A historic mutual defence pact called the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement was signed by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan on 7 August. It stipulates that an attack on any single member nation constitutes an attack on all three. Representatives from the three nations maintain that it is purely defensive while remaining open-ended for other aligned nations to potentially join.

Iran welcomed the agreement, calling it a sign of the growing realisation in the region that they “cannot trust the US and other extra-regional countries to provide them security.”

“Given developments over the past two or three years, regional countries have realized that security is not a commodity that can be purchased from false security brokers,” Esmail Baghaei, official spokesperson of Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a regular press conference in Tehran on Monday.

He also rejected speculations about Iran being the target of the regional security arrangement, claiming his country has nothing to worry about the pact because of its “deep-rooted bonds” with all three countries.

Iran’s reaction to the pact announced last week largely reinforces the assurances given by leaders of Pakistan and Türkiye.

Both Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sherif and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan have dismissed the arguments about a possible Iranian threat being the motivation behind the Mecca Accord as it is informally referred to.

Both underlined the fact that talks for such a regional arrangement had been taking place much before the US-Israeli war on Iran began. Turkish FM Fidan claimed talks began around three years ago. Fidan claimed the failure of existing security arrangements under the umbrella of “external hegemons” in the region has played a significant role in pushing the parties to come together.

“External hegemons coming into the region do not solve the problems; they make them more acute, and the cost becomes very high,” Fidan said during an interview with Anadolu Agency, underlining the need for countries in the region to develop their own mechanisms and institutions to resolve their security and economic issues.

US failures to curb Israeli expansionism

The signatories of the Mecca Accord emphasised deterrence without naming specific threats and expressed hope that more countries in the region would join the accord in the coming days.

They have all underlined that the motivation behind the collective security arrangement was the ongoing wars in the region and growing threats of expansionism.

Despite the fact that Tukiye is already a NATO member and Saudi Arabia has several large US military bases, both have realised the precarity of their security situation and economic interests in the last few years.

Israel launched a war in Gaza in October 2023 and has since invaded and occupied lands in Lebanon and Syria, and attacked Iran and Yemen. In September last year, it also launched a strike inside Qatar, home to one of the largest US bases in the world.

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and continues to practise violence and apartheid in other occupied Palestinian territories. It has violated international laws and the territorial integrity of several countries in the region in carrying out the assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders without facing any repercussions.

Israeli leaders have threatened attacks against Türkiye as well over its opposition to genocide in Gaza. The growing possibility of a geostrategic confrontation in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government has further intensified the tensions between both countries.

Lately, they have also pushed the narrative of a “greater Israel” which envisages grabbing land mostly from long-term regional allies of the US.

Successive administrations in the US have not only failed to stop Israeli aggressions and reassure its allies by taking a strong stance against the “greater Israel” concept but instead actively defended its actions, doubled military support, and even participated in wars.

The US has dragged Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region into its war with Iran by using its military bases located in these countries. It has also failed to protect them when the Iranians retaliated.

The failure of the US to stop Israel and provide protection from Iranian retaliations together had pushed these countries, hitherto relying on its military might, to seek alternative arrangements.

Aims to strengthen collective security

Though the details of the agreement signed by Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman are still patchy, the joint statement issued by the parties on Friday, 7 August, confirms that it has the provisions of a collective security arrangement.

The arrangement is similar to Article Five of the NATO Agreement, according to Fidan. This means the signatories would consider an armed attack on one of them an attack on all three.

However, there is no explicit obligation to use force in the agreement. It largely provides for greater security-related cooperation and coordination among the signatories without any compulsion to use force on each other’s behalf during a conflict involving one of them.

Pakistan has also claimed that the Mecca Accord is very similar to the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed last year and builds on its provisions rather than superseding them.

The signatories have claimed the pact is purely defensive in nature and “aims to strengthen collective security and promote peace, security and stability in the region and beyond.”

Maternal deaths have nearly doubled in Ituri province, the epicentre of the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak ever recorded, ravaging the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

About six women are “dying each week from childbirth-related complications,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, said in a press conference on 7 August. ​

Fear of catching the disease in healthcare facilities, “combined with disruptions to services,” is keeping people from seeking medical care, said John Agbor, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Representative in the DRC.​

“Ebola infection during pregnancy remains associated with almost universal foetal loss,” added Haq.​

However, as women avoid healthcare facilities fearing infection, childbirth without medical supervision is on the rise, as indicated by a 13% fall in deliveries at healthcare facilities across the province since the outbreak was declared on 15 May​.

According to UNICEF, the percentage drop is far higher in the hotspots within Ituri: 30% in Rwampara, 38% in Bunia, and a steep 70% in Nizi. This drop in facility-assisted deliveries correlates with the near doubling of maternal mortality.​

Children are also at high risk, as the routine administration of vaccine shots has halved in the hotspots. This compounds the dangers the “children already face directly from Ebola itself,” UNICEF said in a statement, adding that although less than a quarter of the confirmed cases have been detected in children, they account for a third of all the deaths. The case fatality rate is almost double that of adults in children below the age of five. Over 60% of the infected children in this age group have died.​

Less than three months since the outbreak was declared on 15 May, the disease has killed at least 1,850 and infected more than 4,000 people as of 5 August, in what has become the largest ever Ebola outbreak recorded in DRC. The speed of its spread is outpacing the West Africa outbreak in 2014, which killed 11,325 and infected 28,600 across many countries.

However, in the first three months since the outbreak was declared, it had infected 759 and killed 467—a fraction of the number of confirmed cases and deaths in the current outbreak, which had spread over 51 health zones across five provinces.

All of them are located in the conflict-ridden northeast of the country, including the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, large portions of which are occupied by the Rwandan military and its proxy, the M23 armed group. This has imposed additional difficulty in tracing and responding to the health emergency.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched on the streets across India, with thousands risking arrest in various parts of the country on Monday, 10 August. The actions were part of a joint national call by peasant and worker unions opposing the proposed trade agreement with the US and raising other demands.

The protesters, which included farmers, informal and formal sector workers, students, youth and women, marched in several cities and towns in India to their respective government offices carrying banners and red flags, and raising slogans of peasant-worker unity against government policies.

At some places they also clashed with the security forces trying to block their marches and laid a temporary siege of the government offices.

The protesters demanded the withdrawal of the proposed Indo-US trade deal announced by the Donald Trump administration earlier this year, calling it antithetical to Indian agriculture. They published a detailed charter of the demand as well.

At various places large gatherings were organized where speakers reminded the audience of the failures of the Narendra Modi government in fulfilling major promises related to the welfare of the country’s farmers.

The speakers talked about how a series of legislation brought by this government has actually harmed the interests of the farmers and the country’s rural economy, which has long been in distress.

The speakers accused that by supporting a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US, the ultra-right-wing government, led by the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has yet again exposed its subordination to imperialist dictates and its indifference to the country’s real interests.

A large number of protesters were seen on the streets of various Indian states, such as West Bengal, Kerala, Tamilnadu, Tripura, Rajasthan, Haryana, Assam, Maharashtra, among others.

The protest was jointly called by Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) and Central Trade Unions (CTUs) along with the All India Agricultural Workers Association (AIAWA) and was supported by students, youth, and women’s unions.

SKM has issued a charter of demands and given the government until 26 November, the sixth anniversary of the farmers agitation on the borders of Delhi, to fulfill those demands, warning of a larger indefinite movement otherwise.

Agricultural distress in India under Modi

The SKM and CTUs, representing millions of farmers and workers, have claimed the 26 November protests would be their joint attempt to “Save Agriculture, Save Industry and Save India.”

More than 40% of India’s workforce and nearly 60% of its population is still dependent on agriculture and related fields for their livelihood. Around 70% of Indians still live in rural areas.

Decades of neoliberal economic reforms have negatively impacted the rural economy and agriculture, causing massive agricultural distress with hundreds of thousands farmers committing suicide due to indebtness and the lack of an alternative means of living.

The distress has forced millions to abandon agriculture and migrate to cities seeking alternative sources of livelihood.

Instead of addressing their issues, the Modi government which came to power in 2014, farmers accuse, has adopted policies which have further harmed their interests. This has led to several rounds of mass protests in the last decade.

After over a year-long farmer protest at the borders of the capital, New Delhi, the Modi government was forced to sign an agreement with the SKM on 9 December 2021.

It agreed to withdraw contentious agricultural laws it had brought in 2019 and to enact a law for the legal Minimum Support Price (MSP) for agricultural products to address a long standing demand of farmers.

The SKM claims that, due to the absence of a legal MSP, farmers are often forced to sell their products at prices much lower than their actual cost of production, incurring huge financial losses every season.

However, five years later, farmers are alleging that none of the demands which the Modi government agreed to were fulfilled.

“The Narendra Modi government has failed to fulfill its promises of implementing a legal MSP and withdrawing cases against the protesters made during the farmers agitation five years ago,” Hannan Mollah, one of the leaders of the 2020–21 farmers agitation and leader of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), a major constituent of the SKM, said in a message.

He accused the Modi government of enacting more policies which make the lives of farmers and workers in the country even more difficult.

The government has introduced more contentious legislation, including a bill for the privatization of electricity and the withdrawal of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), a major relief for millions of peasants looking for some work during the period between two crops and signed several FTAs with countries like New Zealand, EU, and the UK.

Major demands

The proposed trade deal with the US has caused concern among millions of farmers about the possible tariff-free imports of American agricultural products.

The tariff-free entry of highly subsidized agricultural products from the US and other countries will make Indian agricultural products even more expensive for local consumers, the SKM claims. This will displace millions more from farming with no alternative means of living.

Apart from the withdrawal of all FTAs and the proposed trade deal with the US, there are six other major demands raised by the protesters:

1. An MSP law on the basis of C2+50% (total cost of production+50% profit) for all agricultural products

2. A comprehensive loan waiver to end rural indebtedness addresses suicides of peasants and daily wagers”

3. The withdrawal of four labor codes and a national minimum wage of Rs. 31,000 (around $325 per month)

4. The restoration of the NREGA and a minimum 200 days of guaranteed work for all

5. The withdrawal of the electricity privatization bill

6. An end to all forceful land acquisitions

AIKS, in a press release on Saturday, had called the protests a message to the government about the strong peasant-workers unity against “the brutal exploitation of farmers and workers by the corporate capitalist forces through the denial of minimum support price to farmers and minimum wage for a dignified life to workers and agricultural workers.”

The SKM and CTUs have been working in tandem for months now mobilizing against the anti-worker and anti-farmer policies of the Modi government. SKM had supported the national strike against the four new labor codes on 12 February in which an estimated 300 million Indians participated.

SKM has warned that if the government fails to listen to the farmers and workers after the protests on Monday it will send a mass delegation to the prime minister of India on 17 August to submit the charter of its demands and begin preparing for the indefinite protests from 26 November by carrying out local level campaigns.

Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, health workers have been among the loudest voices exposing Israel’s attacks on healthcare. Nurses, doctors, and other medics warned relentlessly that the systematic destruction of health and life in Palestine is a blueprint for what could follow if occupation authorities are not stopped. They helped mobilise millions around the world—yet they also faced censorship and attempts to discredit them inside their own professional spaces.

Recent experiences by health professionals suggest these are not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated strategy to delegitimise medical expertise when it counters Israel’s claims about attacks on Palestinian, Lebanese, and other patients, medics, and infrastructure.

As part of this trend, surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta was accused of antisemitism before medical regulatory bodies in Britain, a campaign that included lobbying by the group UK Lawyers for Israel. Late last year, public health expert Dr Mary Bassett was removed as head of Harvard’s Frances-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights following campaigns by pro-Israel groups. Similarly, health workers and academics with expertise on conflict health are continuously undermined at conferences and meetings through postponements, restrictive speaker guidelines, and attempts at public discreditation.

Dr. Eveline Hitti, a professor of emergency medicine, notes that lobbying for censorship of scholarly work dealing with health in Palestinian and Lebanese populations is especially pronounced in academic settings. “These are the spaces where discussion about health in Gaza have been most heavily policed,” she told BreakThrough News, “precisely because of the credibility of the people producing this work and the ripple effect it has across the medical community.”

The weaponisation of objectivity and medical neutrality

Last month, only hours ahead of a discussion on healthcare in conflict and displacement settings in West Asia, planned to be hosted by the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s (SAEM) Global Emergency Medicine Academy, speakers were informed that the talk was to be postponed. Informally, they were told the decision had come after an intervention by the American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA) to SAEM’s leadership complaining about the set-up.

AJMA’s representatives reportedly argued the webinar would present a definitive take on a “contested geopolitical conflict.” The featured speakers included Dr Hitti, who helped lead Lebanon’s COVID-19 response and healthcare activities in the aftermath of Israel’s pager attacks, and Assistant Professor Dr Thaer Ahmad, who worked in Gaza’s emergency services during the genocide. On more than one occasion, building on available medical data, both Dr Hitti and Dr Ahmad exposed the devastating impact of Israel’s attacks on health in Gaza and Lebanon. Their scholarly work helped counter attempts by Israel itself and pro-Israel advocates to claim that attacks on Palestinian and Lebanese hospitals and health workers are anything other than what they are under international law: crimes.

AJMA resorted to a well-known tactic by implying the webinar would be “one-sided” without the presence of an Israeli speaker. Pro-Israel groups continue to call for “both sides” to be represented at the table as they attempt to silence criticism of the ongoing genocide, trying to equate such criticism with antisemitism.

In medical settings, the tactic is often reinforced through the misuse of the concept of medical neutrality. These organisations weaponise the principle—meant to uphold the right of all patients to care within conflict irrespective of their role or side—to claim that health professionals have no place in any political debate. The argument is adapted and has increasingly been used at different levels of health governance, from webinars like SAEM’s to the halls of the World Health Organization (WHO), where the Israeli delegation regularly cries “politicization” as WHO members discuss health conditions in Palestine.

Yet as Dr Hitti points out, the guiding principle for physicians and other health workers should be to protect the right to health by upholding human rights and adhering to evidence, international law, and medical ethics—not the pursuit of artificial political “balance.” In fact, when dozens of United Nations experts and humanitarian organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights Israel, as well as countless scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals have documented Israeli war crimes, it becomes difficult to argue that including the occupation’s representatives would lead to a sound academic discussion.

Dr Hitti emphasises that insisting on “representation” imposes a standard not applied to other academic sessions. “A panel on the health consequences of tobacco is not biased because it lacks tobacco industry representation,” she points out. “When we present in academic settings,” she adds, “we are required to uphold academic integrity standards by grounding our talks in strong medical evidence.”

“Their demand to include representatives from the occupying forces is, in fact, imposed political advocacy.”

“AJMA supports and celebrates Israel!”

Materials available on AJMA’s channels suggest this instrumentalisation of “balance” and “neutrality” is central to the organisation’s approach. Founded in “the aftermath of October 7, 2023,” AJMA states it has approximately 3,000 members and supporters, whom it allegedly supports in addressing antisemitism, mainly in health workplaces. “Healthcare environments must remain safe, professional, patient-centred, and free from ideological hostility,” they write on their website.

At the same time, AJMA’s activities include participating in New York’s Israel Day Parade—in 2024, 2025, and 2026 —to “show that the AJMA community supports and celebrates Israel.” Throughout the genocide, the association has organised “solidarity healthcare missions” to Israel and co-hosted screenings of the disputed film “Screams Before Silence.”

It has also organised a long list of public events. None of those related to the ongoing conflicts in West Asia appear to have included speakers from Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian organisations. They have, however, featured co-organizers and speakers from the Dinah project, the Anti-Defamation League, and NGO Monitor, as well as former Israeli intelligence officials to speak on the war on Iran.

AJMA’s listed partners include the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), an organization that health workers around the world are calling to be suspended from the World Medical Association (WMA) over its complicity in Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Among others, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned the IMA had provided institutional cover for attacks on Gaza’s health system and “lobbied to block international ceasefire calls, prioritising military alignment over its humanitarian duty to protect life.”

The partnerships pursued by AJMA—including with organisations called out for enabling war crimes—suggest its commitments lie with “supporting and celebrating Israel” rather than protecting medical neutrality.

Conference organisers “in a difficult position”

The approach is not specific to AJMA nor limited to the SAEM webinar. Dr. Hitti notes that this is the third time she has experienced what seemed to be concentrated attempts to censor health-related discussions on Gaza and Lebanon in academic settings. Earlier examples included a presentation she gave at the International Emergency Medicine Conference (IEMC) in Montreal and a panel she was organizing at the Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Conference (MEMC) in 2025.

At IEMC, Dr. Hitti was asked to hold a plenary on Mass Casualty Response to hybrid warfare—a tactic much used by Israel, to which she led the response on multiple occasions. While the audience’s standing ovation spoke to the overwhelmingly positive response, she emphasises, the organisers later let her know it had put them “in a difficult position.” In response, they proceeded to release new speaker guidelines that require presenters to declare their “political conflict of interest.”

Moreover, they expanded speaker selection criteria beyond assessment of content expertise to include review of the speaker’s social media activity and public media presence. The new guidelines now require speakers “to submit plenary presentations slides” for review by “speaker coaches” who would screen for “concerning content”—all amounting to curated speech suppression within spaces that are meant to honor academic freedom.

The difficult position IEMC organizers referred to might be linked to a document that Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) submitted to the Canadian Senate. In it, the organization argued one of the interventions at the conference—presumably Dr. Hitti’s—was part of a worsening climate of antisemitic hatred in the medical community. They wrote the following: “It [the presentation] also mischaracterized Israel’s September 2024 ‘pager operation,’ a targeted military action against Hezbollah operatives, a “war crime” … The speaker also accused Israel of bombing hospitals in Gaza, omitting Hamas’s documented use of these facilities as Hamas command centres, weapons depots, and hideouts for Hamas operatives.”

However, while accusing health workers of antisemitism for standing in solidarity with Palestine, DARA’s brief made no reference to the fact that UN experts described Israel’s pager attack as “terrifying violations of international law.” At the time, UN experts emphasised that the detonation of communication devices in civilian spaces constituted a severe breach of humanitarian norms. Similarly, DARA did not mention the extensive audiovisual and written materials documenting the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. Nor did they note that several mainstream outlets have debunked claims that Palestinian hospitals were being used as cover for military operations. Instead, DARA insisted that genocide should not be discussed among health workers as “a medical diagnosis.”

Medical associations must stand up to pro-Israel groups” pressure

By attempting to silence health workers“ and academics” voices, pro-Israel groups are undermining some of the most essential humanitarian values medicine is supposed to uphold. Additionally, by trying to limit space for documenting the impacts of Israel’s attacks on healthcare in West Asia, these organisations are also contributing to obscuring information about the conditions in which care is being delivered in Palestine, Lebanon, and other countries under attack—as well as ongoing attacks on other health workers.

This is echoed through the associations” continuous collaboration with Israeli groups accused of enabling international crimes, like the IMA. “While Palestinian health workers are killed, tortured, and forced to operate under siege, the IMA, and much of the Israeli medical community, has remained silent, failing to condemn attacks on healthcare or hold its members accountable for violations of medical ethics,” the People’s Health Movement (PHM) wrote. “This silence, in the face of systematic destruction and dehumanisation, destroys the integrity of the medical profession and enables further attacks on health workers.”

And while the IMA does obviously not meet any requirements for “medical neutrality,” pro-Israel health organisations seem to have no problem collaborating with them. If medical associations are to retain claims to ethical and academic integrity, they must resist pressure exercised by these groups and uphold the right of health workers to speak on the basis of medical professional values and humanitarian law. If they call out and fight back against intimidation attempts, Dr Hitti says, they are likely to find overwhelming support among their members.

Riding on the windfall public revenues generated from mining after expanding state ownership and increasing royalties, Mali’s government is mulling over a plan to raise over $880 million to develop critical infrastructure.

Following the first meeting of the Energy, Water and Transport Infrastructure Development Fund on July 31, Finance Minister Alousseni Sanou said that the fund generates at least 50 billion CFA francs (almost $88 million) annually. He added that this steady stream of revenue could be leveraged to borrow up to 500 billion CFA francs for infrastructural development.​

Created in 2023, this fund is financed by taxes collected from mining companies, including 10% of ad valorem taxes and 1% of quarterly turnover for the first five years of the permit, followed by 2% thereafter.​ This fund is only one of the many means by which the government is channelling mining revenues back into the national economy.

