Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 103
May 17, 2018
May 15, 2018
«Εθελοτυφλούν όσοι βλέπουν καθαρή έξοδο από το Μνημόνιο» – Συνέντευξη, ΤΑ ΝΕΑ, 28 ΑΠΡ 2018
Πόσο κόστισε η διαπραγμάτευση του 2015;
Φανταστείτε να ετίθετο το ερώτημα «Πόσο κόστισε το ΟΧΙ της 28ης Οκτωβρίου στον Ελληνισμό;», με κάποιους να ωρύονται ότι εκείνο το ΟΧΙ ευθύνεται για τα δεινά της Κατοχής που ακολούθησε. Η απάντηση βέβαια είναι ότι δεν κόστισε το ΟΧΙ αλλά το τελεσίγραφο των κατακτητών και η Κατοχή που ήρθε μετά την κατάρρευση του μετώπου του ΟΧΙ. Ετσι και με την άνοιξη του 2015: Ο ελληνισμός πλήρωσε ακριβά τα συνεχή ΝΑΙ στην τρόικα εκείνων που σήμερα ανερυθρίαστα μιλούν για «κόστος Βαρουφάκη», για την ακρίβεια με την συρρίκνωση του ΑΕΠ από τα 238 δισ. ευρώ το 2009 στα 178 δισ. το 2014. Και σήμερα πληρώνει την μετατροπή του ΟΧΙ της 5ης Ιουλίου 2015 σε άλλο ένα ΝΑΙ στη χρεοδουλοπαροικία. Πόσο λοιπόν κόστισε η διαπραγμάτευση; Μηδέν! Το εθνικό εισόδημα το άφησα την ημέρα της παραίτησής μου λίγο-πολύ στο ίδιο επίπεδο με εκείνο του Ιανουαρίου 2015. Ακόμα και σήμερα, μετά τα αποτελέσματα της συνθηκολόγησης, το ΑΕΟ βρίσκεται λίγο πολύ στα επίπεδα του Ιανουαρίου 2015. Κατά την υπουργία μου δεν εισάχθηκε ούτε ένα ευρώ νέων φόρων, περικοπών σε συντάξεις ή μισθούς ή επιδόματα. Ούτε ένα ευρώ νέου δημόσιου χρέους, καθώς κατά τη διαπραγμάτευση το κράτος κάλυπτε πλήρως τις δαπάνες του αποπληρώνοντας από το υστέρημά του τοκοχρεολύσια. Οσο για τα ταμειακά του κράτους, τον Ιούλιο του 2015 ήταν λίγο καλύτερα σε σχέση με τα απολύτως άδεια ταμεία που παρέλαβα. Το τι συνέβη με τη διαπραγμάτευση του 2015 το περιέγραψε πρόσφατα ο Jeff Sachs, καθηγητής στο Columbia, με σχόλιο-απάντησή του στους ισχυρισμούς Βίζερ περί 200 δισ. ευρώ «κόστους Βαρουφάκη»: «Οπως γνωρίζει ο κ. Βίζερ – καθώς ήταν από τους αρχιτέκτονες των πολιτικών της τρόικας – η ελληνική οικονομία στραγγαλίστηκε το 2015 από τους δανειστές. Οι δανειστές κατέφεραν σοβαρή ζημιά από την πρώτη μέρα: υπονόμευσαν τη ρευστότητα του τραπεζικού συστήματος, αρνήθηκαν την αναδιάρθρωση του χρέους, επέμεναν σε σκληρή λιτότητα και, το πιο σημαντικό, αρνήθηκαν κάθετα να διαπραγματευτούν ή ακόμα και να συζητήσουν καλή τη πίστει.» Το πραγματικό κόστος ήταν εκείνο που επέφερε η τρόικα κλείνοντας τη στρόφιγγα της ρευστότητας στις ελληνικές τράπεζες με σκοπό την επιβολή capital controls, που στόχο είχαν να πάψει η οποιαδήποτε συζήτηση για την αναδιάρθρωση χρέους
n που ήταν προαπαιτούμενο για στόχο πρωτογενούς πλεονάσματος 1% με 1,5%
n που ήταν προαπαιτούμενο για την μείωση των φορολογικών συντελεστών
nπου επέμενα ότι ήταν αναγκαία συνθήκη για την ανάκαμψη.
Δεν είναι ενδιαφέρον ότι όλοι εκείνοι οι «βάστα Γερούν», που τότε συντάσσονταν με την τρόικα που έκλεισε τις ελληνικές τράπεζες ώστε να αυξηθούν οι φορολογικοί συντελεστές, σήμερα βαφτίζουν το κόστος της τρόικας «κόστος Βαρουφάκη» και, παράλληλα, απαιτούν τη μείωση των… φορολογικών συντελεστών;
Η χώρα βγαίνει απο το Μνημόνιο;
Κάθε Μνημόνιο που επιβάλλεται σε χρεοκοπημένη χώρα αποτελείται από τρία μέρη: (Α) Νέα δάνεια, (Β) Νέα μέτρα, (Γ) Αποπληρωμές δανείων. Αυτό που τελειώνει το καλοκαίρι είναι το (Α): τα νέα, άμεσα δάνεια από το 3ο μνημονιακό δάνειο, με την κυβέρνηση να έχει ξοδέψει 54 δισ. και να κρατά ως μαξιλάρι 32 δισ. Από αυτά τα 32 δισ. το Δημόσιο θα πρέπει να αποπληρώσει: 98 δισ. την περίοδο 2018-2030 κι άλλα 174 από το 2030 έως το 2060 – ποσά που πρέπει να βγουν από τη σάρκα και το αίμα του ελληνικού λαού. Παράλληλα, η κυβέρνηση έχει δεσμευτεί σε νέα, πάνσκληρα μέτρα λιτότητας από τον επόμενο Ιανουάριο, ενώ οι ευκολίες πληρωμών που συζητιούνται για το χρέος, πρώτον, θα επιβαρύνουν το χρέος μακροπρόθεσμα και, δεύτερον, θα δοθούν υπό νέους όρους λιτότητας στο διηνεκές. Αν κάποιος εθελοτυφλεί τόσο πολύ που τα πιο πάνω να τα χαρακτηρίζει «τέλος του Μνημονίου», «καθαρή έξοδο» κ.λπ., αξίζει τη συμπάθειά μας.
Τι πήγε λάθος στην πρώτη διακυβέρνηση;
Οτι υποχωρήσαμε από μια θέση στην οποία δηλώναμε ανυποχώρητοι: Δεν υπογράφουμε συμφωνία που επιτρέπει στην τρόικα να πληρώνει τον εαυτό της υπό όρους που μονιμοποιούν τη χρεοδουλοπαροικία.
Το κίνημά σας τι θα έκανε;
Το ΜέΡΑ25 ιδρύθηκε για να επαναφέρει αυτή την κοινή λογική στο πολιτικό σκηνικό. Μετριοπαθείς, λογικές τομές που καθιστούν τη χώρα βιώσιμη, τις οποίες θα κάνουμε ακόμα κι αν το αντίτιμο είναι η εκδίωξή μας από το ευρώ.
Μήπως δρομολογείτε έναν νέο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ;
Δεν ήμουν ποτέ μέλος του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Οι ίδιοι λόγοι που με απέτρεπαν να γίνω μέλος τότε εγγυώνται ότι δεν με ενδιαφέρει η… επανίδρυσή του σήμερα – πόσω μάλλον η συνεργασία με τη σημερινή του έκφανση.
