Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 11

Our Present Moment in History: a wide-ranging discussion with Aaron Bastani in a packed EarthH Theatre – 14th FEB 2024

On 14th February 2024, I had the great privilege of a live discussion with Aaron Bastani in front of a marvellous audience at EartH in Hackney, North-East London. We talked about, of course, Israel-Palestine, but also about China and, in particular, the New Cold War being waged for control of what I call cloud capital. We touched on the United States’ ‘liberal’ imperial ways, Russia, Iran, Germany (with special reference on Nordstream and the new intolerance of dissenting views) – and on whether legal bans on fascists is the way to tackle fascism’s resurgence.Thank you to Raoul and Francesca Martinez for organising this, along with the brilliant Novara Media, as part of the promotion of their  new documentary series, ‘In The Eye Of The Storm: The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis’ which can be watched here: www.eyeofthestorm.info00:00 Intro 03:03 2023 for Yanis 05:36 Israel & Palestine 13:45 The Problem With Liberals 24:45 Is The US a Dying Empire? 35:49 China, Russia & Iran 43:51 The New Cold War 55:45 Nordsteam & Germany 1:04:04 Novara Germany Wouldn’t Be Possible 1:06:23 Banning Fascists Doesn’t Work

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Novara interview on almost everything (e.g. Crisis, Democracy, Syria, Israel-Palestine, Journalism at gunpoint)

Ash speaks to Yanis Varoufakis and film director Raoul Martinez about their new film Eye Of The Storm: The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis, what the left got wrong after 2008 and the West’s complicity in the genocide happening in Gaza. You can buy ‘In The Eye of the Storm: The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis’ at http://www.eyeofthestorm.info 00:00 Introduction 00:30Eye Of The Storm 04:40The Financial Crisis 07:16Why Wasn’t Democracy Enough?09:12Syria and Optimism 12:38Should we Confront State? 16:50But What About Don’t Pay? 20:20Israel Is Killing Journalists 22:55Palestinian Resistance Is Unacceptable To The West 28:17

The Polycrisis Novara Live broadcasts every weekday from 6PM on YouTube and Twitch. Episodes of Downstream are released Sundays at 6PM on YouTube. Support our journalism by buying Novara Media merch: https://shop.novaramedia.com

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PoliticsJOE interview on capitalism, technofeudalism, the Labour Party, Western Hegemony and Gaza

Sat down to discuss the downfall of capitalism and Western hegemony, the Labour Party’s shunt to the right, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Also, we discussed Raoul Martinez’s documentary In The Eye of the Storm: The Political Odyssey of Yanis Varoufakis 

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The Guilty Feminist Culture Club: In the Eye of the Storm with Yanis Varoufakis and Raoul Martinez

Interviewed by by Deborah Frances-White in Brian Eno’s Studio, on the occasion of the launch of  Raoul Martinez’s IN THE EYE OF THE STORM: Yanis Varoufakis’ Political Odyssey

Recorded 15 February in London. Released 21 February 2024.

For THE GUILTY FEMINIST side, click here.

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The roots of European farmers’ anger were baked into the EU – UNHERD