Expanding national stakes in mining

The mining reforms in 2023, as a part of which this fund was established, also gave the state a free 10% stake in all new mining projects and required foreign mining companies to transfer 5% of their equity to Malian private investors through a state-owned intermediary.​

This brought the minimal national stake – private and public – to 15%. It could go up to 35% as it empowered the state to purchase an additional 20% stake. The almost $1.47 billion the state collected in mining revenues in 2024 amounted to a 52.5% increase compared to the pre-reforms period, when the 2019 mining code capped the maximum state ownership to 20%, and made no provisions for local Malian investors.​

However, soon after adopting this code, the France-backed regime of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was overthrown in a popularly supported military coup in 2020, amid mass protests against its subservience to the former colonizer. Later in 2022, the military government led by Col. Assimi Goïta consolidated mass support by expelling French troops in an assertion of Mali’s political sovereignty.​

The government has since pursued greater national control over its mineral wealth – historically extracted by and for the benefit of foreign companies – as an economic corollary of Mali’s political sovereignty. In early 2023, the government launched an audit of the past year’s mining operations.​

The new mining code enforced since July 2023 was an effort to address the problems identified in this audit, which revealed massive shortfalls in the state’s mining revenues. The government then set up a commission to recover these shortfalls from foreign miners.

Facing down the mining giants

Mining companies, including the Canadian giant Barrick Mining, resisted. The government, however, did not play softball. It issued an arrest warrant for its CEO, seized its gold stockpile from the Loulo-Gounkoto mine, which was temporarily placed under state administration.

After dragging the tax dispute for two years, Barrick finally settled last year, paying $438 million and agreeing to migrate to the new mining regime. Also paying up and agreeing to toe the state policy were the Canadian miners B2Gold and Allied Gold, the UK-based Endeavour Mining and Kodal Minerals, Australian company Resolute Mining, and the Chinese Ganfeng Lithium.

By the end of 2025, the commission had recovered USD 1.2 billion in arrears. In March 2026, the government redistributed $33 million in mining revenues to municipalities and local administration in mining-affected areas and other underdeveloped regions.​

To formalize artisanal mining

Later that month, Mali’s council of ministers adopted legislation establishing the Malian Office of Precious Substances, which became operative in July to formalize artisanal mining.​

There are nearly two million people involved in artisanal mining in an estimated 350 to 400 sites across Mali. In the absence of any functional mechanism put in place by previous governments to procure their production, 30–57 metric tonnes of Malian gold worth USD 1.98–3.77 billion left the country through smuggling networks every year.​

Bringing this tonnage into the official channels through the Malian Office of Precious Substances will further boost state revenues in the coming months and years, as demonstrated by neighboring Burkina Faso.​

The success of these mining reforms has been widely acknowledged in the business press and mining-focused publications. Fousseni Togola, president of the Mali Chamber of Mines, is scheduled to be one of the two panellists for a session titled ‘Expanding Africa’s Gold Output’ at the annual African Mining Week (AMW) from October 14–16 in Cape Town, South Africa.​

He will be sharing the panel with Benford Mokoatle, an Advisory Board member of the AMW, and the executive director of the South Africa-based Gold Fields Limited, one of the world’s largest gold mining firms, listed on the Johannesburg and New York stock exchanges.​

A recently published report claims that the Narendra Modi-led ultra-right-wing government in India ignored all international and domestic warnings about the Israeli genocide in Gaza and directly or indirectly enabled Israel in committing war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

India emerged as one of the leading weapon suppliers to Israel, with a total of over 2,596 shipments of arms sent to it since the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023, says the recently published Amnesty International report.

The report says Indian weapons, ammunition, parts, and components of dual-use items were used by the Israeli army to kill and maim Palestinians and destroy the civilian infrastructure in Gaza.

The report, titled “Made in India: The Supply of Weapons and Ammunition to Israel,” was published on 30 July with details of shipments, actors involved, and the possible nature of their complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Over 73,000 Palestinians, a large number of them children, have been killed, and over 174,000 others have been wounded in the Israeli war in Gaza.

Though a ceasefire was achieved in October last year, Israel still continues to carry out daily attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, with over 1,200 people killed and over 4,100 others injured in those attacks.

Close ideological connections

It is a fact that India was not the only country supplying weapons to Gaza during the war. The US and various European states, such as Germany, France, and Slovenia, have been major suppliers of arms to Israel in this period. However, the pace of India’s transformation from an anti-colonial actor to an occupation and genocide enabler has been remarkable.

India for decades refused to have formal diplomatic relations with Israel and had a long-standing position of supporting a two-state solution. Now, under the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, ruling the country since 2014, it has even refused to criticise Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

The Indian government under Modi boasts about close ideological connections with Zionism and has been pushing for deeper economic and military ties despite strong opposition from within the country.

Modi made an official state visit to Israel earlier this year amidst the global calls for sanctions over the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He ignored the fact that the ICC has issued arrest warrants against his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu and its former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes.

Modi called Netanyahu a “close friend” and went ahead and even addressed the Knesset on the eve of the US-Israeli war on Iran, boasting about historical ideological links and invoking “shared victimhood” of “terrorist violence.”

The Modi government has cracked down on domestic protests against the genocide in Gaza and has been accused of persecuting even minor forms of expressions of solidarity with the Palestinians. On international platforms such as the UN, it has avoided voting against Israel on critical resolutions.

Deep military ties

India sent weapons, ammunition, parts, and components of dual-use items to maintain the supply chains “enabling Israel’s military operations,” including those which have been widely recognised by the UN and other international bodies as acts of genocide, the Amnesty report says.

“Israel has been enabled to carry out a crime of this magnitude by an almost uninterrupted supply of weapons and munitions from states that, in facilitating this supply, have been providing material support for the genocide,” the report says.

The Indian companies which supplied arms to Israel include both the public and private. According to the Amnesty report, India has shipped nearly a million units of arms parts, parts used to make explosive devices such as drone warheads and components of military vehicles, to Israel since October 2023.

India, under Modi, has also established strong business relationships with various Israeli weapon manufacturers, such as the Elbit systems and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, among others. Some of these Israeli companies have also established their factories in India under joint ventures.

These joint ventures include one of India’s largest private corporate groups, Adani, as well as the public sector undertakings such as the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

India contributes to Israeli occupation and genocide also by being the largest buyer of its arms for years. It bought weapons worth over a billion dollars from Israel in 2022, contributing one-third of all its earnings from arms sales that year.

India may be complicit in Israeli war crimes.

According to international law, all states are prohibited from allowing sales of weapons which can potentially be used for human rights violations. If a state or a private entity within that particular state is involved in such weapons transactions, it is liable to face war crime charges.

Since all suppliers of weapons are expected to do due diligence to identify and prevent any use, actual or potential, of their supplies in committing human rights abuses by a state or a non-state actor. It is obvious that India knowingly violated its obligations.

Amnesty report also underlined the lack of any judicial initiative to prevent India playing a role in Israeli genocide. The Indian Supreme Court dismissed a petition submitted by former civil servants demanding cancellation of all weapons export deals to Israel while citing “economic, geo-political and other interests” in international relations in 2024.

The report concludes that despite genocide being common knowledge, India continues to supply weapons to Israel and demanded that “India and Indian companies must take urgent action to stop this” or face the risk of complicity in Israeli war crimes.

News that, in the midst of the genocide in Palestine, the German parliament was this week advancing legislation that would criminalise speech that denies that Israel has a “right to exist,” with penalties of up to five years in prison, came as a surprise to virtually no one.

This is, after all, the same Germany that perpetrated genocide first in Namibia and then in Europe and is now actively and enthusiastically participating in the ongoing genocide in Palestine while brutally repressing all who dare speak out against it inside Germany.

Indeed, alongside Israel and the U.S., the German state today has the dubious distinction of being among those most captured by Zionist interests and most corrupted by Zionist ideology.

The German state even has an official policy (Staatsräson) dedicating the German state to the continued existence of the Israeli regime, and a formal declaration of Israel’s “right to exist” is required to acquire German citizenship. (No such declaration of Germany’s right to exist is required).

But the statement that the Israeli regime has no right to exist is not only a legally protected opinion. It is also demonstrably true, as a matter of both fact and law.

Of course, the statement that Israel “has a right to exist” has always been nonsense, unrooted as it is in either law or fact.

But this Zionist claim rings familiar to the ear of people in the West because it has been so often repeated as a pillar of Zionist propaganda, echoed by Western politicians benefiting from Israel lobby bribes, and buttressed by Israel-aligned media corporations dutifully.

Ask yourself if you have ever heard a similar refrain asserting Italy’s right to exist, or Canada’s—or Germany’s, for that matter? And yet the claim is constantly made that the Israeli regime (and only the Israeli regime) somehow has such a right.

The most obvious conclusion is that the regime and its proxies in the West are so deeply insecure about the legitimacy of the state, given the lawless and bloody history of its founding and expansion, that they have deemed it necessary to impose an enforced (and fictional) orthodoxy, rooted in an idea of Israeli exceptionalism and state-sponsored impunity.

But there is no such right in international law. None.

Inconvenient facts

Indeed, when I first entered the corridors of the United Nations in the 1980s, many states then existed that no longer existed when I left in 2023. Did the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and the United Arab Republic have a “right to exist”? No. And neither does Israel.

States come and go, but none of them has a “right to exist.” As a factual matter, this is undeniable.

And yet, some still actively parrot the baseless Zionist fabrication that the Israeli regime somehow possesses it, others accept it without question, some (like Germany) even seek to compel others to declare it, and still others prohibit any attempts to challenge the lie.

There is no “right to exist” for states under international law. Thus, Israel cannot claim such a right.

Of course, states do have some rights. For example, states normally have a right to sovereign equality, to territorial integrity, and to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. But even these rights normally afforded to states are subject to conditions and qualifications, many of which would exclude Israel’s claim to them.

For example, the International Court of Justice has repeatedly found that Israel has no right to claim self-defence in its attacks on occupied Palestinian territories. (In essence, you cannot break into someone’s house and then claim a right to self-defence when they resist you).

Secondly, except for those agreed in treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), Israel does not even have defined borders. Much of the territory claimed and held by the Israeli regime is territory over which it has no legal claim whatsoever, and other territory claimed as part of the state is itself subject to challenge.

The regime can make no legal claims of territorial integrity over lands it unlawfully seized in 1967 and after, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

Its 1949 “Green Line” with Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza, is not an international border, but rather an armistice line merely meant to separate forces. The regime cannot claim it as a lawful border.

Moreover, given that the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force is a jus cogens norm (the highest, peremptory rules) of international law and a binding obligation under the UN Charter, it cannot claim any of that land as part of its lawful territory.

Even the land claimed by Zionist forces in 1947 under the UN partition proposal is subject to legal challenge. Given that fact, the UN General Assembly had no authority under its Charter, or more broadly in international law, to overrule the will of the indigenous people or to create a settler-colonial state, and the Zionist forces had no right under international law to deny the self-determination of the Palestinian people or to acquire territory by force.

In fact, the International Law Commission has held that states must not recognise claims based on violations of jus cogens and erga omnes norms (binding on all states), such as those perpetrated by Zionist forces during the Nakba of 1947–48 and by the Israeli regime ever since. In addition, territorial acquisitions resulting from the threat or use of force impose obligations of non-recognition on all states.

The ICJ has recalled this principle with regard to the Israeli regime’s presence in occupied Palestinian territory as recently as 2024, when it found that the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip is entirely unlawful, that it must end quickly and completely, and that all states are obliged not to recognise Israel’s presence in those territories and to work to end it.

Thus, as Israel has no defined territory, its legal claims to territorial integrity are significantly limited. And without recognised borders (and here we are not talking about a minor border dispute, but rather a lack of definition for most of the state’s territory), it even lacks a key criterion for recognition as a state.

To this day, almost thirty UN member states across Africa, Asia, and Latin America (including some of its closest geographic neighbors) do not recognize the state of Israel, and others have cut off diplomatic relations with the regime during the current ongoing genocide.

No sovereignty without equality

Finally, without lawful sovereignty, there can be no claim to sovereign equality.

Sovereignty, in international law, belongs not to states, but rather to people. The Israeli regime declares itself a “Jewish state” and claims to represent its people.

But it does not represent the interests of non-Jewish persons (Muslim and Christian Palestinians) who are either present or have a right to be present and part of the legitimate polity of that territory.

The ethnonationalist state of Israel can perhaps claim to represent 7.2 million (Jewish) constituents. It cannot credibly claim to represent the almost 16 million Palestinians who have a right to form part of the polity of that land.

Indeed, even if the regime forcibly settled every Jew on the planet on the land, it would still only represent a minority of the population, vis-à-vis the majority of Palestinians.

Excluded variously from equal representation (1948 Palestinians), any representation (Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem Palestinians), or even the ability to exercise their legal right to return and participate (diaspora Palestinians), are the overwhelming majority of persons who have a right to form part of the polity.

Nor can Israel claim legitimate governmental authority. This is because international law establishes that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government,” which must be “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”

Excluding millions of the indigenous people of the land on the basis of ethnonationalist criteria is a textbook breach of that requirement. As such, the Israeli regime cannot claim legitimate governmental authority.

The ICJ has recently affirmed that the regime has no such authority in Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem. But the unequal terms imposed on Palestinians inside the Green Line, and the total exclusion of those in the diaspora, make the point equally applicable to the remainder of the Palestinian community as well.

And without that authority, the regime cannot claim legitimate sovereignty.

Similarly, the regime’s lawless conduct weighs against claims of sovereignty.

This is because modern conceptions of sovereignty include an element of responsibility (especially vis-à-vis respect for non-aggression, human rights, and international law) that a genocidal, apartheid regime with a continuous history of aggression, assassinations, crimes against humanity, and a chronic scofflaw status in the face of international legal rulings and UN resolutions cannot claim to have met.

From illusory rights to actual duties

Thus, as a matter of law and fact, the Israeli regime has no “right to exist.”

But the analysis should not stop there.

Even a cursory examination of international law reveals that, to the contrary, the Israeli regime should not exist.

The international community of states has obligations to cease recognition of the regime, to isolate it, and to work for its dismantlement and for the liberation of the Palestinian people from the regime.

Clearly, no one would today argue that Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, Vichy France, or Khmer Rouge Kampuchea had a “right to exist.” Nor would we entertain claims for eternal colonial regimes in Algeria, India, Namibia, or Kenya. For the same reasons, no legal (or moral) argument could justify a right to exist for Zionist Israel.

To the contrary, international law requires that, where breaches of peremptory norms of international law are integral to the creation, expansion, and sustaining of a state (as was the case in apartheid Namibia and Rhodesia), such entities should not be recognized or accepted as legitimate states and should in no way be assisted.

Israel’s record is clear. It was founded on the breach of two peremptory (jus cogens) norms: the right to self-determination of the people of the land, and the rule on the non-acquisition of territory by force, as well as on the two highest crimes in international law: genocide and aggression.

Since then, it has refused the return of refugees and their compensation, and has continuously expanded its unlawful evictions, land theft, and colonization.

The United Nations and every major international human rights organisation have concluded that the Israeli regime is guilty of apartheid and racial segregation, unlawful occupation, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

The regime is now on trial for genocide at the ICJ, charges that the Court has found plausible enough to issue a series of preliminary orders (all of which the regime has ignored).

And the same court has found the regime guilty of unlawful occupation, the forced denial of self-determination, the unlawful acquisition of territory by force, war crimes, apartheid, and racial segregation.

And the International Criminal Court has indicted the regime’s leaders for crimes against humanity.

For the full eighty years of its existence, the Israeli regime has held the distinction of being in breach of the highest number of UN resolutions and ICJ decisions of any country on the planet.

Today, the regime is unlawfully occupying Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria; attacking Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and beyond; and perpetrating genocide in Palestine.

It has carried out assassinations across the region and has admitted to (indeed, bragged about) transnational terrorist attacks with booby-trapped pagers in Lebanon.

Judged against the imperatives of international law, Israel is, in the strictest sense of the term, a rogue regime, illegitimate in its founding, and devoid of all legitimacy in its conduct ever since.

To declare that such a regime has a “right to exist” is an affront to generations of its victims, to international law, and to human decency itself. And the threat that it poses extends far beyond Palestine.

The Israeli regime is driven by a deeply racist and fundamentally violent ideology. It is armed with advanced technologies of surveillance and death, holds powerful conventional weaponry, and possesses stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

It has declared policies mandating the mass murder of civilians (the Dahiya Doctrine), the killing of its own citizens (the Hannibal Directive), and the potential nuclear destruction of the world (the Samson Option).

Its spies are active in countries around the globe, and its proxies are actively engaged in corrupting governments and institutions across the West.

Does such a regime have a “right to exist?” No.

In fact, dismantling such a regime and its replacement with a free Palestine with equal rights for all is not only a legal requirement but also an existential imperative for all of humanity.

United States President Donald Trump neither denied nor admitted that the reported lack of munitions is the leading cause of the suspension of strikes against Iran during a press conference on Thursday, 6 August, while also repeating claims that the war would end “pretty soon.”

Indirectly responding to the question, Trump said that “we have certain types of munitions that are very powerful, that we have unlimited, virtually unlimited supply. We have others where it’s a little bit tighter.”

The admission of the lack of certain critical munitions came days after the US suddenly halted its weeks-long strikes on Iran. The media has been reporting the reason for the sudden end of strikes being the shortage of bombs and other munitions.

The reports of the lack of munitions have also caused tensions between Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, as reported by the Washington Post on Thursday, citing unknown sources.

Trump, however, tried to dismiss the report of such tensions, calling it fake news and warning the media against publishing them. The “leakers of these treasonous statements are being hunted down” and will face “long-term jail sentences” when found, Trump wrote in his social media post on Thursday.

During his press conference, Trump also repeated his claims of Iran being weakened due to the war and expressed hope that the war would end “pretty soon,” saying the Iranians cannot go on much longer the way it is going.

However, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian parliament and head of its delegation which signed the peace deal with the US in June, contradicted Trump’s claims, calling his administration’s approach toward ending the war and establishing peace in the region insincere.

In his social media post on Thursday, Ghalibaf accused Trump of indulging in “theater diplomacy on loop” asking him to focus on facts and fulfill his commitments under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) instead.

“Massive attack coming … wait, never mind, they want to negotiate,” Ghalibaf summarized the rapidly changing, sometimes completely contradictory statements given by Trump repeatedly since the beginning of the war on Iran.

Trump’s contradictory claims and statements have caused widespread uncertainty and distrust among the Iranians.

Ghalibaf called it a failed strategy of “using a combination of bullying, broken promises and fake news as leverage.”

Iran-Oman deal over Hormuz

Iran claimed on Wednesday that it is about to sign a deal with Oman to manage traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. However, any such deal would not lead to the automatic opening of the strait for international traffic.

The Strait of Hormuz will open for traffic only after the US ends its war with Iran and fulfills its commitments under the MoU, Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister said.

Mohsen Rezaei, senior defense advisor to the country’s Supreme Leader reiterated on Thursday that the US should abandon its attempts to reopen a second corridor in the Strait of Hormuz as Iran “will never allow” it.

If the US fails to understand Iran’s concerns, the volatile situation in the strait will continue, threatening the security of US vessels and its forces in the region, Rezaei warned.

The MoU has largely become defunct within weeks after it was signed due to, what Iran claims, US violations of its commitments over the strait and its attempts to undermine the Iranian role in the management of shipping through it by trying to open an alternative route through Omani waters.

Due to disagreements over the strait, both sides have launched attacks and counter attacks and reimposed their respective blockades on shipping through the Persian Gulf. This has led to a massive fall in traffic on one of the world’s busiest sea routes for energy supplies and other trade.

According to a report in Al-Jazeera, on Thursday only seven commercial ships transited through the strait. Before the war began in late February, about 150 ships used to transit through it daily.

The edifice complex of the Trump administration is proving to be an aggressive one. As with previous presidents, the current occupant is keen to leave his architectural mark. And it promises to be an exceedingly vulgar one. In keeping with his abominable sense of taste, President Donald Trump has his sights on a large White House ballroom, valued at US$400 million and intended to cover 90,000 square feet over the area formerly occupied by the now demolished East Wing. With a degree of inventiveness that only comes with the deranged, the decision to build this beastly addition has been justified as a necessary security, even military measure.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation took against the project, convincing the district court to grant them a preliminary injunction halting construction on work on the ballroom taking place above ground. The order did not extend to halting construction to underground facilities, including the “national security features.” The White House appealed. In a two-to-one ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found against Trump’s unilateral decision, citing the need for Congressional authority. In their joint majority opinion, Judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia (both appointees under Democratic administrations), pointed to the sheer gravity of the move: “Executive actions that take control of that property out of the hands of the people’s representatives while irreparably harming the historical and visual architecture of perhaps the most prominent public building in the United States seriously intrude on the public interest.”

The judgment is speckled with reproach and reminders. “Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Resident,” the majority ruling states curtly. “The President has no—and claims no—constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people.” One senses a sharp intake of breath from the justices in their reprobation of Trump’s view that the ballroom was just another one of those “alterations and improvements” justified by statute. This would grant “the President unilateral authority to carry out any construction project—up to and including demolishing and replacing the entire White House—with any source of funding he can identify.”

The justices were clear that they did not hold a position on “whether the proposed ballroom is desirable or not, as a matter of policy.” (This was a sentiment poorly concealed.) The ruling did not even mean that the ballroom could not be constructed. “What it does mean is that the Defendants may not do so during the district court’s expeditious litigation without securing Congress’s authorization, as the Constitution and laws require.” The Executive’s assertion that it could act lawlessly, “destroying treasured national landmarks and harming the interests of individuals, and that no court can stop it flouts our constitutional order.”

