Is Milei an instrument for the transition to technofeudalism?

A few weeks ago, I wrote in my column in Ámbito about the debate between State and Market, highlighting the fact that the antinomy is not black-white or Boca-River, but the multiple ways of shaping that balance. But the intellectual laziness of our times, added to the prevailing post-truth, makes an honest discussion on the subject very difficult, and, in turn, the very Javier Milei He takes the conversation to the extreme of absurdity by stating that he himself came to put an end to the State.

But let’s move on a little, and what if Milei is not talking about something as absurd as he is suggesting and is actually referring to something else? On this side of the divide, we tend to pigeonhole Milei’s government as neoliberal or financial valorisation, but is that all? Are we facing a new version of economic policy similar to that of the military government (1976-1983), similar to the nineties or the four years of Macri? Or is it something on a larger scale, effectively tending towards the destruction of the State? In other words, if we identify Javier Milei’s political economy alliances, what kind of State-Non-State do they need?

Recently, Yanis Varoufakis, an economist, author of several books and Minister of Economy during the first months of the Tsipras government in Greece in the midst of the debt crisis, put forward a hypothesis in a recent work on the global transformation of capitalism. I must admit a particular interest in the man who was my professor at the University of Texas, in whom I always found overcoming proposals that escape the gaze of economic balances and imbalances.

In his new book, “Technofeudalism”, From a historical materialist perspective, the question is whether the economic, political and social organization on which the capitalist economy is based is still alive. The technological change that involves big data, artificial intelligence, the life of algorithms and who manages the data clouds (cloud capitalism) and the accumulation and distribution of wealth that it entails are modifying the classic structure of capital owners who require labor to produce and appropriate the differential produced by it.

In other words, Varoufakis suggests that great economic wealth and power are moving away from traditional forms of income based on surplus value (although these are still in force) and land rent. He even suggests that financial valorisation is mutating into a new way of generating, recycling and concentrating the world’s capital. For the author, this change is so great that we are no longer facing a variation within capitalism, but rather we find ourselves in another system of production and accumulation.

This risks a return to the feudal idea, where a few are owners of privileges by law (they are now owners of intellectual property rights, patents, or APIs) and the others pay rent for using their goods or services (now in the form of free delivery of data and time that the algorithms need). Thus the new feudal lords in the world of algorithms are the large platforms, owners of the clouds that store data. The previously called GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) to which we must add X – formerly Twitter -, Microsoft and the Chinese magnate WeChat along with TikTok.

Two central elements stand out: a) the privatization of the Internet carried out by the big American and Chinese technology companies, and b) the way in which Western governments and Central Banks responded to the 2008 crisis (fearful of the crisis, the Central Banks issued a lot of currency that did not end up in productive products or investments, but – together with the subsequent pandemic – to increase the enormous profits of the technology companies that only require 1% of the income for the proletarians of the cloud to operate, compared to 80% for industrial companies. Here we find a dangerous fusion: cloud capital with financial capital, not only at the level of Wall Street, but in each of our cell phones.

Returning to one of our initial questions, do these national state companies need to establish order or guarantee a balance between capital and labour to ensure a certain number of consumers? A priori the answer is no. Nor do they need an educated population, if the less we know, the easier it is to trust an AI agent or an algorithm. Why redistribute, if wealth is not concentrated from the sale of mass or exclusive products?

At the same time, the economic concentration that we are experiencing in the world is of such magnitude that technology companies can give loans and investments to the same States and subnational governments, guaranteeing access to the natural resources necessary for the new techno-feudal paradigm.

This seems to be Milei’s bet, who has already visited the great “popes” of technology (Musk, Zukerberg, Galperín) and the far-right forces in the world. What is his agenda? The current national misgovernment that generates indigence, poverty, unemployment, deindustrialization and national fragmentation is far from benefiting any national economic actor; not even such a bastardized financial industry finds peace in this hell. Therefore, Milei’s affirmation of the destruction and weakening of the State seems to be fortuitously aligned with a global transition. Here it is worth asking whether Peronism will succeed in showing – once again – that there is another way.