Manos, a sixth-generation farmer from Thessaly, put it to me bluntly when I asked him to explain why he was prepared to drive his tractor 400km to Athens to camp outside Parliament: “If I don’t, my farm will soon follow our village school, co-op, post office and bank branch into oblivion.”His story is neither novel nor confined to Greece. We are accustomed to French farmers, in particular, blocking roads and exacting a significant price from politicians before returning to their home turf. Occasionally, an impressive stunt has been staged in Brussels — as in 2012 when a multinational farmers’ coalition sprayed the European Parliament with tons of milk, in protest against cuts to EU milk quotas.What is new, in this latest round of farmers’ protests, is that it is not only the usual suspects who have taken to the streets of our capitals. Our television screens are showing farmers mobilising across the European Union, from Poland to Ireland. We are not used to German and Dutch farmers, traditionally much wealthier relative to their Graeco-Latin colleagues, entering our cities with the passion — and in the numbers — that we are now witnessing.If you ask the Dutch or the German farmers why they are revolting, their answer is similar to the one Manos gave me: they will tell you that their way life, their capacity to keep working the land, is in jeopardy. I believe them. But British farmers are also facing an existential threat and they are not blocking motorways. Almost half the UK’s fruit and vegetable growers and a third of dairy farmers face bankruptcy within less than two years. So why are they not blocking Piccadilly or occupying Trafalgar Square in anger? Cultural differences may play a role but a structural feature of the EU explains why European farmers are revolting and British farmers are not.In theory, the EU is all about free-market liberalism; in reality, it began life as a cartel of coal and steel producers who, openly and legally, controlled prices and output by means of a multinational bureaucracy. That bureaucracy, the first European Commission, was vested with legal and political powers superseding national parliaments and democratic processes. And its first task was to remove all restrictions on the movement and trading of steel and coal between member-states. After all, what would be the point of a cross-border cartel if its products were stopped at borders and taxed? Brussels’s second step was to expand the scope of the cartel beyond coal and steel, co-opting the electrical goods industry, car manufacturers and, of course, banking. The third step, once tariffs on manufacturers were removed, was to remove all tariffs.Alas, that meant, among other things, untrammelled competition from imported milk, cheese and wine for French and German farmers. How could Brussels secure the consent of these larger, richer and therefore politically more powerful farmers to a European free-trade zone? By handing them a chunk of the heavy industry cartel’s monopoly profits.That’s precisely what the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was. You can see it in the Treaty of Rome, which established today’s EU: it is a contract between Europe’s heavy industry cartel and Europe’s wealthier farmers, according to which the largest chunk of the European budget, generated by the former, would be sprinkled upon the latter. In 2021, the EU allocated €378 billion for CAP: 31.8% of its total budget for the six-year period 2021-2027. Of this mountain of euros, about 80% ends up in the pockets of the richest 20% of Europe’s farmers. And the worst thing is, it’s hard to see a way out: these mind-boggling sums, and their unequal distribution, are based on the mid-Fifties deal that gave us the original EU; they’re baked into its structure.That unequal distribution was justified by claims of “productivity”. Large landowners are far more profitable per acre cultivated, or per farmworker. For instance, according to the  Financial Times , in 2021, each additional worker boosted the net value of a small farm — defined as a farm with a total output worth between €4,000 and €25,000 — by around €7,000. By contrast, an additional worker increased the net value of a large farm — one with an output worth more than half a million euros — by €55,000.As a result, traditionally most farmers in the south of Europe — including in large parts of France, where farm plots are much smaller than, say, in Germany or the Netherlands — merely survived. Meanwhile, their northern colleagues commanded substantial profits, resources and subsidies.

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This explains why Greek, Spanish, Southern Italian and French farmers always had the greatest tendency to block roads: six decades ago they were cut a deal that didn’t serve their best interests. Today, however, with de-industrialisation now proceeding apace even in Germany, the original, pan-European industrial cartel that was meant to pay for the rich farmers’ generous subsidies is also in decline.As for farmers such as Manos, a combination of old problems and new calamities has taken its toll. Last autumn, the climate crisis paid his valley a visit when Storm Daniel destroyed all his equipment by submerging his land in metres of water, before moving south to drown thousands of people in Libya. The usual, ridiculously long, delays that characterise bureaucracy in Greece meant its insurance companies were slow to come to Manos’s help.But an even uglier source of discontent among his peers is the mass repossessions of farms by the numerous vulture funds. Taking advantage of Greece’s long-standing bankruptcy, they have entered the country to purchase non-performing farmers’ loans, at five cents to the euro, before auctioning off the land. In this way, oligarchic interests grab fertile agricultural land and, with grants and loans from Brussels, cover it with solar panels. Farmers and urbanite Greeks then pay through the nose for the electricity it produces. And as the former are squeezed, domestic food supplies become scarcer.

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Now, similar stories are playing out in wealthier parts of the EU: in the Netherlands and Germany. Here, there are three main triggers. Firstly, having surrendered what used to be public electricity utilities to the private cartel hiding behind the Dutch auction houses, the EU does nothing to protect farmers from the voracious appetites of energy speculators and rentiers. Secondly, there is the bureaucratic nightmare farmers must endure before they apply for the smallest of benefits, or even for the right to trim a tree whose branches poke them in the eye as they pass by in their tractors. Thirdly, there is Ukraine: not just the heightened fuel costs and the competition from €13 billion worth of “solidarity” imports last year alone but, more importantly, the prospect that, were the war-torn country to join the EU, most countries that are now net recipients of CAP funds, including Poland, will become net contributors, with their farmers bearing the brunt.And then, of course, there are the two elephants in the room. One is the EU’s Green Deal. Brussels makes all the right environmental noises, demanding immediate green action, but lacks the ability to pay for it. Take the Dutch farmers’ bone of contention: the clear and present danger of nitrates in the water table, which must be addressed. After decades of turning a blind eye to the problem, their government — pressured by Brussels — suddenly demanded that Dutch farmers solve it by, among other measures, “eradicating” one in three cows.Even more intractable is the second, and larger, elephant: a 15-year European economic slump that, to my eye, can be entirely explained by the inane handling of the euro crisis. This slump explains why the continent is deindustrialising. It’s why the Common Agricultural Policy can no longer respect the original, Fifties-era deal between Europe’s industrial and agricultural cartels. And it’s also the reason why the EU’s Green Deal is just another European Potemkin village — another product of the EU’s penchant for announcing big numbers that dissolve under closer scrutiny.