In the Trump lexicon, words such as “authorization”—especially when it comes to a Congress foundering in impotence—have no place. Ditto the “Constitution” and “laws,” decorative features of a lost age. This is hardly a flippant suggestion; the two justices recoiled at the suggestion from the defendants “that even if they are acting without authority and lawlessly, no court—not the district court, this court, or the Supreme Court—has the power to stop them since the East Wing has already been destroyed.” The highest magistrate in the age of the Reality Television President is nothing if not despotic, even if that despotism has no clear form or philosophy.

Judge Neomi Rao, in an obedient dissenting judgment, showed what judicial independence looks like in US courts by agreeing with Trump’s expansive, capricious authority. He had, after all, put her on the bench, and loyalism comes before the law. The National Trust, and her fellow judges, were also taken to task. The district court’s grant of an injunction “was a blatant abuse of discretion.” It had “no jurisdiction because the Trust has no standing to stop construction at the White House.” The lower court had also “elevated the aesthetic displeasure of a single passerby over the government’s security interest in the ballroom and the security risks of leaving an open construction site at the President’s home and office.” And who, pray, was the buffoon who created that construction site to begin with?

Trump was left fuming, champing at the bit to take the matter to the country’s highest court. “This unjust decision must be overturned by the Supreme Court in its entirety,” he bellowed on Truth Social. Here was a ruling “horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful.” Again, the security canard was cited, with this “unlawful ruling” being “a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents.” History chokes with instances where power was abused and subsequently justified on shaky grounds of principle and security.

The ruling against the President is the second one in a week to question his architectural judgment and his megalomaniac tendencies. The National Park Service also found Trump’s proposed 250-foot-tall (76 metre-tall) triumphal arch, to be built near the National Mall, a potentially blighting construction. Dozens of historic sites in the area, notably the key connection between the Lincoln Monument and Arlington House, former home of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee, would suffer an unwarranted interference as a result. “The bridge alignment and associated ceremonial landscape,” the report by the service notes, “were intended to physically and symbolically unite North and South through a coordinated monumental composition extending across the Potomac River.” The White House sees it differently: adding the arch would be a “fitting addition to the monumental axis between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House.” More litigation, contentious disputation, and gaudy construction projects await.

When my book Technofeudalism was published, I had not imagined that it would be embraced by the likes of Steve Bannon but I had fully anticipated a barrage of criticism from Marxist thinkers, especially in response to the book’s provocative subtitle (What Killed Capitalism). Conceived as a Marxist analysis of the present historical moment, but written for a broader audience, a presentation of its thesis tailored for Marxist readers was always on the cards. Now, three years and several critical reviews later, the Marxist case for the technofeudal hypothesis can be outlined.2

The centrality of capital accumulation as the force driving modern societies lies at the heart of Marxist economics. Bypassing moralistic censure or portrayals of capitalism as a system dependent on sleaze, pilfering, injustice and brute force, Marx chose to study capitalism in its purest form. Depicting it as an alien force with its own logic and a supernatural compulsion to reproduce itself through the commodification of everything, he focused on capital, its nature, the process by which it accumulates and, importantly, the extractive powers it bestows upon its owners in the context of a vicious class struggle. Today, any analysis that purports to pursue this task must do likewise.

In this vein, it is incumbent upon Marxists to focus on a brand-new variant of capital whose proliferation weighs heavily on our twin tasks of interpreting and changing the world. I call it cloud capital: networked machines that produce no commodities but generate enormous rent-extractive powers, on behalf of their owners, through interfacing directly with us, outside anything that can be usefully described as a market. Studying this fascinatingly novel form of capital must surely be every Marxist’s burden, regardless of whether one agrees with my hypothesis that cloud capital has transformed capitalism into what I call technofeudalism.

To expedite a fruitful debate, I begin by correcting three misunderstandings regarding cloud capital’s impact and my technofeudal hypothesis. First, I am not arguing that cloud capital’s emergence has returned us to feudalism (Section 1). Second, the proliferation of rents is nothing new to capitalism (Section 2). Third, I also dismiss as an unhelpful form of data fetishism the belief that data is the new “land” from which a new technofeudal class derives its extractive powers (Section 3).

With these three red herrings cast aside, there is a clear path toward a Marxist analysis of cloud capital (Section 4), its withering effect on markets (Section 5), its deployment of influencers and unwaged labour (Section 6), its

It is incumbent upon Marxists to focus on a brand-new variant of capital whose proliferation weighs heavily on our twin tasks of interpreting and changing the world.

impact on business cycles and long term crises (Section 7), the manner in which AI enhances its monetary, geopolitical and ideological footprint (Section 8) and, finally, how it informs revolutionary politics. Only in the conclusion do I return to the question of semantics: Is Marxist theory and politics helped or hindered by referring to the current socioeconomic mode as “capitalist” or “technofeudal”?

1. No, we are not returning to feudalism

To dispel a common misconception, the technofeudal hypothesis never implied that history had gone into reverse, heading backwards towards a technologically advanced version of our medieval past whence capitalism emerged. On the contrary, driven by unbridled capital accumulation that begat astonishing machines capable of interfacing directly and dialectically with us, history is hurtling forward towards an entirely new socio-economic mode of production, distribution, exchange and communication, within which capital is more dominant than ever before—a mode I term “technofeudalism.”

Nor do I claim that wealth now accumulates chiefly in the form of rents lazily extracted from owning passive assets (land, fossil fuels, intellectual property or, indeed, our stolen data), as was the case under feudalism. No: wealth grows exponentially in the form of returns to gigantic investments in dynamic assets: extraordinary machines that cost Big Tech multi-trillion-dollar investments to develop, manufacture, install and update. In this sense, sprawling conglomerates like Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Apple et al are capitalist enterprises driven as ruthlessly as Edison, Westinghouse and Ford once were.

So, why is this not just digital capitalism,3 hypercapitalism, 4 computerised capitalism,5 rentier capitalism,6 platform capitalism,7 or surveillance capitalism?8 Before answering, it is helpful to return to the rich vein of insights on capitalism’s dalliance with economic rent, rent-seeking and other forms of wealth accrual that fall outside pure capitalist market competition.

2. Rents are endemic to capitalism

Capitalism never existed, and could not have done so, in the pure form we encounter in the neoclassical textbooks or in the writings of Adam Smith. Like our bodies, that rely on residual serpent DNA to function, capitalism’s genotype needed remnants of feudalism to replicate. Early on, David Ricardo9 warned that, as markets expand and capital accumulates, ground rent not only survives profit’s triumphant march but, indeed, grows dangerously fast, gobbling up increasing portions of an economy’s surplus. In time, rent not only grew in magnitude but also divided and multiplied, spawning different types—all part and parcel of capitalism’s dynamically expanding domain. In short, from its inception, actually existing capitalism was rentier capitalism.10

When capitalism’s monopoly phase arrived on the coattails of electromagnetism, resulting in the networked conglomerates of the early 20th century, ground rent was overshadowed by what Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy termed monopoly surplus,11 a form of rent accruing to concentrated industrial capital. Instead of a steady collection of rents on static assets (e.g., land or patents), the entire profit-generating process of conglomerates like Ford, General Electric, Boeing and Walmart had augmented surplus value extraction with a vast rent-seeking enterprise founded on three capacities: restricting output; generating new demand via marketing and advertising, the so-called attention economy; and, enlisting an army of bureaucrats, marketeers, scientists and engineers comprising what Galbraith called the Technostructure.12

Bred during the War Economy, and fledged fully during the Bretton Woods era, this broad cross-sector professional class blurred the lines between government and corporate officials. It moved through a “revolving door” to create a symbiotic network that directed state power—through defence contracts, favourable regulations, and intellectual property (IP) law—to protect and subsidise the market dominance of conglomerates. Thus, the accumulation of massive monopoly rents, on top of economic profits, was not merely a market phenomenon; it was the result of a collaborative, planned effort between the corporate branch of the Technostructure and its apparatchiks within the state apparatus.

In Marxist terms, along with the development of the attention economy, the Technostructure empowered big business to obtain substantial surplus value produced by smaller firms elsewhere in the economy. Monopoly power, Marx explains in Capital, Vol. III, creates barriers that restrict the free flow of capital into its sphere. These barriers take very different forms (for instance, patents, intellectual property, network effects, advertising or sheer economies of scale) but their effect is the same: to extract surplus that does not correspond to value created on their premises.

In Marx’s own account, this extra net revenue is a “transfer” or a “deduction” from two sources: first, from the surplus value of other capitalists operating in more competitive sectors (who must, also, pay inflated prices for inputs); and second, from the suppression of workers” real wages (when the good produced by the monopoly is a consumption necessity). In short, big business uses its market power to prevent the equalisation of the rate of profit across the economy and to accumulate surplus value produced elsewhere at the expense both of other capitalists and the working class.13

Once Bretton Woods was jettisoned, as it had to be after the United States became a deficit economy, financialisation became inevitable and neoliberalism emerged as its ideological cover.14 Thus mountainous financial rents were grafted on to pre-existing forms of rent (ground, IP, monopoly etc.), to the point that it became not just legitimate but urgent to speak of dispossession as almost overwhelming accumulation15 of the overshadowing of productive capital by what Marx defined as fictitious capital,16 of the finance curse;17 of asset-manager autocracy;18 and so on.

But, if rent’s growth and proliferation, along with its profound impact on the nature and character of capitalism, is not reason enough to look beyond capitalism in order to understand the world we live in, then what is? Some suggest that our data has become the new privatised, fenced-off, land out of which a new feudal power has sprung. I am not one of them.

3. Data is not the new land!

The use of insider information and propaganda to enrich oneself at others” expense is as ancient as Homo Sapiens. But it was under capitalism’s monopoly phase that networked machines weaponised information to secure additional monopoly rents. Free-to-air radio and television were the first to subvert the conventional commodification process: they de-commodified shows (produced at great expense to be given away for free) in order to commodify our attention (secure access to our eyeballs and ears and immediately sell this access to advertisers).

The technofeudal hypothesis never implied that history had gone into reverse, heading backwards towards a technologically advanced version of our medieval past whence capitalism emerged.

The advent of cable television threatened to erode all this by replacing advertising revenues with subscription fees. However, the privatisation of the original internet commons in the mid-1990s disrupted this disruption, giving a momentous boost to the attention market. Tech became Big Tech by moving rapidly on from the commodification of the attention of an amorphous, heterogeneous audience to the commodification of targeted information flows built upon individual data that it harvested directly.

Facebook, Google and so on could now offer advertisers a virtual guarantee that particular sets of eyeballs would be attracted to particular wares. Additionally, they could provide real-time information on what users bought, at what time of the day or night they bought it, etc. Through intense surveillance which allowed them to sell to corporations the power to manufacture tailor-made demand and real-time information flows, Big Tech became the force it is today. In turn, that new power gave conglomerates new scope to pinch more of the surplus value produced in other capitalists” workplaces.

All that novel power, and the rents it generated, were founded on Big Tech’s capacity to harvest personal data. This intensive surveillance made a mockery of liberal notions of personal autonomy. Understandably, liberal critics19 protested the violation of our customary rights over our data and spoke of surveillance capitalism. Some went further by warning that something like a feudal logic of expropriation was making a comeback.20

However, the incontrovertible fact that personal data is harvested by stealth, making propaganda far more effective in shaping demand and shifting surplus value more violently across different sectors (further preventing the equalisation of profit rates), is not suggestive of new modes of value production “but modes (in some cases not particularly new) of participation in the pool of surplus value.”21

Despite startlingly new exploitation-enhancing strategies that digital technologies made possible, Marxists had good cause to reject claims that something fundamental about capitalism had changed just because our data was now stolen systematically by corporations“ intent on extending the reach of their advertisements (Google, Meta etc.) or intermediation (Uber, Airbnb etc.). Evgeny Morozov rightly quips that ‘[i]n pathologising the ongoing extractive side of contemporary digital capitalism,’22 such a critique (e.g. Zuboff ”s Age of Surveillance Capitalism), “…completely normalises its non-extractive dimension.”

Put differently, surveillance capitalism would dissolve, if only legislation was passed that granted us full property rights over our data. Any alleged “transformation” of capitalism that evaporates the moment the bourgeois state discovers the courage to enact a Bill of Digital Rights could not have been that transformative!23 Data, to conclude, is not the new land conjuring up feudal-like powers that monopoly capital did not already possess since the early 1900s. Nevertheless, the algorithmic manipulation of pilfered data and information flows does create new powers which neither the notion of surveillance capitalism nor data fetishism (the conviction that data is the new land) help us fully grasp.

Consider traditional advertisers and marketeers who worked as agents of, or service providers to, Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Unilever. Their interests were fully aligned with those of monopoly capital. But that’s not so with Alphabet, Meta, and such like. Big Tech’s interests, unlike those of an advertising firm, are no longer aligned with the interests of traditional capitalists extracting surplus values in the analogue world (even if they, too, use digital tools). Cory Doctorow demonstrates this difference well.24 Once we, the users, have been locked into one of its platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok), and our data is harvested and sold to capitalist vendors, the latter become increasingly dependent on that platform for their revenues. Business users getting as little as 10 percent of their revenue from, say, Google, discover that the costs of switching away from it are unfathomable. Google, immediately, exploits this, pushing them down its search lists and demanding a ransom to bring them up again.

In short, Big Tech is doing more than merely harvesting consumer data in the interests of big business: it uses its power over information flows to create extractive realms from which—for different reasons—both consumers and capitalists find it costly to escape. Thus, unlike advertising companies that were paid by capitalist conglomerates to enhance their monopoly power, Big Tech has found ways to enhance conventional capital’s monopoly power while, at once, creating for itself monopsonistic power over conventional capital.

While this realisation brings us closer to the notion of digital platforms as akin to cloud fiefs,25 Foley is right in saying that, to make sense of Big Tech’s role, we need ”…a clear understanding of the origin of value in the expenditure of productive labour and of surplus value in the exploitation of productive labour’26—in short, an advance in Marxist analysis is needed. Morozov is also right to argue that such an advance would need “to make sense of the digital economy—of what, exactly, is produced and how.”27

And there’s the rub. In Morozov’s next sentence he states that “[i]f one accepts that Google is in the business of producing search-result commodities—a process that does require massive capital investment—there is no great difficulty in treating it as a regular capitalist firm, engaged in normal capitalist production.”

Quite: except that Google’s search results, and most of Big Tech’s significant products, are not commodities.

4. Cloud capital: unproductive but all-powerful

Marx defines commodities as goods or services produced, not to be used or gifted by their producers, but to be exchanged in some market (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter One). Capital goods, in the same vein, are produced means of commodity production (PMCP) and markets are decentralised trading sites,28 or “spheres of circulation,” where commodity values turn into money29 and surplus values (once rent and interest are paid) transform into profits. This is the context in which Marxists must ask: What is a Google Search result? What type of capital good is involved in its “production”? Is amazon.com a market? Is Uber just an oligopsonistic capitalist intermediary between drivers and passengers?

When Google charges you money for watching a film on YouTube, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents you server space, or OpenAI and Netflix sell you subscriptions, they are acting as commodity suppliers utilising sophisticated digital machinery as standard produced means of commodity production (PMCP). But, when the same machinery provides you with, say, a Google search result, or YouTube invites you to upload your video for free, or Amazon’s Alexa helps you choose a book or electric bicycle, Marx is emphatic: however pleased you may be with their service, these are not commodities.30

But if they are not commodities, then what are they? It is easy, but wrong, to surmise that these services are nothing more than the Internet-based equivalent of a free-to-air TV station broadcasting a football match to capture our attention in order to sell us, say, burgers. Indeed, there is a key difference between McDonalds convincing us to buy a burger via a TV ad shown during the Superbowl half-time interval and Google’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa convincing us to buy a particular electric bicycle.

When they are not selling us their in-house-produced commodities, Big Tech’s machines do something radically novel: something that free-to-air TV stations could never do in the context of the original attention economy. They engage us in a one-on-one, two-way, real-time dialogue with a view to automating what human propagandists, advertisers and marketeers used to do: influence our desires, modify our behaviour and guide our choices. In that guise, these are dialectical machines producing nothing, except a direct power to modify our behaviour.

These machines surely do harvest information to get a leg up on us; yet, their ambitions go well beyond pilfering our data to target advertisements more effectively, or to charge us different prices depending on our willingness to pay.31 What is this higher aim, for which Big Tech’s machines are optimised? Nothing short of gaining our trust through a never-ending, one-on-one dialogue. For once they succeed in building up, in real time, a dialectical relationship with each one of us separately, complete with the subliminal bonds of trust, they gain unprecedented powers to modify our behaviour. Suddenly, these machines are no long conventional capital goods (PMCP) but have crossed the Rubicon into what I call cloud capital: machines that function as produced means of behavioural modification (PMBM).

To illustrate this, let us examine Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri etc. While we treat them as servants (“turn off the lights,” “buy me some milk,” “suggest a good movie”), these devices (linked to enormous networks of cloud capital) are primed to engage us as follows. First, they train us to train them to know us better, so as to be able to give us helpful advice and thus gain our trust. Once trust has been established, they guide us to particular commodities which they offer to procure with the click of a button. The moment we click it, cloud capital has sold us a commodity (that cloud capital played no role in producing) outside any market, netting its owner (a fellow like Jeff Bezos) up to forty per cent of the price we just paid—a “commission” that is clearly a form of absolute rent, which I call cloud rent.32

Big Tech is doing more than merely harvesting consumer data in the interests of big business: it uses its power over information flows to create extractive realms from which—for different reasons—both consumers and capitalists find it costly to escape.

Conventional capital, Marx taught us, has a dual nature: it is a produced means of commodity production (PMCP), but it is also a social power that its owners exercise over their waged workers to extract surplus value.33 Cloud capital, in contrast, comprises dialectical machines that are, in Marxist terms, unproductive (that is, they produce no commodities). What they do produce, however, is three new types of social power: over consumers (or users), over waged labourers and, lastly, over conventional capitalist producers. Exploiting these powers, cloud capital replaces markets and siphons off as cloud rent large portions of surplus value produced by waged labour operating conventional capital. That’s the key to understanding cloud capital as PMBM.

But I hear you ask: “Isn’t amazon.com a market? Isn’t Uber a capitalist intermediary between passengers and owner-drivers? Is Instacart not a hyper-efficient consumer surplus extraction machine—every capitalist’s dream? Are TikTok, Instagram and YouTube creators not entrepreneurs in business for themselves? Are Alibaba and Amazon not capitalist competitors? Are we not free, as opposed to cloud-serfs, when we can freely move to another platform?” Perhaps, but not if you’re looking at these phenomena through a Marxist prism.

5. Digital markets or cloud fiefs?

Let’s begin with why Amazon.com is not a market. Gosplan, the Soviet State Planning Ministry, was a trading and exchange system matching millions of buyers and sellers at prices that were centrally directed. But a market it was not—in fact, it was its opposite: a top-down, algorithmic planning scheme by which to replace the market mechanism. Amazon.com is not a market for the same reason.

Markets are, by definition, fairly decentralised systems, with buyers and sellers able to interact directly. For Marx, these anarchic, unplanned interactions were essential to the process by which commodities circulate so that values created in the sphere of production are realised as prices and surplus values as rents, interest and profits. Even in a fully monopolised market, buyers can still interact with one another. In contrast, under both Gosplan and amazon.com no one can interact with anyone unless expressly matched by the prevailing, top-down, all-seeing all-controlling algorithm. In this light, amazon.com is a more efficient, digitised version of Gosplan, with one fundamental difference: it does not even pretend to be pursuing some common good, owned as it is by one man, Jeff Bezos. That’s the first sign of technofeudalism, the system cloud capital has begotten, which has replaced markets with something quite different: digital platforms which, I argue, can be usefully labelled cloud fiefs.

Critics of my technofeudal hypothesis, even when they acknowledge the power of cloud capital, assume that its effects are marginal; that most economic activity still unfolds under traditional capitalist, ultra-competitive markets; that cloud rents are mere bubbles on a steady stream of capitalist profits. However, on closer inspection, a different picture emerges: capitalist profit is fast becoming the bubble on a whirlpool of cloud rents accruing not only within cloud fiefs such as amazon.com but also across countless small, bricks-and-mortar retailers.34

A good case in point is Instacart, a corporation that spreads its cloud capital across thousands of retailers, of all sizes and localities, to practise a form of price discrimination so extreme that it annuls the most basic features of a capitalist market.35 By implementing “perfect price optimisation,” a practice now emulated by every major retailer in the United States and beyond, Instacart not only extracts what economists call ”consumer surplus’36 but, far more importantly, it renders price competition next to impossible. With perfect recall of every consumer’s behavioural pattern, its algorithm follows a pricing pattern that prevents anyone from comparing prices across persons or timeframes within, but also across, shops and platforms. Additionally, Instacart enables physical retailers and digital platforms alike to collude—sometimes unbeknownst even to their managers—in ways that the naked eye can never discern. The system is designed to be unseen, indiscernible; an irresistible solvent of anything that can be described as a market mechanism.37

Turning to Uber, yes, it looks very much like a monopoly reseller of monopsonised owner-drivers” labour (and capital stock) to paying commuters.38 In addition to Instacart-like surge and customer-specific pricing, Uber practices real time wage discrimination. Drivers reluctant to accept Uber’s fares are offered higher rates until they start accepting them. Soon they begin to rely on the combination of higher per mile pay and the high ratings (or stars) they amass from appreciative customers. At that point, once tethered to the Uber app, their pay rates enter a downward spiral. They can, of course, quit the app but doing so is the corporate equivalent of quitting before your share options have matured.

