Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnan Guru Murphy and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is the Greek economist Janis

Varifakis. He was briefly in 2015 the Greek finance minister during the height of the

debt crisis. He has been involved in electoral politics in his own country. He has campaigned

around Brexit and been very involved with the Labour Party in this country. But he recently

lost his parliamentary seat himself. He is the author of many books and his latest is called

Technofudalism. What killed capitalism? Thank you very much and do you have a joining us?

Thank you for having me. Let's go through this very simply. I mean first of all feudalism.

By feudalism I imagine medieval peasants who are effectively forced to live on the land of

their lords and masters. They give him a slice of their produce or their income and they are

basically bound to him and have no freedom. Is that what you mean by feudalism? That's what we

mean by feudalism but not by technofudalism. So what's this technofudalism? I'm glad you started

with feudalism because the great transformation which has created the modern world was the one

from feudalism to capitalism. As you correctly put it, feudalism was a socio-economic system

predicated upon land and land ownership. So the aristocracy owned the land. It got a lot of

economic, social, political power. It was all one thing back then. There was no distinction. If

you had political power, you had economic power unlike under capitalism. And the wealth

was transferred to the ruling class to the aristocracy through, as you put it, rent,

taking a slice of the produce, the harvest of the peasants who didn't

labor for a wage. There was no labor market. You couldn't quit. You didn't receive a wage.

You just kept that which the landlord or the sheriff operating on the landlord's behalf

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