Κι αν η ΕΕ έχει μια άκαμπτη αρχιτεκτονική και ο δρόμος που προτείνετε είναι ανέφικτος;
Οι επτά τομές που το ΜέΡΑ25 δεσμεύεται να νομοθετήσει είναι αναγκαίες για την ανάκαμψη της χώρας είτε εντός είτε εκτός ευρώ. Για αυτό δεσμευόμαστε να τα νομοθετήσουμε άνευ διαπραγμάτευσης. Αρα, είναι απολύτως εφικτές. Το εάν και πόσο η ΕΕ είναι τόσο άκαμπτη όσο λέτε, αυτό θα φανεί από την αντίδραση του βαθέος κατεστημένου της. Θα μας εκδιώξουν από το ευρώ ως αντίποινα για τις αναγκαίες τομές που θα εισάγουμε; Πιστεύω πως όχι. Αλλά ακόμα κι αν προχωρήσουν στο Grexit, με την νομοθέτηση των επτά τομών που εισηγούμαστε η Ελλάδα, μεσο-μακροπρόθεσμα, θα ανακάμψει ουσιαστικά.
Θα τα βρίσκατε με τον Αλέξη Τσίπρα; Υπάρχουν βουλευτές του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ που σας καταλογίζουν πως κοστίσατε πολύ.
Δεν θα αρνηθώ σε κανένα στέλεχος του σημερινού ΣΥΡΙΖΑ το δικαίωμα να υπονομεύει τον Πρωθυπουργό του μέσα από τέτοιες δηλώσεις – δεδομένου ότι καθετί που έκανα ήταν σε πλήρη αρμονία με τον κ. Τσίπρα. Είναι εσωτερικό τους ζήτημα. Οσον αφορά τις συνεργασίες, το ΜέΡΑ25 δεν θα συνεργαστεί σε παλαιοκομματική βάση επιλέγοντας άτομα και κόμματα. Θα συνεργαστούμε με δυνάμεις που συμφωνούν με την άμεση νομοθέτηση, άνευ πρότερης διαπραγμάτευσης, των επτά τομών που προτείνουμε. Το 2015 δεν θα επαναληφθεί.
THE NATION: Yanis Varoufakis’s vision for a more democratic Europe – a review of ‘Adults in the Room’, ‘Talking to My Daughter About The Economy’ & ‘And the Weak Suffer What They Must?’ by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
That isn’t to say the union would be problem-free: Unresolved conflicts between national sovereignty and a supranational bureaucracy were baked into its very structure. And the EU never totally figured out a unified fiscal policy, or how it would deal with large-scale bank failures. Indeed, it took until the financial crisis of 2008 for one of the most fundamental tensions of all—that sovereign nations sharing a currency could not make their own decisions about borrowing, lending, and spending—to become a cause for alarm. When banks went on a continent-wide lending spree in good times, the economy hummed along happily. In the grim post-2008 years, Europe’s political and economic union appeared to be in a state of imminent disintegration. When European leaders began pushing austerity on countries like Greece as the only way out of bankruptcy—and when their counterparts farther west felt like they were still picking up the bill—freedom of movement and a common market and currency didn’t seem like such a good trade-off.
REVIEWED
TALKING TO MY DAUGHTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY, By Yanis Varoufakis
ADULTS IN THE ROOM, By Yanis Varoufakis
AND THE WEAK SUFFER WHAT THEY MUST? By Yanis Varoufakis
Greece was not the only country to rebel against these conditions. Nationalist politicians throughout the continent began to speak of Europe not as one people, but as a hodgepodge of countries bound by pesky supranational rules. Brexit put this notion to a referendum: Why help faceless Europeans when there are Brits down the street who need help too? And why bother with the entire supranational enterprise anyway? Nor are Brexiteers the only ones asking these questions. Many on the left—from Greece’s Syriza to Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise—also had grown uncomfortable with the idea and especially the economic institutions of “Europe.”
When Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister who hopes to become the country’s next prime minister in 2019, first came to international prominence in the aftermath of the financial crisis, he was one of those left-wing politicians critical of Europe’s economic institutions, though not necessarily of the idea of Europe itself. Even as a young man, Varoufakis had always been struck by the idea of a united Europe as a way to “forge bonds relying not on kin, language, ethnicity, [or] a common enemy, but on common values and humanist principles.” His brief stint in the Syriza government never shook that conviction, but it did shape his ideas about how Europe should be reformed, and his trilogy of books about the financial crisis—The Global Minotaur; And the Weak Suffer What They Must?; and Adults in the Room—along with his latest book to be released in English, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, all advance his vision of a more democratic international system.
The problem with Europe is that it is not a political union but a monetary one. Worse, key decisions about spending and lending are shaped by German and French technocrats, not by elected national representatives acting on their constituents’ wishes. Varoufakis’s reform proposals, put forward via his new pan-European movement, DiEM25 (“Day 25” in Latin), are wide-ranging and admirable. He hopes to see something like a United States of Europe emerge out of the EU’s existing structure—one in which Europeans share rights and responsibilities in both good times and bad, aided by the continent’s central banks, which would pool the profits from their various investments in a common depository in order to secure the economy in moments of crisis or scarcity. A share of every initial public offering undertaken in the EU would likewise go toward a universal dividend for all Europeans; citizens would be guaranteed a decent job in their home country, to prevent involuntary migration. By the same token, a common inheritance tax would apply, regardless of where people lived (or died).
Rather than getting bailed out in their home country, banks would be “Europeanized” and put under public control. The European Central Bank would be more helpful to member states seeking debt relief and financing. Finally, the euro would remain in place—but through a system of digital tax credits, or “fiscal money” that could only be used at home, individual countries would have a certain amount of leeway to make their own decisions concerning alleviating poverty and funding public projects. All the while, freedom of movement throughout the EU would still apply.
There’s a lot going on here—some of it eminently practical, some not—and one could debate the specifics of Varoufakis’s policies. But the overarching motivation is simple: more democracy, more Europe, and more of the right kind of globalization to give substance to the idea of a European unity. Varoufakis summed up the spirit of his worldview in a 2015 standoff with then–German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble: “The obvious solution [is] the globalization of welfare benefits and living wages, rather than the globalization of insecure working poverty.”
Varoufakis’s political career had begun in earnest the year before, when Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s candidate in the approaching national elections, asked Varoufakis to be his finance minister should the scrappy leftist party win. Varoufakis had in the mid-2000s briefly advised George Papandreou’s social-democratic administration (which he came to publicly despise), but Tsipras’s offer was Varoufakis’s first opportunity to formally enter into Greek politics. Until then, he had mostly been known for his academic work. A trained economist with advanced degrees in game theory, Varoufakis had been elected to serve as leader of the black student union as an undergrad at England’s University of Essex, arguing that “black” was a “state of mind” and that, as a Greek, in the context of a dominant Northern Europe, he more than fit the bill. Finishing his doctorate in Essex in 1987, Varoufakis hopped from one academic appointment to the next over the following 20 years, teaching in the UK, Australia, and the US before returning to Greece to run the University of Athens’s economics PhD program.
In the years following the 2008 meltdown, Varoufakis began writing in a plain and refreshing English about the crash on his blog. When he was approached about the finance minister’s position in late 2014, he decided to first run for Parliament before being formally appointed, because he wanted the backing of the Greek people. He got it: Varoufakis won more votes than any other candidate. By then, he had already established a reputation as an outspoken Marxist iconoclast at home, and his entrée onto the international scene could not have been better timed. The cast of the European debt narrative appeared almost exclusively in muted suits, so Varoufakis’s presence—leather-jacketed and pulling up on a motorcycle—filled a significant dramatic hole.
The real work began two days after his election. As Syriza’s finance minister, he had to negotiate intractable debt-reduction deals on his country’s behalf. At this point the European Central Bank was offering Greece financing, but the terms were onerous; the rest of Europe was dead set on punishing his country for its previous fiscal transgressions, some of which were real (like the Greeks’ tendency not to pay their taxes) while others were a product of happy-go-lucky lending in deficit countries on the part of large banks, with no plan B on the continental level to manage the fallout.
