《Talking to My Daughter About the Economy》by Yanis Varoufakis | Reading Notes

Chapter one | Why So Much Inequality?

Bureaucracy, army, clergy

When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus.

And as we examine these relations, what also becomes clear is that a state could never have been born without surplus.

Chapter two | The Birth of the Market Society

The genesis of market societies

The process of production requires three basic elements:

Raw materials that ultimately must be extracted from nature (for example, iron ore), tools and machines with which to work them, fences and buildings in which to house it all, a whole panoply of infrastructure – all this is known as the produced means of production, or as economists call them, capital goods.
Land or space,such as a farm, a mine, a factory, a workshop or an office, where this production takes place.
Labour to breathe life into the product.

And so they made a bold decision: get rid of all those perishable crops, like beetroots and onions, that offer no access to the emerging global markets; build fences around their estates, creating in this manner large enclosures; evict the swarms of pathetic serfs and replace them with flocks of sheep, which were more submissive and whose wool could be sold for a mint internationally. Thus, Britain experienced one of the most violent transformations in human history, the so-called enclosures.

So (enclosure) began the process of Britain’s transformation from a society with markets into a market society, because kicking the serfs out turned both labour and land into commodities. How? Well, what would you or I do if, all of a sudden, we found ourselves left out on a muddy road without a home in rural England? We’d probably walk to the next village, knock on the first door we came to and plead, ‘We’ll do anything for a piece of bread and some shelter.’ There you have it: the birth of the labour market – a market in which humans lacking access to land or tools must survive by auctioning off their labour, by commodifying their toil.

Factories: the grey laboratories of history

Then add hordes of unemployed former serfs begging on the streets for a piece of bread, for work, for anything at all.

The Great Contradiction

The triumph of exchange values over experiential values changed the world both for the better and for the worse.

On the one hand, with the commodification of goods, land and labour came an end to the oppression, injustice and wretchedness of serfdom. A new concept of freedom was born, along with the possibility of abolishing slavery and the technological capability to produce enough goods for all.

On the other hand it prompted unprecedented new forms of misery, poverty and potential slavery. With the advent of market societies and the exclusion of serfs from arable land, these landless former cultivators became either industrial workers or farmers who paid rent to landowners. In both cases they were now free to the extent that they no longer could be forced to work against their will, but their freedom came with new chains. While the waged labourers were free to do as they pleased, they were now entirely at the mercy of the markets – free only as long as they managed to find employers for their labour or buyers for their wool. Without land, they were free to go wherever they wanted, but were also at risk of the absolute deprivation of homelessness.

《Talking to My Daughter About the Economy》Yanis Varoufakis Reading Notes