The idea that we are entering an era of techno-feudalism that will be worse than capitalism is chilling and controversial. We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.
By Yanis Varoufakis, David Moscrop
February 18, 2024
Source: Jacobin
Yanis Varouakis
The controversial concept of techno-feudalism suggests we have transitioned from capitalism to something even worse — a new era that exhibits disturbing feudal characteristics. On this view, capitalists now primarily rely on consolidated political power and rents to extract capital. If true, this form of feudal extraction represents a drastic shift away from the conventional mechanisms of capitalism. Importantly, it would mark a move from capitalism’s claimed foundational attributes of competition and innovation.
Jacobin’s David Moscrop recently talked to economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis about his latest book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Varoufakis makes the case for techno-feudalism, arguing that rents have displaced profits. He delves into the rise of cloud capital, the implications of what a new feudal order would mean for us, and the possibilities of an alternative future.
Capitalism, But Not as We’ve Known It
DAVID MOSCROP: In Technofeudalism, you argue capitalism has brought about its own demise, but not in the way that, say, Marx would have expected. Capitalism has its own contradictions — most fundamentally in the antagonism between capital and labor — and yet those contradictions seem to have produced a mutation that is perhaps worse than anyone might’ve expected. So how did capitalism kill itself and what is replacing it?
YANIS VAROUFAKIS: This book falls squarely within the Marxist political-economic tradition. I wrote it as a piece of Marxist scholarship. So, from my Marxist perspective, this is a tragic book to have to write.
The contradictions of capitalism didn’t lead to the anticipated resolution where, after all these centuries of class stratification, society would be distilled into two classes, poised for a high-noon clash. This decisive confrontation between oppressor and oppressed would result in the liberation of humanity — the emancipation of humanity from all class conflict. Instead of that, however, this clash between the capitalist — the bourgeoisie — and the proletariat ended up in the complete victory of the bourgeoisie: a complete loss after 1991, especially.
In the absence of a competitor in the form of trade unions — the organized working class — capitalism went into a rampant dynamic evolution that caused this mutation into what I call cloud capital. This transformation effectively marked the end of traditional capitalism. It killed capitalism — a development that embodies a Marxist-Hegelian contradiction, but not the kind of contradiction we would have hoped for.
Cloud capital has killed off markets and replaced them with a kind of a digital fiefdom where not just proletarians — the precarious — but bourgeois people and vassal capitalists are all producing surplus value for the vassal capitalists. They are producing rents. They’re producing cloud rent, because the fiefdom is a cloud fiefdom now, for the owners of cloud capital.
Cloud capital created a kind of power, which we as Marxists must recognize as being structurally, qualitatively different from the monopoly power of somebody like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, or the great robber barons. Because those people concentrated capital, concentrated power, bought out governments, and killed off their competitors to sell their stuff. Today’s “cloudalists” — cloud capital owners — they don’t even care about producing anything and selling their stuff. This is because they have replaced markets — they have not simply monopolized them.
If capitalism is market-based and profit-driven, well then this is no longer capitalism, because this is not marketplace-based. It’s based on digital platforms that are closer to techno-fiefdoms or cloud fiefdoms, and they’re driven by two forms of liquidity. One is cloud rent, which is the opposite of profit, and the other is central bank money, which funded the building of cloud capital. And that is not capitalism.
Now you can choose to call it capitalism if you want, if you redefine capitalism and if you say that anything that stems from the power of capital is capitalism, but it’s not capitalism as we’ve known it. To paraphrase Spock in Star Trek: “It is life but not life as we’ve known it.”
And I think that it’s important to make the linguistic transition from the word “capitalism” to something else, which is very difficult to make, because we’re all wedded to the idea that we’re fighting against capitalism. After all those decades of feeling that we came to this planet to overthrow capitalism, it’s really very difficult to have an idiot like me coming along and saying, “But this is not capitalism anymore.” You say, “Bugger off. Of course it is capitalism. If it’s not socialism, it must be capitalism.” That’s what a fellow Marxist said to me. And I killed myself laughing because I remember my Rosa Luxembourg. No, it can be barbarism.
Vampire-Like Parasitism
If techno-feudalism has replaced capitalism, as you’ve suggested, it has also led to the emergence of “cloud serfs” and “cloud proles,” modern equivalents of the serfs and proletarians discussed in historical contexts. How do these contemporary classes differ from their counterparts in the traditional capitalist model?
From a Marxist perspective, the simple answer is that cloud serfs directly produce capital with their free labor. That has never happened before. Serfs under feudalism produced agricultural commodities. They did not produce capital — that was up to the artisans who produced tools and instruments and plows and stuff. In contrast, modern users contribute to capital formation simply by engaging with platforms, offering free labor to augment cloud capital for the capitalist. That never happened under capitalism.
Techno-feudalism remains deeply reliant on the capitalist sector, mirroring the dependence of capitalism on the agricultural sector and the feudal sectors for sustenance. And just as capitalism needed feudalism to ensure a food supply, techno-feudalism is parasitic, drawing essential support from the capitalist sector to sustain itself.
So, the capitalist sector remains foundational. It is producing all value — it’s why this analysis is distinctly Marxist. All surplus value is produced in the capitalist sector, but then it is usurped. It is appropriated by this mutant capital — cloud capital — most of which is not reproduced by proletarians. It’s reproduced by people in their leisure time who work for no pay. That has never happened. That’s why I’m saying this is not capitalism. And it doesn’t help to think of this as capitalism, because if you remain wedded to the word capitalism, the mind fails to comprehend the great transformation.
You mentioned that the rise of techno-feudalism is driven by two primary causes: the enclosure and privatization of the internet, similar to pasture enclosure in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and a steady, heavy flow of central bank money, particularly after 2008. Could things have gone otherwise?
Well, everything could be different. That’s what David Graeber has taught us, right? And as leftists, we have to believe that nothing was foretold. Otherwise, we don’t believe in human agency — otherwise, what’s the point of living? We might as well become couch potatoes watching the world go by. So, everything can always be different. The historical counterfactual is always interesting, but I cannot do it. I really cannot do it. I mean, I tried to do it often in my previous book, which was a political science-fiction novel called Another Now. Effectively, I created another time line where in 2008 we did things differently with Occupy Wall Street to bring about socialist transformation. And that’s a great game to play with your own mind, but I don’t think it’s historically pertinent.