Varoufakis had no love for his country’s creditors, but he saw the EU favoring the bottom lines of international banks over the welfare of the Greek people. He was also practical, and keen to “shower [the EU] with moderation” and prove it wrong about the Greeks being undisciplined and lazy. So he assembled an international team of supporters, including American economists Jeffrey Sachs and James Galbraith, former treasury secretary Larry Summers (aka “the Prince of Darkness”), and Deutsche Bank’s Thomas Mayer, along with some financiers from Lazard, the asset-management and advisory firm, to demonstrate to Brussels that he was willing to negotiate on its terms.
That was when his lack of political experience started to show. Over the five months that followed, his meetings followed a depressing pattern: A sanguine Varoufakis would enter the negotiations, with a mandate from his people to reject the austerity measures that were causing a crisis back home. He would hit it off with seemingly sympathetic European ministers who, in private, would appear to be on his side. He’d spend all night coming up with an ingenious financial workaround to placate even the most hawkish austerity-mongers, thinking sincerely that he was getting somewhere. Then he’d wake up to discover that he had been stabbed in the back by much of the rest of Europe.
The betrayals in Brussels came from all over: socialists, conservatives, friends, foes. Varoufakis noticed a “terrible disconnect between the eminently sensible things some ministers say behind closed doors and the inanity of their statements…when the television cameras are switched on,” he writes in And the Weak Suffer What They Must? The only person to play it straight was Schäuble, whom Varoufakis characterizes repeatedly as a humorless crank (part of it seems to be his frustration at his own inability to charm him). For many of Europe’s leaders, Varoufakis declares, austerity became a “morality play pressed into the service of legitimizing cynical wealth transfers from the have-nots to the haves during times of crisis, in which debtors are sinners who must be made to pay for their misdeeds.”
In the end, even Syriza gave Varoufakis up. Before he’d been formally appointed, he had impressed upon his party that in order to get the best debt deal possible, they had to be willing to make concessions: privatizing certain industries, transferring Greek bank shares to the EU, launching a domestic development fund, and creating a public “bad bank” to deal with toxic loans so that individuals and small businesses would not have to pay for the bankers’ indiscretions. But he also insisted that the party had to pledge not to “bluff against the troika” (meaning the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund); if Syriza was serious about Greece staying in the EU and getting itself back in the black, then the party had to agree to refuse another bailout with austerity attached to it, even if the consequence would be to default or to stage a “Grexit” from the EU. And so they agreed—at least in theory. But when Syriza won the election, that scenario stopped being hypothetical and many within the party started to feel the pressure to get with the EU’s program.
By midsummer, it became clear that Varoufakis had lost support not just in Brussels, but in Athens. The country was running out of money, the markets were still shaky, and the threat of capital flight loomed over Greece. Syriza called a referendum on whether to accept an onerous new debt deal. The Greek people voted against it, vindicating Varoufakis’s position. But a bleary-eyed Alexis Tsipras announced that he’d opted to comply with the German agenda, leaving Varoufakis abandoned by his party. On his blog, he accepted Syriza’s request to step down, adding, “I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.”
There’s no question that Varoufakis was upset by the events of 2015. The bailout that Tsipras and Syriza accepted brought with it more debt and more austerity troubles; Greece will likely be repaying its creditors for decades to come. This was a punch in the gut. While Varoufakis embodies the vision of an urbane cosmopolitan (he spent time abroad in part to avoid the draft), he still identifies very much as Greek. His commitment to public service easily defies British Prime Minister Theresa May’s now-infamous statement that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”; Varoufakis wanted to see Greece escape from the fate that the troika was imposing upon it and set an example for anti-austerity parties across the continent. To add insult to injury, he got blamed by his party for screwing up in Brussels. Some have even attached a price tag to this failure, arguing that he’d personally cost Greece billions of euros.
Varoufakis’s resignation nevertheless helped him out in one way: He’d held public office but never actually had to sell out. Since Varoufakis has always presented himself as a bit punk, that didn’t exactly hurt his image. While politicians and elites snubbed him, he explains in Adults in the Room,
Taxi drivers, suited gentlemen, old women, schoolchildren, policemen, conservative family men, nationalists and far-Left recalcitrants alike—a whole society whose sense of pride and dignity had been offended…would stop me in the street to offer thanks for that brief moment…. It is a source of personal pride and joy to me that the troika’s cheerleaders within Greece use every opportunity they can to undermine me. I consider their attacks a badge of honor, conferred for having dared to say no to their demands in the Eurogroup.
Since stepping down, Varoufakis has used his considerable talents as a writer, an economist, and, yes, a brand to demystify complex financial concepts designed to elude us. He’s appeared on TV shows, in gossip rags, even on Russell Brand’s podcast to further this mission. “I have always believed that if you are not able to explain the economy in a language young people can understand, then, quite simply, you are clueless yourself,” he writes in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, his back-of-the-envelope history of modern capitalism. “…Ensuring that everyone is allowed to talk authoritatively about the economy is a prerequisite for a good society and a precondition for an authentic democracy.” If this is his goal, then Varoufakis has more than achieved it. Throughout this book and his three earlier ones, he clearly and patiently helps readers come to an understanding of just how much power global corporate finance—and the supranational institutions that serve it—wields over our lives.
This isn’t to say that his books are beach reads, exactly. (I would know—I read Adults in the Room on a beach.) The subjects he covers range from Eurobonds to Bretton Woods and back to the European Central Bank; they are intricate and often dull, even when he livens them up with backroom gossip and references to Greek drama (his interlocutors, he notes, are characters straight out of Sophocles or Shakespeare: “neither good nor bad…overtaken by the unintended consequences of their conception of what they ought to do”). Still, Varoufakis patiently diagnoses problems in the system, then suggests a great many solutions. He lays out his proposed solution to his country’s debt crisis—essentially an innovative debt swap that pegs how much Greece should repay and at what rate to its GDP and rate of growth—so clearly and convincingly that it’s hard to argue with (unless, of course, you’re a Eurocrat who had actually been arguing with him). Why shouldn’t repayment be linked to recovery? It’s a perfectly logical solution.
When it looked like Greece might be cut off from receiving funds if it didn’t agree to the Eurogroup’s demands, Varoufakis devised a parallel economic system of “fiscal money” that would allow Greeks to pay for goods and services using future tax credits instead of cash, thereby keeping the economy running. He later even admitted to hatching a harebrained contingency plan that involved hacking into Greece’s tax systems with the help of a childhood friend who knew about software and assigning a reserve account to every tax file. Fiscal policy has never sounded this straightforward—but as Varoufakis came to realize, good economics do not good politics make.
One lesson Varoufakis learned during his time in Brussels was that nearly all of Europe’s economic questions boiled down to political ones, and vice versa. What is failing to keep Europe—the idea and the continent—together is that the EU did not evolve into a single political institution, but instead became more like a group of sparring sovereigns. Going back to the EU’s origins, Varoufakis argues that its inflexibility is hardwired: From its inception as a steel-and-coal cartel to its present “megabureaucracy” status, the EU was “invented to serve a cartel of large businesses seeking common rules and industry standards in perfect freedom from any parliament with real power over its actions.” The single market, the sub-sub-agencies, the jobs advising the advisers’ advisers—these, too, were all created with the elites in mind. Most insidiously, he writes, the EU’s institutions “were designed, back in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to bleach politics out of them. And since nothing is as political nor as toxic as an attempt to depoliticize a political process, the result was institutions at odds with the concept and practices of a democracy.” Along with his commitment to internationalism, the idea that all decisions around money are political emerges as a first principle in Varoufakis’s thought. Today, his project seeks to combine these two principles into a coherent leftist platform.
