 קורדינג, אונטא. רואה, ערב טוב לכולם, שמי כפי קורנלוסטיג ממכון וניר בירושלים, אני מאוד שמח להרח איתנו את יניס ורופא, כי כארצת ההורח לנו ביום הראשון שבכנס זה הזמן לפרוס קפיטליזם. אני מגבי שהייתם איתנו במהלך היום וקשבתם, להשתתף אתם בחלק מהפנלים שהיו לנו, אנחנו, לאחר-מכר, אנחנו מקווים שנעלה את כל הפנלים האלה לאתר המכון, אתם גם מוזמנים, כמובן להצטרף לגבוצת הפייסבוק שלנו בנושא פוסט קפיטליזם ולמשיך את הדיונים שם, לאחר שיציג את ורופא כיס והוא ייתנת ההרצאה שלו, לצרינו, לא נוכל לפתוח את זה לשאלות ותשובות, אבל אנחנו נשמח עם תשארותנו גם למחר. בואו נאמן, אני כפי קורנלוסטיג בבין לירג' רוסטון אינסטיטוט, אני מאוד ארחי ומחפי להרחי את יניס ורופא כיס כארצת ההורח שלנו, של הקורנלוסטים שלנו בנושא פוסט קפיטליזם. בלב היום, אנחנו נשמח על הרבה פנסות, הרבה הרבה פנסות על זום, על כל מיני דברים ושאלות ובאלות האקדמית ובאלות שהם עושים לסיבוסות ישראל לגבי קורסים של קפיטליזם ובסיבה של נושא פוסט קפיטליזם ולמשיך. אני אעשה את יניס ורופא כיס ולמלך, אנחנו נשמח על הרבה פסות, אנחנו לא יכולים להפך על הלב כארצת, אבל אנחנו יכולים להתארצת כארצת ובאלות, ובגלל, אני אעשה את יניס ורופא כיס ולמלך בבקשה, אני אעשה כדי להתערח. יניס ורופא כיס הוא סליחה של קפיטליזם ומרארד 25, הוא גם מ-25 קופיטליזם ופרופסור האקרונמיקה כבאים את האסניה. פרופא כיס רד אורטים ובאלות כבבאים את האסניה של אסקס וברמינגה, ופשוט תתפקר קפיטליזם כבאים את האנגליה, קמביץ, סדני, גלזגו, טקסוס ובאים את האסניה, כשהיא תדעה שיהיה כבאי נפלוליקל האקרונמיקה. הוא אופסור בקביל לסליחות, שבסליחה, שזה פסדים של מילה של ומראש, אדולי בשדה, אני מחיירה כבאים לדבר, ‫תסתכל על האחר שלי ‫באמצע האקרומי, ‫באמצע ההיסטריה של קפליזם, ‫אם הוויכים שאופרו מהם מוצאים, ‫האירופה, אוסטרידי, ‫אם הסטרקט הגלובלוסטיבילי, ‫כל הן הולדים הולדים ‫בבולטי-הד, בין 2016 ו2020. ‫באנגרנט 2015, ‫הוא נתקדת לגרסס פרלמן, ‫הוא הכל הכל הכל הכל הכל ‫באנגרנט של גרסס פינסטר, ‫באנגרנט של גרסס פינסטר. ‫באמצע ההיסטריה של גרסס פינסטר, ‫כי הוא מטחה לתכנות ‫לגרסס פרלמן ‫שבארפתרטסיפנית ‫בדפלישי של גרסס פרלמן. ‫באמצע 2016, ‫באמצע התבאות בגרססת ‫בדפלישי של גרסס פינסטר, ‫הבדמוקרסי תרצת נרצת ‫באמצע האנגרנטי. ‫במקרסת 2018, ‫בגרסס פרלמן, ‫בירה 25, ‫היא תפאלות חלקות. ‫לדבי ורופגס מירה 25 ‫הנטרד פרלמנט ‫הוא 9ם פיז בג'ולי 2019, ‫ג'נרל אולקטיינס. ‫אני אעשה כאן, יניס, ‫ואז אני אעשה קצת קצת קצת. ‫תודה, קפיר. ‫תודה, כמובן, ‫באתן בינתיים בינתיים. ‫בסביבי DM25, DMTV, ‫דמוקרוסי ואירופי מובימנטים, ‫השתכנת בג'לים כאן ‫בסביבי נטרד פרלמנטים. ‫דמוקרוסי ואירופי ‫שירבחים, ‫ואז אני אעשה לך. ‫אני אעשה לך, ‫באתן בינתיים בינתיים, ‫בכל כתוביות, ‫ואז באמת, ‫אתה תלכו את זה, ‫אפשר של אתן בינתיים. We have DM groups, we call them spontaneous collectives in Ramallah, in Kalkidiya, in Tel Aviv. The future that we are striving for is a non-sectarian one, one that goes beyond racism, beyond a disemitism, and beyond the apartheid which is practiced today, unfortunately in the land of Israel, in the land of Palestine. Let's talk about the topics of today. Capitalism and post-capitalism. And in particular, let me remind you the title of my talk. Post-capitalism, it's present, it's future, or two possible futures to be more precise, and a story in between. Now, you may be surprised to see the first part of the title. The present of post-capitalism is there post-capitalism. I shall put forward the hypothesis that we don't live in capitalist times anymore, that we already live in post-capitalist times. Not the kind of post-capitalism that progressives, socialists, eutopians imagined, but nevertheless, a post-capitalism which is qualitatively different to what we used to call capitalism until the year 2008. I mentioned 2008 because it plays a pivotal role in my understanding of our present moment and indeed of the future of humanity. Capitalism always had crisis. In a sense, it is a system that unleashed many creative powers, productive powers, compared to what preceded it, feudalism. And it did so in a manner which the same metaphorical production line that produced an infinity of gadgets, of commodities, of products, all those goods and services that flooded planet Earth with material wealth. The same production line that produced all the stuff, to put it bluntly, is the production line that generated one crisis after the other. Crises are a designer feature of capitalism, they are baked into the mode of production referred to as capitalism, they are not accidents, they are not the result of mistakes. And yet, since the inception of capitalism, there have been two crises, two moments in history where the discontinuity, the tumult caused by that crisis effectively changed the world. One such moment was 1929. The second moment, our generation's 1929, was 2008. I shall focus in discussing what I described in my title as the present of post-capitalism, I shall focus on 2008. But what I shall say about 2008 is not to be similar to what I have to say about 1929. So you see, unlike the crisis of 1907, unlike the crisis of, in my memory, 1973, of 1982, of 1991, of 2001, some of you may remember the dot-com bubble bursting in the United States, a created economic crisis. Unlike all these crises, 1929 and 2008 were such that it's what I refer to, I use using the word discontinuity, the caused, a rapture, a discontinuity. So going back to 1929, nothing after 1929 made sense in what passed as conventional wisdom prior to 1929. The Wall Street collapse precipitated a sequence of events with a collapse of banking leading to a massive recession, loss of jobs, the grapes of wrath, to quote one of the most beautiful texts that explain Steinbeck's The Era. 1929 gave rise to a sequence of events that led inexorably to the rise of fascism, of natism, of the Second World War, the creation of the New Deal, the expansion of the New Deal in the form of the Bretton Woods system after 1944. