h always going to happen and I it’s the main reason why I stopped being a happy academic writing uh obscure text for 20 people and I started writing for a broader public and to try to explain what happened 2008 and then the rise of cloud habit is because I could see that fascism was going to rise up. it was in the air and I come from a family that has experienced fascism in many different decades and I just wanted to warn people uh what the rise of cloud capital did was to make a bad thing worse. So the the rising tsunami of fascism was turbocharged by cloud capital by big tech. So some of I guess for much of my life um politics has often been framed as a kind of pitch between pitched battle between like the power of the state and the power of uh corporations, right? Rightly or wrongly um wrongly and wrongly. Well, I mean that that was what I was hoping you could dig into, right? Because you know some people will see um you know Elon Musk sat there with Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg sat around a big dinner table I think they were recently with Donald Trump and they might go like oh this feels like very different to what I’m told politics is meant to be like these these forces are meant to be against one another and explain why that is why that is wrong. Well, this is the greatest fallacy uh that uh we have labored under in the west uh since I was a kid. It is true that social democrats and um such aites monetarists call them what you what you must tries pretended that this was a great clash between those who believed in the state and those who believed in the market. But capitalism would not have existed without the state. Mhm. Now, the reason why capitalism rose up in this country is because the king’s army helped the landlords build up the enclosures. Mhm. Without the the state, there would be no enclosures. Without the enclosures, there would be no market for land and no market for labor. So there would have been no capitalism and the enclosures just to for anyone watching that that that’s like the taking of common land and parceling it up into fencing over the land the expulsion of the peasants they replacement with sheep because wool was in becoming an international commodity. The moment wool became international commodity. Now, you know, with the peasants thrown off the land, the landlords could uh uh rent the land to proto capitalists who took some of the expelled peasants and have you know made them raise sheep and uh shear uh the wool and then they would sell it in the international markets. So if you then suddenly the international internationally determined price of wool determined how much each plot of land was worth in terms of its rent. So suddenly you have a market for for land which end of the industry we didn’t have. Mhm. Right. And then because workers were workers laborers were now uh expelled from the land. They would knock on doors and say I would do anything for a loaf of bread. That’s the first labor market because before that they were autonomous producers. they would produce wheat and then the landlord would come and take his cut. Yeah. Send water, send the shave to to collect it. Uh so capitalism happened because of the king’s army of the state and this is why it didn’t happen in France because France didn’t have such a concentrated power uh in the hands of the state of the king. It was a very loose uh adomeration of few the lords. Um and so and to bring it forward if it wasn’t for the British Empire the British India India Company would have uh collapsed uh the British power thing about the British state and the British India Company where one thing meshed. Yeah. Okay. The the army initially was private then became public. So the state and capitalist power have always been in cahoots. They’ve always been hand in hand. If it wasn’t for the state uh the great collapse after 1929 would never have I mean the state uh initially started uh spending more money on weaponry then we had wars and without those wars there would have been no capitalism then after the second world world war we had the bread and wood system. Mhm. You know the golden age of capitalism of the market was a time when we had very limited competition. We had big conglomerates that in cahoots with the American state we’re fixing everything for you know I when I was born the exchange rate between the Greek currency and the American dollar was uh 30 dramas to $1. When I was 16 it was still 30 dramas to $1. There was no market for currencies. Same same to the British pound and the dollar. there was no market for, you know, interest rates were fixed at 4% for decades. So, you know, that was a golden era of capitalism. It wasn’t a marketplace. It was an oligarchy uh with large corporations in cahoots with the state doing things. Now, the fact that that system collapsed is just another example of how capitalism effectively undermines itself. uh and it needs constantly to revive itself by squashing labor, by plundering, by you know crisis is is is is the way in which it uh revives itself. And what do what do you see in the in the relationship between the kind of