You can take the money out of politics, but you can’t take the politics out of money, Varoufakis explains in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy. This is the case within each country, but as important, it is also the case between them. “There is nothing wrong with the idea of a Single Market from the Atlantic to the Ukraine and from the Shetlands to Crete,” he writes. “Borders are awful scars on the planet and the sooner we dispose of them the better, as the recent Syrian refugee crisis confirms. And there is nothing wrong with a single currency either.” What is wrong is the system of institutions that currently regulate and manage Europe’s single market and single currency; they cannot exist without a functional democracy to stabilize the powers that be. “While the unimpeded movement of goods, money and moneyed executives,” Varoufakis insists, “has always been a sacred cow of globalized finance…the equivalent freedom of movement for people has always been severely circumscribed. No wonder, then, that racism grows in proportion to our free trade zones’ economic crises.”
But there’s another, underappreciated challenge to fixing Europe that Varoufakis seems to grasp intuitively: The institutions that govern Europe are not just flawed, but boring. Varoufakis’s gripes could just as easily be rephrased to say: Europe is an institution governed by bores, who make boring rules about boring things and make even the most outrageous proposals—austerity, for starters—sound boring. If Europeans are ever going to engage or care enough to change things, this can’t go on. Politics and economics need to become interesting again. The stakes are just too high. Toward the end of And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, Varoufakis poses what has emerged as the central question of his political project today: “Can we combine deep criticism of the European Union with an appreciation of the tremendous costs that its fragmentation would occasion?”
That’s the question Varoufakis’s new European political movement, DiEM25, is supposed to answer. It’s also the motivation behind his 2019 candidacy in Greece with a new party called MeRA25, the party of “responsible disobedience.” DiEM25 is premised on the idea of a different kind of Europe—a more democratic one focused on sharing in the good times and the bad, and united “against the dominant oligarchy-without-borders but also against nationalist parochialism.” Varoufakis and his followers initially thought they might be able to achieve these goals by supplementing national parties with a “transnational list” to compete for seats in the European Parliament. These slots, they hoped, would replace the ones abandoned by the UK after Brexit; they would thus discourage nationalism at the procedural level, by making room for political parties to appeal to all EU citizens, not just those in their home country. The EP voted against transnational lists in February; DiEM25, registered as an international organization under EU law, still has plans to organize across borders and to partner with politicians in individual countries to advance their ideas on the ballot.
To that end, DiEM25 has proposed a policy platform that local politicians might attach themselves to: a European New Deal that revolves around green energy, more debt reform, profit-sharing, and other progressive ideas. At this early stage, its mission, while ambitious and clearly articulated, rests more on big ideas than actionable policies; the movement’s jargon-heavy organizational structure, with its “coordinating collective,” “advisory panel,” “validating council,” and so on, is faintly reminiscent of an undergraduate Trotskyist group (or worse, the EU itself).
It’s hard to imagine this European New Deal taking shape unless its supporters come to power on a large scale, but there’s nevertheless something to be said for Varoufakis pushing these ideas into the open. Much as he did with his memoirs and columns, he is moving the Overton window to the left—and given the spirited conversations taking place about a universal basic income, job guarantees, and even cryptocurrencies (which Varoufakis characterizes as utter nonsense), the time seems right for it.
Varoufakis’s national party, MeRA25, is positioning itself to seize this sort of power, or at least a seat at the table. It is likewise based on economic recovery and debt relief—for starters, nationalizing the banks on day one to pay back Greece’s debt. That, of course, is a matter of political, economic, and personal importance for its leader: “I wake up, and dream at night, of debt [relief],” Varoufakis told The Guardian. “It’s like being a prisoner of war. You have to try to escape. Our country is a debtors’ prison.” MeRA25 is not shy about framing the challenges facing Europe in class terms. “A vicious class war lurks behind the infamous ‘reforms’ that the ‘radical left’ Syriza government is implementing,” Varoufakis writes on his website, reminding voters and readers that the persistent ill effects of austerity on pensions, employment, and public assets are all designed to benefit Greece’s creditors, not its people.
If elected, MeRA25 wants to leverage Greece’s position to force change, by hook or by crook. And Varoufakis is the obvious—or rather, the only—man for this job. Without being bound by someone else’s agenda (or sense of decorum), he can nuclearize his training as a game theorist and his experience working with the European establishment to go back and make good on the types of threats Syriza never carried through. This would involve enacting its democratically chosen domestic agenda, even against the wishes of the Eurogroup; halting repayment to the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the other bodies set up to bail out ailing states; turning to Varoufakis’s alternate banking proposal should the country run out of money; and all the while, accepting the possibility of expulsion from the EU. MeRA25 reminds us that after 10 years of crisis and decades of bad leadership, Greece has nothing left to lose. In that, Varoufakis has found a certain freedom.
Since both DiEM25 and MeRA25 are not only the parties of new European democracy but also the parties of Yanis Varoufakis, they are not lacking in radical chic. Naomi Klein, Saskia Sassen, and Richard Sennett are all part of DiEM25’s advisory board. Brian Eno, another supporter, composed an anthem titled “Stochastic Processional” for the European movement. In math, “stochastic” means something has a random pattern of distribution. That might describe Varoufakis’s strange bedfellows: Julian Assange, whom he continues to defend loudly, on grounds that he’s being hounded not for sex crimes but for radical transparency; the linguist Noam Chomsky; the filmmaker Ken Loach; and the ex-president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa.
It doesn’t take Cambridge Analytica to figure out that this all-star lineup is unlikely to appeal to someone who isn’t already a Brian Eno fan with a copy of No Logo on his or her nightstand. Even so, Varoufakis says his aim with his new MeRA25 party in Greece is to win over the 1 million voters who don’t show up at the ballot box because they are too radical. Varoufakis has also been outspoken about wanting to forge alliances with centrist “reactionary forces”—even those seduced by right-wing ideas—in order to stabilize Europe.
Varoufakis’s search for approval from the right comes through in his writing, too. He takes an impish pleasure in quoting Margaret Thatcher’s comments on how the European monetary union was fated to be wholly undemocratic. He relishes the chance to surprise his reader politically, noting that his “friendship with true-blue Tory and Eurosceptic Lord Lamont of Lerwick, the chancellor who had ensured that Britain dropped out of the European Monetary System…was at odds with my image as a loony-left extremist.” He spares no criticism for the chickenshit leftists in Brussels—or in Greece, for that matter. He’s running for office against his former party, after all.
Varoufakis, in other words, is speaking to everyone you’d expect—all while subliminally marketing himself as the “loony-left extremist” whom even Tories can get behind. His vision is syncretic: a radicalism rooted in institutions, or perhaps a kind of Macronian Marxism. It’s a fitting approach for a political moment when figures like Steven Pinker preach the gospel of “reason, science, humanism, and progress.” And it dovetails with Varoufakis’s academic training as a game theorist, and his power-obsessed, materialist reading of history. In the prologue to Talking to My Daughter, he cites Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel as one of his biggest influences (the book got a lot of flak for its Eurocentric perspective). His appeal to repentant centrists—those who want to maintain their freedom of movement within Europe, are generally progressive on social issues, and would very much like for the extreme right to go away—seems, for the first time, rather viable. Still, to succeed as a leftist candidate and organization, Varoufakis and the DiEM25 movement will have to find allies in umbrella organizations such as the Party of the European Left, who attended DiEM25’s launch of its transnational list not as participants but as “observers.” He will presumably also have to deal with those on the left who are Euroskeptics themselves.
Varoufakis has his work cut out for him. Though he describes himself as an internationalist, a leftist, and an “erratic Marxist,” his politics don’t fit neatly inside a box. That makes him more interesting, intellectually speaking, than the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. It also makes him less palatable as a politician. This is a man who led a black student union in his university days and now routinely rubs shoulders with bankers and Tories; a man whose wife is thought to be the inspiration for Pulp’s “Common People,” and whose own dispatches about spending time with actual common people come off as quite canned, but who would happily nationalize banks in a heartbeat should he be given that power. Dashing by on his motorbike, he can appear to embody the worst kind of champagne socialism. And yet he does inspire confidence: If anyone can figure out a way to put a chicken in every pot and a bottle of bubbly on every table, it’s Yanis Varoufakis.