How could things have been different? Well, one could say that the privatization of the internet was inevitable because we live under capitalism. And capitalism has this capacity of eating up and infecting every capitalist-free zone. The reason why I could never align with utopian socialism, like that of Robert Owen in the nineteenth century. Despite his efforts to create capitalism-free zones, history shows that capitalism inevitably invades and corrupts these spaces. You cannot have pockets of socialism surviving for long within capitalism.
Now With More Crisis
You say techno-feudalism is parasitic on capitalism. If that’s the case, techno-feudalism will still require the existence of classical capitalist production. Amazon still needs producers to manufacture goods to sell on its platform. Uber and Tesla require physical vehicles. How will that relationship work in the long run under a techno-feudalist order?
Again, I need to make this point very clearly. Capitalism in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, when it emerged, overthrew feudalism, but it needed the feudal sector to continue producing food because otherwise we would all have died. That’s why I’m saying that capital was parasitic on the feudal agricultural sector. So, it’s not that one dies and the other lives. What happens is that capital takes over the hegemony of the system, but it is parasitic on the previous system. That’s a standard Marxist, historical, material analysis.
Now what is happening is that at the center of techno-feudalism you have a capital sector, which is absolutely necessary. The capital sector is the only sector that produces value — exchange value in Marxist terms — but the owners of that capital, of old-fashioned capital, are vassals to the cloud capitalists. Their profits are being skimmed off. So surplus value is withdrawn from the circular flow of income by the “cloudalists.”
Now that makes the system even more unstable, even more prone to crisis, and even more contradictory and even less viable than capitalism was. That’s what I’m saying in the book: that the takeover by cloud capital — the supplantation of capitalism by techno-feudalism — is making our societies more fraught with conflict. They’re becoming more stupid, more conflictual, more poisoned, and less capable of allowing space within them for social democracy, for the liberal individual — for values that even the Right cherished under capitalism.
The Left was never against the idea of liberty; our critique lies in the limiting of liberty to a select few. But now even this limited form of liberty is under threat, and therefore the contradictions are getting worse. I hold on to hope that perhaps these growing tensions will push humanity into a decisive showdown between good and evil — between the oppressors and the oppressed. But the rapid approach of climate catastrophe poses the risk that we may reach the point of no return before that resolution takes place. So, we have our work cut out for us, and humanity is staring extinction in the face — unless we pull our socks up.
Not Your Parents’ Rentiers
You spend a lot of time making the case that rents have usurped profit. Is it not the dream, though, of every “capitalist” to extract rent? Does any capitalist really want to be a capitalist? It seems to me every capitalist wants to be a rentier.
Well, the era when capitalists wanted to be capitalists was gone a long time ago. I trust that Henry Ford liked being a capitalist in the same way that, in a strange and completely warped manner, Rupert Murdoch likes to be a newspaperman — even though he has done so much to destroy newspapers. But these people are either dead or on their way to hell. So, yes, capitalists don’t want to be capitalists, especially here in Europe, especially in my country. All the capitalists, and I’ve known quite a few, have stopped being capitalists; they’ve become rentiers.
The difference is that the capitalists who were transforming themselves into being rentiers, until the emergence of cloud capital, were essentially passing their capital stock onto others or possibly to private equity. These former capitalists extracted rent from the monopoly profits of these highly concentrated capitalist firms.
But what happens with people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I mean, they want to do what they’re doing. They want to be cloud capitalists or “cloudalists,” as I call them. They love it. These people, a bit like Thomas Edison, love what they do. They’re not like standard rentiers. They’re not like the feudal lords of the past. They are not like the capitalists who no longer want to be capitalists. These people are enthusiastic’ and they’re very talented, and, unfortunately, they’re very smart. The combination of their drive with the exorbitant power of the cloud capital that they own creates a highly potent, concentrated form of “cloudalist” power, which we have to take very seriously.
The end of the Bretton Woods system transformed global capitalism and ultimately made possible, among other things, techno-feudalism. Could we imagine a contemporary Bretton Woods cast in the mold of deep egalitarian multilateralism and a socialist financial system?
Oh, yes, I have done that. That was the reason why I wrote my previous book. Another Now envisions exactly what you say. It features a new Bretton Woods system inspired by John Maynard Keynes’s original proposal — rejected by Harry Dexter White and the Roosevelt administration — merged with a participatory democratic socialist framework. This setup has been designed for ongoing redistribution of income and wealth from the Global North to the Global South, especially in the form of green investment. So, I’ve mapped all that and can answer your question of how things could work today, with the technologies that we have, if property rights were equally distributed — which is what I believe socialists should be aiming at. But that was my political science fiction. This book is about what we’re facing.
The World’s Biggest Excel File to the Rescue?
As part of an alternative order, you advance this idea of a central bank digital wallet system and monthly dividend. How would that work?
Well, technically it’s dead easy. It can be done in a week because it is so straightforward. Imagine something like an Excel file, which is kept by the Fed, and every single resident in the United States is one row. And when a payment is made, the corresponding value transfers from one cell to another, representing the payer and payee. This process would be free, instantaneous, and anonymized. By creating a separation between the software operators and the identities of individuals, identified only by codes similar to Bitcoin addresses, privacy can be assured. And checks and balances could be established to ensure that the state is not watching what each one of us is doing.
And because the money will be shuffled through the same spreadsheet, nothing stops the central bank from adding the same number to everybody every month. And that’s a universal basic income (UBI), which is not, and this is crucial, funded by taxation. Because the problem with the idea of UBI is that it is vulnerable to complaints like, “What are you talking about? You’re going to tax me, tax the dollars that I earn, to give to a bum, a surfer in California or to a drug addict or to a rich person?” But this proposal leverages the central bank’s capacity to generate funds. And we should let no one tell us that it would be inflationary or would be a problem — because they’re printing trillions on behalf of financiers. Why not print them on behalf of the little people? Of everyone equally?
Now, the reason why you don’t have this system in the United States and why you are very far away from a digital dollar is because if anybody in the Fed dares move in that direction, they will be murdered by Wall Street — they’ll experience political and character assassination. Wall Street will never allow it because it would spell the end of Wall Street. Because why would you want to have a bank account with Bank of America if you can have a digital wallet with the Fed?