uh Trump government and those cloud baronss that you’re that you’re talking about kind of what do you think the potential is there? What do you think the trajectory is there? Well, initially Donald Trump loathed them. He was, if you think about it, they banned him from Facebook, they banned him from YouTube, they banned him from Twitter. He was trying like antitrust stuff with some of them. That’s right. Uh he talked about Bitcoin as a terrible idea, as a very stupid thing. That was the depth of his analysis. Yeah. Uh and then suddenly he there’s the second coming Trump 2.0 and you have this photograph if you remember uh of his coronation inauguration the colon and there are all these tech lords um with him at the front and the the take of the main media was okay so he’s now leading this cabal of technopida lords as I call them. I don’t think that’s what it was. I think it was more of a Roman triumph. And let’s remind ourselves what the Roman triumph was. When Roman emperors would um would conquer Cartage or some Germanic tribe, they would capture their lords and take them to Rome um in chains, humiliate them to prove their success, the Roman emperor’s success. I think that’s what it was. He had them there. They volunteered to go, of course, because he was going to offer them some uh privileges, but he had them there to humiliate them because, you know, he’s a very vindictive person, Donald Trump, as we all know. And they took it and they took it and they gave him everything they wanted. You know, the Washington Post, even before the election, banned the editorial board from taking a position against uh Trump and Washington Post was the archetypal Democratic newspaper. the democratic small D, large D. Um, and you know, Zugerberg and Bezos and they did their mayor Kulpa, they apologized profusely. They spent lots of millions on his campaign, on his inauguration party in so he has effectively usurped them. He’s annexed them and now he’s propelling them to the stratosphere but always on condition that they lie in his pockets. So how is he propelling them? Recently uh his administration pushed through Congress uh something called the Genius Act. To cut a long story short, this is handing over the minting of the US dollar to big tech. He privatized the dollar and he totally and utterly suppressed the power of the central bank. It used to be the case as a central bank was the uh purveyor of the national currency, the fear currency, in the case of the United States, the US dollar, the mighty dollar. Now essentially he pushed uh and put the Fed down and he’s handing over and this is extremely dangerous in my view. This is the reason why this will be the the form that the next huge financial crisis is going to take. But this is another big story. So essentially the what I call cloud capital and technofidalism is now being turbocharged by Trump even though [clears throat] he was against them uh through the process of uh handing off the minting of America’s mighty dollar to this technofido cabal. And the story you you kind of tell of these kind of rising technofudal lords um feels like one of you know the American tech gods like taking the world over. Um at the same time as we hear a lot about an American decline kind of like there’s a sort of prediction of the end of American empire. Um how sort of how do those two narratives to you kind of like uh sit together? Oh, very easily and very comfortably because if you think about it, uh the era that uh Donald Trump refers to when he says, you know, make America great again is the pre971 era, the period of Breton Woods. He doesn’t say so, but that’s we can imply that because that was a time when you had full employment. You had uh an America that was in a had a trade circles visa with the rest of the world. uh and effectively controlled the world the world’s monetary system. Uh when that died in 1971, it was Richard Nixon who blew it up. And he didn’t blow it up because he didn’t like that system. It was that that system could no longer survive. Why? Because America had become a deficit country. It had gone from being a surplus country, having a trade surplus and a budget surplus to having a budget deficit. And primarily effectively America was living uh beyond its means. It was me importing a lot more than it was exporting. And at that point, it was the American administration under Richard Nixon that decided, okay, we’re not going to be Germans. In other words, we’re not going to tighten our belt to austerity or Rachel Reeves or Jos, right? We are going to increase our deficits and we’re going to make the rest of the world pay for them. Okay? And this is exactly what was happening. The American trade deficit has been increasing constantly, constantly. And how are they paying for this deficit? With dollars. So they buy stuff from Japan, from China, from Germany, from France, from wherever. And they pay with IUS called dollars, right? Increasingly huge quantities of dollars that are being minted by the French. Now the problem that these capitalists in Germany, in Japan, China and so on have is that they can’t use the dollars in their