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist and the author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015). Follow her on Twitter @atossaaraxia.
For original post on THE NATION site, click here.
EL PAIS: COMPORTARSE COMO ADULTOS: El exministro de Finanzas griego ha publicado un libro sobre las entretelas de la política europea
Polémico. Atractivo. Brillante. Controvertido. Los seis meses de Yanis Varoufakis(Atenas, 1961) al frente del Ministerio de Finanzas de Grecia lo convirtieron en una celebridad global, en una suerte de estrella del rock de la política económica. Sus detractores lo caricaturizan como un extremista medio chiflado de izquierdas —según su propia definición—, enamorado de las motos potentes, de los restaurantes chic, de las chaquetas de cuero y del glamour de las islas griegas. La troika afirma que su gestión le costó a Grecia 100.000 millones de euros.
Lo más suave que dicen sus críticos es que se trata de un intelectual cuya inmersión en la política, más allá de la fama, puede calificarse como mediocre. Varoufakis acaba de responder a sus censores con un ejercicio de funambulismo literario: Comportarse como adultos, que en España acaba de publicar Deusto, ofrece una mirada única a las entretelas de Bruselas y es, sin duda, uno de los libros del año. A lo largo de 700 suculentas páginas se explica, asume algunos errores y, sobre todo, salda cuentas pendientes con una prosa de gran altura que incluye sonoros disparos a diestro y siniestro. El exministro conserva una lengua venenosa y es dueño de un análisis demoledor para Europa. “No se engañen, la crisis sigue ahí; el euro corre peligro”, embiste en una entrevista realizada con este periódico.
Europa crece a un ritmo superior al 2%. El paro ha bajado de la cota del 9%. Los déficits mejoran. Los populismos acechan, pero de momento siguen quedándose a las puertas de llegar al Gobierno en los grandes países. Las instituciones europeas presumen, en fin, de recuperación. Sin embargo, Varoufakis desdeña todo eso —“Una reactivación cíclica”, lo llama— y brinda un mal dato por cada dato bueno. Y, sobre todo, esboza un relato mucho menos complaciente que el de las élites de la UE.
“En la fase más aguda de la crisis del euro, hubo serios riesgos de fragmentación. El BCE supo contenerlos, pero las amenazas aún existen, aunque adopten otras formas: el Brexit, una Alemania que no logra formar Gobierno, la extrema derecha en Austria, Cataluña, el hundimiento del bipartidismo en Francia y los reflejos autoritarios en Europa del Este son claros síntomas de un malestar profundo. Las grandes crisis son momentos de revelación de las fallas del sistema: en Europa le hemos visto las costuras al euro y si nada cambia la amenaza es el hundimiento gradual de lo que solíamos llamar democracia liberal”.
Una situación como la de 2001
¿Lo peor ha pasado? No. Varoufakis, que ha fundado un nuevo partido (DiEM 25) para luchar contra ese malestar, se ríe cuando se le recuerda que el apocalipsis casi siempre defrauda a sus profetas: “Los análisis más pesimistas, entre ellos los míos, no han fallado en los últimos años; lo siento, pero es así”. ¿Lo peor ha pasado, al menos? “La situación actual me recuerda a la de 2001: veníamos de veinte años de encadenar burbujas, estalló la de las puntocom, y aun así nos las arreglamos para seguir igual y provocamos una crisis aún más grave con una burbuja aún mayor que estalló en 2008. Corremos el riesgo de volver a las andadas. En España, la deuda total va al alza. En Italia hay fuga de capitales, una crisis bancaria en ciernes, una situación política explosiva. Lo que tenemos en Grecia no puede llamarse recuperación, y la deuda es impagable. Los ejemplos son inagotables. En toda la periferia hemos cambiado empleos a tiempo completo por trabajos precarios, y con ello se ponen en peligro las pensiones futuras y las bases de la economía europea. Los desequilibrios financieros y macroeconómicos no solo no se han reducido, sino que son incluso mayores: me temo que no estamos para celebraciones. El euro, tal como está hoy, es insostenible”.
“Lo más preocupante”, acaba el griego, “es el bajo nivel de inversión y las divergencias crecientes en la zona euro. Sin inversión y sin convergencia es imposible hablar de fin de la crisis. Europa sigue metida en una: 10 años después de [la caída de] Lehman Brothers, somos incapaces de reforzar la arquitectura del euro y la moneda, contra lo que decían sus impulsores, es una fuente de incertidumbre. Europa es muy rica y puede mantener ese euro con pies de barro durante un tiempo, pero a la larga, créame, las costuras saltarán”.
Errores y maldiciones. Varoufakis se retrata a sí mismo como una suerte de héroe trágico en su libro. Alude a algunos de los errores que cometió como miembro del Gobierno de Alexis Tsipras, aunque su capacidad de autocrítica no está a la altura de su talento literario. Y aun así merece la pena prestar atención a su análisis. “Grecia no podía aceptar ningún acuerdo sin reestructurar su deuda, que era y es insostenible. Pero a los acreedores no les interesaba que pagáramos: simplemente querían dar una lección a Grecia como aviso a otros países. Al final, desgraciadamente, Tsipras capituló. En el póquer, si tienes malas cartas, solo tienes una posibilidad de ganar si tu farol es creíble y lo mantienes hasta el final, pero si crees que el oponente no va a retirarse no deberías jugar. Estoy orgulloso del auténtico susto, aunque breve, que se llevó la troika. Pero no supimos resistir”. “Nuestra derrota tuvo unos costes enormes”, admite en el libro. “Maldigo a mi Gobierno por no haber resistido”, añade durante la conversación.
Guindos: “Es uno de ellos”. Varoufakis critica con suma dureza a la Comisión Europea —“El Eurogrupo y hasta el grupo de trabajo del Eurogrupo mandan mucho más”—. Atiza sin miramientos a Tsipras, a Jean-Claude Juncker, a Pierre Moscovici, a Jeroen Dijsselbloem, a muchos otros. A lo largo de Comportarse como adultos apenas salva al ministro alemán Wolfgang Schäuble, que llegó a proponer la salida de Grecia del euro. Su análisis sobre Luis de Guindos está plagado de claroscuros: “Hablamos el mismo idioma porque Guindos, a diferencia de la gran mayoría del Eurogrupo, sabe de economía. Tuvimos interesantes discusiones, y a puerta cerrada estábamos más o menos de acuerdo. Pero en las reuniones Luis mantuvo posiciones indignantes: su primer objetivo era castigar a Grecia para penalizar a Podemos. Y siempre era el primero en darle la razón a Schäuble. Con él me pasó lo que con tantos otros: podía llegar a posiciones comunes en privado, pero a la hora de la verdad no servían de nada: eso es democráticamente deshonesto”. ¿Le ve con opciones al BCE? “Viene de la banca de inversión, como Mario Draghi. Tiene buenos fundamentos económicos. Y lo más importante: es uno de ellos”, remacha el exministro.
Egos revueltos. Varoufakis explica de forma pormenorizada en su nuevo libro qué significa ser uno de ellos a través de una conversación con el influyente Larry Summers, exasesor de Barack Obama y exsecretario del Tesoro con Bill Clinton. “Hay dos clases de políticos: los que ven las cosas desde dentro y los que prefieren quedarse fuera, los que prefieren ser libres para contar su versión de la verdad. El precio que pagan por su libertad es que los que están dentro, los que toman las decisiones importantes, no les prestan la menor atención. Los que viven las cosas desde dentro deben acatar una ley sacrosanta: no ponerse en contra de los que están dentro, no contar lo que sucede. ¿Cuál de los dos eres tú?”, le pregunta Summers. Varoufakis lo deja claro a lo largo de más de 700 páginas. Graba y transcribe reuniones, cuenta pormenores de decenas de entrevistas con líderes mundiales, pone sobre la mesa hasta el último y sonrojante detalle.
