Varoufakis' word salad visions offer no solution path

These were some quick thoughts I shared with a friend after reading Varoufakis’ recent article on a Star Trek-inspired Utopia. This loosely links to my earlier post on “ Graeber and Thiel”.

Yanis’ utopian view is one I agree with that we should aim to live in a future where “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things.” But his reasoning that accumulation is followed by imperialism is weak. Why? Becuase his premise is that a post-scarcity utopia can be achieved through energy abundance (which is really what Star Trek’s “Replicators” are: machines that can make anything from green energyI haven’t watched Star Trek so I am using his description of them. ). The follow-on question, which he doesn’t really address, is how can one get to this infinite energy future without a manufacturer of solar panels or some other harnessing technology of permanent/renewable energy sources? Can we manufacture anything without gathering (accumulating!) resources to manufacture these technologies capable of harnessing and then supplying this infinite energy?

Just because energy is itself freely available doesn’t mean that we can manufacture distribution technologies without resource accumulation, which inevitably requires capital and agency. Today, capital is a basis for enabling agency to create these energy abundance technologies just as much as good will/intentions. This capital can come from bureaucractic governments, which are slow, or private capital, which can be fast- both can be to a detrimentWhich is why we need to seriously experiment with new ways to organise action. . Thus, I don’t see anyway out of accumulation. In fact, I see it as essential to our energy abundant future- a future where energy is too cheap to meter.The questions that then follow are what are our technology optionswhich I will explore in a future post. to achieve this abundance and then we can think about the politics of organised action.

Capital is new; the evolution of our trading behaviours are not. Varoufakis’ position ignores our roots as not just hunters, but gatherers, which enables trade/barter (i.e., much like I said about capital enabling agency but also many other things). To me, it follow that if no one gathers, then no one can have and therefor no one share/trade/barter with another. In that vein, if everyone gathers (the same stuff) then everyone can have but again, no one need share/trade/barter. But in reality effort and motivation are not equally distributed among a population, which’s why only some people gather some of the stuff which then creates conditions for trading.

Both Graeber (whom I love as his wit reminds me of Christopher Hitchens) and Yanis have lofty goals but do not present concrete ideas of getting there from where we currently are. And this, to me, is lazy. What we need to do is to solve a motion planning problem that generates a path using, as inputs, today’s conditions and their utopian goal state. But they don’t do that- perhaps it is because they are incapable of thinking about things in that way or they disagree with it or purely because they are more comfortable with arm-chair philosophising, which is frustrating. Moralistic posturing of this kind without action is hard to get behind because it exposes a lack of appreciation of, especially today, technology being upstream of politics and not the other way around. One only needs to look at the recent use of social media in elections across the world to understand this claim’s veracity. One can counterargue that Apollo is an example of politics bucking the claim but one only needs to look at the idea’s origin: Tsiolkovsky articulated the need for liquid propelants, which inspired research into rocket propulsion (largely in Germany and America) that was then weaponised and eventually became the basis for the Apollo programWorth reading the first chapter of John Drury Clark’s Ignition. . The political choices of weaponisation and space exploration was thus downstream of rocket technology progress.

So, reader, I leave you with questions: do we really need another critique on today’s world without a semblance of a solution? How long can we run on the fumes of a vision of what a wonderful world it could be?