For the Unherd site, click here.

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The Politics & Letters Podcast – a (joyous) discussion on my TECHNOFEUDALISM

What isn’t ending?  What isn’t on the verge of extinction?  It’s a short list of exemptions these days, and we, us human beings, aren’t on it. Neither are bees, bipartisanship, butterflies, coastlines, childhood, civility, coral reefs, democracy, elephants, empire, facts, families, frogs, gender, glaciers, God, higher education, humanities, love, male supremacy, manatees, manhood, men, morality, middle classes, minibars, national borders, Nature, objectivity, party systems, patriarchy, religion, science, sex, soil, tigers, transgression, whiteness, work . . . and these species are endangered according to activists, journalists, and writers of every political persuasion.   And now, if we are to believe Quinn Slobodian, Clara E. Mattei, McKenzie Wark, and Yanis Varoufakis, capitalism, too, has outlived its expiration date. Once upon a time, as the saying goes, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. No longer.

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Jacobin Magazine’s David Moscrop reviews my TECHNOFEUDALISM

The idea that we are entering an era of techno-feudalism that will be worse than capitalism is chilling and controversial. We asked former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to elucidate this idea, explain how we got here, and map out some alternatives.The controversial concept of techno-feudalism suggests we have transitioned from capitalism to something even worse — a new era that exhibits disturbing feudal characteristics. On this view, capitalists now primarily rely on consolidated political power and rents to extract capital. If true, this form of feudal extraction represents a drastic shift away from the conventional mechanisms of capitalism. Importantly, it would mark a move from capitalism’s claimed foundational attributes of competition and innovation.

Jacobin’s David Moscrop recently talked to economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis about his latest book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Varoufakis makes the case for techno-feudalism, arguing that rents have displaced profits. He delves into the rise of cloud capital, the implications of what a new feudal order would mean for us, and the possibilities of an alternative future.

Capitalism, But Not as We’ve Known ItDAVID MOSCROPIn Technofeudalism, you argue capitalism has brought about its own demise, but not in the way that, say, Marx would have expected. Capitalism has its own contradictions — most fundamentally in the antagonism between capital and labor — and yet those contradictions seem to have produced a mutation that is perhaps worse than anyone might’ve expected. So how did capitalism kill itself and what is replacing it?YANIS VAROUFAKISThis book falls squarely within the Marxist political-economic tradition. I wrote it as a piece of Marxist scholarship. So, from my Marxist perspective, this is a tragic book to have to write.

The contradictions of capitalism didn’t lead to the anticipated resolution where, after all these centuries of class stratification, society would be distilled into two classes, poised for a high-noon clash. This decisive confrontation between oppressor and oppressed would result in the liberation of humanity — the emancipation of humanity from all class conflict. Instead of that, however, this clash between the capitalist — the bourgeoisie — and the proletariat ended up in the complete victory of the bourgeoisie: a complete loss after 1991, especially.

In the absence of a competitor in the form of trade unions — the organized working class — capitalism went into a rampant dynamic evolution that caused this mutation into what I call cloud capital. This transformation effectively marked the end of traditional capitalism. It killed capitalism — a development that embodies a Marxist-Hegelian contradiction, but not the kind of contradiction we would have hoped for.

Cloud capital has killed off markets and replaced them with a kind of a digital fiefdom where not just proletarians — the precarious — but bourgeois people and vassal capitalists are all producing surplus value for the vassal capitalists. They are producing rents. They’re producing cloud rent, because the fiefdom is a cloud fiefdom now, for the owners of cloud capital.

Cloud capital created a kind of power, which we as Marxists must recognize as being structurally, qualitatively different from the monopoly power of somebody like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, or the great robber barons. Because those people concentrated capital, concentrated power, bought out governments, and killed off their competitors to sell their stuff. Today’s “cloudalists” — cloud capital owners — they don’t even care about producing anything and selling their stuff. This is because they have replaced markets — they have not simply monopolized them.

If capitalism is market-based and profit-driven, well then this is no longer capitalism, because this is not marketplace-based. It’s based on digital platforms that are closer to techno-fiefdoms or cloud fiefdoms, and they’re driven by two forms of liquidity. One is cloud rent, which is the opposite of profit, and the other is central bank money, which funded the building of cloud capital. And that is not capitalism.

Now you can choose to call it capitalism if you want, if you redefine capitalism and if you say that anything that stems from the power of capital is capitalism, but it’s not capitalism as we’ve known it. To paraphrase Spock in Star Trek: “It is life but not life as we’ve known it.”