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the rise of financialization, which required a new ideology to go without, called neoliberalism, which was neither new nor liberal, and so on and so forth. To understand the United States of the 1950s of the 1960s, Europe of the same era, the formation of the European Union, you cannot do that in terms of anything that preceded 1929. That's why, historically speaking, I do believe that there have been a couple of moments in history, 1929 and 2008, that shaped the world, or reshaped the world. 1929 created a new version of capitalism, not an alternative to capitalism, a new version of capitalism, that the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith referred to as the age of affluence on the one hand in terms of the socio-economic feel and aesthetic of the period, but also Galbraith referred to the Newton regime as a kind of techno structure. By this he was highlighting the increasing importance of the conflation between very large corporations that had the capacity to monopolize markets and state institutions that regulated global capitalism. If you think about it, after 1944, with the Bretton Woods system, you had a system of centrally-planted capitalism. Just a few examples. The exchange rate between the American dollar and the Deutsche Mark, or the French franc, or the Greek drachma for that matter, that exchange rate was fixed for years to come. Maybe there were a few adjustments, but there was no column in the newspaper, in the financial newspaper, telling you how the exchange rate fluctuated. This was a very planned system with capital controls, with very boring banking. Banks were not allowed to do fancy things. The financial genie had been placed into the bottle. While at the same time, large corporations had enormous power, even politically. It was large American multinationals that toppled governments in Iran, with Mosadeq in Greece in 1967. I'm saying that because I suspect, influenced by the fact that today, the 21st of April, is the anniversary of that coup d'etat on the 21st of April 1967, organized, orchestrated by the CIA. That run very much by private multinational companies. Think of what happened in 1973 in Chile with Pinochet, aided and abetted by Coca-Cola and IDT. So this was a techno-structure, but it was still a kind of oligopolistic capitalism, but it was still distinctly capitalist. In what sense was the world that emerged after 1929 distinctly capitalist, in the sense that the driving force of the socio-economic system remained profits. Prophets made by selling things. Capital accumulation. Companies, using their exorbitant power, using their connections with the state, fixing prices very often and so on. But nevertheless, what was driving the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Siemens, and so on, was the capacity to generate profits. And when that profitability went into reverse, there were crises, but the whole point was to restore that profitability. Wealth creation, wealth accumulation was a process determined, fully almost, by the process of profit maximization, profit making, tangible capital accumulation to put it in Marxist terms, if you want. That all changed in 2008. What had happened was that between the mid-late 1980s and the 2000s, the financial sphere decoupled itself from the economic sphere. The easiest way of making money between the 1980s and 2008 was to be in finance, no longer to make things. I think that the example of General Motors is a splendid one. They used to say that what's good for General Motors is good for the United States of America. The ideology of multinational concentrated, vertically integrated capital was so strong that whenever somebody said what's good for GM is good for the US, it resonated amongst most Americans. They didn't mind it, they saw it as more or less logical as well. But General Motors by the year 2007, when the crisis hit, leading to the collapse, implosion in 2008, General Motors by that time was not a car company anymore. It was a financial company, and most of what it was doing, all the profits that it was making, were coming from speculation in the financial markets, in derivatives. So it was a financial company that produced some cars on the side. This process of financialization shifted the center of gravity, of money making, of power, if you want, from the economic sphere to the financial sphere. So capitalism, at the very beginning, 18th century, began to shift power from the political sphere to the economic sphere. For the very first time, you had lowly, in terms of social class, lowly merchants making money, lowly members of the English society creating factories and amassing very large profits. And therefore power that was disproportional to their lack of social status. There were not lords and barons and members of the landed gentry. So capitalism decoupled the economic sphere from the political sphere, economic power