Yanis Varoufakis consigue reírse de sí mismo, aunque se las arregla para quedar bien casi siempre. Y mantiene el pulso literario de un volumen largo que tiene hechuras de novela negra y de drama shakespeariano. Pero sobre todo de tragedia griega. Porque a pesar de sus torrenciales explicaciones, el lector no alcanza a explicarse cómo Tsipras, Varoufakis y los suyos no consiguieron ni acercarse a lo único que importa: el mejor acuerdo posible para Grecia.
MARIO DRAGHI, EL “DÉSPOTA TRÁGICO”
Varoufakis nunca quiso salir del euro: su posición fue reclamar una reestructuración de la deuda pública griega (en torno al 180% del PIB: un nivel “insostenible”, según el FMI) y objetivos fiscales asumibles. Su estrategia era amenazar con un impago, y tener listo un sistema de liquidez alternativo si (como sucedió) los acreedores provocaban un cierre de los bancos.
En el momento clave, junio de 2015, el primer ministro, Alexis Tsipras, se echó atrás, y el BCE precipitó el final del drama. Varoufakis carga con suma dureza contra el Eurobanco (“el banco central más politizado del mundo”) en su libro. Califica a Draghi como “déspota trágico”. Le acusa de forzar la mano con “vergonzosas amenazas”. “Los abusones culpan a sus víctimas. Los abusones listos consiguen que la culpabilidad de sus víctimas parezca evidente. […] El BCE demostró una habilidad especial en esta última técnica”, dispara el exministro. Draghi, según esa versión, le obligó a cerrar la banca y le forzó a aceptar más austeridad, en un país que ha recortado las pensiones varias veces, prohibido la negociación colectiva y donde solo el 8% de parados recibe algún subsidio.
Marx predicted our present crisis; and points the way out – The Guardian, LONG READ, 20 APR 2018, print and audio versions
For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.
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No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.
As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”
For Marx and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together? Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.
To see beyond the horizon is any manifesto’s ambition. But to succeed as Marx and Engels did in accurately describing an era that would arrive a century-and-a-half in the future, as well as to analyse the contradictions and choices we face today, is truly astounding. In the late 1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and timid. And yet Marx and Engels took one long look at it and foresaw our globalised, financialised, iron-clad, all-singing-all-dancing capitalism. This was the creature that came into being after 1991, at the very same moment the establishment was proclaiming the death of Marxism and the end of history.
Of course, the predictive failure of The Communist Manifesto has long been exaggerated. I remember how even leftwing economists in the early 1970s challenged the pivotal manifesto prediction that capital would “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere”. Drawing upon the sad reality of what were then called third world countries, they argued that capital had lost its fizz well before expanding beyond its “metropolis” in Europe, America and Japan.
Empirically they were correct: European, US and Japanese multinational corporations operating in the “peripheries” of Africa, Asia and Latin America were confining themselves to the role of colonial resource extractors and failing to spread capitalism there. Instead of imbuing these countries with capitalist development (drawing “all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation”), they argued that foreign capital was reproducing the development of underdevelopment in the third world. It was as if the manifesto had placed too much faith in capital’s ability to spread into every nook and cranny. Most economists, including those sympathetic to Marx, doubted the manifesto’s prediction that “exploitation of the world-market” would give “a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”.
As it turned out, the manifesto was right, albeit belatedly. It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union and the insertion of two billion Chinese and Indian workers into the capitalist labour market for its prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for capital to globalise fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more delicious irony?
Anyone reading the manifesto today will be surprised to discover a picture of a world much like our own, teetering fearfully on the edge of technological innovation. In the manifesto’s time, it was the steam engine that posed the greatest challenge to the rhythms and routines of feudal life. The peasantry were swept into the cogs and wheels of this machinery and a new class of masters, the factory owners and the merchants, usurped the landed gentry’s control over society. Now, it is artificial intelligence and automation that loom as disruptive threats, promising to sweep away “all fixed, fast-frozen relations”. “Constantly revolutionising … instruments of production,” the manifesto proclaims, transform “the whole relations of society”, bringing about “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”.
For Marx and Engels, however, this disruption is to be celebrated. It acts as a catalyst for the final push humanity needs to do away with our remaining prejudices that underpin the great divide between those who own the machines and those who design, operate and work with them. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” they write in the manifesto of technology’s effect, “and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. By ruthlessly vaporising our preconceptions and false certainties, technological change is forcing us, kicking and screaming, to face up to how pathetic our relations with one another are.
Today, we see this reckoning in millions of words, in print and online, used to debate globalisation’s discontents. While celebrating how globalisation has shifted billions from abject poverty to relative poverty, venerable western newspapers, Hollywood personalities, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, bishops and even multibillionaire financiers all lament some of its less desirable ramifications: unbearable inequality, brazen greed, climate change, and the hijacking of our parliamentary democracies by bankers and the ultra-rich.
None of this should surprise a reader of the manifesto. “Society as a whole,” it argues, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.” As production is mechanised, and the profit margin of the machine-owners becomes our civilisation’s driving motive, society splits between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. As for the middle class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction.
At the same time, the ultra-rich become guilt-ridden and stressed as they watch everyone else’s lives sink into the precariousness of insecure wage-slavery. Marx and Engels foresaw that this supremely powerful minority would eventually prove “unfit to rule” over such polarised societies, because they would not be in a position to guarantee the wage-slaves a reliable existence. Barricaded in their gated communities, they find themselves consumed by anxiety and incapable of enjoying their riches. Some of them, those smart enough to realise their true long-term self-interest, recognise the welfare state as the best available insurance policy. But alas, explains the manifesto, as a social class, it will be in their nature to skimp on the insurance premium, and they will work tirelessly to avoid paying the requisite taxes.
Is this not what has transpired? The ultra-rich are an insecure, permanently disgruntled clique, constantly in and out of detox clinics, relentlessly seeking solace from psychics, shrinks and entrepreneurial gurus. Meanwhile, everyone else struggles to put food on the table, pay tuition fees, juggle one credit card for another or fight depression. We act as if our lives are carefree, claiming to like what we do and do what we like. Yet in reality, we cry ourselves to sleep.
Do-gooders, establishment politicians and recovering academic economists all respond to this predicament in the same way, issuing fiery condemnations of the symptoms (income inequality) while ignoring the causes (exploitation resulting from the unequal property rights over machines, land, resources). Is it any wonder we are at an impasse, wallowing in hopelessness that only serves the populists seeking to court the worst instincts of the masses?
With the rapid rise of advanced technology, we are brought closer to the moment when we must decide how to relate to each other in a rational, civilised manner. We can no longer hide behind the inevitability of work and the oppressive social norms it necessitates. The manifesto gives its 21st-century reader an opportunity to see through this mess and to recognise what needs to be done so that the majority can escape from discontent into new social arrangements in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Even though it contains no roadmap of how to get there, the manifesto remains a source of hope not to be dismissed.
If the manifesto holds the same power to excite, enthuse and shame us that it did in 1848, it is because the struggle between social classes is as old as time itself. Marx and Engels summed this up in 13 audacious words: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
From feudal aristocracies to industrialised empires, the engine of history has always been the conflict between constantly revolutionising technologies and prevailing class conventions. With each disruption of society’s technology, the conflict between us changes form. Old classes die out and eventually only two remain standing: the class that owns everything and the class that owns nothing – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
This is the predicament in which we find ourselves today. While we owe capitalism for having reduced all class distinctions to the gulf between owners and non-owners, Marx and Engels want us to realise that capitalism is insufficiently evolved to survive the technologies it spawns. It is our duty to tear away at the old notion of privately owned means of production and force a metamorphosis, which must involve the social ownership of machinery, land and resources. Now, when new technologies are unleashed in societies bound by the primitive labour contract, wholesale misery follows. In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
The sorcerer will always imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee, then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends. Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness.