And I think that it’s important to make the linguistic transition from the word “capitalism” to something else, which is very difficult to make, because we’re all wedded to the idea that we’re fighting against capitalism. After all those decades of feeling that we came to this planet to overthrow capitalism, it’s really very difficult to have an idiot like me coming along and saying, “But this is not capitalism anymore.” You say, “Bugger off. Of course it is capitalism. If it’s not socialism, it must be capitalism.” That’s what a fellow Marxist said to me. And I killed myself laughing because I remember my Rosa Luxembourg. No, it can be barbarism.

Vampire-Like ParasitismDAVID MOSCROPIf techno-feudalism has replaced capitalism, as you’ve suggested, it has also led to the emergence of “cloud serfs” and “cloud proles,” modern equivalents of the serfs and proletarians discussed in historical contexts. How do these contemporary classes differ from their counterparts in the traditional capitalist model?YANIS VAROUFAKISFrom a Marxist perspective, the simple answer is that cloud serfs directly produce capital with their free labor. That has never happened before. Serfs under feudalism produced agricultural commodities. They did not produce capital — that was up to the artisans who produced tools and instruments and plows and stuff. In contrast, modern users contribute to capital formation simply by engaging with platforms, offering free labor to augment cloud capital for the capitalist. That never happened under capitalism.

Techno-feudalism remains deeply reliant on the capitalist sector, mirroring the dependence of capitalism on the agricultural sector and the feudal sectors for sustenance. And just as capitalism needed feudalism to ensure a food supply, techno-feudalism is parasitic, drawing essential support from the capitalist sector to sustain itself.

All surplus value is produced in the capitalist sector, but then it is usurped. It is appropriated by this mutant capital — cloud capital — most of which is not reproduced by proletarians.

So, the capitalist sector remains foundational. It is producing all value — it’s why this analysis is distinctly Marxist. All surplus value is produced in the capitalist sector, but then it is usurped. It is appropriated by this mutant capital — cloud capital — most of which is not reproduced by proletarians. It’s reproduced by people in their leisure time who work for no pay. That has never happened. That’s why I’m saying this is not capitalism. And it doesn’t help to think of this as capitalism, because if you remain wedded to the word capitalism, the mind fails to comprehend the great transformation.

DAVID MOSCROPYou mentioned that the rise of techno-feudalism is driven by two primary causes: the enclosure and privatization of the internet, similar to pasture enclosure in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and a steady, heavy flow of central bank money, particularly after 2008. Could things have gone otherwise?YANIS VAROUFAKISWell, everything could be different. That’s what David Graeber has taught us, right? And as leftists, we have to believe that nothing was foretold. Otherwise, we don’t believe in human agency — otherwise, what’s the point of living? We might as well become couch potatoes watching the world go by. So, everything can always be different. The historical counterfactual is always interesting, but I cannot do it. I really cannot do it. I mean, I tried to do it often in my previous book, which was a political science-fiction novel called  Another Now . Effectively, I created another time line where in 2008 we did things differently with Occupy Wall Street to bring about socialist transformation. And that’s a great game to play with your own mind, but I don’t think it’s historically pertinent.

How could things have been different? Well, one could say that the privatization of the internet was inevitable because we live under capitalism. And capitalism has this capacity of eating up and infecting every capitalist-free zone. The reason why I could never align with utopian socialism, like that of Robert Owen in the nineteenth century. Despite his efforts to create capitalism-free zones, history shows that capitalism inevitably invades and corrupts these spaces. You cannot have pockets of socialism surviving for long within capitalism.

Now With More CrisisDAVID MOSCROPYou say techno-feudalism is parasitic on capitalism. If that’s the case, techno-feudalism will still require the existence of classical capitalist production. Amazon still needs producers to manufacture goods to sell on its platform. Uber and Tesla require physical vehicles. How will that relationship work in the long run under a techno-feudalist order?YANIS VAROUFAKISAgain, I need to make this point very clearly. Capitalism in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, when it emerged, overthrew feudalism, but it needed the feudal sector to continue producing food because otherwise we would all have died. That’s why I’m saying that capital was parasitic on the feudal agricultural sector. So, it’s not that one dies and the other lives. What happens is that capital takes over the hegemony of the system, but it is parasitic on the previous system. That’s a standard Marxist, historical, material analysis.The takeover by cloud capital — the supplantation of capitalism by techno-feudalism — is making our societies more fraught with conflict.

Now what is happening is that at the center of techno-feudalism you have a capital sector, which is absolutely necessary. The capital sector is the only sector that produces value — exchange value in Marxist terms — but the owners of that capital, of old-fashioned capital, are vassals to the cloud capitalists. Their profits are being skimmed off. So surplus value is withdrawn from the circular flow of income by the “cloudalists.”

