Reporting from Gaza with Palestinian Poet Ahmed Sarsour“It’s not just about what’s happening in Palestine, it’s happening everywhere. The same forces that are controlling the world, the capitalist and imperialist forces, they are the ones who started the war in Sudan, and they are the ones waging wars in communities in every country in the world, like in Congo and Turtle Island, and Cuba and Venezuela,” Ahmed Sarsour tells me. It’s the afternoon of Friday, June 26, and Sarsour is struggling to stay on the call amid interruptions in electricity. The 33-year-old Palestinian poet is speaking to Unicorn Riot from his birthplace, his grandparents’ home in the center of Gaza in the city of Deir Al-Balah. Shaken but still standing after three separate bombings, the house sits adjacent to rubble from their neighbors’ former home. The local mosque has also been destroyed.
https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/reporting-from-gaza-with-palestinian-poet-ahmed-sarsour/Sanae Takaichi Cannot Resolve Japan’s Economic CrisisJapan has been in a prolonged economic crisis, with the yen reaching a 40-year low in value at the start of July. Takaichi was elected in part due to her bold economic promises. While there has been some debate, Takaichi is generally seen as a Keynesian politician who aims to stimulate the Japanese economy through major investments in key industries tied to advanced technology and the defense industry, favoring multi-year budgeting over single-year budgets. She has further promised to relieve consumer costs by lowering Japan’s 8 percent tax on food sales to just 1 percent. Elected largely due to her economic promises, Takaichi has been unable to pass much of this agenda, even with her party’s supermajority. Instead, she has had to rely on intervention from the United States, which stepped in late last week to prop up the yen. Whether or not this intervention succeeds in stabilizing Japan’s economy, it signals the Japanese government’s own inability to address the issue most impacting Japanese workers. It also further reinforces Japan’s subordination to the United States at a time when the United States is increasingly weak and unable, or unwilling, to act as a reliable ally, even to its most sycophantic partners.
https://www.leftvoice.org/sanae-takaichi-cannot-resolve-the-crises-facing-japan/The Marxist Case for the Technofeudal Hypothesis By Yanis VaroufakisFirst, no, we are not returning to feudalism. History is not going backward. Driven by unbridled capital accumulation, we are hurtling forward into a brand-new socioeconomic mode. According to the technofeudal hypothesis, capital is more dominant than ever. Wealth grows exponentially from gigantic investments in dynamic machines, not static assets. Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are as ruthlessly capitalist as Edison and Ford ever were. Thus, the term “technofeudal” denotes no literal regression, but rather draws an analogy with extractive power practiced outside markets. Second, rents are not new to capitalism. Capitalism never existed in the pure form of mainstream economics. Like our bodies need residual serpent DNA, capitalism needed remnants of feudalism to function. David Ricardo warned that ground rent would grow dangerously, as it did. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy showed how monopoly surplus was a form of rent. Since the 1970s, financialization grafted mountainous financial rents onto existing forms. So the mere proliferation of rents offers no evidence that capitalism is evolving into something else. For such a claim to be plausible, there must be evidence of a qualitative change in capital itself. Third, data is not the new land. The belief that our stolen data has become the new feudal estate is a form of “data fetishism” that Marxists must reject. “Surveillance capitalism” constitutes no qualitative change of the capitalist system, since legislation granting us property rights over our data would eliminate any rents extracted via its surreptitious harvesting. The real novelty lies elsewhere: in how cloud capital uses data to modify our behavior directly and “transport” us outside anything resembling a capitalist market.
In short, the technofeudal hypothesis revolves around the notion of cloud capital. To grasp its nature, we need to start with Marx’s definition of commodities as goods or services produced for exchange in a market, of capital goods as produced means of commodity production (PMCP), and of markets as decentralized spheres of circulation where labor values turn into money and surplus values into profits, rents, and interest.
https://jacobin.com/2026/08/varoufakis-tech-capital-marxism-technofeudalism