Bank of America would be compelled to justify their services and fees. They’d have to come and convince you that you need to have an account with them because they want to give you something at a decent price — like a loan — without scamming you. And they can’t do that because the whole point of Bank of America or Citigroup is to extract rents from you by monopolizing payment systems and holding deposits. You keep your money with them because, currently, there’s no other way of keeping your money.Email
Yanis Varoufakis born 24 March 1961 is a Greek economist, politician, and co-founder of DiEM25. A former academic, he served as the Greek Minister of Finance from January to July 2015. Since 2019, he is again a Member of Greek Parliament and MeRA25 leader. He is the author of several books including, Another Now (2020). Varoufakis is also a professor of Economics – University of Athens, Honorary Professor of Political Economy – University of Sydney, Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance – University of Torino, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Political Economy, Kings College, University of London.
How to Take Back the Internet
To Democratize Finance, We Must Take the Banks Away From the Bankers
February 15, 2024
Source: Green European Journal
Ben Tarnoff argues that to remake the internet, we will have to remake everything else.
Source: Green European Journal
Ben Tarnoff argues that to remake the internet, we will have to remake everything else.
(Philipp Katzenberger / Unsplash)
Platforms that one represented a promise of freedom are now monopolies based on data extraction and surveillance. Users who joined social media to stay in touch with their friends find themselves trapped in a toxic environment. How did it all go wrong and what can citizens and regulators do to restore a healthy digital ecosystem? A conversation with tech activist, writer, and blogger Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: In your new book, you argue that online platforms created a self-serving system with artificial barriers that make it hard and costly for users to leave their services. The outcome is extreme concentration, monopolisation, bad user experience, and probably also the surveillance of citizens, as well as the spread of harmful content. You suggest interoperability as a key solution to these issues. What is it about?
Cory Doctorow: Let me slightly correct you first. The monopolisation of the tech sector – meaning, the mergers that allowed a handful of companies to become so big and so powerful – came earlier. This monopolisation helped them secure the policies that block new market entrants. In this setting, it is easier for them to capture their regulators. It is not hard for five companies to agree on what they are all going to tell the European Commission, while it would be much more complicated for 400 companies to come up with a shared playbook.
Once you allow the creation of a monopoly, regulatory capture follows.
Is it this capture that makes it difficult for users to leave the platforms?
Tech has always grown thanks to network effects. A network effect means that a service gets better when more people use it. So, you joined Facebook because the people you love were already there. And then, other people who love you joined Facebook because you were there. Or you bought an iPhone because you liked the apps that were available for it. And then because you had an iPhone, someone made another app for the device.
This has always been the case since the personal computer. What changed is that, in the past, you could always develop a new technology that would make it easy to leave the old one. When IBM dominated the market with mainframes and charged 1000 per cent margins for hard drives, companies like Fujitsu made hard drives that would work with IBM mainframes. And then, eventually, they made mainframes too.
When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace, collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there, and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to take so many users from MySpace so quickly. This is what interoperability is about. But if you tried to do that today, Facebook would use laws that were either enforced differently or did not even exist at the time of MySpace, to ruin you.
If we were to restore this “noble ancient art” of technological interoperability, the users who are so obviously discontent with the platforms they use would consider the costs low enough to leave and join better spaces. In turn, the companies would be smaller, would pay more attention to user satisfaction, and could not push around the governments that tried to hold them to account.
At the moment, X (formerly Twitter) is a good example of a platform that is hated by many of its users. If the current competitors – among others, Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, and Threads – would embrace interoperability among each other, could that be a driver for unsatisfied X users to leave the platform?
Sadly, I do not think that the lack of interoperability is what stops people from joining these other platforms. I opted not to join Threads or Bluesky because they are owned respectively by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and by a nonprofit whose board includes Jack Dorsey, the man who sold Twitter to Elon Musk, so I do not trust them. I wish that people were thinking long-term about why they join or not specific platforms. But the reason most X users are not switching to Mastodon or Bluesky is that they care more about the people than they do about the user interface, the management, or the policies.
As for the lack of interoperability, it is a form of mutual hostage-taking: the people you love are trapped on X, and that means that you are trapped on X. At the same time, the fact that you are trapped on X is why the people you love are trapped on X. There’s no technical reason that prevents to leave X, set up an account somewhere else, and continue to send messages to the people who stay behind. This is not like the Soviet Union. When my grandmother was a Soviet refugee, she lost touch with her family for 15 years. They could not write, phone, or visit.
In the case of X, it is simply a policy barrier: the service refuses to interconnect. The reason it does that is that it understands that the harder it is for you to leave its service, the worse it can treat you, or the more data it can extract from you. Platforms treat users the same way as an airport: once you get past security, suddenly a bottle of water can cost horrible sums, because you would not be able to get it from somewhere else.
If these alternative platforms managed to team up and make a pledge for interoperability, would that not be a possible driver for a large enough pool of people to leave X? This scenario might even prompt X to open up.
I think that it is far more probable to achieve this through regulatory action rather than through an agreement between platforms. In the EU, we already have the Digital Markets Act, which mandates interoperability from large firms. X violates many existing regulations, as well as the consent decrees, the remedial measures imposed for its previous rule-breaking both in the US and in the EU. At some point, it is likely that regulators come to X with action that could wipe out the company.
One of the things that regulators could do to protect X users from what they have on the platform would be to require the company to set up an interoperable gateway. At that point, every other platform would exploit that interoperable gateway to steal X users. And they would, in turn, offer users a better environment.
The business models of the biggest tech companies today are based on the presumption that they are and will remain monopolies. Would this mean that once there is competition, they will simply collapse?
It is even more interesting than that, because you need to take into account the so-called “curse of bigness”. Google, for example, is a search and advertising company; all they do is sell search, and sell advertising on search. Smart Cities and Wi-Fi balloons and all the rest of it is just nonsense and window dressing. Now, Google cannot attract new search users and grow its search business. There are not so many people out there who have heard of Google but never tried it. And yet, Google needs to grow, because that’s the imperative of firms that are publicly traded. They want to attract capital, they want to enrich the managers who have been given lots of shares as part of their compensation package, and so on. Google must grow; and one way that Google can grow is by putting less energy and less money into keeping search results good or secure. It can also make search results deliberately worse by showing ads ahead of the quality content that the algorithm has come up with. It’s already happening.
