I hope you’re all recovering from the challenging midterm: I’ve rolled up my sleeves and am grading now (which is definitely on the “alienated” side of any prof’s labor).

Meanwhile, I came across a review of a book by Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist, arguing that we have entered a new phase of economic development that represents a return of sorts, a “technofeudalist” era. The article rightly points out that there’s a wave of analyses at present making parallel arguments–the article mentions McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead, and I would add Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism–that, whatever their differences, believe that we have reached an inflection point where the development of global capitalism out of the ashes of medieval feudalism to the present is giving way to … something new.

We just took a little sip of Marx, and you’d need some big gulps from Capital to properly contextualize Varoufakis’s book, but the bit from Capital we read together, with its attempt to show the distinctiveness of capitalism and the use of money as “universal equivalent” by contrasting it with feudal barter, Crusoe’s self-accounting, and the idealized communist collective organization of labor through planning, give us enough light to read by in assessing these recent books.

See you Thursday, when we’ll reel back the histori-o-meter to 1900 or so and run it back again, looking at the development of theories of the psyche and the subject from Freud onward.