Is capitalism on its last breath?

It may be hard to imagine that capitalism has outlived its relevance. No one can argue it better than Yanis Varoukakis, the former Finance Minister of Greece, who experienced the transition while negotiating his country’s debt crises with the European Union. Responding to his daughter’s compelling question ‘why is there so much inequality’ resulted in a slim volume entitled Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism which is a precursor to the book under reference. Capitalism’s two pillars, markets and profits, have mutated into cloud capital and cloud rent. Digital platforms are markets in themselves, and their primary function is to extract rent. 

The mutation may seem subtle, but its impact is profound. Cloud capital doesn’t necessarily labor to bring a commodity to market but receives a significant portion of what the consumers pay for it. With every click and scroll, the consumer pays rent to access what is on offer at those digital platforms. Varoufakis argues that cloud capital no longer focuses on growth, value and profit, but instead on rent extraction and control. Further, cloud capital reduces consumers into fragments of data, identifies them as a pack of choices, and manipulates them through algorithms. This reshaping of our lives may seem transformative, but it is no less exploitative and an imminent threat to our social co-existence. 

Called cloudalists, the sphere of influence of the new capitalists extends to nearly every facet of our app-powered daily life. Such is the influence, according to Varoufakis, we are reduced as products with our incessant clicks and searches generate profit for massive corporations; our data too is a product that gets bought and sold, and on top of it those who control the platforms have direct control over us, reducing us as digital pigmies. Need it be said that our capacity to stay focused has been compromised. Under such changing scenario, algorithms reinforce patriarchal stereotypes and hate-mongers for optimizing capital flow. 

TechnoFeudalism is about the historical journey in which humans not only transformed matter by taking control of technology but got transformed in return too. Ancient Greek poet Hesoid had summed it up by saying that iron hardened not only our ploughs but also our souls. Marx had described our condition under capitalism as one of alienation, under technofeudalism we no longer own our minds. Under technofeudalism, elaborates Varoufakis, a new class draws power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone. The author leaves the reader with the choice - accept either the world resembling Star Trek, where machines help us improve ourselves, or like The Matrix in which we are the fuel that empowers machines.  

It is not easy to read this book, but the narrative is insightful and empowering. Getting slowly sucked into the world of technofeudalism, the compelling question remains: will the new-age capitalism leave space and scope for freedom and democracy? The answer lies in capturing all that has changed since Mad Men implanted longings into our subconscious. It has since then been replaced by Alexa taking charge, spinning us out of control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. The rules of game are indeed threatening 

Technofeudalism is all about authority and control, it erects strong barrier to being questioned. By giving fewer opportunities for people to come together, it incapacitates people to organize and forge alliances for representation. The challenge is how to represent ourselves when what seemed labor to be paid and work to be executed is anything but a rent seeking feudalism that subsists on high-tech form of serfdom. The emerging technofeudalism is indeed global, and its power truly global. This book is not about technology but about the treatment meted to capitalism and therefore to us through screen-based, cloud-linked devices. 

TechnoFeudalism 
by Yanis Varoufakis
BodleyHead/Vintage
Extent: 281, Price: Rs. 531.

First published in Deccan Herald.

When the Sky poured acid

Innocent people invariably bear the cost of being nature's custodians at the hands of the colonial design.

Towards the end of Imbolo Mbue’s self-professed grueling novel How Beautiful We Were, the unnamed narrator leaves the readers in a peculiar double bind as the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of tussle between a sociopathic oil company and a defiant forest community veers towards a nuanced exploration of self-interest. Capturing human predicament that germinates in the contaminated soil of such industrial crimes, Mbue delivers compelling vignette of resistance and compliance, neglect and exposure, surprise and provocation, and litigation and corruption that grinds down exploited people to lose their sense of purpose. 

Told through the perspectives of a generation that is willing to sacrifice everything for its people, Mbue allows the full range of human desirability to evolve amidst despair while seeking an answer to the moral indecisiveness that lets humans fight for the same things they all want. Like her award-winning debut Behold the Dreamers about an African immigrant struggling to become an American citizen, the story empathizes with the legal and constitutional inadequacy of people fighting for survival within their own country. 

In this world that is fast turning emotionless and timeless, a fictional place comes alive with people with emotional range unfolding disconnect between what is assumed to be going around them and what is actually happening within them. Not leaving much to chance, the story starts by presuming its own end ‘when the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead.’ Nuanced but somewhat predictable, the possibility of an inspiring defeat at the hands of an inevitable corporate victory turns out to be a familiar story on individual suffering that often gets conveniently dispensed en masse. Mbue’s rerunning the events and repeating the collective voice dilutes the impact of narration, though.  