Another way tech companies can increase profits is by abusing their workforce. Google laid off 12,000 engineers in January last year, right after doing a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
The third possible way of growing – and most people hope that these big firms will do it this way – is by entering new markets. However, in the winner-takes-all economy of big tech, executives within big companies are wary of their colleagues becoming too powerful by doing something new. In the case of Google, for example, the founders came back to run the AI projects, because they knew that if they turned it over to the business itself, the executives would sabotage them.
So, the problem is not only that losing their monopoly would mean losing their business. It is also that their scale stops them from doing exciting new things.
In your book, you are somewhat critical of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In general, what is your impression of the EU’s digital policies? Do they have potential and could they allow the EU to become a global trendsetter?
They could have the potential, but so far the EU has neither been superb nor terrible. In fact, the GDPR is an interesting guide to how digital policies can go right and how they can go wrong. There are parts of the GDPR that I consider a bad idea. None of them have to do with privacy, but mostly with censorship. One problem, for example, is the right to be forgotten, which turned into a way for people who committed terrible crimes to stop the world from knowing about them – although that is not what this right was intended for.
However, the main problem with the GDPR has to do with enforcement, which is a latent issue in the project of European federalism. Europe has a bunch of corporate havens within itself: Ireland, Malta, Luxembourg, to a lesser extent the Netherlands, Cyprus, and so on. These countries bend policy towards allowing criminality by wealthy people, and they compete with one another to become the most advantageous territory for the worst people and corporations in the world to set up their headquarters. As a result, you get ridiculous outcomes like with the GDPR, where Facebook and Google pretend that they are headquartered in Ireland; and then the Irish Data Commissioner never gets out of bed, so that Facebook and Google can violate the GDPR. That is also why I am worried about the enforcement of the DMA.
My other worry is the interest of the European Commission. The GDPR was the signature achievement of the previous Commission, and when the new Commission came in in 2019, they were not all that interested in pursuing it; it was not theirs. And they let it languish. If the DMA is going to be the force that we hope it will be, there has to be an enforcement agenda that crosses different administrations within the Commission. And that enforcement agenda needs to be staffed up now and to score some early wins. If Europeans themselves are not to tolerate a failure to enforce the GDPR or the DMA, they must see the value in it. That way, if digital policy is not enforced, they will get angry, and they will demand action.
Finally, I see problems related to a lack of longitudinal experience. The DMA started off with the promise that it was going to impose interoperability on some of the widely used secure messaging tools: end-to-end encrypted services, like iMessage, WhatsApp, and Messenger. However, the Commission should have started with social media platforms, where introducing interoperability is relatively straightforward. Messaging is just too hard to deal with, as it is very sensitive to even small technical errors. A mistake in this domain could compromise a service’s encryption and thereby put people at risk – even endanger lives. Remember that the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was lured to his death by a cyber weapon which was produced by the [cyber intelligence firm] NSO Group, and then purchased by the Saudi royal family.
Big Tech can currently outspend anyone. They offer the highest paying jobs for data scientists, coders, tech policy experts, industry lawyers, etc. – so basically, regulators are captured by them, while the best people work for them. How can anyone compete with this expertise?
When companies grow beyond a certain scale, they become very hard to regulate. The historic reason for competition law was not merely to react against the harm that large companies were already engaged in, but to ensure that a company never got so large that if it engaged in harm, we would not be able to do something about it. When a sector is extremely concentrated, chances are that the only people who understand how those companies operate are the people who work for those companies. That is why we often see that the regulators who step in to hold the companies to account are drawn from within the ranks of the companies. It is not merely due to a revolving door; it is also the outcome of a certain degree of pragmatism: a sector with five companies does not have a lot of outside experts.
This does not mean that it is impossible to regulate Big Tech; it just means that we should have started 25 years ago, and now we face an uphill battle. One of the things that we can do is to simply block companies from engaging in certain conduct. In the US, for example, there is a law that is going to force companies like Google and Facebook to choose whether they are going to offer the marketplace where ads are bought and sold, represent the sellers of ads, or represent the buyers. Right now, each company does all three. They also play the roles of both advertisers and publishers. This arrangement makes it possible for tech platforms to take about 50 per cent of every ad dollar, while historically, fees and service charges would have been 10 to 15 per cent.
So, indeed, it is very hard for a regulator to understand how a company can be a seller, a buyer, a platform, a publisher, and an ad buyer at the same time. But the problem can be solved by forcing it to sell off some of its units.
Do you expect this to go smoothly?
Not necessarily. The companies could try to undermine an interoperability mandate or a breakup. If regulators tell Facebook that under the Digital Markets Act, it has to allow third parties to connect to it using Mastodon, Bluesky or some other service, Facebook might decide to block or throttle those rival services, and pretend it did so accidentally, in a good faith attempt to protect users’ security. As Facebook is so big and gnarly, and because almost everyone who understands how Facebook works is a Facebook engineer, it might take years to tell the fake claims from the real ones. By that time, the companies that were trying to interoperate with Facebook will have already gone out of business.
This is where so-called adversarial interoperability comes into the picture: technologically savvy people can just decide to disregard platforms’ self-serving rules and use a combination of means disliked by large companies – such as bots, scraping, and reverse engineering – to extract the data that they need to build an interoperable service.
And big companies will tolerate this?
They will not like it. They can try and stop this – but ultimately, it is very hard to do so with technology alone, once regulations don’t favour big tech anymore. All the adversarial interoperator needs to succeed is to find flaws in the defensive strategy of a tech company. To prevent this, that company would need to make no mistakes – that’s something not even the biggest and richest companies can achieve.
If we empower new market entrants to use the same tactics that once made Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon so wealthy, we could reach a new equilibrium.
How can progressive policymakers promote an environment in which you have more adversarial interoperability?
I have an archenemy, a guy called Milton Friedman. He was the architect of the neoliberal revolution, a great friend of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the person who created the misery that we live in now. While he was a monster, he understood how to make change. He wanted to create a feudal regime in which most of us were no longer socially mobile, and many of us would lose access to health care, university education, or retirement, and would just act as servants to those who are better off. This plan is certainly not something that would appeal to a majority of people; but Friedman argued that in times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the centre so quickly, that the impossible becomes the inevitable.