So far, so hyper-capitalist. But that’s not the whole story. Before their pay rate falls, promises of higher per mile rates and better customer ratings en—courage Uber drivers to borrow—often from Uber affiliated financiers—to upgrade their cars. That’s when Uber’s algorithm drops the offered pay rates precipitously, discouraging risk-averse, indebted drivers from experimenting with some other platform, opting instead for longer working days—only to find that, on days before their monthly debt repayments are due, their pay rates fall further. This tactic is now typical of many other work-finding applications whose reach spreads like wildfire.

The ShiftKey and ShiftMed applications, which Cory Doctorow has described as “Uber for Nurses,” track nurses“ financial obligations in order to offer them lower hourly rates a few days before their rent or their monthly credit card payments fall due. Similarly with Amazon’s own Mechanical Turk work hellscape, where millions work for piece rates.39 In short, cloud capital and debt finance have now merged to create a newfangled hold over cloud-proles; that is, proletarians forced to yield ever greater surplus value by the same algorithms that modify consumers” behaviour.

To see how Uber-like applications propel the social relations of production and exchange beyond the thin red line into technofeudalism, consider another hidden dimension of the business practices its cloud capital has made possible—a feature it shares with Tesla and others. When you drive a cloud-connected Tesla, or are driven in an Uber, their algorithms record where you travel, what music you listen to while travelling, what purchases you make on amazon.com or Instacart soon after you arrive, whom you visit, when your next credit card or rental payment is due etc. Cloudalist corporations then use this data to enable their “assistants” (Alexa, Google’s Assistant, Instacart’s Cart Assistant etc.) to win you over more efficiently with “better” advice and tips. Thus, their cloud capital stock (their PMBM) accumulates as a result of the waged labour of cloudproles (e.g., Uber drivers or Mechanical Turk and ShiftMed workers) but also the unpaid labour of all of us—the cloud-serfs.

Snow objects, contending that “consumer-users are not serfs” since “they really can leave platforms, and do so all the time.” Sure enough, we can, if we so choose, delete any and all apps (Uber, x.com, amazon.com, ShiftMed, YouTube etc.). We can join other platforms or even opt for flip phones, petrol cars, physical cash. This is a legitimate liberal point: we have the formal freedom to say “no” to cloud capital. But since when are Marxists impressed by formal freedom? If, as Marx taught us, capitalism’s formal freedom masks a deeper real unfreedom, which becomes more pervasive the more voluntary it appears, then surely our abstract liberty to quit cloud capital’s interfaces is no evidence that we are not cloud-serfs.40

This is unprecedented. We work and interface with unproductive machines that incite us to labour effectively—and unwittingly—to build ever higher fences around us, that raise our costs of exiting their cloud-based realm. With every video we post or commodity we buy, every rating that we earn, and every mile we drive, we help the walls around us get taller, we enable cloud capital to accumulate, we help turn the digital platform into a cloud-fief that, yes, we can quit but at a cost that we ourselves increase with every click, every like, every drive, every review, every purchase.41

Perused from a broader political economy perspective, cloud capital ensures that we labour (voluntarily, of course) to build up its capital stock and amplify its power to extract larger cloud rents from the pool of surplus value at the expense of capitalist profit. Ergo, our (mostly unpaid) work is now doing something that never obtained under capitalism: by fuelling the accumulation of unproductive cloud capital, it deepens and hastens the falling rate of profit and, consequently, the next crisis.

6. Competition or rivalry? Empowered influencers or cloud serfs?

A related objection to my technofeudal hypothesis is that Big Tech’s digital platforms, unlike the original fiefdoms, are engaged in cutthroat competition (e.g. TikTok vs Instagram, Uber vs Lyft). While there is, undoubtedly, an intense rivalry between them, is it equivalent to competing in a market context as, for example, Ford and Volkswagen or Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk do? The question is important because the difference between market competition and economic rivalry is both easy to miss and crucial.

Fierce economic rivalry predates capitalism by centuries. Benedictine monasteries forged alliances to wage economic war against secular lords.42 Lords poached peasants from rival fiefs by offering better economic terms.43 The Hanseatic League fought for control of lucrative trade routes against feudal Danish kings and Slavic princes. Pre-capitalist economic rivalries were ferocious, brutal zero-sum games for control of the factors of production and the means of distribution in land-based economies. Conflict over land, labour, trade routes, and legal privileges was prevalent. But market competition it was not.

Market competition, at least from a Marxist perspective, is specific to capitalism and hinges on fluctuating prices, qualities and, in the case of labour markets, terms and conditions. But the clash of Big Tech corporations utilising cloud capital to extract cloud rents is nothing like that. TikTok’s success against Instagram, for example, bears no resemblance to Toyota’s defeat of General Motors, which boiled down to lower prices and higher quality. The argument that platforms compete as if in some marketplace, I shall argue below, collapses upon close inspection.

Though we have not gone back to feudalism (Section 1), the clash between cloudalist corporations is closer to pre-capitalist economic rivalries than to market competition. Whether in the social media space (TikTok vs Instagram vs YouTube) or in the contest for controlling physical commodities (Instacart vs amazon.com vs walmart.com), cloudalist firms are in a race to recruit users, customers, workers and capitalist firms. Rather than attracting us through lower prices (which we can hardly compare across platforms), they lock us in with highly efficient cloud capital that can directly modify our behaviour. Once there, the same cloud capital that lured us into its platform surreptitiously puts us to work to reproduce it through our unpaid labour so that it can increase its hold on us.

What of the influencers whom Big Tech rewards handsomely? Does the fact that so many of them make so much money contradict their portrayal as cloud-serfs? Are they not entrepreneurs whom Big Tech empowers freely to create content using its cloud capital? What do I say to a YouTube creator who celebrates that she is “…not beholden to any network”; who proudly and happily says: “I am the CEO, and I am the showrunner, and I am the host, I am the talent. Like, I’m all of it”? At a personal level, I congratulate her for doing something she likes and making money out of it. But, from the vantage point of Marxist analysis, it is a different story.

Influencers work hard. To gather a loyal audience and keep them coming back for more takes real, often backbreaking work, plus talent, skills etc. However, from a Marxist political economy perspective, it is unproductive work—which is not the same as pointless work. To see the difference between unproductive and pointless work, consider a simple, rather primitive, two-sector economy featuring capitalists and proletarians, where one sector produces corn (using proletarian farm labour) while the second produces gold (using proletarian mining labour). Of these two commodities, corn is both a consumption good (sustaining proletarians and capitalists) but also (in seed form) the only capital good (PMCP). Gold, in contrast, is only a consumer good (as it is not used to produce either gold or corn).

While gold is produced by proletarian miners who do the gruelling, dangerous work of digging it out of the ground, and people covet and admire gold so much that they are prepared to pay through the nose for it, nonetheless Marx considers the miners” labour unproductive. This is not a moral or normative but an economic argument. Having refined Adam Smith’s definition of unproductive labour as work expended in a sector whose product is not an input into the production of any commodity, in his Theories of Surplus Value Marx says it clearly: “Only that wage-labour is productive which produces capital.”44

Returning to influencers, their labour generates use-value, or utility. But it produces no new (exchange) value and does nothing to spearhead the production of more capital. But do influencers not produce, reproduce and augment cloud capital, unlike the gold miners above whose work produces no capital goods? They sure do. Alas, cloud capital is itself not productive (Section 4)! Thus, the influencers” labour is unproductive, however lucrative it may be for influencers and for Big Tech’s shareholders.

In summary, the accumulation of cloud capital spawns brutal rivalries between the platforms it powers up. Each platform, or cloud fief, is in the business of recruiting unpaid cloud-serfs, and locking them in. To help them win this recruitment game, Big Tech companies remunerate a small percentage of users—the influencers—whose work helps lure more unpaid users.45 Once locked in, users” unpaid work helps augment the cloud fief “s cloud capital that strengthens the walls around the cloud fief ”s perimeter. Consequently, its owners extract snowballing cloud rents—burgeoning portions of the surplus value produced in other sectors employing productive labour and productive capital.

7. Volatility and crises in the Technofeudal Age

But what is the macroeconomic impact of this? In Marx’s political economy, it is the accumulation of capital that drives business cycles, periodic recessions and capitalism’s slide into a long-term profitability slump. Prior to the emergence of cloud capital, there were two drivers of capital and labour flows between the sectors producing consumption and machine (or capital) goods. First, the tendency of capital to shift to the sector with the highest profit rate and, secondly, the tendency of labour to shift to the sector in which the exploitation of workers is relatively less intense.

Assuming that the production of machines is more mechanised (i.e., capital intensive) than the production of consumption goods, the profit rate will be higher in the latter thus causing a flight of capital from the machine goods to the consumption goods sector. As capital flows to the sector with the higher profit rate, profit rates tend to equilibrate. However, proletarians working in the consumption goods sector find that they are exploited more intensely (relative to those working in the machine goods sector). So, labour will tend to migrate from the consumption goods to the machine goods sector and so the profit rates will diverge again, causing a further migration of capital from the machine goods to the consumption goods sector. Thus, there is a permanent flux of capital and labour shift between the two main productive sectors (see Appendix).

At the macroeconomic level, as production becomes increasingly mechanised across the board, the economy’s average profit rate declines. Less efficient firms go bankrupt, rising unemployment pushes down aggregate demand, profit rates decrease further and a recessionary negative feedback mechanism kicks in. Once input prices and wages fall below their value level, and bankruptcies eradicate many of their competitors, surviving capitalists see their profit rates rise sharply. To shore up their newfound market power, they begin to invest and so a self-propelling recovery begins. But that spurt of growth is, again, pregnant with the next recession. Moreover, with every recession that is overcome, as capital utilisation rises across the economy, profitability follows a downward trend and thus the capitalist system sinks deeper into its permanent crisis.46

Let us now bring in cloud capital. The machines on which it runs are dual-use, capable of functioning (with minor modifications) both as traditional capital goods deployed productively (PMCP) and as unproductive cloud capital goods (PMBM).47 The economy is thus divided in two departments: The productive department in which all value is created, comprising the consumption goods and the machine goods sectors. And the technofeudal department in which no new (exchange) value is created, but where cloud capital empowers its owners to amass cloud rent. It is now fairly easy to demonstrate the effect of this technofeudal department both on business cycles and on the economy’s secular tendency toward increasingly violent crises.

Modelling the prey-predator dynamic between productive and cloud capital, the first result is that, as cloud rents are extracted from the consumption goods sector, the profit rate in the latter trails the rate of return in the rest of the economy. Consequently, two migration processes emerge. The first is the standard migration of capital and labour backwards and forwards between the two productive sectors which now also depends on the size of the cloud rents extracted by the economy’s technofeudal department. However, it is the second process that goes to the heart of the technofeudal hypothesis: the migration of capital from the productive to the technofeudal department (see Appendix).

A simple extension of Marx’s two-sector model sheds light on this. The assumption that adheres to Marx’s original work is that the technofeudal department will grow relative to the productive department when the returns to cloud capital (cloud rents) exceed the returns to productive capital (profits). And vice versa. Furthermore, to be consistent with Marx’s original analysis, two dynamic links between the rate of profit and the rate of cloud rent extraction are posited (see Appendix):

• The technofeudal dynamic: When profitability rises above some threshold (π*), cloud capital over-accumulates and the rate of cloud rent extraction falls.

• —The productive dynamic: When the rate of cloud rent extraction falls below some threshold (ρ*), productive capital accumulates in the productive department thus pushing down the rate of profit.

Analysing the dynamic interplay that results from the above, we find that the economy goes through four phases:

In Phase 1 the technofeudal department grows at the expense of the productive department as the rate of cloud rent extraction rises and cloud capital accumulates while profit rates fall across the productive department. However, when the rate of cloud rent extraction (ρ) exceeds some threshold ρ*, the system moves into Phase 2 in which productive capital is converted to cloud capital, resulting to an increase in the rate of profit in the productive department.

Phase 2, in short, is a period when both the technofeudal and the productive departments grow. But then, once the profit rate exceeds its threshold (π*), we are in Phase 3.

In Phase 3, because cloud capital has over-accumulated, it pushes the rate of cloud rent extraction (ρ) downward. Phase 3 is, therefore, a period during which the cloud rent leakages have grown so much that aggregate demand falls and the technofeudal sector suffers the fate of a parasite that sucked too much energy and nourishment from its host. Thus, Phase 3 is a period during which the technofeudal expansion is checked and the productive department reclaims part of its lost ground, untilthe rate of cloud rent extraction (for the first time since Phase 1) dips below its threshold (ρ*), at which point the system enters Phase 4.

In Phase 4, both the productive and the technofeudal departments are in recession, as profit rates and cloud rent extraction rates are in decline. However, the moment profitability drops below threshold (π*), cloud capital starts accumulating again and the rate of cloud rent extraction begins to rise. As it does, and once it exceeds its threshold (ρ*), the system returns to Phase 1—the phase during which the technofeudal department grows at the expense of the productive department. And so on.

This analysis of the dynamic clash between the technofeudal and the productive departments (resembling the clash between a predator and its prey) is consistent with the intuition that the growth of the technofeudal part of the economy is bounded by the capacity of the economy’s productive labour to generate the values that cloud capital plunders. But what happens in the long run? Is this cycle, from Phase 1 to Phase 4 and then back to Phase 1 and so on, stable? Can the productive department escape the clutches of its technofeudal counterpart? Is there an end-state to this bifurcated economy?

While the analysis cannot predict the timing of these cycles or how long it will take for the system to approach its end-state, it does point to the system’s unique end-state: a collapse of both the profit rate and the cloud rent extraction rate. The analysis thus generalises Marx’s original falling rate of profit hypothesis for a world in which capital is bifurcated between productive and cloud capital.

The intuition behind the analysis is clear. In Marx’s original analysis, capital accumulation is in the driving seat, pushing the capitalists” profit rate down-wards as it amplifies the economy’s organic composition of capital. The rise of cloud capital adds a second driver: the rising organic composition of cloud capital. As the ratio of cloud rents to Big Tech’s wage bill increases, courtesy of cloud capital’s capacity to accumulate by recruiting massive unpaid labour (outside of any labour or commodity market),48 the trajectories of the profit rate (π) and of the rate of cloud rent extraction (ρ) tend toward zero.

In conclusion, the accumulation of cloud capital not only amplifies the volatility and secular degeneracy that Marx showed to be inherent to capitalism, but it also produces a doom loop of collapsing cloud rents and profits. In this context, technofeudalism is a process that exacerbates the dilemma expounded by Rosa Luxemburg from her prison cell: socialism or barbarism.

8. AI, the dialectics of cloud capital, money, class struggle, ideology, geopolitics and war

Cloud capital did not need AI to materialise. Big Tech’s cloud fiefs were erected on reinforcement learning algorithms well before AI burst upon the scene with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Even before large language models could emulate human-like interaction between people and machines, cloud capital interfaces (Amazon’s web-based algorithm, Alexa, Google’s Assistant etc.) had already empowered Big Tech to extract macroeconomically significant cloud rents. What AI brings is a massive escalation in cloud capital’s extractive powers and the final demise of any pretence that cloud fiefs compete in anything resembling a marketplace.

AI is also a dual use technology. Much like Amazon’s machines, which bring in profit when selling data storage space, and cloud rent when they sell someone else’s cereal,49 AI is deployed to do two things: First, allow companies like OpenAI, Anthropic etc. to supply a standard commodity to paying customers (i.e., subscription services that help us write reports, code, poems etc.). Secondly, empower Big Tech’s existing cloud capital to modify our behaviour far more efficiently. It is this second use of AI that will have the greatest impact.

When Chinese start-up DeepSeek disrupted the AI-commodity market with a free service that was far less costly to produce and not worse than ChatGPT, Big Tech realised that their prospects as profitable AI-based commodity (or subscription service) suppliers were coming to an end. The race was on to shift AI-powered cloud capital from the economy’s productive to its technofeudal department. It could not be otherwise. Given a choice between (a) precarious profits that any start-up, like DeepSeek, can dissolve overnight and (b) cloud rents that AI-enabled machines can lock in for the long run, Big Tech is opting for the latter. Any company that, today, continues to try to profit by supplying AI-based commodities will either have to switch to extracting cloud rents in the technofeudal department or perish.50 The reason is obvious to anyone who has spent a moment or two with one of the latest AI-powered bots.

An AI-powered version of Alexa, or a similar bot, will very soon not only know you perfectly but will be able to speak to you in a manner that is indistinguishable from that of a human.51 Meanwhile, underneath its human-like bonhomie, it will gradually cultivate in you a dependence that makes it indispensable to your psyche. Going back years, it will remember every detail of anything you said or did or wished for. It will develop a capacity to take you to the brink of your tolerance (so as to extract maximum rents from you, and the vendors selling to you) without crossing your red lines. It will have perfect recall of your whims, musical sensibilities, shopping habits, disappointments. It will keep you company in moments good and bad. It will be able to predict when one of its recommendations will jar with you. And once you have struck such a relationship with your AI bot, switching to a competitor’s alternative bot will be almost unthinkable—closer to a heart-wrenching divorce than to finding another e-shop to buy stuff from.52

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels depicted history as the outcome of a constant, dialectical clash between (backward) social relations of production and (advancing) produced means of production (PMCP). Cloud capital adds to this another dialectical contradiction, which gathers pace and potency as a result of AI, On the one hand there are artificial social relations of consumption (ASRC) between humans and AI-powered cloud capital (the produced means of behavioural modification, PMBM). On the other hand, there are the AI-powered produced means of behavioural modification (PMBM) themselves. As the latter (PMBM) evolve faster than the former (ASRC), our common domain is strained like it never had before and ruptures become more frequent and deeper.

While human labour remains the only value-producing force, the social relations of both production—and, now, consumption—are increasingly dominated by unproductive machines (i.e., AI-powered cloud capital) whose evolution causes both profits and cloud rents to shrink in the long term.53 The question then becomes: How does capital react to these intensifying realisation crises?

Shortly after Marx completed his analysis of why the most ethereal, purest, form of capitalism is ridden with contradictions and prone to crises, his successors considered what that meant in practice. How did capitalism respond to its own inherent contradictions? The answer they gave was threefold: through the rise of finance capital and the financialisation of society;54 through imperialism;55 and through suitable ideologies such as neoliberalism, which act as legitimisers of the ruling class’s brutal moves to reclaim lost ground.56

Cloud capital’s rise, and the intensification of the contradictions it occasioned, has already had a profound impact on finance, geopolitics, war, and ideology. As cloud capital merged with traditional finance into what I call cloud finance, it ignited the New Cold War between the United States and China giving imperialism a new twist.57 More recently, propelled by Donald Trump’s “Genius Act,” cloud finance has become pivotal in the gradual privatisation of the dollar by means of stablecoins that bequeath Big Tech with powers once reserved for central banks.58

Meanwhile, cloud capital accumulates new powers in the battlefields, where its algorithms” capacity to understand and to manipulate humans is improving at breakneck speed.59 In addition to refining Amazon’s, Google’s and Meta’s ability to make us buy things, to poison our conversations on x.com, and to drive increasingly dispossessed proletarians, nurses, drivers and warehouse workers, AI-targeting devices that maximised death and destruction in Gaza also enhance the cloud capital that Palantir and Oracle sells to Britain’s National Health Service.

On the ideological front, just as financialisation begat neoliberalism, cloud capital is giving rise to a new creed: techlordism. A mutation of transhumanism, techlordism replaces Homo Economicus at the heart of neoliberalism with a human-AI continuum (which I have referred to as HumAIn).60 The result is an ideological cloak that shrouds cloud capital’s expanding domain in three ways. First, techlordism justifies the wholesale replacement of human value-creating labour with cloud-rent-extracting machines. Second, it paves the ground for the complete integration of Big Tech into state institutions (from the Pentagon to the last federal or state agency).61 Third, it offers cloud finance a supporting narrative to its project of taking over central banks.