from political power. So it was no longer the case that to be rich, you had to be a lord, and if you were a lord, you were rich. Suddenly that was the couple. What happened in the neoliberal era, which has nothing to do with liberalism or neoliberalism, but that's how we came to know it after Thatcher and Reagan from the 1980s to 2007, was that the financial sphere spint off from the economic sphere. So you had the political sphere, the sphere of democracy, of liberal democracy, which became smaller and smaller and smaller, it was shrinking inexorably. Yet the economic sphere, which is capitalism, where things were produced, where people actually worked, companies tried to make profits, and then you had the financial sphere. And this sphere, by 2008, had become 100 times bigger than capitalism, than the economic capitalist sphere. And then of course, under the weight of its own hubris, to remember that I'm Greek, came the nemesis, came the collapse of 2008. In that moment, ushered in the presence of post-capitalism. That is my hypothesis, and now I'm going to say a few words to justify it. How did what was understood as capitalism get saved? There were two forces that saved capitalism after 2008 from this 1929-like moment. The first was of course the Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the United States, that printed rivers of cash and diverted it, not only to the banking sector of Wall Street, but to the banks of the West. In Switzerland, in France, in Germany, all those idiotic banks that had gotten themselves into serious trouble and they had become deeply bankrupt, were saved by fed swap lines, dollar swap lines, that allowed the banking sector of the North Atlantic, the United States of the European Union of Europe in general, to survive. And the second force that helped capitalism stay afloat and not have the experience of Soviet communism in 1991. The second force that did that was China. The Chinese authorities boosting remarkably and magnificently internal investment. Investment reached the unprecedented level of 50, 52, 53% of Chinese GDP. And in so doing, they sucked into China a very large number of very large quantity of economic dynamism. They sucked into the Chinese economy, German exports that kept German capitalism afloat, and provided the demand that was necessary to replace the missing demand for goods and services as a result of the North Atlantic implosion. However, even though capitalism was refloated, it was no longer something that resembled that which we understand as capitalism. And let me explain this a little bit better. The printing presses of the Federal Reserve of the European Central Bank, of the Bank of England, of the Bank of Switzerland, of the Bank of Sweden, of the Bank of Japan that were operating night and day to keep large corporations and large banks afloat, big firms and big banks afloat. These printing presses kept going after 2008, because at some point in 2010, 2011, especially in 2011, the powers that be realized that if the moment they tried to say, the moment they imagined, they hoped that the refloating process had succeeded and there was no reason anymore for continuing to pump new central bank state money into capitalism. The moment they started tapering, that's the term used in the financial newspapers, in the financial sector, there were spasms. The patient was not responding well to the withdrawal of the cortisone or the morphine that was being provided to it. So they kept going. So after the so-called taper tantrums of the capitalist beast, the capitalist patient, the central banks of the world continued to print money, which means that something substantial, significant, monumental, historic happened in the very foundation of capitalism. The complete and utter decoupling of wealth creation from capital accumulation, from money making, from profits. Now, how is this possible? Allow me to demonstrate it or illustrate it, that's a better word. Allow me to illustrate this process of decoupling of wealth from profits. Of wealth from profits. By means of an example, when after the 2008 fiasco of financial capitalism, the central bank of Europe, all of England, all of the United States printed billions in order to maintain a semblance of normality and to reflow the financial markets in the hope of saving capitalism. When they did that, how did it exactly work? What was the mechanism by which the money was printed and to whom was it given? That is very important. This is the process. Let's use an example in the United States or in Europe, it doesn't matter. I'll use Europe since we are closer to Europe. The audience and me in the UK are closer to Europe. So, Frankfurt, the European Central Bank, creates digitally, at the stroke of a button, a few billion euros today. Who gets this money? The only people, people, institutions that have an account with the central bank. Some of you and me, you and me, European citizens, European citizens are not allowed to have accounts with the central bank. But banks, private banks, have accounts with the central bank. So, these banks, who have bank accounts with the European Central Bank, suddenly are told that the ECB, the European Central Bank, has granted them a very large overdraft facility. That is, they can draw money from their