own country. So they have to send it back to United States. Wall Street and Wall Street uses it in order to finance the American government through purchasing American bonds. uh the stock exchange and real estate. That’s why Trump is rich because of all the foreign money coming into Wall Street uh which is the flip side of the trade deficit of the United States. So why am I saying all this? Because you ask me how is it possible for the technofudal class of the United States to be going from strength to strength for American Germany to be rising while America America the heartlands of America are shrinking. they are going through carnage as you know to use a word that Donald Trump has has also used very effectively in his pre-election campaign and after it’s been happening since the 1970s uh so Wall Street was going from strength to strength uh the American economy was de-industrializing because it was relying more and more on stuff that was imported from abroad okay the entire class the top 0.1% uh of finances and so on and the government and the American army and air air force and navy were going from strength to strength. But America was [clears throat] shrinking and the people from America today still the average hourly wage in real terms is lower today than it was in 1974. You only have to say that to make the point. So there’s nothing new, weird or strange uh with the idea or the observation, my observation that those technofidal laws are getting stronger and stronger at the expense of the vast majority not just of the population around the world but also of Americans. But allow me just one more point that that also adds to the significance of this technical hypothesis. They are the only ones. They are not the only ones. These American technofidal lawyers who own lots of cloud capital. There’s another huge concentration of cloud capital in China. Yeah. And we have all noticed the increase in tensions between the west and China. That was always going to which comes from the west because it doesn’t come from China. It comes from the west. It’s a one-sided intensification of tensions. Why? Because I if this is my estimation, the American technical class are very scared of the cloud capital of China uh because it can threaten the dominance of the American dollar. We saw that with um the AI model that came out of uh China and instantly the kind of stock market in the US just shook and over that was just just a a preemptive uh event. This was a walk in the park in the park compared to what is going to come because that was simply a deepseek. This is a Chinese company effectively offered all of us for free that which uh chart GPT of an AI charges $20 a month for. So that caused the you know the American cloud capital to tank in the stock exchange in the United States. But what the American authorities and big tech worry about is something much bigger and that is payment systems because in the United States in Europe we have digital money right I mean you make you pay for your coffees using your coffee and so on but it’s all linked to some bank you have to have an account with Blay with IBS with Lloyds with Deutsche Bank or whatever okay and they charge you an an arm and a leg and they charge um uh outlets and vendors and so on. But in China now there is something called WeChat. There’s an app that allow you to make free payments and there is also a central bank app that you can download and you can have an account with your central bank. Imagine if you could have an account with the Bank of England that gave you high interest rate and it was completely safe and charged you nothing. Yeah. Why would you have an account with Barclaysman? You wouldn’t. Yeah. Unless Barlay is offered you something that now is not going to offer. So you know western financial capital and big tech are very very scared of that and in in my estimation in my mind the reason why Trump Trump one pointer started the cold war against China was not Taiwan. It was not the rise of the Chinese navy in the South China Sea or anything like that. It was the rise of of the cloud capital that the technofudal uh forces within China. For someone who writes so much about big economic and political structures, Janice’s work has always had a personal touch. His book talking to my daughter, a brief history of capitalism was addressed to his daughter and technudalism is written as an address to his dad. He takes that much further in his latest book, Raise Your Soul. It is, in his words, a collection of stories of resistance drawn from the experiences of several women in his family. Within that are recollections of living through past dictatorships and moments of right-wing dominance, which he suggests might help us live through some similar political formations today. Some of the most fascinating moments for me came in his recollections of family members who had been swept up in the false promises of these regimes. I wanted to ask Yiannis what he thought the appeal of right-wing politics was and is and how family members who might be even quite close to one another personally can find themselves being pulled in