While it is clear that, in the same way that imperialism, wars, financialisation and neoliberalism ameliorated capitalism’s internal contradictions, and bought it a century of dominance in spite of severe crises that Marx had astutely anticipated, the developments described above will, no doubt, buy time for the new technofeudal order. But, exactly as the financialisation of the 1980s and 1990s bought capitalism a few decades of fast growth at the cost of the 2008 earthquake, cloud finance, the New Cold War, techlordism etc. are now buying time for this new system at the cost of future crises whose magnitude grows exponentially with every expansion of cloud capital’s domain.

While waiting to see how these forces play out, it is not too soon to discern a phenomenon of great significance to those of us who make sense of the world through the prism of historical materialism. Marxist analysis places great emphasis on how capital accumulation within the bourgeois mode of production separated political from economic power (Wood, 1999, 2003).62 Following the financialisation drive that the Nixon Shock delivered in the early 1970s,63 the sphere of economic power was itself subdivided into two separate spheres: industrial and financial. And now?

Intriguingly, cloud capital is now re-integrating all three spheres, along with that of state power. What Galbraith64 had described as the Technostructure (a unitary professional class running, simultaneously, the state, Wall Street and monopoly capital) has been overshadowed by the increasingly dominant cloudalist or technofeudal ruling class which is concentrating all powers in its owners” hands (financial, industrial, political, cultural and state power). However, and this is its central dialectical contradiction, the more it succeeds in concentrating every power that matters in its hands, the more our new ruling class is undermining itself in the long run, unleashing as it does a dynamic heralding systemic collapse.

9. Beyond theory: How do we change the world?

Critics of my technofeudal hypothesis argue that Marx would take one look at Big Tech and immediately recognise them as capitalist firms. Of course he would, as we all do! But, he would also discern a crucial peculiarity of Big Tech: a new power stemming from a mutation of capital into cloud capital, that renders it unproductive (in Marx’s analytical terms), yet so incredibly potent that it bestows upon its owners an unprecedented power to fulfil every capitalist’s ultimate fantasy: to replace markets with wholly owned fiefs, encase other capitalists and consumers in it, and charge them all cloud rents.65

This is the dialectical materialist contradiction at the heart of the technofeudal hypothesis: by enabling a tiny band of capitalists to replace markets (with market-like cloud fiefs) and siphon off profits (as cloud rents), a mutation of capital is demolishing capitalism’s twin pillars—markets and profits. In addition to dominating the social relations of production, capital now also dominates the social relations of leisure and consumption in ways that undermine what we assumed capitalism to be:66 a mode of production where profits are the main driver of wealth accumulation and all economic activity is channelled through markets. The result is not a regression to the socioeconomic mode from which capitalism emerged (feudalism) but, rather, a hi-tech world in which capital ditches markets and sheds profits to achieve a despotic power reigned in only by its dampening effect on surplus value generation.

Some critics have objected that, in claiming that something even worse than capitalism is upon us, I am absolving capitalism and serving the agenda of bourgeois propagandists in the business of canvassing a return to some fictitious pure capitalism.67 This is an understandable but misplaced fear. As the preceding pages show, the technofeudal hypothesis is grounded firmly in the Marxist tradition which depicts capitalism as monstrously irrational (and for this reason unjust) even in its purest form. Moreover, cloud capital is shown to be a mutation whose reasons and logic are internal to capitalism, not a deviation from pure capitalism that could have been somehow avoided, or which can be dis-invented or reversed.

Like unemployment, recessions and devastating crises are not bugs but designer features of capitalism, the emergence of the technofeudal department (Sections 4–7 above) was functional to capitalism and could only have been prevented by the socialist transformation of society that capitalist forces employed such brutality to avert.68 In this light, rather than being strategically disorienting for the Marxist left, the technofeudal hypothesis offers us new, powerful arguments for the socialist transformation—the only alternative to societal and environmental collapse.

One such argument is that private capital is now inconsistent with private ownership, except that of a tiny band of techlords. After two centuries of fear—mongering that socialism is out to collectivise the middle class’s dwindling belongings, AI-enabled cloud capital is collectivising each and every product of our intellect, even our audio-visual identities. With mounting evidence that the bourgeois state is incapable of effectively regulating Big Tech, it is easier than ever for Marxists to make our long-standing case that realigning our technological capacities with our species” interest requires the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication—i.e., society’s capital stock, both conventional and cloudalist.

Even so, I appreciate how the technofeudal hypothesis jars with many Marxists” mindset. The most touching objection I encountered was by a Marxist economist who, in private, said he refused to let go of the thought that people like us came to this world to overthrow capitalism. “If capital did that without us, what’s our purpose in life?,” he asked with a bitter smile. I sympathised. For I too grew up in hope that we, the left, would have the honour of felling capitalism; that the next socioeconomic mode would be a socialist one that we construct, not a technofeudal one that Big Tech imposed. But then I remembered Rosa Luxemburg’s decisive formulation: “socialism or barbarism.”69 By posing this alternative, she was warning us that socialism was not inevitable and that barbarism was another, very real, possibility. In her days, barbarism prevailed in the form of fascism. Today’s fascism is riding on the coattails of technofeudalism and Big Tech’s techlordist ideology.

Moving beyond “interpreting the world” to what needs to be done to change it,70 another criticism focuses on my claim that, in the technofeudal age, it is not enough to organise auto-workers, nurses, teachers and miners; that it is crucial to forge a united front of traditional proletarians, cloud proles, cloud serfs and even some vassal, small-scale capitalists facing ruin in the shadow of cloud capital.71 This is, of course, a contentious suggestion that must be scrutinised by Marxists. Nonetheless, it is certainly not a novel question. Since Marx’s time, revolutionaries have debated vociferously the optimal potential alliance of waged labourers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie.72

Like those older debates on what alliances best served the cause of overthrowing the tyranny of capital were taking place within the Marxist framework, today our debate on whether cloud serfs can, or should, be organised—or, indeed, if vassal capitalists must also be courted—is a debate we must also have within the Marxist frame. In short, turning a blind eye to the technofeudal turn of capital accumulation and political power undermines, rather than upholds, the Marxist tradition.73

10. Conclusion: What’s in a word?

Underpaid work generating surplus value in the workplace has been capitalism’s lynchpin from its inception. Unpaid domestic labour has also been crucial to indirectly aiding capital accumulation.74 By highlighting a new role for unpaid work beyond traditional workplaces, the technofeudal hypothesis marks a fundamental transformation in the social relations of both production and consumption: unpaid work is now directly reproducing a form of capital—cloud capital—that generates not profits but the power to extract rents from surplus value.

Cloud capital enlists the masses, from all classes, to labour “voluntarily” to build up its power to extract burgeoning cloud rents at the expense of capitalist profits and workers” wages. Our unpaid work within Big Tech’s cloud-fiefs boosts our economic and, increasingly, emotional costs of switching to other platforms, thus erecting ever taller walls around us. As this newfangled unproductive cloud capital accumulates, our unpaid labour accelerates the fall of the profit rate and, in the process, deepens the system’s crisis.

Whether one considers this a radical break from capitalism or an extension of its domain is a matter of judgement, not calculation. What is beyond dispute is that Marxist analysis is duty-bound to take this radical development seriously. Which brings me to the ultimate question: What’s in a word? Should we still call this capitalism or should Marxists call it something different, such as cloudalism or technofeudalism? Does it matter what we call it?

Marxists must surely agree that we are witnessing a new and dangerous transformation. Whether this a transformation within capitalism, as my critics argue75 or beyond capitalism, as I claim, is another issue. Before deciding, or even agreeing to disagree, it is helpful to remind ourselves that capitalism always featured a non-capitalist, rent-extracting department (Section 2).

So, the question becomes: Is the realm of cloud capital (the technofeudal department in Section 7) just an annex to capitalism’s pre-existing feudal component, or has it subjugated the economy’s capitalist department to such an extent as to warrant the claim that the parasite has taken over the host?76 Has a new ruling class (the cloudalists or techlords) emerged as dominant on the coattails of cloud capital? Are their cloud rents macroeconomically inconsequential bubbles on a torrent of capitalist profits, or are capitalist profits increasingly turning into frothy bubbles on a vortex of cloud rents?

These questions have an empirical and an analytic dimension. The empirical question is difficult to answer definitively because, since capitalism’s early days, it has been hard empirically to separate profits from rents. Today, this separation is even harder to make, given the dual nature of the digital technologies involved.77 However, the empirical dimension may not be the deciding factor.

In the 1770s, Adam Smith was celebrating the birth of “commercial society” as a “system of natural liberty”—his terms for capitalism. Back then, British society’s feudal sector overshadowed its relatively small capitalist sector. But that was no reason for Smith to hold back his proclamation of a great transformation. Even in the 1840s and 1850s, when Marx and Engels were writing, a case could be made that the capitalist sector was smaller than the feudal one, especially if one took in the entire European continent, where capitalism had not taken root properly yet. In this sense, Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Engels could have credibly called the new era industrial or market feudalism. Yet calling it capitalist helped their peers appreciate the extent of the transformation underway.78

So, words matter. The safe option today is to continue to assume that the cloudalist transformation is internal to capitalism. The controversial choice, in contrast, is to jolt our collective imagination by adopting a different term (e.g., cloudalism, technofeudalism) by which to emphasise the radical nature of the ongoing transformation.79 Both options are defensible within the Marxist tradition and neither choice is a good reason for unnecessary nastiness.80 Indeed, the two outlooks are fertile ground for a dialectical synthesis that constitutes an advance for Marxist analysis and practice.81

Dialectics begins with the recognition that reality is neither harmonious nor homogenous, but is instead built on contradiction. As Bertolt Brecht taught us,82 the soul of real drama is not conflict between people who disagree about this and that but, rather, the co-existence of two things that shouldn’t be able to exist at the same time. Similarly with our current bourgeois mode of production: it is both capitalist and technofeudal, in the same way that at the time of original Great Transformation, it was both feudal and capitalist.83

The whole point of Marxist dialectics is to see this puzzling, unfathomable co-existence and recognise in it the possibility of radically overcoming the contradiction through socialist transformation. But first, we need to recognise the contradiction. Once we have recognised it, the emancipatory, revolutionary potential of resolving it knows no bounds.

Appendix

The intertwined dynamics of capital and cloud capital accumulation. Marx’s falling rate of profit hypothesis, now augmented with a falling rate of cloud rent extraction hypothesis

In each sector i, the profit rate is defined as πi = Πi/(Ci+Vi) and the exploitation (of labour) rate as εi= Si/(Ci+Vi)

where

—Πi are the total profits in sector i,

—Ci is the expenditure on capital goods in sector i (i.e., investment in productive machines),

—Vi is its expenditure on labour (i.e., the wage bill), and

—Si is the surplus value (net of rent and interest payments) extracted from labour in sector i (as a result of paying workers for the value of their time and skills but not for the value that they actually input—through their labour—into the final commodity).

It is now simple to show that:

πi = εiμi = εi(1-ki) … (1)

where

—μi is the ratio of expenditure on wages over total expenditure on machines and labour [μi = Vi/(Ci+Vi)], and

—ki is Marx’s definition of the sector’s organic composition of capital, a metric of capital intensity calculated as the ratio of expenditure on productive machines (i.e., capital goods) over total expenditure on machines and labour [ki = Ci/(Ci+Vi)].

Proof of Equation (1): Assuming, as Marx does, that competition restricts total profits (Πi) to the total surplus value left over for the capitalists (after repaying rent and interest), equation (1) obtains as follows:

πi = Πi/(Ci+Vi) = Si/(Ci+Vi) = (Si/ Vi ) X (Vi /(Ci+Vi)) = (Si/ Vi ) X [1-(Ci /(Ci+Vi))]

The Transformation Problem (Resolved)

Marx initially assumed (Capital, Vol. I) that profit rates and labour exploitation rates must be (both) equalised across all sectors of a capitalist economy (i.e., πi = πj and εi = εj). However, when the organic composition of capital ki (i.e., capital intensity) differs across sectors, either profit rates (πi) will be equalised or exploitation rates (εi) will be equalised—but not both. This observation gave rise to the notorious “transformation problem.”

However, it is not a problem (see Capital Vol. III) if one accepts either that surplus value generated in one sector is appropriated by another (e.g., through monopoly power or, as in my analysis, cloud rents extracted by cloud capital) or that the two equalisation processes work in tandem, with the system permanently in flux—see below. [For more on the “transformation problem,” see Chapter 5 in our Modern Political Economics.]84

Proof that labour and capital will migrate constantly

If the machine goods sector is more capital intensive than the consumption good sector (i.e., kM > kC), and if the rate of exploitation is the same in the two sectors (i.e., εM = εC), profits will be lower in the machine goods sector and capital will, therefore, flow from the capital good to the consumption good sector. But, as this capital migration tends to equalise the profit rates, the exploitation rates will diverge; with labour exploitation increasing in the machine good sector.

As a result, labour will now migrate to the consumption good sector. But, as it does, the exploitation rate there will fall and so will [see equation (1)] the profit rate in the consumption good sector, causing a capital flight back to the machine good sector. And so on.

The analysis here begins with the original Marxist model outlined above before introducing the technofeudal hypothesis that cloud capital enables its owners to extract cloud rents R from the surplus value in the consumption good sector. So, equation (1) now becomes

πC= (εC—r)(1-kC) … (2)

where r=R/Vc is the ratio of cloud rents to total wages of workers in the consumption good sector.
Meanwhile the machine good sector’s profit rate remains the same as

πM= εM(1-kM) … (3)

Assuming (once more) that the machine sector is more capital intensive than the consumption good sector (i.e., kM>kC), capital will migrate from the consumption to the machine good sector pushing πM and πC closer together. Equalising (2) and (3), and solving for r we find the level of r (say r*) the profit rates will be equalised within the productive department:

r” = [εC(1-kC)—εM(1-kM)]/ (1-kC) …. (4)

However, as r rises approaching that level (r”), the rate of exploitation within the consumption good sector will exceed that in the machine good sector and, therefore, labour will tend to leave the latter for the former.

This labour migration disequilibrates the profit rates, pushing profitability in the consumption good sector below that of the machine good sector and, once again, causing capital to flow to the machine good sector. And so on.

Dynamic Analysis

The analysis below borrows from Goodwin85 the idea of using a system of two differential equations in order to capture Marx’s dynamic analysis.

Let the cloud rent extraction rate ρ be defined as the ratio of total cloud rents over total expenditure in the technofeudal department [i.e., ρ = R/( CT+VT), where CT and VT are, respectively, the expenditure on cloud capital (CT) and waged labour (VT) in the technofeudal department]. Now, suppose ρ* is the threshold of ρ such that, if exceeded, profitability (π) in the productive department falls. Then, the technofeudal dynamic is captured as follows:

—If ρ > ρ*, then π rises—and vice versa.

This dynamic can be expressed most simply by the following linear differential equation:

—dπ/dt = α(ρ—ρ*) … (5)

where α is some positive constant capturing the speed at which profitability in the productive department responds to changes in the technofeudal department’s cloud rent extraction rate.

Now, let us assume that when profitability π exceeds a certain threshold (π*), then the cloud rent extraction rate ρ (the ratio of total cloud rents over total expenditure in the technofeudal department) falls. In short,

—If π> π*, then ρ falls—and vice versa.

This second dynamic is captured by the linear differential equation in (6) below.

—dρ/dt = β(π*-π) … (6)

where β is some positive constant capturing the speed at which the cloud rent extraction rate in the technofeudal department responds to changes in the profitability of the productive department.

To see how this system yields the four phases that are described in the text, plot equations (5) and (6) on the (ρ,π) plane and note that at profit rates above π* the rate of cloud rent extraction ρ declines (and falls when π< π*) while the profit rate π falls when ρ lies below threshold ρ*. These two tendencies (the Techno-feudal Dynamic and Productive Dynamic) produce the phase diagram in Figure 1.

An important caveat applies, here: Whereas capital can flow relatively unimpededly between different sectors of the economy’s productive department, the same is not necessarily true between the productive and the technofeudal departments. Due to network effects, and the need to recruit millions of users as cloud serfs, the fixed costs of building up cloud fiefs are enormously larger than constructing even an electricity grid used to be. In other words, second and third movers may find that they need to invest sums multiple times those of first movers before they can collect significant cloud rents. This is why Elon Musk was keen to buy Twitter, rather than try to build a cloud fief from scratch: see Chapter 5 of my Technofeudalism.

As cloud capital accumulates and expenditure on waged labour in the technofeudal department falls concurrently (courtesy of the increasing preponderance of unpaid labour that cloud capital recruits), the two thresholds ρ* and π* in equations (5) and (6) decline. As ρ* and π* decline, the system’s cycles shift downwards, tending toward the origin in Figure 2. Ergo, not only is this analysis consistent with Marx’s original hypothesis that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall but points to a secular decline in the cloud rent extraction rate as well.

Hypothesis 1: As cloud capital accumulates, the profit rate threshold (π*), beyond which the rent extraction rate (ρ) declines, also declines

The cloud rent extraction rate ρ is an increasing function of the cloud capital stock in the technofeudal department (CT) if and only if the organic composition of cloud capital (γ) is less than the responsiveness of aggregate cloud rents to changes in the stock of cloud capital (η). As cloud capital accumulates (i.e., CT rises), the threshold ρ* declines.

PROOF: The cloud rent extraction rate is defined ρ=R/CT+VT). The rate of change in this rate is thus defined by equation (7)

∂ρ/CT=((CT+VT ) ∂R⁄/CT—R)⁄(CT+VT)2 … (7)

It is now simple to show that the condition for ∂ρ/(/CT )>0 is that γ<η where

—γ=(CT/(CT+CT )) is the organic composition of cloud capital (i.e., the ratio of expenditure on cloud capital over total expenditure in the technofeudal department), and

—η=(∂R×CT/(∂CT×R)) is the ratio of the proportional rate of change in aggregate cloud rents over the proportional rate of change in the stock of cloud capital.

In other words, the condition for the rate of cloud rent extraction to stabilise (π=π*) requires that γ=η. However, it is in the nature of cloud capital that, as its stock grows (i.e., CT rises), its owners” expenditure on waged labour (i.e., VT) declines for any given level of cloud rents (R). This means that both γ and η will be rising in the longer-run in response to the secular decline of VT. Consequently, the profitability level at which ρ stalls (i.e. π*) must decline. QED.

INTUITION: As cloud capital (CT) accumulates, the organic composition of cloud capital (γ) rises. At low profit rates (π<π*), γ>η and, thus, ρ rises as cloud capital accumulates. But, above a certain level of profitability in the economy’s productive department, η (the responsiveness of aggregate cloud rents to the

increases in the stock of cloud capital) exceeds the organic composition of cloud capital (γ) [i.e., η>γ]. At that point, the accumulation of cloud capital leads to a fall in ρ, the rate of cloud rent extraction. That point, however, is where profitability in the productive department equals threshold π*. But, as cloud capital accumulates, and both γ and η grow, the profitability threshold π* at which the rate of cloud rent extraction stalls (dρ/dt=0) must decline.

Hypothesis 2: The rent extraction rate (ρ*), beyond which the profit rate rises, also declines as cloud capital accumulates

As the organic composition of productive capital (kC and kM) rises in the longer run for every level of expenditure on cloud capital (CT), the cloud rent extraction rate (ρ) at which profitability picks up (i.e. ρ*) must fall. In other words, the threshold of the cloud rent extraction rate, ρ*, below which profitability in the productive sector rises, and thus productive capital accumulation, falls is a decreasing function of cloud capital accumulation. QED.

Notes

1 Thanks are due to Julian Assange, Tony Aspromourgos and Cory Doctorow for helpful comments. All errors are, of course, mine.

2 See, for example, Henry Snow, ‘We’re Still Living Under Capitalism, Not “Techno-Feudalism”’, Jacobin, 2023, available at:

https://jacobin.

com/2023/10/cloud-capitalism-technofeudalism-serfs-cloud-big-data-yanis-varoufakis; David Addison and Merle Eisenberg, ‘Capitalism Is Changing, but Not Into “Neofeudalism”’, Jacobin, 2025, available at https://jacobin.com/2025/05/capitalism-neofeudalism-tech-medieval-history; Evgeny Morozov, ‘Le numérique nous ramène-t-il au Moyen Âge?’, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2025, pp. 1, 8–9.

3 Daniel Schiller, Digital Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: MIT: 1999.

4 Philip Graham, ‘Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism’, New Media and Society, Vol.2, Issue 2, 2000, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614440022225742

5 Nicholas Gane, ‘Computerized Capitalism: The Media Theory of Jean-François Lyotard’, Information, Communication and Society, 6, 3, 2003, pp. 430–50.

6 Guy Standing The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay, Hull: Biteback Publishing, 2016.

7 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2016.

8 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, New York: Profile Books, 2024.

9 David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, edited by Piero Sraffa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951 [1817].