Now that makes the system even more unstable, even more prone to crisis, and even more contradictory and even less viable than capitalism was. That’s what I’m saying in the book: that the takeover by cloud capital — the supplantation of capitalism by techno-feudalism — is making our societies more fraught with conflict. They’re becoming more stupid, more conflictual, more poisoned, and less capable of allowing space within them for social democracy, for the liberal individual — for values that even the Right cherished under capitalism.

The Left was never against the idea of liberty; our critique lies in the limiting of liberty to a select few. But now even this limited form of liberty is under threat, and therefore the contradictions are getting worse. I hold on to hope that perhaps these growing tensions will push humanity into a decisive showdown between good and evil — between the oppressors and the oppressed. But the rapid approach of climate catastrophe poses the risk that we may reach the point of no return before that resolution takes place. So, we have our work cut out for us, and humanity is staring extinction in the face — unless we pull our socks up.

Not Your Parents’ RentiersDAVID MOSCROPYou spend a lot of time making the case that rents have usurped profit. Is it not the dream, though, of every “capitalist” to extract rent? Does any capitalist really want to be a capitalist? It seems to me every capitalist wants to be a rentier.YANIS VAROUFAKISWell, the era when capitalists wanted to be capitalists was gone a long time ago. I trust that Henry Ford liked being a capitalist in the same way that, in a strange and completely warped manner, Rupert Murdoch likes to be a newspaperman — even though he has done so much to destroy newspapers. But these people are either dead or on their way to hell. So, yes, capitalists don’t want to be capitalists, especially here in Europe, especially in my country. All the capitalists, and I’ve known quite a few, have stopped being capitalists; they’ve become rentiers.

The difference is that the capitalists who were transforming themselves into being rentiers, until the emergence of cloud capital, were essentially passing their capital stock onto others or possibly to private equity. These former capitalists extracted rent from the monopoly profits of these highly concentrated capitalist firms.

But what happens with people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I mean, they want to do what they’re doing. They want to be cloud capitalists or “cloudalists,” as I call them. They love it. These people, a bit like Thomas Edison, love what they do. They’re not like standard rentiers. They’re not like the feudal lords of the past. They are not like the capitalists who no longer want to be capitalists. These people are enthusiastic’ and they’re very talented, and, unfortunately, they’re very smart. The combination of their drive with the exorbitant power of the cloud capital that they own creates a highly potent, concentrated form of “cloudalist” power, which we have to take very seriously.

DAVID MOSCROPThe end of the Bretton Woods system transformed global capitalism and ultimately made possible, among other things, techno-feudalism. Could we imagine a contemporary Bretton Woods cast in the mold of deep egalitarian multilateralism and a socialist financial system?YANIS VAROUFAKISOh, yes, I have done that. That was the reason why I wrote my previous book. Another Now envisions exactly what you say. It features a new Bretton Woods system inspired by John Maynard Keynes’s original proposal — rejected by Harry Dexter White and the Roosevelt administration — merged with a participatory democratic socialist framework. This setup has been designed for ongoing redistribution of income and wealth from the Global North to the Global South, especially in the form of green investment. So, I’ve mapped all that and can answer your question of how things could work today, with the technologies that we have, if property rights were equally distributed — which is what I believe socialists should be aiming at. But that was my political science fiction. This book is about what we’re facing.The World’s Biggest Excel File to the Rescue?DAVID MOSCROPAs part of an alternative order, you advance this idea of a central bank digital wallet system and monthly dividend. How would that work?YANIS VAROUFAKISWell, technically it’s dead easy. It can be done in a week because it is so straightforward. Imagine something like an Excel file, which is kept by the Fed, and every single resident in the United States is one row. And when a payment is made, the corresponding value transfers from one cell to another, representing the payer and payee. This process would be free, instantaneous, and anonymized. By creating a separation between the software operators and the identities of individuals, identified only by codes similar to Bitcoin addresses, privacy can be assured. And checks and balances could be established to ensure that the state is not watching what each one of us is doing.They’re printing trillions on behalf of financiers. Why not print them on behalf of the little people? Of everyone equally?

And because the money will be shuffled through the same spreadsheet, nothing stops the central bank from adding the same number to everybody every month. And that’s a universal basic income (UBI), which is not, and this is crucial, funded by taxation. Because the problem with the idea of UBI is that it is vulnerable to complaints like, “What are you talking about? You’re going to tax me, tax the dollars that I earn, to give to a bum, a surfer in California or to a drug addict or to a rich person?” But this proposal leverages the central bank’s capacity to generate funds. And we should let no one tell us that it would be inflationary or would be a problem — because they’re printing trillions on behalf of financiers. Why not print them on behalf of the little people? Of everyone equally?