very different directions politically. So, your new book uh Raise Your Soul um tells these kind of five wonderful stories of uh kind of pe people persevering through with women persevering persevering through kind of various different um hard times um and resisting against kind of oppressive structures. I was really interested that also in some of those stories you also take the time to kind of try and understand why um often it’s because all of these women are members of your family and then kind of like other members of your family who might have been um siblings might be husbands kind of actually felt either accepting of these systems or actively enthused by them. Um, you know, we’re sort of here talking about Jeff Bezos and talking about uh Trump and all of these people kind of as as these kind of horrible sort of pantoime villains maybe. Um, and and yet some people feel really infused by these movements. What do you think the appeal is of uh whether it’s Trumpism or whether it’s kind of like Elon Musk um mania? What what do you think the the appeal to people who are enthused by these movements are? Advanced technology is invigorating. Um I tell the story in this new book uh of uh you know when my mother and her brother they were young teenagers. It was 1941 and they heard the roar of the Stookas the message the luvaf over Athens. they were going to bomb British and Greek vessels in the port of POS. Uh, and my mother Doro realized that her brother, who was a 14 year old boy, was jumping up and down and uploading the the Nazis. It wasn’t because he didn’t know what Nazis was. He was a 14 year old 14 year old boy, but he loved the machine, you know, the flying machine. It was it was like a symbol of modernity, of progress. humans uh had managed to conquer the skies to to fly like birds and for you know it’s really very easy to be caught up in this and you know I recognize that so you know the idea that as we speak there are algorithms developed by big tech that design antibiotics that can kill horrible bacteria that in turn kill human beings in hospitals and which are absolutely the system to antibiotics that human beings are designed. So there’s there are algorithms that design you know antibiotics that the best human minds cannot design and that with these antibiotics we are saving human lives. That’s invigorating. Yeah. That’s to be celebrated that we know we need to celebrate this as a triumph of the human spirit not of the machine. Mhm. But at the same time and this is something my father taught me and this is why my book on technohedalism was addressed to him as a long letter. But when I finished writing that book on AI the lure of technology and also the danger of technology it’s a double-edged sword right every technology can be used for ill or for good. The question that that decides whether it is for ill or for good is who owns it and how they do they use it. Um when I finished writing this I thought okay well I’ve talked a lot about my dad but about my mom who was my political mentor and I felt really ashamed myself here is a boy talking about his dad my mother was the the one who really shaped me uh as a political and moral being so I decided I’m going to especially at the time around 2023 when I was a bit depressed by you know the state of the world you know the genocide Palestine in the war in Ukraine, my electoral defeats in Greece or my party’s electoral defeats. It was a pretty nasty moment. Um I don’t usually get depressed, but there was a moment when I nearly became depressed. So I re reacted by saying, “Okay, I’m going to write out my mom’s story.” And then that was enough because then, you know, uh I needed to carry on telling the story. The a story of resistance. I mean, the subtitle originally was going to be five women who taught me how to resist authoritarianism, fascism, and the male chauvinist within. Mhm. But Penguin thought it was for wrong. [laughter] But I’m repeating it so that you know what what the intention was. So then I start telling the story of um my father’s mother who was my father’s mentor. And cut a long story short, I there are five parts this book. Each one is dedicated to one woman in my family. The last one is my wife. Uh and through their eyes, it’s a kind of memoir of the last 100 years without me in it. trying to tell the story through their eyes because you know one of the great lessons from secondwave feminism in the 1970s is that the personal is political and by telling the story or you know what’s going on in my own family I don’t nobody cares about what happened in my family not even I but you are telling if you tell it well a story about the world we live in about all these contradictions of you know technologies that are simultaneously liberating and enslaver of families that are torn between uh you know the left and the right um couples that are caught up in patriarchy. You know, I don’t know about you, you’re too young for me to know or to presume to know about your socialization when you were a kid, but my generation, we were socialized as boys through misogyny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was