10 Mainstream (or neoclassical) economics defines economic rent as any payment for a commodity over and above the opportunity cost of supplying it. However, in David Ricardo and Karl Marx, absolute rent (as opposed to differential rent) is understood as the payment to landowners for the mere permission to use land, arising from their exclusive property rights over the land. Marx, in particular, argued that absolute ground rent stems from the fact that agriculture has a lower organic composition of capital (see Appendix) than industry, allowing agricultural products to sell above their price of production but at their value. The difference between value and price of production is pocketed by the landowner as rent. The concept of cloud rent that is introduced below stems from this notion of absolute ground rent, adapted to a world in which absolute cloud rents (as opposed to ground rents) are charged to anyone wishing access to digital, or cloud, fiefdoms – e.g., amazon.com.

11 Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, New York: Modern Reader, 2016.

12 John K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

13 The monopoly price of certain commodities would merely transfer a portion of the profit of the other commodity-producers to the commodities having the monopoly price… In this case the monopoly price would be paid by a deduction from real wages (i.e.. the quantity of use-values received by the labourer for the same quantity of labour) and from the profit of the other capitalists’: Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Chapter 50.

14 Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy, London: Zed Books, 2011.

15 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.

16 Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London: Verso, 2006; Cédric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future. London: Verso, 2017.

17 Nicholas Shaxson, The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer, London: Bodley Head, 2018.

18 Brett Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, London: Verso, 2023.

19 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, op. cit.

20 Cédric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy, London: Verso, 2024 (original French version in 2020); Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, New York: Encounter Books, 2020.

21 Duncan Foley, ‘Rethinking Financial Capitalism and the “Information” Economy’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 45: 257, 2013, available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0486613413487154.

22 Evgeny Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, New Left Review, 133/134, 2022.

23 Cory Doctorow, in our private communication, offers a devastating challenge to the bourgeois idea of individual property rights over private data: ‘I think this is a really bad frame. Data is valuable but it is not property (people are valuable but we’re not property, either). Who owns the fact that your father is your father? You? Him? Me. If your father was abusive and wanted to stop you from publishing the fact that he was your father, would he have a property right to decide whether that fact could be disclosed? Do your kids have the right to give half of your DNA to 23andme? “Property” is a really bad framework for regulating data — far better to put data rights into frames like labour, privacy, etc.’

24 Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, London: Verso, 2025.

25 Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, London: Bodley Head, 2023.

26 Foley, ‘Rethinking Financial Capitalism and the “Information” Economy’, art. cit.

27 Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, art. cit.

28 Markets can be less or more competitive, oligopolistic (few sellers, many buyers) or oligopsonistic (many sellers, few buyers); tending in the limit to monopoly (a single seller and many buyers) or monopsony (a single buyer, many sellers). However, markets wither when the number of buyers and the number of sellers both shrink, tending to one on each side (in which case we have a case of one-on-one bargaining, or bilateral monopoly-monopsony).

29 Markets are integral to capitalist reproduction, essential links in the circuit of capital where money M buys commodities C (i.e., labour power and capital goods) to power up the production of more commodities C’ whose sale results in more money M’ etc. (M→C…P…C’→M’).

30 ‘In order to produce [commodities], he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others… (And not merely for others. The medieval peasant produced a corn-rent for the feudal lord and a corn-tithe for the priest; but neither the corn-rent nor the corn-tithe became commodities simply by being produced for others. In order to become a commodity, the product must be transferred to the other person…through the medium of exchange.)’ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 1.

31 Price discrimination is as old as any market: the seller’s attempt to extract the so-called consumer surplus (the difference between the maximum price they would be prepared to pay for an item and the actual price). To this end, sellers attempt to separate customers from one another so as to charge each one of them the maximum price that they would pay (a task that necessitates making it impossible for buyers to re-sell to one another). Naturally, algorithmic machines do this better than any previous analogue device or method ever could.

32 Critics of the technofeudal hypothesis contest the economic significance of Alexa or even WhatsApp on the basis that they have not been monetised successfully. Snow (‘We’re Still Living Under Capitalism’, art. cit), for instance, writes that ‘[f]ar from being an asset, Alexa has been a multibillion-dollar write-off’. But this is an accounting mirage. Amazon subsidises the Alexa devices massively, choosing to sell them below their manufacturing cost. Apple provides Siri for free. Instacart does the same with its assistant. Nonetheless, these assitants are excellent investments. Alexa allows Amazon to extract cloud rents that its accountants do not, and cannot, ascribe to Alexa. This raises the intriguing empirical question of how cloud rents can be measured and distinguished from profits. This problem is not new, of course. When Ricardo (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, op. cit.) introduced the distinction between profits and rents, and Baran and Sweezy (Monopoly Capital, op. cit.) the distinction between monopoly profits and monopoly surplus, the accounting profession proved neither interested nor capable of accounting for these separately. To this day, rents and profits are lumped together under the same column. Marxists, however, have no excuse to fail to draw this distinction and thus to fall into the trap of concluding that Alexa and WhatsApp are lossmaking only because accountants have neither an interest nor the ability to count the rents they procure on behalf of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Marc Zuckerberg.

33 ‘The means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation of, and domination over, the worker’ (emphasis added): Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 33.

34 A report from the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO)describes the Big Tech model as a ‘self-reinforcing machine for rent extraction’.

35 See the documentary on Instacart by ‘A More Perfect Union’, available at

36 Consumer surplus is the sum of the differences between the price that any unit of any commodity sells for, and the maximum that some consumer would be prepared to pay for it (if they had to do so).

37 The COVID-19 pandemic played a role, too. Once supply-chains collapsed and prices took off, the pre-existing collusive price equilibrium was shattered. The resulting price inflation added noise and behind that noise algorithmic pricing took off to annul price competition.

38 A firm is monopsonistic if it is the only one that buys a certain commodity. If a company, like Uber, is the sole buyers of a pool of drivers’ labour power, it is a labour monopsonist.

39 Marx analyses piece-rates in Chapter Twenty-One of Capital, Vol. I. The important difference with Amazon’s implementation of piece rate labour remuneration is that its cloud capital is programmed to modify the readiness of workers to accept lower piece rates depending on their private circumstances, in real time.

40 In the Grundrisse, Marx (see Notebook VI, December 1857 – January 1858, section ‘Bastiat and Carey’) criticises liberal economists Bastiat and Carey for their ahistorical, harmonious view of capitalism, juxtaposing earlier forms of exploitation (corvée, slavery), that were transparent, against capitalist exploitation which is concealed by the wage contract. This concealment is a source of ideological power for the capitalist system, as it creates the appearance of a ‘free and fair’ exchange. By the same token, it is illegitimate to claim that one can’t possibly be an Uber or Amazon cloud serf because one can always quit.

41 Something similar applies to start-ups. In his infamous ‘Competition is for losers’ speech, Peter Thiel preached the importance of capturing and locking in users in digital ‘enclosures’ (or cloud fiefs, as I call them). Failure to do so means bankruptcy, he argued, offering the bursting of the dot.com bubble as an example of what happens when Big Tech fails to lock users in cloud fiefs. Without this ‘confinement’, he continues, tech conglomerates can expect no super profits and, as a result, no venture capital (VC) infusions. Without VC infusions, he went on to say, no start-up can grow fast enough to compete against startups with VC infusions.

Thiel’s argument is a vindication for the technofeudal hypothesis: Finding ways of confining users in digital enclosures created by Big Tech’s cloud capital is their ticket to immense extractive power. Moreover, no start-up that wants to succeed can escape this ‘duty’ to confine users into cloud-fiefs from which they have the formal freedom to escape, but only at a prohibitive cost. See Peter Thiel, ‘Competition Is For Losers’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014, available at: https://www.csun.edu/~vcact-00f/497CapStone/Peter%20Thiel_%20Competition%20Is%20for%20Los-ers%20-%20WSJ.pdf.

42 Constance Hoffman Bernan, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

43 M.M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, London: Penguin Books, 1975, offered evidence that Black Death created labour shortages leading to competitive bidding for workers, undermining legislation that tethered them to the land.

44 ‘Productive labour, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage-labour which, exchanged against the variable part of capital (the part of the capital that is spent on wages), reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour-power), but in addition produces surplus-value for the capitalist. It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage-labour is productive which produces capital’ (emphasis added): Karl Mardx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1, Chapter IV, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987.

45 After all, sheriffs, vicars and court jesters were also rewarded, and often lived exceedingly well, under feudalism. Under technofeudalism, these rewards are decided and divvied up automatically by the same cloud capital which recruits the rest of us to the cloud-fiefs.

46 Marx’s hypothesis known as the Falling Rate of Profit is reflected in equation (1) – Appendix. As the organic composition of capital (k) rises, the profit rate declines. If this is replicated across the economy, and systematically, the more capital accumulates the deeper capitalism sinks into a secular profitability crisis.

47 For example, Amazon’s servers accommodate (a) traditional capital (e.g., running the software of industrial robots manufacturing electronics, cars etc.), (b) pure cloud capital (e.g., Amazon’s own Alexa, amazon.com’s interface) and (c) others’ cloud capital (e.g., Uber). Additionally, they cater for military software applications (e.g., Palantir).

48 Tractors, electricity generators and industrial robots can only be manufactured by employing proletarian labour. In contrast, cloud capital accumulates with every post, video, comment or like we upload — for no pay — on, say, Instagram. With every one of our posts our costs of switching away from Instagram increase. Thus, without doing anything, Meta sees its cloud capital (its power to keep us engaged so that it can modify our behaviour) accumulate in direct proportion to the unwaged labour of its users which, inadvertently, increases their switching costs and, therefore, the hold the platform has over them. This is why Big Tech’s wage bill, as a proportion of their revenues and capitalisation, are so small, compared to conglomerates employing productive capital: its users reproduce much of their cloud capital with their free labour.

49 Digital machines are productive when used to produce commodities but not so when configured as cloud capital. To reject the technofeudal hypothesis because these networked machines, like the servers of AWS, are also used in the context of standard commodity production (as was always the case with machines under capitalism) is a little like saying that capitalism was not qualitatively different to feudalism because capital goods were also used in feudal fiefs. The AWS outage of 2025 adds to this point: Platforms including Signal, Snapchat, Roblox, Duolingo, as well as services such as banking sites and the Ring doorbell company were some of the 2,000 companies affected by the outage, according to Downdetector — a site that monitors internet outages — with more than 8.1m reports of cloud capital failures from users across the world. There is now clear evidence of excessive valuations of companies that, like OpenAI, are in the business of selling AI subscriptions. As Elder (2025) shows, the costs of large language models increase exponentially when the expected subscription revenues increase more or less linearly. In contrast, when AI is incorporated into Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant or Gemini, its capacity to net cloud rents on its owners’ behalf by modifying our behaviour (both as consumers and as producers) knows no bounds.

50 There is now clear evidence of excessive valuations of companies that, like OpenAI, are in the business of selling AI subscriptions. As Elder (2025) shows, the costs of large language models increase exponentially when the expected subscription revenues increase more or less linearly. In contrast, when AI is incorporated into Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant or Gemini, its capacity to net cloud rents on its owners’ behalf by modifying our behaviour (both as consumers and as producers) knows no bounds.

51 In private communication, Julian Assange commented on this point as follows: ‘We are well beyond surveillance capitalism with spying and behavioural surplus as a base. Sensor input, from satellites, radio, radar, weather stations, vehicles, drones, robots, phones, seismic, as well as financial data, will continue to be important, but what people are posting on Facebook or searching for is low volume and noisy, and interrogative learning, which is superior, is also coming down the pipe. This mirrors the development of chess, where for 40 years computer chess was trained on human chess games, but about eight years ago AlphaChess started with a blank slate and played itself, rediscovering, then shifting beyond, all three thousand years of human chess within 24 hours. Of course chess is a discrete toy world with full information, but modern robotics training is using training in physics simulations (very fast) then retraining in the real world (slow)’.

52 Generative AI businesses differ from past success stories in the Big Tech tradition because they are far more capital-intensive. Behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Meta earn a great deal from their legacy cloud rent extraction business model (and can, thus, afford to outspend conventional capitalist enterprises on AI). In contrast, developers such as OpenAI that try to profit through selling AI-created commodities will run out of money unless they switch from commodity production to the technofeudal mode (i.e., the behavioural modification business).

53 Lest there be any doubt that cloud capital is even more concentrated than conventional capital has ever been, consider this: According to the research group Synergy, AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud between them control nearly two-thirds of global capacity in cloud services. China has responded with accumulating its own cloud capital. Europe, in contrast, owns almost no cloud capital. AWS dominates Europe with what it calls the ‘European sovereign cloud’, run by units incorporated in Europe and a management team comprising EU citizens living in the EU. Yet the US Cloud Act, which gives the US government broad powers over data providers, still extends into EU jurisdictions.

54 Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 [1910].

55 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951 [1913]; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism [1917], in Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963.

56 Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso, 2013.

57 See, in Chapter Six of Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, op. cit., the section entitled ‘Technofeudalism’s global impact: the New Cold War’.

58 Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Defusing the Stablecoin Time Bomb’, Project Syndicate, 2 July 2025, available at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ private-stablecoins-are-a-formula-for-financial-crisis-by-yanis-varoufakis-2025-07.

59 Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Technofeudalism Is War’s Handmaiden’, Project Syndicate, 6 February 2025, available at

https://www.project-syndicate.org/

commentary/rise-of-cloud-capital-makes-war-more-likely-by-yanis-varoufakis-2025-02.

60 Yanis Varoufakis ‘Trump and the Triumph of the Technolords’, Project Syndicate, 30 April 2025, available at

https://www.project-syndicate.org/

commentary/technofeudalist-ideology-emerging-from-neoliberal-rubble-by-yanis-varoufakis-2025-04.

61 The rise of cloud capital upends the entrepreneurial state. Gone are the days when new technologies were invented in government laboratories or in universities; innovations that were then developed and monetised by the private capital. Today, top-end innovations are taking place within Big Tech.

62 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, London: Verso, 1999; Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2003.

63 Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, and Nicholas Theocarakis, Modern Political Economics, London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

64 Galbraith, The New Industrial State, op. cit.

65 This is where I part ways with Mackenzie Wark (Capital Is Dead: Is this something worse?, London: Verso, 2019), who argues that ‘capital is dead’, killed by a new vector of information flows. Where we do agree is in that we are facing a new mode of production, one not ruled over by owners of produced means of production (traditional capital goods). But, whereas Wark argues that the new ruling class comprises those who own and control ‘information vectors’, my hypothesis is that the control of information is only a small part of the story of power in contemporary society. Capital is alive and kicking and has morphed into a new form — cloud capital — whose accumulation ushered in a new mode of production ruled over by a new ruling class comprising the owners of this new form of unproductive capital (the cloudalists for short).

66 In contrast to those focusing on surveillance and data extraction, my technofeudal hypothesis sees Alexa, Google Assistant and the rest of Big Tech’s interfaces as desire implanters and market bypassers, not mere data harvesters.

67 Portrayed as a ‘eulogy for capitalism’, the technofeudal hypothesis is dismissed as strategically disorienting and politically convenient for those who would rather debate data harvesting than the source of capitalist power, thus serving a form of nostalgic-liberal rather than a revolutionary politics. Geoff Mann, for example, wrote that my technofeudal hypothesis: ‘… is exculpatory. If capitalism is already dead, we cannot hold it responsible for the misery it continues to produce… This is a gift to the capitalist, who can now say, ‘Don’t look at me, I’m as much a victim as you are’. A Marxist critic added on a social media post: ‘Varoufakis provides a palatable, “radical” analysis for the professional-managerial class that feels uneasy about Bezos but is deeply invested in the 401(k) system. It’s critique as safety valve’.

68 A good example is the manner in which cybernetics (which is what AI used to be known as, before it was taken over by Big Tech) was fruitfully deployed by the Allende government in Chile, before the CIA coup of 11 September 1973. See Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

69 Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in Germa Social Democracy, 1915 translated by Dave Hollis, available at https://www.marx-ists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/index.htm.

70 ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ is Karl Marx’s eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (1845), published in English in 1938 in The German Ideology.

71 Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, op. cit., Chapter Seven.

72 For instance, whereas Georgi Plekhanov and Rosa Luxemburg argued that the revolution should be led strictly by the proletariat, Lenin proposed a worker-peasant alliance (Smychka). Leon Trotsky thought that the proletariat should lead but not before winning the support of the peasantry. In contrast, Mao Zedong gave a different answer to the ‘Agrarian Question’: in colonial contexts, the peasantry had to become the revolution’s main force, leading an alliance that included even the ‘national bourgeoisie’ against imperialism. Meanwhile, Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of the Communist International (Comintern), proposed to its Seventh World Congress (1935) a popular front of proletarians, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie (i.e., capitalists who were also being ruined by large monopoly capital, like the vassal capitalists in Technofeudalism) to combat the immediate threat of fascism—which he described as the ‘open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary… elements of finance capital’.

73 For a detailed account on what alliances I believe can prove truly revolutionary, as well as what the socialisation of capital, cloud capital, land and finance should look like, see my Another Now, London: The Bodley Head, 2020 — a sci-fi novel.

74 In Capital Vol. I, Marx explains how surplus value extracted in workplaces is indirectly analogous to unpaid labour of women in the home – which contributes directly to the reproduction of labour power (the commodity traded in labour markets). By producing use-values (meals, clean clothes, cared-for children) that would otherwise have to be bought from wages, unpaid domestic labour lowers the cost of reproducing the working class. See also Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972 [1884], and Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation, Monthly Review, 21, no. 4, 1969, pp. 13–27.

75 See Snow, ‘We’re Still Living Under Capitalism’, art. cit.; Addison and Eisenberg, ‘Capitalism Is Changing, but Not Into “Neofeudalism”’, art.cit.),

76 In Technofeudalism, I argue that a new ruling class, possessing no productive capital, lives like a burgeoning parasite at the expense of the capitalist department. Therefore, the capitalist department has become for the cloud capital owners what humans are to the machines in the movie The Matrix: essential but utterly subservient.

77 Morozov (‘Le numérique nous ramène-t-il au Moyen Âge?’, art. cit.) claims that AWS makes most of Bezos’ money by providing capitalist services to other conglomerates. This is so. But what are these conglomerates using their access to these dual-purpose machines for (recall Section 4)? Uber, Airbnb, Meta and Palantir rent AWS servers not to offer capitalist commodities but to run their own cloud capital. Essentially, this is a joint cloud capital venture between AWS and other cloudalist firms, not a capitalist B2B service market.

78 Marx hardly ever used the word capitalism, or kapitalismus. His preferred term was the ‘bourgeois mode of production’ or the ‘system of capital’. In the Theories of Surplus Value (1861-63), he does refer to ‘the capitalist mode of production, or capitalism’ (‘die kapitalistische Produktionsweise, oder das Kapitalismus’). However, judging by his prose, Marx resembled a political scientist who studies bourgeois systems of democratic governance but who only speaks of democracy reluctantly.

79 The counter-argument here is that, unlike capitalism that marked a drastic break from land-based feudalism, technofeudalism still relies on capital, albeit cloud capital. On the other hand, however, cloud capital constitutes a rupture from capitalism’s essence: a system driving the commodification of everything via markets. Cloud capital accumulation, in contrast, spawns a power exercised outside markets (Section 5).

80 Morozov (‘Le numérique nous ramène-t-il au Moyen Âge?’, art. cit.) levels the accusation that in my ‘eagerness to imitate Karl Marx’, I ‘ended up copying Charles Dickens, a Victorian melodrama disguised as social theory’. Such accusations are unhelpful and a reminder of attitudes that divide the Marxist left unnecessarily.

81 Whether or not one adopts the technofeudal hypothesis, it is helpful to remember that Marxist economics without dialectics reduces to a stale form of Ricardianism.

82 Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre: The Development of the Aesthetic, New York: Hill & Wang, 1949.

83 The dialectical method completes the circle by returning to the point in Section 1 that the technofeudal hypothesis does not hypothesise a return to feudalism. Rather, the argument is that capital’s stupendous evolution has brought back (not feudalism but) aspects of feudalism – in the same way that the US Constitution is nothing like ancient Athenian democracy but an oligarchic device alluding to it.

84 Varoufakis, Halevi, and Theocarakis, Modern Political Economics, op. cit.

85 R.M. Goodwin, ‘A Growth Cycle’, in C.H. Feinstein (ed), Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.

On Thursday, 6 August, anti-imperialist rallies took place in several Greek cities to mark the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Peace organisations, youth groups, and trade unions recalled the indiscriminate destruction caused by the bombings and warned against Europe’s ongoing militarisation and the growing risk of war facing the working class.

“We are here today because the slogan ‘never again’ remains as relevant as ever,” said Grigoris Anagnostou of the Greek Committee for International Détente and Peace (EEDYE) at one of the rallies. “The danger of a widespread nuclear catastrophe is growing; we are raising our voices and intensifying the struggle for a world without nuclear weapons, without wars, and without the exploitation of human beings by other human beings.”

Over 100,000 people were instantly killed on 6 August and 9, 1945, when the US dropped uranium and plutonium bombs on the two Japanese cities. Tens of thousands more died in the following months from the effects of radiation exposure. The official explanation of the bombing was to force Japan’s surrender in World War II, but the act was largely a demonstration of force aimed at the Soviet Union. “Today, the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not merely a historical anniversary,” the All-Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) stated. “It is a warning and a wake-up call.”