Now, the reason why you don’t have this system in the United States and why you are very far away from a digital dollar is because if anybody in the Fed dares move in that direction, they will be murdered by Wall Street — they’ll experience political and character assassination. Wall Street will never allow it because it would spell the end of Wall Street. Because why would you want to have a bank account with Bank of America if you can have a digital wallet with the Fed?

Bank of America would be compelled to justify their services and fees. They’d have to come and convince you that you need to have an account with them because they want to give you something at a decent price — like a loan — without scamming you. And they can’t do that because the whole point of Bank of America or Citigroup is to extract rents from you by monopolizing payment systems and holding deposits. You keep your money with them because, currently, there’s no other way of keeping your money.

CONTRIBUTORS

Yanis Varoufakis was Greek finance minister during the first months of the Syriza-led government in 2015. His books include The Global Minotaur and Adults in the Room.

David Moscrop is a writer and political commentator. He hosts the podcast Open to Debate and is the author of Too Dumb For Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones.

For JACOBIN’s site, click here.

 

 

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FORTUNE Magazine’s Nick Lichtenberg reviews my TECHNOFEUDALISM

When I admit to my fandom as we sit down for a zoom interview, he immediately tells me off. (This is exactly what I wanted.) “I don’t want fans in life, you know,” he says. “Ever since I entered politics, I acquired two things that I never wanted to have: enemies and fans.” You see, Varoufakis insists, polarization is a greater problem than whether you’re left or right, whatever your beliefs are.“Humanity’s escape from tribalism was the one thing that we could celebrate and now we are going back to a kind of tribalism,” he says. But that’s not why we’re here. We are here to talk about humanity’s escape from something else entirely: the economic system of capitalism. Because Varoufakis’ new book, now out in the U.S. after a European release in 2023, is his theory of “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.”I am such a fan of Varoufakis that I had to write my own critique in the pages of Fortune, insisting that while his and others’ concept of technofeudalism is compelling, what we saw in 2023 was the return with a vengeance of “retro capitalism.” Supply chains and energy independence were the major economic stories of that year as inflation continued its long descent from a 40-year peak in 2022, while so far 2024 is showing that old-school automobiles are still the rage as the electric vehicle revolution stumbles out of the gates.But when Varoufakis, at 62 years old a very distinguished type of provocateur, is sitting across from you on a Zoom call, it’s hard to argue some of his points. But it’s more fascinating to know what his friends and, yes, his fans had to say about his new book that argues capitalism has already been dead for over a decade, and we’re only just now beginning to realize it.“I have to say I was expecting a far worse reception than I got,” he tells me, and he says the left (his own “tribe,” so to speak) was more upset with it, and not because they disagreed with it. “People on both left and right are wedded to the idea of capitalism” he says, likening it to “the air we breathe.”He mentioned the case of an old-school Communist in London who confronted him. “He was spot on. He said, ‘I can’t accept what you’re saying, because if what you’re saying is right, then it’s not enough to organize auto workers and nurses.’” At least he was honest, Varoufakis adds. “He was saying that, you know, [your book is] making my life so unbearably difficult that I can’t possibly accept your premise.”Here’s how Varoufakis broke down his own journey to realizing that capitalism died without (almost) anyone realizing it, how it has especially “poisoned” Gen Z, how the Fortune 500 is in danger of becoming the Fortune 7, and why we all need to act like one of this Gen Xers’ favorite bands, and “rationally” rage against the machine.How the 2008 crash turned capitalism into a Soviet ‘wet dream’ Shortly after telling me about his Communist friend, Varoufakis clarifies that he’s not saying he’s like Adam Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment genius who saw the capitalist world to come with  The Wealth of Nations , but he’s not not Adam Smith, either.Feudalism had been the way of the world for hundreds of years, so who could really believe that free markets and capital would take over? Similarly, we are now living through a “great transformation whereby everything we took for granted is no longer,” he said, adding, “you’re not going to have many converts” to that idea, “at least not at the beginning.”Varoufakis’ own mind rebelled at his conclusions. “It took me years before I accepted that, before I could say to myself that capitalism is dead. When I first said that to myself, I thought, ‘Come on, you’re being stupid.’”But just consider: The Global Financial Crisis and the collapse of century-plus-old banks on Wall Street. Just like the crash of 1929 that brought on the Great Depression, says Varoufakis, the crash of 2008 got him worrying about the state of the world. Even still, he didn’t imagine that something would emerge that would be other than capitalism.After his combustible, short-lived political career, Varoufakis tells me (as he details in his new book), he went back to his mathematical training and began really looking at the algorithms driving the major winners of post-crash capitalism: Big Tech. What he found wasn’t capitalism, wasn’t even a marketplace, at all.