According to Marx and Engels’ 13-word theory of history, the current stand-off between worker and owner has always been guaranteed. “Equally inevitable,” the manifesto states, is the bourgeoisie’s “fall and the victory of the proletariat”. So far, history has not fulfilled this prediction, but critics forget that the manifesto, like any worthy piece of propaganda, presents hope in the form of certainty. Just as Lord Nelson rallied his troops before the Battle of Trafalgar by announcing that England “expected” them to do their duty (even if he had grave doubts that they would), the manifesto bestows upon the proletariat the expectation that they will do their duty to themselves, inspiring them to unite and liberate one another from the bonds of wage-slavery.
Will they? On current form, it seems unlikely. But, then again, we had to wait for globalisation to appear in the 1990s before the manifesto’s estimation of capital’s potential could be fully vindicated. Might it not be that the new global, increasingly precarious proletariat needs more time before it can play the historic role the manifesto anticipated? While the jury is still out, Marx and Engels tell us that, if we fear the rhetoric of revolution, or try to distract ourselves from our duty to one another, we will find ourselves caught in a vertiginous spiral in which capital saturates and bleaches the human spirit. The only thing we can be certain of, according to the manifesto, is that unless capital is socialised we are in for dystopic developments.
On the topic of dystopia, the sceptical reader will perk up: what of the manifesto’s own complicity in legitimising authoritarian regimes and steeling the spirit of gulag guards? Instead of responding defensively, pointing out that no one blames Adam Smith for the excesses of Wall Street, or the New Testament for the Spanish Inquisition, we can speculate how the authors of the manifesto might have answered this charge. I believe that, with the benefit of hindsight, Marx and Engels would confess to an important error in their analysis: insufficient reflexivity. This is to say that they failed to give sufficient thought, and kept a judicious silence, over the impact their own analysis would have on the world they were analysing.
The manifesto told a powerful story in uncompromising language, intended to stir readers from their apathy. What Marx and Engels failed to foresee was that powerful, prescriptive texts have a tendency to procure disciples, believers – a priesthood, even – and that this faithful might use the power bestowed upon them by the manifesto to their own advantage. With it, they might abuse other comrades, build their own power base, gain positions of influence, bed impressionable students, take control of the politburo and imprison anyone who resists them.
Similarly, Marx and Engels failed to estimate the impact of their writing on capitalism itself. To the extent that the manifesto helped fashion the Soviet Union, its eastern European satellites, Castro’s Cuba, Tito’s Yugoslavia and several social democratic governments in the west, would these developments not cause a chain reaction that would frustrate the manifesto’s predictions and analysis? After the Russian revolution and then the second world war, the fear of communism forced capitalist regimes to embrace pension schemes, national health services, even the idea of making the rich pay for poor and petit bourgeois students to attend purpose-built liberal universities. Meanwhile, rabid hostility to the Soviet Union stirred up paranoia and created a climate of fear that proved particularly fertile for figures such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.
I believe that Marx and Engels would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilised.
Blessed, of course, are the authors whose errors result from the power of their words. Even more blessed are those whose errors are self-correcting. In our present day, the workers’ states inspired by the manifesto are almost gone, and the communist parties disbanded or in disarray. Liberated from competition with regimes inspired by the manifesto, globalised capitalism is behaving as if it is determined to create a world best explained by the manifesto.
What makes the manifesto truly inspiring today is its recommendation for us in the here and now, in a world where our lives are being constantly shaped by what Marx described in his earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as “a universal energy which breaks every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond”. From Uber drivers and finance ministers to banking executives and the wretchedly poor, we can all be excused for feeling overwhelmed by this “energy”. Capitalism’s reach is so pervasive it can sometimes seem impossible to imagine a world without it. It is only a small step from feelings of impotence to falling victim to the assertion there is no alternative. But, astonishingly (claims the manifesto), it is precisely when we are about to succumb to this idea that alternatives abound.
What we don’t need at this juncture are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising inequality or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism: the cry to return to some pre-modern, pre-technological state where we can cling to the bosom of nationalism. What the manifesto promotes in moments of doubt and submission is a clear-headed, objective assessment of capitalism and its ills, seen through the cold, hard light of rationality.
The manifesto argues that the problem with capitalism is not that it produces too much technology, or that it is unfair. Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for a pittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not need. Capital fails to make rational use of the brilliant machines it engenders, condemning whole generations to deprivation, a decrepit environment, underemployment and zero real leisure from the pursuit of employment and general survival. Even capitalists are turned into angst-ridden automatons. They live in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans, they will cease to be capitalists – joining the desolate ranks of the expanding precariat-proletariat.
If capitalism appears unjust it is because it enslaves everyone, rich and poor, wasting human and natural resources. The same “production line” that pumps out untold wealth also produces deep unhappiness and discontent on an industrial scale. So, our first task – according to the manifesto – is to recognise the tendency of this all-conquering “energy” to undermine itself.
When asked by journalists who or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations by answering: capital! Of course, this is an idea I have been plagiarising for decades from the manifesto. Given that it is neither possible nor desirable to annul capitalism’s “energy”, the trick is to help speed up capital’s development (so that it burns up like a meteor rushing through the atmosphere) while, on the other hand, resisting (through rational, collective action) its tendency to steamroller our human spirit. In short, the manifesto’s recommendation is that we push capital to its limits while limiting its consequences and preparing for its socialisation.
We need more robots, better solar panels, instant communication and sophisticated green transport networks. But equally, we need to organise politically to defend the weak, empower the many and prepare the ground for reversing the absurdities of capitalism. In practical terms, this means treating the idea that there is no alternative with the contempt it deserves while rejecting all calls for a “return” to a less modernised existence. There was nothing ethical about life under earlier forms of capitalism. TV shows that massively invest in calculated nostalgia, such as Downton Abbey, should make us glad to live when we do. At the same time, they might also encourage us to floor the accelerator of change.
The manifesto is one of those emotive texts that speak to each of us differently at different times, reflecting our own circumstances. Some years ago, I called myself an erratic, libertarian Marxist and I was roundly disparaged by non-Marxists and Marxists alike. Soon after, I found myself thrust into a political position of some prominence, during a period of intense conflict between the then Greek government and some of capitalism’s most powerful agents. Rereading the manifesto for the purposes of writing this introduction has been a little like inviting the ghosts of Marx and Engels to yell a mixture of censure and support in my ear.
Adults in the Room, my memoir of the time I served as Greece’s finance minister in 2015, tells the story of how the Greek spring was crushed via a combination of brute force (on the part of Greece’s creditors) and a divided front within my own government. It is as honest and accurate as I could make it. Seen from the perspective of the manifesto, however, the true historical agents were confined to cameo appearances or to the role of quasi-passive victims. “Where is the proletariat in your story?” I can almost hear Marx and Engels screaming at me now. “Should they not be the ones confronting capitalism’s most powerful, with you supporting from the sidelines?”
Thankfully, rereading the manifesto has offered some solace too, endorsing my view of it as a liberal text – a libertarian one, even. Where the manifesto lambasts bourgeois-liberal virtues, it does so because of its dedication and even love for them. Liberty happiness, autonomy, individuality, spirituality, self-guided development are ideals that Marx and Engels valued above everything else. If they are angry with the bourgeoisie, it is because the bourgeoisie seeks to deny the majority any opportunity to be free. Given Marx and Engels’ adherence to Hegel’s fantastic idea that no one is free as long as one person is in chains, their quarrel with the bourgeoisie is that they sacrifice everybody’s freedom and individuality on capitalism’s altar of accumulation.