“The dropping of the atomic bomb was a horrific show of force by the US, aimed at the Soviet Union and the working-class forces, which had become radicalised during the war years,” the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) remarked. “At the same time, it was yet another proof that the imperialists will stop at no crime to achieve their goals.”

Speaking on behalf of PAME on Thursday, Nikos Tzortzis emphasised the links between austerity and anti-labour policies implemented by European governments—including the New Democracy administration in Greece—with crumbling services and the interests of the arms trade. “Our country’s involvement in the war means billions spent on military equipment and preparations and new sacrifices for workers and the people,” 902.gr quotes Tzortzis as saying. “It means intensified exploitation with 13-hour workdays, starvation wages, the dismantling of collective bargaining agreements, rising prices, authoritarianism, and repression.”

The effects of these policies are devastating, he pointed out, as illustrated by yet another catastrophic fire season in Greece, where several firefighters have already died. “They are not victims of “bad luck,”” Tzortzis emphasised. “They are victims of the undeclared war waged by capitalists who view measures to protect workers“ lives and health as a cost and an obstacle to their profits. These are crimes committed by the state of the exploiters, which proves effective when it comes to serving the profitability of corporate conglomerates, guarding shipowners” vessels in the Red Sea and Aramco’s oil wells, but “incapable” when it comes to protecting human life and enforcing health and safety measures in the workplace.”

Peace groups underscored the continuity of US-led conflicts from the past through to today and insisted that the danger of further nuclear arms use still looms. “The imperialists are modernising their nuclear arsenals, developing new “lower yield” weapons that are 1,000 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a shorter time to avert catastrophe,” wrote EEDYE. “They have spread war fronts across the globe, with the carnage in Ukraine and the Middle East expanding and intensifying. The prospect of a full-scale war looms menacingly.”

EEDYE insisted imperialist forces will stop at nothing to protect their interests. “The message from Hiroshima and Nagasaki confirms this,” the organization said. “The genocide in Gaza confirms this. The decisions of the latest NATO summit confirm this dangerous course.”

As part of the demonstrations, PAME echoed widespread calls for Greece to shut down US military bases and leave NATO, insisting the government should focus on guaranteeing a more dignified life for workers. Thirteen-hour working days and cuts to healthcare and education while millions are being spent on arms is unacceptable, PAME said. “No one should accept the rhetoric of “national unity” and “social peace,” which demand silence, submission, and the sacrifice of the people’s children—whether in the workplace or on the battlefields—so that war preparations and corporate profits can proceed unhindered.”

China officially objected to references of Taiwan and invocations of alleged “China threats” in this year’s Japanese defence white paper. China also claims the document is proof of the growing remilitarisation of Japan, which threatens peace and stability in the region.

“The Defence of Japan 2026 White Paper once again targeted China with groundless accusations, rehashing the so-called “China threat” and grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs with brazen comments on China’s Taiwan region,” Lin Jian, official spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a regular press conference on Wednesday, 5 August.

This year’s white paper was released on Tuesday. The document underlines the alleged growing threats to Japan and the global order from China and North Korea in “the Indo-Pacific” region along with their alleged growing military collaborations with Russia.

It highlights “increased Chinese defence expenditure” and its growing “military activities” around Taiwan and the South China Sea. Points out the supposed military imbalance between Taiwan and China and repeats the allegations of how China is responsible for threatening maritime traffic.

“China’s external posture, military activities, and other activities are a matter of serious concern for Japan and the international community and present an unprecedented and greatest strategic challenge,” the white paper said, while underlining the need for Japan to be ready to respond to any possible threat.

It focuses on “new ways of warfare” in the context of the use of drones, in particular in the Ukraine war and the war on Iran, and talks about developing capabilities, nationally or in collaboration with the allies such as the US and South Korea, to face similar situations.

Revision in Japan’s strategic approach

The white paper says the government of Sanae Takaichi is aiming to revise the country’s three strategic documents—the National Security Strategy, the National Defence Strategy, and the Defence Buildup Program—within the current year to respond to the “rapidly changing in the international security environment.”

The Japanese military must have a “stronger sense of urgency and crisis than ever before” to further reinforce and transform its defence capabilities, the country’s defence minister Shinjiro Koizumi said in the preface of the document.

Japan has maintained a pacifist approach to the country’s defences in the region, created under the post-Second World War order. However, in the last few years, encouraged by the US, Japanese governments, including the present Takaichi administration, have pushed for aggressive remilitarisation of the country.

Takaichi and several ministers in her government have given statements declaring China a threat and emphasising the need to build a stronger defence mechanism in the country, involving both production and the transfer of weapons, including the nuclear bomb.

Last month Koizumi had received strong objections from the Chinese government over similar remarks about the need for the change in the country’s three non-nuclear principles.

The white paper underlines the Takaichi government’s aim to increase the national defense budget to 2% of Japan’s GDP and build a “robust and sustainable defense industry” in the country and justifies the transfer of weapons and defense technologies to allies in the region for “mutual help.”

The document also states that the country’s total defense expenditure exceeded 9 trillion Yen (around USD 58 billion) for the first time in this financial year.

Japan already has US military bases and participates in several regional military exercises annually. The White Paper talks about further strengthening such relationships with the US and other NATO members and countries in the region, explicitly targeting China and North Korea.

The re-militarisation of Japan is a threat to regional peace.

On Wednesday, China rejected Japanese attempts to project its activities in the region as a threat, claiming all its “military activities that were conducted were just and valid,” reiterating it is “committed to peaceful development.”

Lin Jian reiterated the Chinese position that “Japan has not only failed to reflect on” its militarist history, which inflicted immense suffering on Asia and the world during the interwar period, but also “kept speeding up re-militarization” in breach of its own constitution and international laws.

The white paper and other actions expose “the truth behind Japan’s claims of being a peaceful nation,” Lin said, asking the international community to “stay on high alert” and push back the attempts to revive Japan’s militarist past.

During the spring heat wave, Europe registered an estimated 800 so-called “surplus deaths.” Meanwhile, in Germany, deaths by heat are not even recorded in German death certificates. Surplus death is the official term used when more people are dying than in a normal month.

Combatting global warming requires political action, and such action requires politicians who, as a new study shows, are rather oblivious when it comes to global warming. Whether politicians in Germany, for example, implement climate actions programs combatting global warming depends on their perception of voters” willingness to accept measures to fight global warming.

A recent survey, conducted in Germany, sampled German politicians via their professional email addresses. Its task was to compare the perception of 1,600 German politicians of what they assumed to be the willingness of the German people to support climate action with the actual willingness of the German people to support climate action. On the one hand is the “perception” of German politicians about the German population. On the other hand, there is the actual willingness of Germans to support climate action. You guessed it. Both do not match.

Across all political parties, German politicians seriously underestimate the public acceptance of taxes and laws combatting global warming. Politicians also seriously misjudge the people’s willingness to contribute 1% of income to fight global warming.

This phenomenon might best be called the “global warming misjudgment effect.” Surprisingly, the global warming misjudgment effect is even more pronounced among German politicians (what politicians think about the general public) than among Germany’s population (what people think about other people). It gets worse; the global warming misjudgment effect is the most severe in those policy areas that are most effective in combatting global warming.

All this means that to effectively combat global warming what is require is raising awareness—not so much among Germany’s population in general—but, surprisingly, in Germany’s political sphere. What Germany needs is to build actual public support for climate action among politicians—not so much the general public. In short, the people know. Politicians do not. Worse, they falsely assume that the public is not supporting global warming measures, while in reality, the people do.

Not so much for Germans as such, but for German politicians, combatting global warming seems to be a pressing challenge. Overall, it has been widely known that corporate behavior (what corporations do), capitalism as such and the way (over)consumerism is set up is ultimately the cause of global warming. This has been identified as the “anthropocene”—the human impact on climate and as the “capitaloscene”—capitalism’s ravaging impact on the climate. Both mark today’s geological epoch defined by the period in Earth’s history when corporate and human activity became the dominant influence on the planet’s climate, ecosystems, and geology.

Yet, it is—unfortunately—very likely that Germany’s misjudging politicians need to be part of the solution. This is because stopping and, if possible, reversing global warming will require collective action. Only as a collective can human beings implement the necessary global warming mitigation measures to stop humanity from driving down the highway towards clime hell.

Many of Germany’s previous surveys have found widespread support for such climate action among not just the German population but also the global population. Yet, to effectively fighting global warming commands not only individual behavior change, but even more also structural measures like stopping pollution, reducing state subsidies to polluters, getting though of corporate greenwasching, higher carbon taxes, stronger support for renewable energy sources and so on.

Many of these measures need to be implemented by policymakers. Yet, it is exactly those policy makers who hold stark misconceptions about people’s support for climate action. Worse, not only German policy makers act on what they believe their voters” opinion to be. And this is the point where German politicians get it horribly wrong.

In other words, it is crucial that policymakers accurately understand, judge and estimate the reality of existing public support for global warming measures. Astoundingly, actual research about the accuracy of policymakers” perceptions of public support for action against global warming remains rather scant. In other words, common sense is not so common.

To address the perception-vs.-reality problem of the global warming misjudgment effect, politicians have been contacted, in this survey, to ascertain what German politicians think about the German population’s willingness to support action against global warming.

In a second step, this has been compared with the actual willingness—as self-reported by Germans. It reflects the fact that climate scientists have conclusive evidence for global warming. Whenever scientists use words like “conclusive evidence,” they mean to say, “we know.” There is no longer any debate.

For example, there is no debate that Charles Darwin was right. The same goes for Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein or that distance between Earth and the Moon of about 384,400 km. There is no debate. We know. The same goes for global warming and the anthropocene. We know.

Despite these facts, the general public itself also underestimates the widespread support for climate policies among itself—a rather unsurprising finding. In other words, we are greener than we think. We support sustainability stronger than we think, and we want to protect Earth to a much greater degree than we think other people will also do. We support measures against global warming and for sustainability very strongly.

Such misperceptions and underestimations reflect the global warming misjudgment effect. This is the widespread. Sadly, this is also a “collective” misperception of a social norm pertaining to what one’s own group thinks about itself. For example, even though most believe that a particular view—like fighting global warming—is prevalent in their own group, surprisingly, most believe that others do not hold that view.

The global warming misjudgment effect is the misperception of other people’s views about whether or not other people approve or disapprove of a global warming action. It is also the misjudgment of how common environmentally sustainable behaviour is and whether or not other people actually engage in climate action.

This effect has been documented many times including misjudging aggressive and criminal behavior, drinking, underrating the actual support for affirmative action and underestimating support for gender equality among other people.

In the area of action against global warming, large-scale studies show that the public misperceives how widespread support for climate action is. Support is stronger than we think. As a consequence, many citizens underestimate their fellow citizen’s willingness to see global warming as a problem.

A large majority of Americans, for example—up to 80% to 90%—underestimated the real concern others have about global warming and about the level they support for climate policies. Other studies unearthed that people underestimate the portion of citizens who believe global warming is real and is caused by human intervention.

A relatively large study—a worldwide survey—found that most people are even willing to actively combat global warming by contributing 1% of their income. Worse, people substantially underestimated the willingness of others to do the same.

It is not only the public in general that falls into the trap of the global warming misjudgment effect. Attendees of a UN’s Environment Assembly—including media people and surprisingly even NGOs and governments—misjudged the willingness to contribute 1% of their income.

The global warming misjudgment effect among the public is a barrier to action on global warming. This is because people’s willingness to contribute to a common good such as environmental protection also depends on their view of others and their willingness to contribute as well.

Yet, it gets more serious, as such misperceptions are also widespread among policymakers. The global warming misjudgment effect is strongly present in politicians. This constitutes an even more challenging obstacle to enacting environmental policies than the misperceptions among the public.

Simply because politicians have more power and resources to implement pro-environmental and sustainable policies. Unfortunately, the environmental action of politician often reflects both their own preferences and—most significantly—their, how ever wrong they may be—(mis)perception of public opinion.

Indeed, in the domain of environmental policies, the perception of politicians of the public opinion on global warming links the public to the action or inaction of politicians. Sadly, the perceptions politicians hold of the public opinion on global warming are often far from accurate.

Like many ordinary people, politicians too tend to omit the opinions of voters with whom they disagree—for example, on environmental policies. It gets worse. Politicians also overestimate how strongly public opinion is shaped by their own messages. Simultaneously, they tend to underestimate how strongly such views are shaped by messages people receive from family, friends, peers, their immediate social surrounding and corporate mass-media.

Back on the unperceived support for climate policies, even the staff of politicians—often professionally trained policy advisors—tend to miscalculate the public support for regulating on CO₂ emissions. This extends to elected politicians from county, municipality and town. They too perceive the public endorsement for solutions to global warming as lower than it actually is. The self-reported endorsement of pre-environmental policies is way higher than they thought it to be.

Meanwhile, a large sample of elected politicians from all levels of Germany’s federal system—from the highest levels down to local politicians—focused on four areas of support for action on global warming:

1. The acceptance of environmental policies regarding three types of policy measures: information, taxes, and laws.

2. The desire for government to support action against global warming.

3. The awareness of the problem of global warming.

4. The willingness to contribute 1% of their income towards environmental sustainability.

Across all parliamentary levels and political parties, there is a substantial underestimation of public support for action on global warming. The misperceptions and misjudgments among politicians are far greater than those among the general public.

For example, almost half of Germans would be willing to donate 1% of their own income to climate protection. Politicians estimated this proportion of the population to be less than a fifth. Virtually the same applies to environmental policies involving more information being provided to the public, higher taxes for polluters, and stricter laws to safeguard the environment. This also extends to the government improving general awareness of global warming.

Worse, the deeper one digs into environmental policies, the more pronounced the global warming misjudgment effect becomes. In short, the more serious the issue, the less politicians think the public would support them in introducing serious measures to protect the environment. The global warming misjudgment effect tells us that this is a serious error on the part of politicians.

In the end, politicians” misjudgment of the level of public support for action against global warming represents yet another important hurdle to effective climate policy.

The Russian President Vladimir Putin fired the political equivalent of the Oroshnik hypersonic missile Wednesday to scatter the recent pot shots by hawkish factions at the Russian “power vertical,” never a unified construct actually, over the future directions of the Ukraine war.

Putin coolly announced at a Kremlin meeting Wednesday with the Defence Ministry leadership a major reshuffle of Russian commanders in the special military operation zone, asserting that he has his own mind about tactic and strategy and intends to continue with the special military operation to its logical conclusion, while retaining the structural patterns.

Simply put, Russia’s Bismarck does not want to be remembered by posterity as someone who wantonly sacrificed the lives of his country’s youth to conquer foreign lands for self-glorification.

It is a noble decision—pragmatic and tactical but also strategic. This will mean Russia’s attritional war will continue, but a paradigm shift to put maximum pressure on the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to be expected. Indeed, the massive missile strikes at Kyiv in recent days are no longer meeting with missile interceptors, as Americans do not have surplus stocks to spare.

Put differently, there has been a paradigm shift as Russian forces are gaining ground all across the frontline, while there are growing signs of demoralisation within the Ukrainian army whose command and control system has become shaky following the recent dismissal of Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and the replacement of Defence Minister Mykhailo Federov.

Putin has reposed confidence in the military commanders who worked as a team in advancing the special military operation. From the political perspective too, Putin is pleased with the return of the US administration—and President Donald Trump personally—to the Ukraine settlement process.

The big picture also needs to be factored in, as Washington’s high-level contacts with Beijing are intensifying and Moscow cannot afford to lag behind. Russia’s Sherpa to the APEC summit at Shenzhen Ambassador-at-Large Marat Berdyev told Izvestia recently, “It’s premature to discuss specific meetings. However, in my opinion, such a trilateral contact [US-Russia-China] would be very useful. In practical terms, it’s entirely feasible, as three leaders of the leading powers are expected at the designated venue.”

Certainly, the first in-person meeting in Manila on 25 May between foreign ministers Sergey Lavrov and Marco Rubio since September last year was a defining moment. Ukraine was largely the focus of the meeting. Rubio told the media there was a need to seek “new proposals and new ideas,” adding that Washington was prepared to present “some of them in the appropriate context and format.”

This marked a departure from the Anchorage agreements of last August. But Moscow decided not to make an issue of it and instead signalled appreciation that after a lengthy pause, the US was renewing efforts to restart the Ukraine negotiation process.

In a subsequent interview with Fox News on 1 August, Rubio announced that Washington was once again ready to work with Moscow and Kyiv to achieve peace, despite the two countries” existing “strict red lines.” Rubio stated that Moscow and Kyiv have “some pretty strong red lines. Until we can bring these red lines closer together, we won’t achieve our goal. But we are ready to act.”

Rubio also touched on how Washington envisioned the main goal of its diplomacy in the new phase: “The dynamics of the conflict have changed somewhat in recent months, with the Ukrainian side now capable of striking deep into Russian territory and making the Russians feel the effects of this war. Therefore, we want to explore whether this new dynamic can lead to some kind of negotiated settlement.”

But to be sure, Rubio would also have been aware that the emergent reality included sustained and massive Russian missile strikes on Kyiv and that a major drone production facility belonging to the American company Terminal Autonomy was destroyed last week. According to the Guardian, this company manufactured high-precision drones for “deep strikes” in Ukraine, with guidance systems resistant to Russian electronic countermeasures. Of course, Russians were making a point.

On the other hand, Trump retracted from an earlier offer during the NATO summit in Ankara on 8 July to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missiles, and he also failed to respond to a request from Zelenskyy for an “emergency winter package of 300 Patriot missiles” without waiting for licensed production to begin.

The White House and SpaceX are also non-committal apropos of Zelenskyy’s proposal to Trump on 28 July to lift Starlink’s geographic restrictions over Russian territory that would enable Ukraine to use Starlink’s real-time connection to steer long-range drones against mobile Russian ballistic missile launchers positioned deep inside Russia.

Furthermore, it transpires that the new scheme by the US’ European allies for American arms supplies to Ukraine under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme is stalling. Despite $4.5 billion flowing into the US Treasury under PURL as of March, no contracts have been signed so far.

Finally, the “Graham bill” imposing oil sanctions on Russia may not after all pass before the legislative recess which begins on 10 August, as it has become part of a bargaining chip between the Democratic and Republican parties. If consideration of the bill drags on and if the Congress comes under Democratic Party control, the ”bipartisan consensus” over the bill may well wither away even as Lindsey Graham becomes a distant memory. The White House is in no hurry to pass the bill.

However, such “feel good” signalling notwithstanding, fundamental disagreements over key terms of a peace settlement continue to prevent Moscow and Kyiv from resuming full-fledged dialogue. Due to the escalating conflict over Iran, Washington is currently unable to exert the necessary pressure on Kyiv. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to visit Kyiv in the second half of August.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s attacks on civilian infrastructure within Russia are only intensifying, against the backdrop of Russia’s Duma elections. Russia’s retaliatory missile strikes have reached a massive scale.

The bottom line is that the chances of Moscow agreeing to Kyiv and Washington’s new terms are low. So, the nascent negotiation process would inevitably return to square one, which in turn will trigger another round of escalation. Perhaps Russia anticipates such an eventuality.

One positive factor is that Trump himself would seek to achieve at least interim results in the negotiations before the midterm congressional elections. But then, a powerful lobby representing the US military-industrial complex advocates a continuation of the conflict.

The Kremlin meeting on Wednesday and the reshuffle of army commanders steering the special military operation in Ukraine messages that negotiations can only become feasible when the parties are willing to make mutual concessions, and for that to happen, two pre-requisites of the situation are needed, namely, Russia’s battlefield victory and regime change in Kyiv.

Tech company Palantir has become widely known for the dystopian values espoused by its founders and their stated support for Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza. A new report now indicates the company may also be engaged in extensive tax dodging, allowing it to avoid contributing to the public services it profits from.

Launched on 5 August by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) and the Center for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR), the report identifies “an estimated €12 million (approximately USD 13.8 million) “tax gap” between what Palantir pays in Europe and what they would have paid if they didn’t shift profits to the United States.”

“Governments are contracting Palantir to strengthen national security—yet Palantir is undermining public services, including national economic security, by avoiding tax,” said EPSU General Secretary Jan Willem Goudriaan. “Meanwhile, a public services emergency is sweeping across Europe due to lack of investment. Few greater hypocrisies exist in Europe.”

The US: Big Tech’s Haven

According to the report, Palantir is benefiting significantly from protections the second Trump administration has built for US-based Big Tech companies. This has materialised not only in the exemption from the global minimum tax but also in a national framework that allows Palantir to effectively treat the US as a tax haven, CICTAR notes. “The Trump administration has not only been granting record amounts in new contracts to Palantir but is running a global protection racket to help it—along with other larger US tech giants—avoid paying tax both in the US and globally,” the report states.