the misogyny between us boys and the homophobia that made us men. You know, we talked nastily about women, therefore proving that we were growing up and that is an extremely oppressive way of growing up as a boy because you know the only way to oppress others women is to oppress yourself. So for me feminism that’s what my mother taught me my father’s mother taught me even though I never met her but through her writings and through her activism that uh feminism is not about uh liberating women only it’s it’s about liberating us men from patriarchy so it’s a stream of consciousness that this book raise your soul um and I’d like it to be seen as a as a story about the here and now we have the the the resurgence of the manosphere the fascism in the air the you Farajes and the Trumps and the um the radical center which is you know Kar is warming the seat of Tanning Street for Farage. I mean we have a center left that um is simply um you know in a sense they could not do a better job at paving the ground for fascism than they are. So it’s it even though I don’t I’m not explicitly talking about this I would like to think of this as a book which elucidates it throws useful light upon upon all of our predicaments. I think seeing it through those human eyes is really interesting. I mean I I was I was really taken by the uh the story of uh your mother and your uncle um as you say like both uh siblings who are experiencing the same things but kind of drawn in um very different directions in their response um to uh the kind of authoritarian sort of society in which they were living. Um, do you have any, having spent time reflecting on it, writing the book, do you have any advice for people out there who are who are having to like exist around family members or um otherwise loved ones who might be you know cheering on the planes as it were to to to kind of reference that chapter in the book where your uncle is excited about the planes coming. This is the lesson that my mom taught me uh indirectly and that is yeah she adored her brother. She thought the world of him because in the end he became a hero. He sacri almost sacrificed his life uh against the fascist dictatorship under which I was growing up. At the same time she caught him a tad a sexist pig a rightly bastard sometimes right. Um, so the lesson I learned from that is it’s perfectly possible to love someone and be highly critical of them. You see, we live in a world where people are either cancelled or um treated as heroes. No, nobody’s a hero. Nobody is a complete loss for humanity. Everybody has different dimensions. We should and we could remain critical if and you know of of our greatest mentors. We should be critical of you know I’m a Marxist. I spend most of them of my time criticizing marks because this is what you should do with your mentors you with your friends with you your own family and with yourself. This is why I wanted to to put in the subtitle of of the book. You know women who taught me how to fight the male chauvinist within. We boys, we all have a male sovereign. We human beings, we all have a fascist in us, you know, a tendency towards the dark side, a tendency towards anger, a tendency towards authoritarianism. We all have that. Anybody who disputes that is simply lying. And it’s, you know, liberation, freedom means fighting these battles within our within ourselves. Now, I’m not the Christian. I’m an atheist, complete atheist. But this idea of fighting satanic forces which are in our bosom is one that we atheists should adopt. This is actually really this quite quite wobbly. Um I thought I’d wrap up my interview with Janice by asking him a little bit about what he thinks should and could be done about all of this. Janice has had a long political career. He was the finance minister of Greece during a crucial moment in the country’s history in 2015 and is the secretary general of the democracy in Europe movement. I wondered if he could shed some light on why the left seems to be losing in so much of the world at the moment and what it could be doing differently to fend off some of the trends that he’s been talking to me about. You’ve mentioned their kissama, you’ve um [music] talked about um sort of political defeats, I guess. And to sort of bring us to a bit of a close, I guess, why why do you think that the left has been doing quite a a bit of losing lately? Not lately. [laughter] You don’t want to be too pessimistic. 