Our job is to have sufficient good ideas, so that when crisis comes, we can seize upon it to change the world. One of the things that the European Greens and other progressives can do is advocate for technology- and policy-informed, technically detailed solutions that address the structural problems of tech.
Would the world be a better place if the development of the Internet and communications technology had stopped in 1999?
No; it is a gift to Big Tech to assume that today’s problems are intrinsic to technology. I am convinced we could have had social media or search without mass surveillance. In fact, both Facebook and Google started off as privacy-preserving alternatives to their rivals. If you have a look at the PageRank paper that Google’s founders published in 1998 to announce that they had built a new search engine, you will find a promise that their tool would never be advertising-based, because that would adversely impact its quality. Facebook did not spy on its users either for the first several years. Similarly, Apple’s rhetoric about the iPhone and the need to prevent you from installing software from third parties without their blessing is nonsense, because Apple already built a computer that works just fine without that restriction.
So, the problem is not the technology or how we use it; the problem is rather that the people who provide these technologies made it impossible to break up their precise menu, where you have to take surveillance with your social media, accept control over your mobile operating system and price gouging with your publishing. With interoperability, we could turn that set menu into an à-la-carte with technological self-determination.
Platforms that one represented a promise of freedom are now monopolies based on data extraction and surveillance. Users who joined social media to stay in touch with their friends find themselves trapped in a toxic environment. How did it all go wrong and what can citizens and regulators do to restore a healthy digital ecosystem? A conversation with tech activist, writer, and blogger Cory Doctorow, author of The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.
Konrad Bleyer-Simon: In your new book, you argue that online platforms created a self-serving system with artificial barriers that make it hard and costly for users to leave their services. The outcome is extreme concentration, monopolisation, bad user experience, and probably also the surveillance of citizens, as well as the spread of harmful content. You suggest interoperability as a key solution to these issues. What is it about?
Cory Doctorow: Let me slightly correct you first. The monopolisation of the tech sector – meaning, the mergers that allowed a handful of companies to become so big and so powerful – came earlier. This monopolisation helped them secure the policies that block new market entrants. In this setting, it is easier for them to capture their regulators. It is not hard for five companies to agree on what they are all going to tell the European Commission, while it would be much more complicated for 400 companies to come up with a shared playbook.
Once you allow the creation of a monopoly, regulatory capture follows.
Is it this capture that makes it difficult for users to leave the platforms?
Tech has always grown thanks to network effects. A network effect means that a service gets better when more people use it. So, you joined Facebook because the people you love were already there. And then, other people who love you joined Facebook because you were there. Or you bought an iPhone because you liked the apps that were available for it. And then because you had an iPhone, someone made another app for the device.
This has always been the case since the personal computer. What changed is that, in the past, you could always develop a new technology that would make it easy to leave the old one. When IBM dominated the market with mainframes and charged 1000 per cent margins for hard drives, companies like Fujitsu made hard drives that would work with IBM mainframes. And then, eventually, they made mainframes too.
When Facebook was born, it gave people who were already using MySpace a tool that would pretend to be you and log into MySpace, collect all the messages that your friends had left for you, and put them in your Facebook inbox. You could reply to them there, and it would send them back to your MySpace outbox, so your friends would see them. And that was what allowed Facebook to take so many users from MySpace so quickly. This is what interoperability is about. But if you tried to do that today, Facebook would use laws that were either enforced differently or did not even exist at the time of MySpace, to ruin you.
If we were to restore this “noble ancient art” of technological interoperability, the users who are so obviously discontent with the platforms they use would consider the costs low enough to leave and join better spaces. In turn, the companies would be smaller, would pay more attention to user satisfaction, and could not push around the governments that tried to hold them to account.
At the moment, X (formerly Twitter) is a good example of a platform that is hated by many of its users. If the current competitors – among others, Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, and Threads – would embrace interoperability among each other, could that be a driver for unsatisfied X users to leave the platform?
Sadly, I do not think that the lack of interoperability is what stops people from joining these other platforms. I opted not to join Threads or Bluesky because they are owned respectively by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and by a nonprofit whose board includes Jack Dorsey, the man who sold Twitter to Elon Musk, so I do not trust them. I wish that people were thinking long-term about why they join or not specific platforms. But the reason most X users are not switching to Mastodon or Bluesky is that they care more about the people than they do about the user interface, the management, or the policies.
As for the lack of interoperability, it is a form of mutual hostage-taking: the people you love are trapped on X, and that means that you are trapped on X. At the same time, the fact that you are trapped on X is why the people you love are trapped on X. There’s no technical reason that prevents to leave X, set up an account somewhere else, and continue to send messages to the people who stay behind. This is not like the Soviet Union. When my grandmother was a Soviet refugee, she lost touch with her family for 15 years. They could not write, phone, or visit.
In the case of X, it is simply a policy barrier: the service refuses to interconnect. The reason it does that is that it understands that the harder it is for you to leave its service, the worse it can treat you, or the more data it can extract from you. Platforms treat users the same way as an airport: once you get past security, suddenly a bottle of water can cost horrible sums, because you would not be able to get it from somewhere else.
If these alternative platforms managed to team up and make a pledge for interoperability, would that not be a possible driver for a large enough pool of people to leave X? This scenario might even prompt X to open up.
I think that it is far more probable to achieve this through regulatory action rather than through an agreement between platforms. In the EU, we already have the Digital Markets Act, which mandates interoperability from large firms. X violates many existing regulations, as well as the consent decrees, the remedial measures imposed for its previous rule-breaking both in the US and in the EU. At some point, it is likely that regulators come to X with action that could wipe out the company.
One of the things that regulators could do to protect X users from what they have on the platform would be to require the company to set up an interoperable gateway. At that point, every other platform would exploit that interoperable gateway to steal X users. And they would, in turn, offer users a better environment.
The business models of the biggest tech companies today are based on the presumption that they are and will remain monopolies. Would this mean that once there is competition, they will simply collapse?