account that they don't have there, billions. In other words, it's a loan. In other words, it's the equivalent of digital printing of billions and giving to the bankers to do what they like with them. Now, bankers can only profit from money that the central bank gives them if they can lend it at an interest to someone who is going to be relied upon to return the money. Now, in the middle of a recession, of a catastrophic recession in Europe, in America, everywhere, those bankers, let's say Deutsche Bank, Santander, Societe General, would look out there, look at the little people and say, we're not going to lend this money to small businesses, to households, because they are struggling. They probably won't return it, and even if they do return it, it will not be a guaranteed interest-bearing loan. So instead, what they did was they picked up the phone and they called their friends in the business community, in the corporate sector. So they picked up the phone and they called Siemens, Volkswagen, Alstom, and other banks, which is interesting, and they called Apple and Google, the corporations that could be relied upon to return the money. Now, the problem with these large corporations, and I think that also highlights that we do live in strange times, which I call post-capitalism and I'll explain why I'm saying that. The interesting fact, which is unique in the history of capitalism, and it only applied after 2008, was that these corporations had lots of cash in the middle of a recession. You know, that had never happened before. Corporations are not meant to save money. You and I, households, individuals, are meant to save money, and corporations are meant to borrow money, to invest, to hire people and hire factors of production and produce stuff. When Apple has 200 billion dollars stashed away in savings, you know there is something wrong with capitalism. Volkswagen, all of those companies have savings, corporate savings, which is a contradiction in terms. And therefore, when the phone call was made, placed from Deutsche Bank to Siemens, do you want a few billion that the central bank has lent me? You know, the question then came, how much are you going to charge me? And the answer was nothing. Why nothing? Because the central bank had pushed interest rates below zero to negative rates in order to try against all hope and against the grain of facts to stimulate the economies, to stimulate investment. So Deutsche Bank was borrowing at negative interest rates. In other words, the central bank of Europe was paying Deutsche Bank to take this money away from it. So even if Deutsche Bank gave that money, those billions to Siemens, for nothing, for zero interest rates, it was still making money from the differential. So Siemens directors would say, okay, give me the money, you know, reluctantly. And what they would do is go down the street to Frankfurt, to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and buy Siemens shares. By buying Siemens shares, using free money that came from Deutsche Bank, which came from the European Central Bank of Europe, what Siemens was doing was pushing up its own share price. And the director who was doing that, a member of the board of directors, he is usually, sometimes she, but usually he, his income, his bonus was linked to the share price. So he was effectively giving himself a pay rise, which he used to buy a nicer apartment or house in Berlin or in Frankfurt, pushing up asset prices and house prices, creating greater inequality between the rich and the many. Now, this process that I just described has become entrenched between 2008 and today. So you have money printed by the state, keeping companies very, very healthy in terms of their share price, financially wealthy, creating a great deal of wealth and inequality, but doing nothing in order to press into the service of humanity, to create good quality jobs, to invest in the green technologies that we need to ameliorate for climate change. Nothing was happening in that realm. Okay, companies had very low profits and at the same time, the value of the companies was going through the stratosphere. That is what I was referring to earlier when I said that wealth was decoupled from profits. Today, as we speak, friends, we have this very strange and interesting juxtaposition or conundrum. We have an ever-increasing amount of financial wealth and effectively zero profits. If you look at companies, even Amazon, which is making a mint as a result of the lockdowns, it's the modern Red Cross. The package comes home, of course, at the price. It's not humanitarian, it's commercial based. But nevertheless, it's doing really very well on what's going on. It's profitable at large. If you look at the actual numbers of the profitability of Amazon, yes, its revenues go up, but its costs go up because it is investing more in warehouses in order to increase this traffic of packages, of deliveries. But the profitability is very small, compared to the increase in the net worth, in the wealth of Jeff Bezos, the owner, the main principal owner of Amazon. Because his wealth comprises the value of the shares. Those shares are going through the roof because central bank money goes to the Bank of America, to J.B. Morgan, to Goldman Sachs, and from there it goes to Amazon, and Amazon takes this money and goes to the New York Stock Exchange and buys its own shares. There is another wrinkle to this, which I think is a datum that needs to be discussed by everyone. If you go to the New York Stock Exchange today and you look at the composition of the New York Stock Exchange, you'll find that 90% of the companies in there belong to three companies. To three companies that very few people have heard of. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. Three companies own the airlines, J.B. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and so on. Now, forgive me, but this is not capitalism. A commercial world which belongs to three companies that are kept afloat by state money. It's not my idea of capitalism. It's not Adam Smith's idea of capitalism. It is not the idea of capitalism that people like Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hageck, the great gurus of free market capitalism had in mind when they defended capitalism. This is not capitalism. Add to that equation the wonderful digital technologies that have given Amazon, Google, and of course Facebook the capacity to create new spaces, new digital spaces where increasingly value and wealth and income are made, exchanged, and accumulated. And what you have is a confirmation, I think, of my hypothesis that this is not capitalism anymore. The moment you enter Amazon, the moment you enter through your computer, Facebook, you exit capitalism. Suddenly you are in a digital space where there are people doing things, buying things, selling things, speaking, writing, producing content, uploading their own videos. So it's a social space, an economic space, a political space which belongs to one person. And that one person, it's the equivalent of you walking down the streets of your city and suddenly recognizing or realizing or being hit by the realization that everything belongs to one person. Every shop, imagine, a science fiction dystopia where you're walking on a street and you look at every shop and you say, oh my God, that all those shops belong to one person. Every commodity or service whether it's a barber shop or a chocolate producing and selling shop, a patisserie, whatever. Everything in there maybe is not owned by that one person but it's distribution and sale is controlled by that one person that owns every single shop and that same person controls the pavement on which you walk, the air that you breathe and even more strikingly that that person can actually grab your head and make sure that you look at what he wants you to look at. That you never look at something he doesn't want you to look at and you certainly look what you have a look at what he wants you to look at. Now, this street that I just discovered that I just described, is it capitalism? Is it a market street? No, it's feudal. That is the definition of a fifthum. A fifthum was a space. It had some shops. It had houses. It had land, agricultural land. It had some iron smiths, some artisans. It had a church. It had a club. We had a community but they all belonged to one person. And everybody living on that land was effectively not necessarily legally, but they were owned by the Lord. Now, how does this differ to what we have today? Not much. It's a high-tech feudalism. It's a technologically advanced feudalism. But it is feudalism and, therefore, my hypothesis that since 2008 we've moved from something that could be credibly described as capitalism, perhaps a Lycoppo-ly capitalism with elements of the state thrown in to something which is not anything like capitalism because wealth has been decoupled from profit. So, if I'm right, we already live in post-capitalist times. Now, I spent most of my talk tonight talking about the post-capitalism that we have. I think this is important because the question is not should we think of an alternative to capitalism because we are already living in an alternative to capitalism. But it's a very dystopic one because I don't know about you but I don't want my daughter, Xenia, to live under feudal times. I do not want her to walk down that digital space that resembles a high-tech version of the feudal village that I described previously. And certainly, even if we don't mind it, this technofedalism is not sustainable because it leads to decisions regarding the way in which we do things that are incompatible with the reproducibility, the sustainability of planet Earth. Technofedalism can never produce insufficient numbers and in good time the technologies and the change in the way in which we behave and do stuff in good time to save the climate, to save the environment, to save the planet that we want to be in. So to my friends around the world who are concerned about the possibility that this species like a stupid virus is going to kill the host in which we live, planet Earth. To those who believe that a green transition is an imperative beyond anything else, my message is I agree with you, but the technofedalism that we live in condemns all our better efforts as long as we try to deal with the effects of technofedalism on the planet and not the causes of the depletion of our ecosystem's capacity to reproduce itself. It seems to me that in exactly the same way that 2008 was a tipping point that brought about the replacement, the