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- Author: Yanis Varoufakis
- Full Title: Another Now
- Category: #books
- The corporation Kosti described had eliminated not only bosses and hierarchies but one of the crucial injustices of capitalism: that the owners of a company control its profits while those who work within it receive only a wage.
- Just as the ownership of one person by another is intolerable, irrespective of how well the master treats the slave, so too is an illiberal and unjust wage contract, whatever the wage or the working conditions.
- Its central tenet was that power is civilization’s worst enemy, especially when channelled through hierarchies, which only bring out the worst in us. Like left-wing radicals, anarcho-syndicalists opposed private rights over property and the noxious division of earnings between wages for minions and profits for the masters. But anarcho-syndicalists went a step further and opposed the state itself, which they saw as the main defender of those property rights and corporate hierarchies.
- One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s stunning observations was that no private language is possible. By definition, language is something that can only be produced collectively. Iris enjoyed pointing out that the same is true of wealth. In direct contradiction of the myth promoted by capitalists and rentiers that wealth is produced by individuals, only to be collectivized by the state through taxation, the reality, Iris argued, is that wealth, like language, can only be produced collectively. Only then is it privatized by those with the power to do so. To illustrate her argument, she would point out that pre-modern forms of capital such as farmland and seeds were collectively developed through generations of peasant endeavour before being appropriated by landlords. Today, every Apple, Samsung, Google or Microsoft device relies on infrastructure and components that were originally developed thanks to a government grant or made possible by drawing on the commons of ideas that grew in the same way folk tales and songs do: communally. While big tech has eagerly appropriated all this socially produced capital – and made a mint in the process – it has never paid any dividends to society. And it does not stop there. Every time we search for something on Google, navigate using an app or post a photo on Facebook or Instagram, we add to those corporations’ capital stock with our data. Guess who is collecting all the dividends?