Presented on October 12, 2024 in the Quarry Farm Barn as part of The Eleventh Quarry Farm Symposium "Gilded Ages: Humor, Literature, and Society."
In his recent manifesto, TECHNOFEUDALISM (2023), the Greek heterodox economist, Yanis Varoufakis, declares capitalism dead, its longue durée ended not by proletarian revolution, as Marx predicted, but by the enclosure and subjectification of the means of production and circulation by an oligopoly of data-warehousers, which he calls cloudalists. In this paper, I introduce and interrogate Varoufakis's thesis using Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's THE GILDED AGE (1873), as well as some of the events it lightly fictionalizes, from an era which is frequently compared to our own, during which an emergent plutocracy seemed to some, including Twain, poised to overturn the existing political-economic order. By Varoufakis's own admission, it is to this era in U.S. history that the cloudalists themselves turn, not only to imitate the titans of industrial combination, but for hints at how they might avoid populist and regulatory backlash like that which defined the progressive era.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature and Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and Executive Producer of THE AMERICAN VANDAL PODCAST. He is co-editor of the ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE & ECONOMICS (2018). Recent articles can be found in AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY, MARK TWAIN ANNUAL, T.S. ELIOT STUDIES ANNUAL, AMERICAN STUDIES, RECEPTION, HENRY JAMES REVIEW, and LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University, a Taylor Fellow in American Literature at University of Virginia’s Harrison Institute, and a Fathman Young Scholar Award recipient
23 окт 2024