It is even more interesting than that, because you need to take into account the so-called “curse of bigness”. Google, for example, is a search and advertising company; all they do is sell search, and sell advertising on search. Smart Cities and Wi-Fi balloons and all the rest of it is just nonsense and window dressing. Now, Google cannot attract new search users and grow its search business. There are not so many people out there who have heard of Google but never tried it. And yet, Google needs to grow, because that’s the imperative of firms that are publicly traded. They want to attract capital, they want to enrich the managers who have been given lots of shares as part of their compensation package, and so on. Google must grow; and one way that Google can grow is by putting less energy and less money into keeping search results good or secure. It can also make search results deliberately worse by showing ads ahead of the quality content that the algorithm has come up with. It’s already happening.
Another way tech companies can increase profits is by abusing their workforce. Google laid off 12,000 engineers in January last year, right after doing a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
The third possible way of growing – and most people hope that these big firms will do it this way – is by entering new markets. However, in the winner-takes-all economy of big tech, executives within big companies are wary of their colleagues becoming too powerful by doing something new. In the case of Google, for example, the founders came back to run the AI projects, because they knew that if they turned it over to the business itself, the executives would sabotage them.
So, the problem is not only that losing their monopoly would mean losing their business. It is also that their scale stops them from doing exciting new things.
In your book, you are somewhat critical of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In general, what is your impression of the EU’s digital policies? Do they have potential and could they allow the EU to become a global trendsetter?
They could have the potential, but so far the EU has neither been superb nor terrible. In fact, the GDPR is an interesting guide to how digital policies can go right and how they can go wrong. There are parts of the GDPR that I consider a bad idea. None of them have to do with privacy, but mostly with censorship. One problem, for example, is the right to be forgotten, which turned into a way for people who committed terrible crimes to stop the world from knowing about them – although that is not what this right was intended for.
However, the main problem with the GDPR has to do with enforcement, which is a latent issue in the project of European federalism. Europe has a bunch of corporate havens within itself: Ireland, Malta, Luxembourg, to a lesser extent the Netherlands, Cyprus, and so on. These countries bend policy towards allowing criminality by wealthy people, and they compete with one another to become the most advantageous territory for the worst people and corporations in the world to set up their headquarters. As a result, you get ridiculous outcomes like with the GDPR, where Facebook and Google pretend that they are headquartered in Ireland; and then the Irish Data Commissioner never gets out of bed, so that Facebook and Google can violate the GDPR. That is also why I am worried about the enforcement of the DMA.
My other worry is the interest of the European Commission. The GDPR was the signature achievement of the previous Commission, and when the new Commission came in in 2019, they were not all that interested in pursuing it; it was not theirs. And they let it languish. If the DMA is going to be the force that we hope it will be, there has to be an enforcement agenda that crosses different administrations within the Commission. And that enforcement agenda needs to be staffed up now and to score some early wins. If Europeans themselves are not to tolerate a failure to enforce the GDPR or the DMA, they must see the value in it. That way, if digital policy is not enforced, they will get angry, and they will demand action.
Finally, I see problems related to a lack of longitudinal experience. The DMA started off with the promise that it was going to impose interoperability on some of the widely used secure messaging tools: end-to-end encrypted services, like iMessage, WhatsApp, and Messenger. However, the Commission should have started with social media platforms, where introducing interoperability is relatively straightforward. Messaging is just too hard to deal with, as it is very sensitive to even small technical errors. A mistake in this domain could compromise a service’s encryption and thereby put people at risk – even endanger lives. Remember that the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was lured to his death by a cyber weapon which was produced by the [cyber intelligence firm] NSO Group, and then purchased by the Saudi royal family.
Big Tech can currently outspend anyone. They offer the highest paying jobs for data scientists, coders, tech policy experts, industry lawyers, etc. – so basically, regulators are captured by them, while the best people work for them. How can anyone compete with this expertise?
When companies grow beyond a certain scale, they become very hard to regulate. The historic reason for competition law was not merely to react against the harm that large companies were already engaged in, but to ensure that a company never got so large that if it engaged in harm, we would not be able to do something about it. When a sector is extremely concentrated, chances are that the only people who understand how those companies operate are the people who work for those companies. That is why we often see that the regulators who step in to hold the companies to account are drawn from within the ranks of the companies. It is not merely due to a revolving door; it is also the outcome of a certain degree of pragmatism: a sector with five companies does not have a lot of outside experts.
This does not mean that it is impossible to regulate Big Tech; it just means that we should have started 25 years ago, and now we face an uphill battle. One of the things that we can do is to simply block companies from engaging in certain conduct. In the US, for example, there is a law that is going to force companies like Google and Facebook to choose whether they are going to offer the marketplace where ads are bought and sold, represent the sellers of ads, or represent the buyers. Right now, each company does all three. They also play the roles of both advertisers and publishers. This arrangement makes it possible for tech platforms to take about 50 per cent of every ad dollar, while historically, fees and service charges would have been 10 to 15 per cent.
So, indeed, it is very hard for a regulator to understand how a company can be a seller, a buyer, a platform, a publisher, and an ad buyer at the same time. But the problem can be solved by forcing it to sell off some of its units.
Do you expect this to go smoothly?
Not necessarily. The companies could try to undermine an interoperability mandate or a breakup. If regulators tell Facebook that under the Digital Markets Act, it has to allow third parties to connect to it using Mastodon, Bluesky or some other service, Facebook might decide to block or throttle those rival services, and pretend it did so accidentally, in a good faith attempt to protect users’ security. As Facebook is so big and gnarly, and because almost everyone who understands how Facebook works is a Facebook engineer, it might take years to tell the fake claims from the real ones. By that time, the companies that were trying to interoperate with Facebook will have already gone out of business.
This is where so-called adversarial interoperability comes into the picture: technologically savvy people can just decide to disregard platforms’ self-serving rules and use a combination of means disliked by large companies – such as bots, scraping, and reverse engineering – to extract the data that they need to build an interoperable service.
And big companies will tolerate this?
They will not like it. They can try and stop this – but ultimately, it is very hard to do so with technology alone, once regulations don’t favour big tech anymore. All the adversarial interoperator needs to succeed is to find flaws in the defensive strategy of a tech company. To prevent this, that company would need to make no mistakes – that’s something not even the biggest and richest companies can achieve.