How Beautiful We Were is about life lived closer to nature, and the cost innocent people invariably bear for being its custodians while contesting the nefarious designs of colonialism. Polemic in structure, the novel peels layers of assertive human behavior that is thrust upon people whether they like it or not. Set in a fictional village, the story is as close to reality as it gets with complexities of human nature colliding in shaded spaces of existence. Allowing her characters the full range of decency and selfishness, Mbue excels in unraveling dichotomies of existence with panache, wisdom, and courage. Such powerful novels rekindle human spirit for redemption.

How Beautiful We Were 
by Imbolo Mbue
CanonGate/Penguin RandomHouse, New Delhi 
Extent: 364, Price: Rs. 699.

First published in The Hindu, issue dated May 16, 2021.

Because there are buyers around!

Pulling the world of knowledge from the trap of capitalist economy warrants a shift towards restoring academic freedom.

Neoliberal approaches in higher education have largely failed, as:  it has not led to greater efficiencies but to more bureaucracy; it has not led to greater liberties but to more constraints on teaching, research, and engagement; it has not led to more robust and autonomous institutions but to weakened institutions linked too closely to the immediate concerns of the day; and it has not led to new ways to grapple with the crises that face us but to treading farther down the same paths that created those crises. Prof. Lawrence Busch contends that as the capitalist economy promotes the marketing and branding of everything and everyone, pulling the world of knowledge out from the trap of the business model that aims at investing in education for getting a good job would warrant a shift towards restoring academic freedom.     

Knowledge for Sale could not have appeared at a more important time, as it reflects the painful decline the institutions of higher learning are going through. At stake is the role of higher education as a crucial public good, which is being compromised under the influence of the markets. The crisis is so stark that its symptoms are spread all over: decline of humanities education, escalating student debt, and underpaid contract faculty. One would imagine that with the only knowledge worth pursuing is that which has more or less immediate market value, such a situation was bound to occur.  

Lawrence Busch is not convinced, and challenges this market-driven approach. His thesis is based on the premise that most of the present-day problems – from climate change to water shortages, and from obesity to financial crises – would need new knowledge in addressing each of these issues. To imagine that market alone will resolve such issues is a fallacy worth challenging, because the market is neither inclusive nor transformative. It does alter consumptive habits only to the extent of minting profits, and almost always by externalizing costs of such a transition. Consider how market incentives in our food system promote diets that create obesity, thereby putting extra demands on medical institutions. Markets on their own cannot substitute institutions of higher education and research which co-create knowledge for the state to act upon. 

Drawing a distinction between liberals of 18th and 19th centuries with neo-liberals of 20th and 21st centuries, the author explains that while the liberals had argued that the State should merely leave the market alone, the neo-liberals sought nation-states active involvement in the market instead. No surprise, therefore, that the market has intervened at individual and institutional levels by changing the rules of the game. Hence, markets and market-like competitions have replaced direct government intervention in promoting higher education and research. 

Professor emeritus of sociology at Michigan State University, with research interests in environmental and agricultural research, Busch argues that education is a public good and that an educated citizenry is an essential component of functional democracy. Through an in-depth analysis on the influence of neo-liberalism the book provides a crucial rationale for defending higher education as an important public good, which ought to be protected from corporate control as defined by agents of privatization, deregulation, and commodification. For this to be realized, universities and research institutions must be remade as places where the future is neither already made in the mold of the market nor in which the market is to be avoided at all costs, but where many possible futures are proposed, debated, and discussed.

Among many cases of the kind, the case of 10-year lease agreement worth Canadian $7 million biotechnology research between Monsanto and the University of Manitoba illustrates how market influences research that may not necessarily be in the public interest. For three years, much to the dismay of many faculty members, the university administration unsuccessfully suppressed the news. This isn’t an isolated case of market influenced research. What is more, such dubious agreements erode public faith in research institutions.  

Knowledge for Sale peels many layers of the crises, including individual researchers’ laid back attitude awaiting pay-checks to those who capitalize public resources to maximize personal goals. Such situations have created a ‘moral hazard’ for the public sector, which only helped create an opening for the market to make inroads through open competition for external grants and by tagging institutions as products in the market. Although there is some merit in this approach as it promises to increase efficiency, productivity and profits, it eventually undermines research, education, public engagement, and fails to contribute to promoting democracy. In the nutshell, public good gets compromised! 

In making a case for the promoting and strengthening public good, Busch investigates four institutional core areas - administration, education, research, and extension – in enlisting specific proposals for change. Ranging from making research institutions secure places with attached conditions to making universities models of democratic discourse, the book challenges the pervasive idea that higher education needs to be run like a business. Citing successful initiatives at many universities and research institutions, Busch has drawn an actionable agenda at the core of which the leading question before the society at large is: what kind of universities and research institutes we want to help us come out of the wicked problems afflicting us?    

For those in the spheres of academics, Knowledge for Sale offers substance to view the current predicaments while at the same time remaining brief and accessible. 

Knowledge for Sale
by Lawrence Busch
The MIT Press, USA
Extent: 153, Price: $25.95

First published in Current Science, issue dated January 25, 2019.