“The moment you enter Amazon.com, you’ve exited capitalism,” he says, adding that it’s a trading platform, not a market, and you must not confuse the two. And here, the self-described Marxist appeals to the wisdom of not just Adam Smith, but also the arch-free-market economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. “If they were alive, they would agree with me” that every market has to be decentralized, at least to some degree, he says.“We all walk into a market, even if there’s only one seller, at least we can talk one to one another as buyers and exchange views.” For Amazon, Google, Facebook and all of what he calls “cloud capitalists,” there is no conversation of economic exchange that isn’t mediated by the algorithm, “which is owned by one man,” adding that such an outcome would be a “wet dream” of the Soviet Union’s State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. “If Gosplan had the algorithm, they would be over the moon, because it’s the ultimate in centralization.”I have to ask him at this point about the major markets story of 2023 and early 2024, as the exceptional American stock market shook off its bear market and stormed into a bull run with the so-called “Magnificent Seven,” the tech companies that include the very same names Varoufakis accuses of ruining capitalism. Does he see their dominance of the stock market as a sign that he’s right or that he’s wrong? Of course, he says, it just shows that the Fortune 500 risks becoming irrelevant if all the value is going to accrue to the tech firms that operate their own fiefdoms. “It’s going to become the Fortune 7 very soon,” he says with a smile on his face.The poisoning of Gen Z and ‘death of the liberal individual’And this gets to why you are reading about a Marxist provocateur in the pages of Fortune magazine: He is also a committed individualist and, yes, a liberal.This is not to say liberal in the recent American political context of center-left, or liberal in the Adam Smith sense of free markets being the most efficient, but liberal in the tradition of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke or Thomas Hobbes, prizing the importance of the individual in society. (To be clear, this is my interpretation of Varoufakis’ thought, not his own.)Varoufakis does have an example of liberalism in his book: Ironically, it’s his father, a chemical engineer who was a committed Communist while being a very successful bourgeois capitalist, thriving within a system he was ideologically committed to overthrowing—much like his famous son today. Varoufakis writes movingly in Technofeudalism about how his father was the “personification of the liberal individual,” free to have his own political beliefs and his own hobbies, publishing articles on archeology, dabbling in metallurgy, teaching his son about the Greek mythology that animates his thinking even today.This separation of work, leisure and hobbies is gone in the age of the algorithm, Varoufakis argues. Just look at Gen Z and the lie of Big Tech. The Silicon Valley mythology encourages the indulgence of self-expression, but how can you do that in a culture mediated by an algorithm owned by one man? “If you are an upper middle class kid. and you have aspirations for life, you know that every video you upload on TikTok, everything you write on Twitter, everything you put on Facebook is going to be thrown at you during a job interview.” There are only two reactions: apathy or inhibition.In an argument that recalls Kyle Chayka’s  Filterworld  and Taylor Lorenz’s  Extremely Online , Varoufakis says the digital native Gen Z generation is not being driven by a sense of “inner liberty,” but rather by what they think Google considers to be a free person. “There’s no nice, clean separation between work and play anymore. And that cannot leave that generation untouched. It really poisons their way of relating to one another, because even [that] is going to become part of their CV.”It’s a “depressed society,” where aggregate demand is low, he says (agreeing with Larry Summers’ arguments about “secular stagnation”). Every effort by central banks to stimulate the economy goes largely to the cloud fiefdoms described in his book, as economic activity is sucked out of marketplaces into the trading platforms of the cloud. In the real world, the “cloud serfs” with depressed prospects face increased asset prices and a housing market that Varoufakis calls “unapproachable.”The zeitgeist agrees with much of what Varoufakis says. From “quiet quitting” among western Gen Zers to “lying flat” in China to even the surgeon general’s remarks about the “loneliness epidemic,” the emerging culture of young adult professionals is one of grappling with mental health struggles, if not outright depression.The Gen Z that Varoufakis sees are “alienated” people who are cynical because of the pervasive effects of social media on all of culture. “They get much older, much faster as a result of living in a social media world in which they are compelled to try to find an identity which in the end is not self-driven. That’s why I am talking about the death of the liberal individual, because then it’s no longer autonomous.”He even waxes a bit nostalgic for the supposedly “tyrannical” days of mid-20th century capitalism, when to work for IBM, “you had to be dressed in the IBM way,” or to work for Toyota, “you had to sing the Toyota anthem.” In those times, you could be a corporate person during the day and an anarchist poet in the evening at night, he says, and that’s lost to us now.So, I ask, what he describes sounds a lot like one of my favorite bands from the proto-digital 1990s: Rage Against The Machine. Does he want us to take that away from his book?“I loved Rage Against The Machine,” he responds. “I’ve danced to many of those songs. So obviously my answer to you is yes,” but then he pauses and emphasizes that “It has to be a rational rage, a very moderate rage.” Every rebellion is pregnant with authoritarianism, he responds, and after all, he adds, he is a liberal.“Some people think that sounds like a contradiction, to be liberal and left wing.” But the whole point of liberalism, he adds, is the importance of the autonomous individual.It’s a message you could almost be a fan of.