Although Marx and Engels were not anarchists, they loathed the state and its potential to be manipulated by one class to suppress another. At best, they saw it as a necessary evil that would live on in the good, post-capitalist future coordinating a classless society. If this reading of the manifesto holds water, the only way of being a communist is to be a libertarian one. Heeding the manifesto’s call to “Unite!” is in fact inconsistent with becoming card-carrying Stalinists or with seeking to remake the world in the image of now-defunct communist regimes.
When everything is said and done, then, what is the bottom line of the manifesto? And why should anyone, especially young people today, care about history, politics and the like?
Marx and Engels based their manifesto on a touchingly simple answer: authentic human happiness and the genuine freedom that must accompany it. For them, these are the only things that truly matter. Their manifesto does not rely on strict Germanic invocations of duty, or appeals to historic responsibilities to inspire us to act. It does not moralise, or point its finger. Marx and Engels attempted to overcome the fixations of German moral philosophy and capitalist profit motives, with a rational, yet rousing appeal to the very basics of our shared human nature.
Key to their analysis is the ever-expanding chasm between those who produce and those who own the instruments of production. The problematic nexus of capital and waged labour stops us from enjoying our work and our artefacts, and turns employers and workers, rich and poor, into mindless, quivering pawns who are being quick-marched towards a pointless existence by forces beyond our control.
But why do we need politics to deal with this? Isn’t politics stultifying, especially socialist politics, which Oscar Wilde once claimed “takes up too many evenings”? Marx and Engels’ answer is: because we cannot end this idiocy individually; because no market can ever emerge that will produce an antidote to this stupidity. Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment. And for this, the long nights seem a small price to pay.
Humanity may succeed in securing social arrangements that allow for “the free development of each” as the “condition for the free development of all”. But, then again, we may end up in the “common ruin” of nuclear war, environmental disaster or agonising discontent. In our present moment, there are no guarantees. We can turn to the manifesto for inspiration, wisdom and energy but, in the end, what prevails is up to us.
Adapted from Yanis Varoufakis’s introduction to The Communist Manifesto, published by Vintage Classics on 26 April
For The Guardian’s site, click here
Turn the Brexit page and let’s move on by uniting progressives in the UK and in the EU: Interview in BIG ISSUE NORTH, 22 APR 2018
“It’s time to turn the page, to accept that it’s happening,” Varoufakis told Big Issue North. “It’s happening in a disastrous way but Theresa May is going to be allowed to see it through because the Cabinet does not want to fell her until she delivers something that they can then shoot her over.
“So there won’t be a general election, there won’t be a referendum, there won’t be a parliamentary debate over it.”
“In but against” EU
Varoufakis negotiated the most recent EU bailout for Greece but resigned from the government because he believed his one-time ally and prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, climbed down in the face of demands by the troika of financial institutions that the government impose even more austerity on its people.
He is a co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM25, a progressive movement seeking to reform the EU by being “in but against”, and has recently launched a new political party in Greece that will stand in elections promising to end the country’s “debt bondage”.
As one example of a policy DiEM25 would support, Varoufakis suggested co-operation between European state investment banks on a massive green new deal that would boost renewable energy supplies and bring many new well paid jobs.
He said investment in Europe was at a 60-year low even though rich individuals and corporations were sitting on more wealth than ever before.
“Lift all boats”
“How could we emulate a democratic European union when there is none?” he said. “Jeremy Corbyn is talking about creating an investment bank along the lines of the Post Office savings bank – which used to be an investment bank. Let’s say he does. It won’t be enough because there won’t be enough investment capital in it.
“But we have the European Investment Bank in Europe. There is a German one, there is a French one, there is a Swedish one.
“Imagine if you had a press conference – no need for treaties, European Union institutions, anything like that – just a press conference. The heads of all these investment banks announce that they will collaborate and borrow from the private sector – issue bonds – £600-£700 billion every year for the whole of Europe. Now that’s a fantastic sum to invest across Europe. It would lift all boats.”
He said a co-ordinated promise by the heads of Europe’s central banks, including the Bank of England, to buy those bonds if others would not would support their value, giving private investors the confidence to buy them.
“Suddenly you have a huge green new deal for the whole of Europe,” said Varoufakis, speaking before a speech to Sheffield’s Festival of Debate. “So who gives a damn if Britain is in the EU?
“These are the things that we at DiEM25 are talking about. These are the things that can bring people together. What progressive in their right mind could ever object to this, whether they are Remainers, Leavers, half way house, whatever?”
Varoufakis also warned that those who believe the UK can stay in the EU single market but still end free movement of people were mistaken. “That’s nonsense,” he said. “I gave a speech to Labour MPs in the House of Commons a few weeks ago advocating a Norway-plus solution, which would maintain free movement of people.
“I am a strong believer in freedom of movement, not just in Europe but everywhere. It’s just a joke to be saying to the rest of the world that we are going to be stopping people at the border. It’s preposterous.”
But it is not only Brexiters who are proposing putting up barriers. Among EU members, Hungary’s leader Viktor Orban has just won another term by amplifying his anti-immigrant stance, while an government assault on the freedom of the judiciary in Poland has brought fears that the EU’s liberal values are under threat, particularly in former Soviet bloc countries.
The European Commission has threatened disciplinary action against Poland but its scope to act is limited. How would DiEM25 approach the problem?
“Iron-clad, manic might”
“In our manifesto, which was written well before Orban became such a menace we were very clear – we believe in an open Europe, we believe in a social Europe and we believe in a humanist Europe, so anyone who manages to speak to the fears of the populace, securing a mandate on the basis that we hate foreigners and we are going to keep them out at our borders while at the same time demanding we are in the European Union, should be confronted,” Varoufakis replied.
He said the contrast was “astonishing” between how the EU, “in all its iron-clad, manic might”, came down on the Greek government for resisting its demand to cut pensions for the poorest and its treatment of Hungary and Poland.
“Look what’s happening in Spain too with the Catalonians. Whether or not you are in favour of independence – the fact is that there are politicians in jail in Europe and Brussels is whistling in the wind and pretending this is not anything to do with the European Union.”
As well as support for migrants and refugees and a revitalisation of the European economy, DiEM25 is calling for transparency in the EU decision making process, where the roles and responsibilities of the main institutions remains unclear not only to millions of citizens but those who deal with them directly – like Varoufakis.
He said the outcome of the Greek negotiations he was involved with would have been “very different” if, for example, EU meetings were held in public.
“The way they divided and ruled over us was through opacity. I was saying one thing in the Eurogroup and they were reporting another. So imagine if these Eurogroup meetings were live-streamed – the whole thing would have collapsed…
“If there was transparency they would not have even been able to convince their own people. This character assassination plot – it was a plot – to portray our government as unreasonable rule breakers would simply have vanished.”
The political maze was laid out in Varoufakis’s 2017 book Adults in the Room, in which he also recounts a sinister call he received in 2011, before he was a minister but when he was helping journalists investigate banking scandals. The unnamed caller said Varoufakis’s son might not be safe if he continued with his efforts.
Varoufakis recalled his bewilderment at the way the troika conducted its business. “There was fragmentation both horizontal and vertical. There was fragmentation between the institutions. They actually hated each other. The IMF was so critical and dismissive of the Commission – and of the European Central Bank, less so but also – and at the same time the ECB didn’t give a damn about the Commission.
“That was the horizontal fragmentation but there was a vertical fragmentation too. The head of the Commission or the Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs would think one thing and his deputy would think something completely different, and you had no idea what to do or who to speak to.
“What was fascinating was that it was the little people, the lower ranks who had more authority, as usual. If you watch Yes Minister you’d know what I mean.”
Photo: Chris Sanders. For more information about the Festival of Debate see festivalofdebate.com
Interview by Kevin Gopal. Click here for the BIG ISSUE NORTH site.
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