If we empower new market entrants to use the same tactics that once made Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon so wealthy, we could reach a new equilibrium.
How can progressive policymakers promote an environment in which you have more adversarial interoperability?
I have an archenemy, a guy called Milton Friedman. He was the architect of the neoliberal revolution, a great friend of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the person who created the misery that we live in now. While he was a monster, he understood how to make change. He wanted to create a feudal regime in which most of us were no longer socially mobile, and many of us would lose access to health care, university education, or retirement, and would just act as servants to those who are better off. This plan is certainly not something that would appeal to a majority of people; but Friedman argued that in times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the centre so quickly, that the impossible becomes the inevitable.
Our job is to have sufficient good ideas, so that when crisis comes, we can seize upon it to change the world. One of the things that the European Greens and other progressives can do is advocate for technology- and policy-informed, technically detailed solutions that address the structural problems of tech.
Would the world be a better place if the development of the Internet and communications technology had stopped in 1999?
No; it is a gift to Big Tech to assume that today’s problems are intrinsic to technology. I am convinced we could have had social media or search without mass surveillance. In fact, both Facebook and Google started off as privacy-preserving alternatives to their rivals. If you have a look at the PageRank paper that Google’s founders published in 1998 to announce that they had built a new search engine, you will find a promise that their tool would never be advertising-based, because that would adversely impact its quality. Facebook did not spy on its users either for the first several years. Similarly, Apple’s rhetoric about the iPhone and the need to prevent you from installing software from third parties without their blessing is nonsense, because Apple already built a computer that works just fine without that restriction.
So, the problem is not the technology or how we use it; the problem is rather that the people who provide these technologies made it impossible to break up their precise menu, where you have to take surveillance with your social media, accept control over your mobile operating system and price gouging with your publishing. With interoperability, we could turn that set menu into an à-la-carte with technological self-determination.
To Democratize Finance, We Must Take the Banks Away From the Bankers
Progressive economist Gerald Epstein explains how we can build a banking system that puts people over profit.
By Gerald Epstein, CJ Polychroniou
February 18, 2024
Source: Truthout
New York Stock Exchange (Photo: Jeffrey Zeldman)
Our current banking and financial system has transformed politics in favor of the rich, debilitating democratic institutions, destroying the common good and hurting the poor in the process. In this context, the challenge we face is to end plutocracy and restore democracy.
It is this challenge that world-renowned progressive economist Gerald Epstein brilliantly elucidates in his pathbreaking book Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us and which he discusses in this exclusive interview for Truthout.
One possible way to accomplish this dual feat is by creating an alternative banking system that democratizes finance. In fact, the movement for public banking — a system where banks are owned by the people rather than the wealthy elite — is gaining momentum in many parts of the country. Just this month, a blueprint for the implementation of a public bank in the state of New Jersey was submitted to Gov. Phil Murphy.
In the interview that follows, which builds on our previous conversations about how “SEC’s Approval of Bitcoin Markets May Set the Stage for Financial Disaster” and how “A Growing Number of Economists Are Joining the Fight to Rein In the Big Banks,” Epstein addresses the issue of democratic finance, including the advantages that it offers as well as the challenges that it faces in a society where money dominates politics. Epstein is a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
C.J. Polychroniou: Jerry, in your recently published book Busting the Bankers’ Club you highlight the need for changes to the current financial system that go beyond regulation. As you write, “we need banks without bankers.” You propose public banking as the best way toward creating “a financial system that works for all of us.” What are the advantages of public banking, or having banks without bankers?
Gerald Epstein: There are numerous advantages to having more public banks in our financial ecosystem. But before I discuss these advantages, let me explain what I mean by public banking or “banks without bankers.” Many public banking advocates and activists define “public banks” as banks that are owned by governments — federal, regional, state or local — and that are tasked with serving a public mission.
This is a fine definition but when I use it, I mean something a bit broader: I include government-owned financial institutions, but I also include any financial institution for which maximizing profit is not the main goal. These banks must have a main mission that entails pursuing social goals such as community economic development, the promotion of environmental justice or promotion of cooperative economics. These banks might be purely government owned, but they might also be public-private partnerships. The key is that the “mission orientation,” not profit, has to be dominant.
As Thomas Marois has shown, there has been a resurgence in the creation and use of public banks around the world. There has also been a strong public banking movement in the United States, especially since the great financial crisis and the Occupy movement. As my former graduate student Esra Nur Ugurlu and I discovered when we did a survey of public banking activists, they pursue a number of goals in their attempts to establish public banking institutions: to provide affordable banking services to underserved communities, to invest in key social goods such as affordable housing, to provide more credit for cooperatives and small business, to promote environmental sustainability and fight against climate change.
The potential contributions of public banking to help solve these problems are many. First of all, private banks avoid making investments in these areas because they are perceived to be too risky or not profitable enough. It will largely take financial institutions with a public mission and mandate to make significant progress on many of these challenges.
Second, public banks can provide an alternative to overcharging, speculative mega banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. This will help society and the government to be less dependent on these “too big to fail” institutions and, in fact, can make it somewhat easier to just let them go by the wayside.
Third, by leveraging the financial power of the state, and by avoiding having to pay high returns to shareholders or massive salaries to bankers, these public financial institutions can provide basic financial services more cheaply.
Finally, because these public financial institutions will typically not face pressures from shareholders and highly paid management and traders to pursue maximum profits and bonuses, these institutions will take on less speculative and risky investments and be a stabilizing force in financial markets. Further, the governance structures of public banks are typically much more democratic and broadly representative than that of private for-profit banks. Most public banking initiatives have stakeholder and community representation on their boards of directors and/or advisory boards.
What are the challenges facing public banking, and what progress has been made so far towards public banking and finance?
Public banks come in various sizes and locations, and have various structures, procedures and functions. Public banking activists Ugurlu and I interviewed described a number of challenges they faced in their attempts to set up public banks. But one thing they almost all have in common is that they face serious pushback from the major private banking institutions and their allies, that is, from the “Bankers’ Club.”
The American Bankers Association (ABA) and local banking organizations routinely oppose legislation to establish public banks. The ABA position on public banks is as follows:
“The US has a healthy banking system with approximately 5,500 banks that offer a diversity of financial products and services to consumers, businesses and state and local governments. Creating a public bank would not only be redundant in the current marketplace, where financial offerings already efficiently meet customer needs, but potentially dangerous — placing taxpayer funds in institutions that may not have deposit insurance and whose business decisions will be driven by political priorities instead of sound risk management.
