Ten years ago, Occupy Wall Street helped awaken the United States to the need for a critique of capitalism, something that had become a kind of taboo in the previous sixty to seventy years. In 2020, you publish a book, Abolish Silicon Valley, that takes the critique of capitalism further. Could you briefly explain your reasoning behind arguing that we need to free technology from capitalism?
Wendy Liu: Sure, thank you for that introduction. So I guess we’ll start by saying, if we look at the top ten corporations by market cap today, you know, maybe six, seven, eight of them are what we think of as technology companies. Look at the top five – all of them except Saudi Aramco, an oil company – they’re all technology companies. They’re all founded in the last fifty or so years. They all involve some kind of software and hardware, and they’re what we traditionally think of as tech companies. So I’m talking about Apple, Amazon, Alphabet – companies like that – and I think what that says is, that tells us that there is a lot of money to be made from harnessing the use of digital technology. And that doesn’t mean that there’s something especially new about this kind of digital technology. Its technology has always been something that has enabled a variety of people to produce a lot of wealth, and to accumulate that capital, and just keep it within their own hands, even as that technology itself is produced by a variety of people, including their workers that they employ, and by scientists, by people who are working outside their company. Still, what’s interesting about technology today is that it has allowed so much wealth to accumulate in such a short period of time. And so we’re seeing companies that were founded in the last twenty years, that are now worth billions and billions of dollars.
— source democracyatwork.info | Wendy Liu, Richard Wolff | Aug 23, 2021