It also shows that Palantir paid nothing in federal income tax in 2025, even though it would have owed USD 348 million at the standard corporate rate. This situation is unlikely to change soon. The report notes the company has declared over USD 3.5 billion in deferred tax assets—losses incurred in earlier years for which tax authorities give deductions that can be used to balance taxes on future profits. CICTAR estimated that Palantir’s deferred tax assets are so high that it might not have to pay federal taxes for nearly a decade.

The Trump administration’s policies can also help Big Tech companies minimise tax payments abroad. By analysing annual reports and financial documentation, CICTArecognisedR demonstrated how Palantir relies on stock-based compensation and excessive profit shifting to achieve this.

Palantir makes millions from contracts in countries including the UK, France, and Germany, yet books almost all of its profits in the US, where it pays zero federal tax: over a quarter of the company’s revenue is secured outside the US, yet it books over 96% of profits there. This is quite a notable gap, suggesting it might be a way to avoid paying contributions in Europe.

Some countries are worse off than others. Britain—Palantir’s largest market outside the US, accounting for 10% of global revenue—seems to be in particularly deep trouble. The company holds at least £670 million (approximately USD 782.4 million) in UK government contracts, yet this has not translated into comparable tax payments. The tax gap noted in the report stands at £7.2 million (approximately USD 8.41 million). “This suggests that Palantir may have avoided more tax in the UK—with growing revenue from government contracts—than in any other country besides the US,” CICTAR wrote.

Other European nations also boast Palantir’s presence. The report identifies affiliates in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In many of these countries, the company has secured government deals—notably in intelligence and “defence”—though it has also provided services to financial authorities and the private sector.

Financial records indicate that many of these contracts were signed with Palantir US, while local affiliates charged for providing services to the parent company—another approach that would help obscure actual profits made in each country and reduce the tax owed.

Contracting with Palantir means supporting an ideology centered on US domination

Recently, several European governments and public institutions have announced plans to phase out cooperation with Palantir, largely due to national security and data sovereignty concerns. Tax action, however, has not figured prominently in these discussions.

France stands out as a rare exception. Following an audit by national tax authorities, Palantir appears to be paying “closer to an appropriate level of tax,” the report notes. Significantly, France is also the only country where a worker’s representative body—a works council—is recognized within the company.

EPSU and CICTAR have called for decisive measures, including through revisions of the EU Public Procurement Directive to allow blacklisting companies based on tax accountability and transparency failures. The report also recommends more robust global tax reforms and country-level audits of Palantir’s financial records.

“The urgent question now facing governments worldwide is whether any potential benefits of contracting Palantir outweigh the costs,” the report concludes. “Contracting with Palantir means giving support to a disturbing ideology and worldview centered on the notion of US cultural, economic, and military domination openly espoused by Palantir.”

This may seem like a slightly belated reaction to India’s president’s visit to Macedonia on 20–23 July. Yet the event deserves a brief reflection through a gender lens. The real inspiration comes from my engagement in a two-year project aimed at encouraging greater participation of women in politics—Gender Equality Mobilization (GEM), implemented together with academic and civil society institutions from Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. Our aim is to encourage young women and girls to consider politics as a way to improve their position in society and make their voices heard and effective. As part of this effort, we organised mentoring sessions with female MPs and councillors, offering young women an opportunity to see political work beyond the public image. That was until some of the “mentors” began publicly calling their female colleagues “hens”. At that moment, the masks fell off, revealing something deeply rooted in Macedonian political culture.

The visit of India’s President Droupadi Murmu, hosted by Macedonia’s President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, was undoubtedly a significant event for a small state like Macedonia. An official visit by the head of state of a country of 1.4 billion people naturally attracted attention. Some interpreted it, mistakenly, as a possible sign of a shift away from Macedonia’s almost fatalistic attachment to the so-called Collective West. Yet the visit is not primarily about geopolitics, even though there were some gestures in promoting economic cooperation (a topic that deserves a comprehensive analysis). Here we raise a much broader question: Can women who reach the highest positions of state become genuine political actors, or do they remain symbolic figures within male-dominated parties and systems of power?

The protocol elements of the visit (the bust of Gandhi, the visit to Mother Teresa’s birthplace, a rather non-transparent business forum and the trip to Ohrid) unfolded according to the expected script for two “British-style queens,” i.e. constitutional figures with limited political power. In both India and Macedonia, the presidency is largely ceremonial. Both women performed the roles assigned to them. Perhaps this is precisely why the visit will soon fade from public memory.

At first glance, however, the image of two women representing their respective states appeared inspiring. Yet a closer look reveals a different reality. In India, the dominance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is so strong that many barely remember that the country also has a president. In Macedonia, Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski remains the central political actor, while the president largely performs diplomatic, cultural, and representational duties. The question, therefore, is not only constitutional power. It is also moral and public authority: what do these women do with the symbolic power entrusted to them in societies facing deep social and political challenges?

The life trajectories of the two presidents could hardly be more different. Droupadi Murmu comes from one of India’s most marginalized communities. She belongs to the Santal people, an indigenous Adivasi community with constitutional protections and affirmative measures in education, employment, and political representation. She became India’s first president from an indigenous community, the second woman to hold the office, and the first person from a tribal background to occupy the country’s highest constitutional position. Her biography is marked by hardship, including profound personal tragedies. As Governor of Jharkhand, she demonstrated independence by refusing to approve two controversial bills that would have facilitated the transfer of tribal land, one of the most significant moments of her political career. However, her path to the presidential palace was ultimately shaped not by direct popular support but by the strength of Narendra Modi’s party within India’s electoral college. For the ruling establishment, Murmu represented an ideal candidate: a woman from a marginalized community, carrying enormous symbolic value, but without an independent political base that could challenge the power structure that elevated her. Since becoming president in 2022, she has largely remained within the conventional boundaries of India’s ceremonial presidency, approving government decisions and appearing mainly at official, cultural, and symbolic events.

Siljanovska-Davkova’s trajectory is almost the opposite. Unlike her counterpart, she does not come from the social margins. Born into a partisan family and later connected through marriage to another even more prominent partisan family, she possessed significant social capital in socialist Yugoslavia, a position within what could be described as the country’s ”red bourgeoisie.” This does not diminish her academic achievements or personal effort, but her path was fundamentally different from that of Murmu. She built a respected academic career and entered politics during the early years of transition, initially associated with liberal politics before moving toward the conservative camp. After her unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2019 as the candidate of VMRO-DPMNE, she became an MP and later, with the support of the same party structure, became president in 2024. The promises that she would be a ”subversive” president, outspoken and willing to address Parliament when necessary, have largely remained unfulfilled.

The paradox is that both presidents publicly support greater participation of women in politics. Yet their political conduct, characterized by ceremonial performance, restraint in moments of controversy, and alignment with government policies, raises questions about the meaning of women’s representation when the structures of power remain unchanged.

The Gandhi bust presented during Murmu’s visit was intended to symbolize shared values of nonviolence and peace. Yet both countries remain far removed from Gandhi’s understanding that poverty is the greatest form of violence and from his support for Palestinian rights. Today, India and Macedonia share, among other things, close relations with Israel and elements of alignment with Donald Trump’s political agenda, although the nature and scale of these relationships differ. Meanwhile, inequality continues to deepen: through class divisions in Macedonia and caste inequalities in India.

The irony is that during this carefully choreographed diplomatic visit, India was experiencing what became known as the ”Cockroach Revolution,” a movement named in response to a Supreme Court judge’s insult against young protesters, whom he called “cockroaches” and “parasites.” For the sake of balance, it should also be remembered that when Macedonian students protested in 2011 and 2014/2015, Siljanovska-Davkova, then a professor, stood on their side, opposing policies supported by the very party that later helped bring her to the presidency.

I follow developments in India closely and listen with admiration to Arundhati Roy, whose voice has become one of the strongest critiques of Modi’s authoritarian tendencies. Her voice is powerful and uncompromising—unlike the institutional silence of India’s president. This contrast leads to a subversive thought: imagine the political scandal if a president decided to act not merely as a constitutional ornament but as the conscience of the state.

This is the paradox of contemporary politics: presidents are not expected to demonstrate courage, but discipline; female presidents even more so. But is not the greater scandal that, rather than using the moral authority of their office to speak on behalf of the oppressed, they choose to legitimize the very policies of the parties that placed them at the summit of the state?

The conclusion imposes itself. Not every woman in power changes politics. Sometimes power changes the woman.

The speed of the spread is 8.5 times faster than the world’s largest known Ebola outbreak that started in West Africa in 2014, infecting 28,600 people and killing 11,325 by the time it was declared over in 2016. It has spread to 10 countries, including the US and Italy.

However, in the first two and a half months, the disease had infected only 423 people, which is just over 11% of the number of cases recorded in the same time period since the current outbreak was declared on 15 May.

It started in the northeast province of Ituri, bordering South Sudan and Uganda. While most cases remain concentrated here, the disease quickly spread south to the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, large parts of which are occupied by the Rwandan military and its proxy, the M23 armed group, in a war against the DRC for its mineral wealth.​

Infections have also spread to Ituri’s north, to the province of Haut-Uélé, and westward to Tshopo. Across these five provinces, the outbreak has affected 49 health zones, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement on 1 August.

“The convergence of insecurity, population displacement and mobility, and cross-border movements complicate response operations and increase the risk of further geographical spread,” it warned.

Neighbouring Uganda, which had also announced the outbreak on 15 May, had officially announced its end on 28 July. However, the spread in DRC is intensifying, the WHO said. The 567 new cases and 296 deaths in the latest full week of reporting marked the “highest weekly number” recorded since the outbreak, “underscoring the exceptional pace of transmission,” added its statement.

The strongest El Niño in 75 years, brewing in the Pacific Ocean, casts a dark shadow over Africa as crop failures, water shortages, and other disasters loom over the continent that is home to 309 million of the 645 million who suffered hunger globally last year.​

A climate pattern caused by periodic warming of surface water temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, El Niño disrupts atmospheric circulation, causing droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures worldwide. Its impacts are particularly acute as the planet is already warming due to greenhouse emissions.​

Meteorologists have forecasted that the moderate El Niño, already at work in the Pacific by July, will peak between November 2026 and February 2027, with a 90% probability that it will develop into what has been termed a “Super El Niño.”

“The 2026/2027 El Niño event is projected to be the strongest since 1950. This is not a distant possibility. It is an imminent risk that demands immediate preparation,” said Moses Vilakati, the African Union (AU) commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment (ARBE).​

Addressing an extraordinary session of the specialised technical committee on agriculture, rural development, water and environment on 27 July, he insisted, “The question before us is no longer whether another El Niño will occur. The scientific evidence suggests that it will. Africa needs to be sufficiently prepared to anticipate, mitigate and respond effectively to its impacts.”

The uneven impact across the continent complicates the response. Its impact on Western and Central Africa is unpredictable and will vary between areas within the region. In Southern Africa, El Niño is associated with a shortage of rain during the principal agricultural season between October and April. The transition from drought-resistant millets and tubers to maize as the main staple food under colonialism has made the region highly vulnerable to crop failure and shortages.​

The worst impact is expected on Eastern Africa. El Niño has historically spelt poor harvests due to reduced rainfall in its western parts, including Sudan and South Sudan (two of the hungriest countries in the world) and parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda.​

Oxfam distributing clean water to a drought-stricken area in southern Ethiopia during the 2011 drought. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In the eastern part of the Horn of Africa, flash floods and landslides caused by excessive rains and overflowing rivers between October and December threaten to destroy crops, damage homes and infrastructure, and displace communities. The consequences are particularly dire for Somalia, which also remains one of the hungriest countries in the world.

“These climate extremes have profound consequences for agriculture, food security, water resources, energy production, public health, education, infrastructure and ultimately the livelihoods of millions of Africans,” Harsen Nyambe, director for sustainable environment and blue economy at the AU Commission, told the extraordinary session last week.

“Now is the time to act: mitigating risks before impacts are felt, rather than waiting for emergency response after the fact,” insisted the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Along with the World Food Program (WFP), it has issued “a joint Anticipatory Action Appeal seeking USD 202 million to protect 8.8 million people” across 22 countries, including 12 in Africa.

However, heavily dependent on the US for their funds, the agencies are already fund-starved by the administration of President Donald Trump. The WFP reported a 40% slash in its funding from 2024 to 2025.

After days of devastating wildfires in France and Spain, Greece has become the latest European country to sound the alarm over rapidly spreading blazes. In recent days, five firefighters died as they battled the flames: this includes two aircraft crew members who were killed in a crash with another response helicopter on Sunday as they joined efforts to contain a fire northwest of Athens.

Authorities have recorded over 200 forest and agricultural blazes across the country in the past week alone, according to local media. Strong winds have hampered operations, including those conducted from the air. Evangelos Tournas, Minister for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, stated that the wind had shaped “extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence.”

However, extreme weather is not the only culprit for the struggles of Greek firefighters—echoing experiences from France and Spain. Recently, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) once again criticised the New Democracy government for failing to develop a proper fire prevention plan or hire adequate staff. The KKE reiterated that the fire department suffers from “thousands of unfilled permanent positions and massive shortages of resources and essential equipment, which is why firefighters are fighting a battle under adverse conditions.”

European Union data shows Greece employed 17,400 professional firefighters in 2024, technically an increase of 1,200 from the previous year. Yet, this still represents less than 1% of the country’s total employment. This trend is not unique to Greece: while EU reports indicate firefighting numbers rose slightly over the past couple of years, the total remains below 400,000 across the bloc—accounting for only 0.19% of total employment. In contrast, still in 2024, there were 1,551,663 police officers across EU member states.

In May 2026, the KKE emphasised shortages in sectors crucial for fire response are still notable. “Based on the already “slashed” organisational chart drawn up by the government, there are 3,500 vacant firefighter positions; forestry services have been decimated, with a shortage of approximately 1,500 foresters and 10,000 forest workers,” the party wrote. Combined with ageing equipment, these gaps create exhausting workloads for firefighters and compromise their ability to respond effectively, threatening their lives and the lives of the communities they are protecting.

The KKE and other progressive groups are thus urging the government to adopt a fully funded national prevention strategy. These calls include regulating energy infrastructure linked to the commercialised concept of a “green transition.” “The policy of so-called “green” development has turned mountains into sites for wind turbines and power plants, with thousands of kilometres of cables running through forests, constituting a constant source of fire hazards,” the KKE argued. Sources suggest the current blaze in the proximity of Athens originated from such a power plant.

Not even EU programmes that claim to increase member states” fire preparedness can replace adequately funded local strategies, left-wing and progressive groups insist. In this context, the KKE suggested that the European Civil Protection Mechanism, which deploys response teams across borders in situations of crises, “legitimises the proximity that perpetuates the lack of personnel, firefighting resources, and infrastructure in every country by shuffling meagre resources from one member state to another.” The party added that this puts “already insufficient firefighting and rescue crews—who risk their lives on the front lines—in great danger.”

Similarly, MeRA25, the progressive party led by former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, shared similar concerns. They pointed out that full-time and seasonal firefighters, along with their unions, have long warned about “shortages of personnel and aerial resources, understaffed departments, ageing equipment, inadequate prevention measures, exhausting work schedules, and a system that relies on self-sacrifice rather than planning.”

“Firefighters deserve investment that will protect them and the citizens whom they devote their lives to protecting—they don’t deserve austerity,” the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) stated on International Firefighters” Day in 2024.

The undeservedly discredited horse is again coming in for criticism as a food filler for items that make nary mention of its presence. In a world of mass supply, changing of hands, and bewilderingly complex distribution channels, can anyone be sure that the final product is what it’s marked to be? In the food market, this is further compounded by the risk of accretions and additions to processed products on route. Tampering is bound to happen.

To that end, the investigations being conducted in Australia by the program Four Corners might induce something of a yawn. Relying on confidential documents obtained by New South Wales Greens MP Abigail Boyd from the NSW Food Authority, the program found that “hundreds of businesses, including aged care homes, hospitals and catering companies, were issued notices for food safety breaches between 2022 and 2026.” Among the trove of items secured by Boyd were privileged documents revealing, in the MP’s words, a “concerning number of illegal knackeries and the result is that you’ve seen horses and other animals ending up in what people would assume to be minced beef or minced lamb.”

The issue of labelling, the worn theme of identity, and the notion that food is supposedly meant to be a pure manifestation of authentic flavours and origins is not something that should trouble Australia. Beginning as a penal colony of slop and gristle, roughing it up with British variants, the advent of mass processing was probably a merciful event. Be that as it may, Australia would inherit from its Britannic mother a fondness of the quadruped that did not extend to its use in cooking.

The aversion to munching equine flesh by the English is captured well by Charles Dickens in Household Words, his two-penny weekly launched in March 1850. On 19 April 1856, we find the novelist’s reflections on “horse-eating.” Personally, he finds much to merit it. “If it will pay to fatten an ox who has served his time in the plough, or a cow who has fulfilled her contribution to the dairy, it would also remunerate the grazier to fatten a horse past work, supposing that his carcass could be disposed of as readily as those of the ruminants.” He then turns to the reasons why the English find this unpalatable. “Prejudice, and nothing else! the same prejudice which makes the English refuse to taste frogs and escargots, though both are esteemed and expensive dishes on the continent.” That same prejudice afflicted those fussy “Orientals” who repudiated “the flesh of the hog,” and starving Irishmen who “would not eat Indian corn.”

The other side of prejudice is undue favour, a sort of animal worship. With characteristic bite, the comedian Frank Muir, in his An Irreverent and Thoroughly Incomplete Social History of Almost Everything (1976) wittily observed that, “One of the reasons for the low standard of teaching was that it was poorly paid. The English governing class was more interested in the schooling of its horses than of its offspring.” The aristocrats and well-to-do sorts would ship off their offspring to boarding schools for their Spartan training, cold baths and hideous nosh, all in the name of building character.

Dickens was also aware of the surreptitious use of horse as a substitute meat. “In Paris, there is a daily clandestine trade in horse-flesh, both for the restaurants, who serve it as fillet of venison; and for the poor, who in that case pay more for it than its real market value.” The danger here was the presence of glandered horses at the market, glanders being a serious, infectious condition transmissible to humans. “But, by a public and open sale, under the same authorised inspection as is exercised at the abattoirs, all danger of the kind is avoided.”

In 2013, the United Kingdom was again beset by the practice as part of a European wide scandal on the contamination and corruption of food products. It began with tests conducted by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, which found horse DNA in over one-third of sampled frozen beefburgers and ready meals from supermarkets and pig in 85% of them. The UK Food Standards Agency was alerted in November 2012 by the Irish regulator about these irregularities in the supply chain, but the FSA told MPs that it only found out the adulteration in January 2013. “So, just as in France 150 years ago,” Hugh Pennington remarked in the London Review of Books, “in Britain and Europe today the fraudster’s clandestine trade in horse meat continues, and the poor are still being ripped off.”

The New South Wales Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DRIPD) is adamant that horse meat had not been detected in Australian food. In a press release (28 July), the department indignantly claimed to have found no “horse meat in beef, lamb or any food for human consumption.” The assertions by the ABC were “misleading and not correct.” A spokesperson explained that random surveillance testing was conducted by the department “on meat products for species identification.” Horse meat had not been found, nor were there any abattoirs in the state licensed to process horse meat for human consumption. Those engaged in operating illegal knackeries had been prosecuted, the most recent being a case involving the production of horse meat for pet food, largely for the greyhound industry. The individual involved, a certain Adrian Talbot, was subsequently convicted of two charges of operating an unlicensed knackery and unlicensed animal food van in Wagga Wagga Local Court in June, being fined A$12,000 and made to pay A$30,000 in costs.

The question of spotting or identifying unwanted horse flesh in confidently labelled products is part of the broader problem of reliability regarding the product’s veracity. Can we ever be sure that the soy sauce we purchase has no trace of human hair? Or that milk powder does not contain traces of melamine added to ostensibly boost protein content? Boyd’s procured documents also noted instances of mouse fur in food, metal shavings in bread products, dairy-free products that so happened to have traces of dairy; instances of contamination; and incidents involving the identification of needles in some food. With such glorious finds, it’s a wonder anyone ever does the weekly supermarket shop.

Mislabelling should never be justified. The independent 2011 Labelling Logic review on food labelling law and policy, commissioned by the Australian and New Zealand Ministerial Forum on Food Regulation, handed down 40 public health recommendations for reform. A mere three have been implemented, all concerning alcohol. Jane Martin of the Food for Health Alliance at Cancer Council Victoria states with heavy resignation on food regulation in the country that, “Even when we get to the point of identifying a problem and an evidence-based solution, which often takes years, those solutions aren’t implemented.”

One should merely put stock in the fact that regulators and labellers cannot be trusted in their breezy confidence on what eventually ends up on the shelves. Best say that a product “may contain” traces of something or rather. Do essentially what some restaurants do for reasons of future exculpation in the event an allergy is aggravated: “This item may contain traces of nuts.” Or, in this case, horse.