Numerous studies on the viability of public banks support the conclusion that they are not necessary, pose a significant risk to taxpayers, and would not provide an overall benefit to the state and local governments they are intended to serve.”
Virtually every sentence in this statement is false, but that does not prevent the ABA’s negative impact on the politics of public banking.
The private banks fear competition, and they fear a slippery slope movement to more public financial institutions and away from private, for-profit ones. There is also often a lack of understanding and interest among the public about the positive roles that public banking can play in their community.
In addition, increasing skepticism about government’s role in society can lead even critics of the big financial institutions to embrace private “solutions” such as cryptocurrency instead of public, community initiatives like public banking. Sometimes those in state government oppose the creation of public banks because they are worried about bank failure, or even the creation of financial institutions outside of their control.
Apart from these political and ideological obstacles, there are a number of rather specific logistical obstacles that public banks face. Ugurlu and I asked public banking activists to describe the major obstacles they faced. These included, first and foremost, acquiring the initial capital needed to start the bank; a continuous source of funds that they can use to lend to the target borrowers; a source of liquidity and financial backup, such as the Federal Reserve System might provide, that they could depend on in cases of unexpected adverse shocks; and community support for their activities.
There are some other factors that we thought would create challenges, but our interviewees did not mention them as important: These included skilled administrators with banking experience and employees who would be interested in working for the bank.
Just this month, the New Jersey Public Bank Implementation Board submitted a blueprint for the creation of a public bank to Gov. Phil Murphy. So, it seems that public banking efforts are indeed gaining momentum and clarity. But would these public banks help cities and state governments keep money away from Wall Street?
Yes, public banking activists are working in a significant number of states in the U.S. Public banking is also widespread in other parts of the globe. Many of these activists have proposed public banking institutions based on the model of the Bank of North Dakota, the only state bank in the U.S. (There is also a new public bank in Guam, with the motto: “The better-for-all-of-us bank: Reinvesting in the communities we serve.”)
The Bank of North Dakota, started by populist activists in 1919, operates on the partnership model: The bank does not take deposits from the public, but rather holds tax funds from the North Dakota Treasury; it does not typically lend directly to final borrowers, but rather lends to “partner” banking institutions who then on-lend to direct customers such as small businesses, housing developers, farm cooperatives, and the like.
The partnership model is being adopted by a number of public banking activist groups, including those in Massachusetts and New Jersey. This partnership model is designed to reduce competition with private financial institutions, with a focus on assuaging the concerns of smaller banks. Moreover, by lending cheaper credit to smaller community banks and helping to provide training for smaller, less experienced borrowers, some public banking models are able to help smaller community banks widen their customer base.
Still, these types of public banks, relatively small as they are, will not reduce these states’ reliance on Wall Street significantly, for example, as far as underwriting infrastructure bond issues and these kinds of financing needs are concerned. But they will help underserved borrowers and meet neglected community needs.
To really be able to compete with Wall Street and the big banks, public banks will have to become larger and more numerous. The Public Banking Act, a federal bill filed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, would, if passed, provide a federal regulatory infrastructure, liquidity support, and other assistance for public banks, making the establishment and running of such banks easier and likely to be more successful.
But placing public banking on a more level playing field with the big Wall Street banks will take a lot more than this. After all, the federal government has been bailing out these mega institutions several times to the tune of trillions of dollars over the last 40 years or more. Public banks have some catching up to do.
In your book, you argue that the Federal Reserve can be seen as having the potential to act as a national bank and thus play an important role as an agent of economic development in an era of climate change. Is this a realistic expectation given the model of capitalism that prevails in the U.S. economy and the power of the Bankers’ Club? Indeed, can the Fed ever become more accountable and democratic when the political system itself is dominated by money and makes a mockery of democracy?
The Federal Reserve is the biggest and most powerful public bank we have. Indeed, it is probably the most powerful public bank in the world. Yet, for the most part, it is overly focused on supporting the private financial institutions and markets, including engaging in trillion-dollar bailouts of banks and other financial institutions on what seems to be an increasingly frequent basis.
The Fed should have a broadened mandate to play a role in promoting the transition to a green economy, directly or indirectly increasing capital for underserved communities, and supporting the growth and reach of public banking. The debate over the role of the Fed and a public bank more generally has been a staple of U.S. history, and it is time that we keep it going and increase our calls for a truly public Federal Reserve.
Activists have made some progress around the edges: They have successful broadened the representation on the Regional Federal Reserve’s boards of directors to include fewer bankers and more community members; and during the height of COVID-19 crisis, through their influence on members of Congress, they won concessions from the Fed to include some small business and community credit facilities in their emergency bailout activities.
Yet, as you say, as in previous periods, there is enormous opposition, especially from the Bankers’ Club, to altering the orientation of the Fed. Still, the Fed is a creature of Congress, and, in principle, Congress can change the Fed’s mandate and marching orders. But to succeed here would require more progressive control in Congress which, in turn, would require the protection and expansion of real democracy in the U.S.
The key here is to limit the role of money in politics, but, as political scientist Doug Amy describes on his enormously valuable website, Second-Rate Democracy, restoring democracy will require much more than that. And now, with the threat of fascist Trumpism, our democracy is even more endangered.
Reform or revolution? Which strategy would work best toward enhancing the prospect of radical financial and social restructuring?
In a sense we need both. Where to start? Some believe we need to wait for another great financial crisis to sufficiently shake up the system, to generate enough anger and disgust, to generate a revolutionary moment to transform the economy, with finance along with it. I point out in the last chapter of my book that this is a problematic strategy since we have many cases, some as recent as the great financial crisis, when crises move politics to the right, not just to the left.
I urge people to join up with one or more of the Club Buster groups around the country (or world), for example Americans for Financial Reform, or a public banking initiative, or anti-fossil fuel funding activism, or work for politicians who will fight fascism and protect democracy.
Winning these battles will weaken the Bankers’ Club, encourage reformers and activists, and enhance their power to change our economy in more comprehensive ways — even revolutionary ways. At least, this is my hope.
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