End of Tradeable Shares

Discussion

Yanis Varoufakis:

"The first ingredient isn’t UBI; it’s the end of tradable shares. The idea that Rupert Murdoch can buy the shares of any newspaper in the world, and effectively turn them into his own mouthpieces, is absurd.

I mean, if that was not the case, and I came to you and said, ‘Look, I have an idea. Let’s chop up into tiny little pieces the ownership rights to every company, and then let’s trade those freely and allow the very rich to buy all the corporations,’ you would think that I am mad. That I am mad and dangerous. Yet this is what we have.

So moving from the oligarchic ownership model, where you buy as many votes... and this is how you should think of shares; shares are votes! And they are the votes in the assemblies where serious decisions are made. The serious decisions are not made in the Houses of Parliament. They are not made in the Congress or the Bundestag. They are made in the boards of directors and the general assemblies of Goldman Sachs, of Volkswagen, of Google, and so on.

This is where the big decisions are being made, the decisions that determine your life, as well as life on the planet. So these are the votes that count. And to say that there is a market for votes and the rich can buy them is the end of democracy. The democracy we have is simply a piece of propaganda. We have an oligarchy with elections and the elections are bought by the oligarchy.

So the first part is ‘one person, one share, one vote.’ That’s a very radical part, but also so simple. That’s what attracts me to it, that it is such a simple idea, and it’s what we already have in the political sphere. You have one vote; you can’t sell it, you can’t rent it, you can’t buy more. You just exercise it.

Number two is a digital bank account that everybody has with a central bank. Because at the moment you can have a bank account at the Royal Bank of Scotland or Barclays, but you cannot have a bank account with the Bank of England. But the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays do have a bank account with the Bank of England, which means that when the central bank is printing money, they can’t give it to you, they give it to them. And [the commercial banks] give it to the large corporations, who take that money and go buy shares. This is what we have now!

So the first thing you do is ban the trading of shares and say one share per employee, and the second thing you do is you cut out the middleman. Suddenly everything changes. Everything." (https://nowthenmagazine.com/articles/yanis-varoufakis-techno-feudalism-and-the-end-of-capitalism)