silent and very underhanded replacement of capitalism by technofedalism. We are fast approaching a moment, a fork in the road when as a species we shall need to make a distinction. A distinction between a post-capitalist mode of production exchange and distribution that is consistent with the needs of the planet and the needs of the majority of the people and the continuation of a technofedal mode of production which is going to simply undermine our own capacity to continue to exist and to reproduce ourselves. That thing is the stark choice we have. Now, the present is pregnant with all the evidence we need as to where technofedalism is taking us. Yes, there are companies out there that are investing in green technologies. Yes, the European Union, Joe Biden many good people, bad people, mediocre people, banal people are speaking about the need for the green transition. But we need $10 trillion US dollars every year to affect the green transition and we need that money to go into not just good quality green jobs but also to be relocated to the developing world which is where the money needs to be invested if we're going to arrest this bandwagon leading us to extinction. Now, that is not going to happen as a result of the feudal lords the technofedal lords of today and the institutions that we have in place whether this is the federal government in the United States the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank the European Central Bank, the European Union these are all institutions that are complicit in the manner of the evolution of this technofedal beast they do not have what it takes it's not a question of convincing them by means of clever arguments even if we convince them it is impossible for them to go against that which is prerequisite for the continuation of their salaries which is the serving of the interests of the technofedal structure. So we have a very difficult task to avoid the present dystopic post-capitalist dynamic leading us to a species wide extinction we shall need two steps I can't see any other way that you can avoid that path the first step that we need and I shall be blunt is green Kenzianism what do I mean by that or a green New Deal we need to take existing mountains of money which is out there and press it into the service of the green transition the creation of green good quality jobs that society needs in order to be able to do all the things that need to be done to change our mode of behavior to go electric to go renewable and so on in order to avert climate catastrophe now personally of course I would like to see Jeff Bezos being taxed the more we tax Jeff Bezos the better not just Jeff Bezos but all those people who are very smart I much smarter than I am but who have managed to use their position of power within the technocracy between the technofedal order in order effectively to rob the rest of humanity the financial resources necessary in order to address the mind numbing levels of inequality and planet destruction practices but you know taxation is not going to work fast enough or in the magnitude which is necessary to do this the 10 trillion dollars that we need to affect the green transition it's impossible to use our tax systems our rum shackle tax systems this is why we need the new deal idea of ranking result the idea that use public financial instruments to soak up the liquidity and press it into the service of what society needs I'll shall place it in a European context what could Europe do tomorrow morning imagine a press conference where the European investment bank announces that it got the green light from the European Union Council to issue bonds worth 600 billion every year it already issues bonds issue more of them and next to the president of the European investment bank you have Madame Christine Lagarde the president of the European central bank announcing yes we will buy those bonds if needs be by Lagarde saying that there would be no need for her to buy the bonds because rich people are going to buy them because if you have billions of dollars or euros or whatever but if the European investment bank issues those bonds borrows it from you with the European central bank standing behind them you will very gladly give that money to the European investment bank because there is nowhere else that you can place your money safely so sadly we would have a war chest of 600 billion every year to throw a green transition to create good quality jobs to buy vaccines to do all the things that Europe needs to do in order to tackle some of the existentialist crisis that we face so green Keynesianism we need it but it's really not enough and why is it not enough because the history of the last century has taught us that Keynesianism or the New Deal works for a very limited period of time and it only works if we do not rely on existing institutions exclusively because existing institutions are very intertwined with the techno structures or the techno feudalisms in today's terms interests if you look at Bretton Woods if you look at Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal you'll find that the moment there is a little bit of recovery as a result of New Deal public financing immediately the political system goes into reverse and stops the green Keynesianism or the