100 years at least. Yeah. Why for the last 100 years has the left been lose? Well, changing the world is not an easy feat, you know. Um the establishment doesn’t need morality, doesn’t need ideology. It has all the it’s got a panoply of weaponry which is necessary in order to keep power. uh when you’re trying to change the world to carry out a revolution, an evolution, social revolution, whatever, then uh um firstly you have to you know go against the grain of power that requires uh a degree of courage. It requires uh an epiphany that allows you to think okay you know life is not worth living unless I take huge risks with my think of the tininess of the 19th century you know mine workers you know they were starving uh going on strike meant that their kids would go to bed without any food in their belly that they would be shot by or beaten up by police we fired. Now it takes heroism to mount collective action to for the better for the betterment of society. Now the problem with this is that the moment you start making the large sacrifices personally you start feeling that you you’re more deserving and that brings out authoritarianism. So you know for me the Russian revolution of 1917 was a great moment in human history but very quickly it you know the revolution started devouring his own children. The communist created gullex for communist. They didn’t create them for their class enemy. The communists were killing communists. And and I try to tell the story in the book. Uh there’s a a chapter chapter two which relates uh lessons that uh I was taught from my father who was in the concentration camp as a leftist. And and at some point he said to me when um I was in my teens he said you know he could see that I was becoming a leftist. Of course, we’re leftists, but remember if my side had won the civil war in Greece, I would probably be in the same concentration camp with different centuries with lefting centuries. So uh and if you look at it historically, you know, even the Christians who were a revolutionary movement, it was a revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire, against uh the uh authoritarianism of the local uh um authorities in Palestine or in Israel. And well very soon after they started their movement they started killing each other you know calling each other heretics uh splitting up their you know what 200 different churches. Uh so this is the problem with anybody who wants to change the world. Every revolution ends up dividing its own its own children. But there’s no alternative to the revolution because the establishment the status quo is also undermining itself and leading humanity to war and climate catastrophe. So you know we need to be revolutionaries who are very suspicious of revolutionaries. So what is what is your that that that was potentially a uh for someone who’s just written a book about uh raising raising the soul um which is kind of full of these stories which are of resistance but of um you I think you say towards the beginning about trying to uh kind of you know in inspire some kind of hope amongst the darkness kind of um thing. This book is about uh you talk about raising the soul in in in the introduction kind of describe it as sort of about finding hope amongst the darkness I guess. Where for you lies the hope in all of the kind of bleakness of the world at the moment? Well, a beautiful poem, uh, lovely sunrise. These are the sources of hope. I make a very sharp distinction between optimism and hope. I don’t think we have any right to be optimistic. To be optimistic, you need empirical evidence that things are going well. There’s none. But at the same time, we need to never give up on hope because it’s the driving force for what life we have in us. So I wake up every morning knowing that I’m going to die. Not on the same day, I hope, but you know, I’m going to So, so what? I still have a spring in my step every morning. uh try to be creative because you know the act of discovering uh beauty within the ugliness of this humanity is what makes life worth living. Thank you so so much to Janice for agreeing to sit down and uh chat with me. Uh as we maybe said in the interview, his new book is uh out now. Uh, as I said at the beginning of this video, this is a new format that we are uh triing out. Uh, so let us know what you think of it. And if you would like to support us uh in experimenting with making new things like this or with just making our sort of standard documentary style videos, then uh we would really appreciate you doing that. As kind of surfs in a technofudal world of YouTubes and Tik Toks and metas, etc. Support through Patreon is really uh vital in allowing us to continue doing what we do. So, if you’d like to find out how you can do that, you can head to patreon.com/toNicholas. It’s really raining. I think we need to I think the camera will break uh if we keep filming and then we really will need some Patreon um help. Thank you so much for watching this video. Once again, all that’s left for me to do is to say a massive thank you to the people who support us in trying out new formats like this through being signed up to the top tier of my Patreon. Those people are Richard Gary Dickon Spain, Bill Mitchell, ZedC Ree, Zoe Alden, Alexander Blank, Neil Zildgard, Sophia R, Sergio Suarez, Richard Rapune, Amit Singh, Parahar, Gabriel Ko, Jimmy Dunn, Fiasco Linguini, Agent Maxwell, Glenn Suggdan, Emil Jarabar, Yillimson, Paulius Edus, Sam Forinato and Sandre Yarten, and Douglas. And if you want to join them in getting early access to videos like this one, copies of scripts to them, um access to my weekly blog, the Friday update, and a bunch of other stuff, then you can find out how to do so over at patreon.comtomnicholas. Thanks so much for watching once again and I’ll see you in the next