Keynesianism or the New Deal policies even in the United States in the 1930s you had a situation where immediately after 1935 two years after the beginning of the New Deal once things started getting better already the political system was pushing Roosevelt to go back to austerity to go back on the New Deal effectively put it in the freezer so that's why New Keynesianism or Green Keynesianism is not going to work it's a stepping stone but it's not enough and that's why we need the second step that's a story in between in my title what's the second step well that's a really hard one we need to reconsider that is my second large hypothesis of the night the first one was that we already live in postcapitalist times the second one is that if we are going to turn the postcapitalism that we already have into a humanist version of postcapitalism we need to reconsider who owns the corporations at the moment consider that most of the important decisions that are determined in humanity's future are taken in the general assemblies and the board of directors of the companies not in parliaments, not in congresses not in cabinet meetings in the boardrooms and the general assemblies of the large corporations that's where the important decisions are being taken the decisions that will determine whether this planet is going to be happy by humans in the next decades how do these decisions get made in those general assemblies of shareholders? democratically they vote except that unlike the political system where you have one person, one vote in our companies you have as many votes as you can afford to purchase suppose I were to say to you that in our countries, in our parliaments we should allow for vote buying we should create a secondary market for votes where people can trade them you can rent them you can have options to buy options to sell, you know, financial markets based on votes you think I'm mad and you would certainly think that I'm clear and present danger for democracy and for basic principles of Isigoria collective decision making and you would be right but yet we allow this to happen in the boardrooms and this is something that you know, started in 1599 with the British East India Company went for the very first time the idea of the ownership rights to a large corporation being transferred on the tiny pieces of paper that can be traded anonymously called shares was instituted and the same time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet 1599 and the result we know what it was we had the British East India Company that plundered the world very soon after that they had 200,000 soldiers destroying millions of lives from India all the way to the Philippines so this, you know, we have all the elements granted to us by history economic history, political history military history, moral history that if we want to convert our current contemporary really existing post-capitalism into one that is consistent with survival of the species and of a distant life and of democracy it is time to reconsider who owns the companies that rule the world my view and it is one that I have pursued in my recent novel Another Now By creating an imaginary world but the blueprint nevertheless technically accurate and sophisticated at least as accurate and as sophisticated as my mind can make it market-based society in which the principle of one employee one share one non-tradable share and one vote on the basis for reconfiguring the ownership of corporations the moment you start doing that the moment you introduce this principle then everything unravels everything changes stock markets disappear JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs disappear because suddenly they have no without stocks and options to trade there is no point in having investment banks and then suddenly you can start imagining a market-based democratic society without capitalism which is the alternative to our contemporary post-capitalism thank you this was fascinating I think you can hear me now thank you very much for this talk I think this is the first or maybe second time that I've heard you use post-capitalism and it's double sense one as a descriptive of the situation right now and one as a prescriptive one where human society can go at this moment which is two different meanings that I believe you are among the few people who use the term in this way in its dual meanings we also read I have to say you're another now booked by our research team our post-capitalist research team and found it very interesting and invigorating and very helped us to develop our own ideas in Israel about post-capitalism this both the history the comparison between 1929 and the present and how you understand present capitalism has been very helpful I believe to an Israeli audience who is unfamiliar so much with this framing so this was wonderful we look very forward to continue reading your works and to have you over maybe again and again and to continue this conversation and this collaboration I want to thank also both the DM audience and structure and both the people and the people in Israel who have followed us the entire day and we welcome you to come tomorrow as well and to come to our panel thank you for this talk and we look forward to continue this conversation thank you תודה רבה ולתוב