For FORTUNE’s site, click here.

 

 

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Why is Labour still using the self-defeating, discredited ‘maxed out credit card’ analogy? The GUARDIAN

It is one thing to U-turn on a modest green transition programme. It is another to do so using mendacious Tory economic paradigms.Rarely has a lacklustre policy been abandoned for a reason so bad that it threatens to inflict long-term damage on a society. Independently of whether the £28bn green investment programme was the right policy for the next Labour government to commit to, Rachel Reeves’s reasons for ditching it were an undeserved gift to the Tories and a partial vindication of their disgraceful flirtations with an austerian, anti-green political narrative.Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today shortly after her U-turn on Labour’s headline £28bn green transition programme, the shadow chancellor explained her decision by claiming that, under Jeremy Hunt, the Treasury is “planning on maxing out the credit card”, adding for good effect that the Tories are “maxing out the headroom ahead of the next general election” thus limiting “what an incoming Labour government will be able to achieve”. By comparing the state’s coffers to an overladen credit card, Reeves endorsed an insidious fallacy.If we owe George Osborne anything, it is irrefutable empirical evidence that using the analogy of a credit card for a nation’s budget (along with inane “belt tightening” and “fixing the roof when it is sunny” metaphors) is a terrible basis for prudent fiscal policy. It is true that the Tories will leave scorched earth behind for the next government, with a budget dripping in red ink and a pitiful level of investment in the technologies and services the UK needs to escape a long-term slump. But this is precisely the reason why Labour must reject the austerian urges that, inevitably, spring from the credit card analogy.When your credit card is “maxed out”, you do indeed need immediately to tighten your belt. The reason why parsimony works for you, and helps limit your debt, is that you are blessed with an income that is independent of what you decide to spend money on. In other words, if you don’t buy the shoes or new phone you covet, your income will not diminish, and so your deficit will shrink reliably. But the state’s budget is nothing like a credit card. As chancellor of the exchequer, your (tax) income is highly dependent on your (public) spending. Limit your spending and you have limited your income too. This is why the more Osborne slashed public spending in the 2010s, the more money he needed to borrow. By adopting the “maxed credit card” narrative, Reeves endorsed Osborne’s flawed logic and, indirectly, absolved the Tories for the wanton damage they have inflicted on a generation of Britons.Austerity, and the credit card analogy that provides its thin veneer of logic, is not just bad for workers and people in desperate need of state support during tough times; it also depresses investment. By hastening the stagnation of a society’s aggregate income, it signals to businesses that they would be mad to put money into building up the capacity to produce the output that society is too impecunious to buy. That’s how austerity undermined investment in Britain and that’s how it will annul Labour’s ambition to draw in private green investments, now that Reeves has ditched her modest green public investment plan, replacing it with wishful thinking that the private sector will, magically, make up the difference.But none of this means that the ditched £28bn policy was optimal or, indeed, that an incoming chancellor can safely commit the Treasury to borrow and spend unlimited amounts. The difficulty that any British government faces today is that, since President Biden inaugurated his expansive green transition spending spree (improbably labelled the Inflation Reduction Act), the UK is caught up in a subsidy war between the US, China and, to some extent, Germany and France. This is a multitrillion-dollar subsidy contest that the UK cannot win and, thus, should not enter. In this context, were it to be spent as planned (ie, as Inflation Reduction Act-like subsidies for private business), Labour’s £28bn would be a mere drop in the ocean, incapable of diverting the torrent of capital rushing into the US and China.If subsidies are a fool’s wager when competing with the US, whose central bank mints the world’s reserve currency, what should Britain do? Having dropped the fantasy that subsidies can attract battery manufacturers and microchip producers to the UK in numbers consistent with a British green industrial revolution, a Labour government should do two things. Set aside a modest sum (say, £6bn) to subsidise energy conservation and, critically, found a public investment bank to inject green investments into green tech enterprises directly (private or public) to the tune of up to 3% of national income annually. These large sums can be raised, not through Treasury bonds that need to be repaid by taxpayers, but by bonds issued by a new public investment bank – to be repaid from the proceeds of the green enterprises they fund. The Bank of England could also help with an announcement: if the price of these green bonds were to fall below a certain point, it would buy them second-hand – even while selling off its stock of Treasury bonds. This mere announcement would ensure it would not need actually to buy them because investors would rush in to snap them up, thus leaving Britain’s public debt servicing costs unaffected.In 1942, John Maynard Keynes proclaimed: “Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the 19th century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income … Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford.” Britain’s conundrum, today, is that the next government, whose job will be to fix the Tories’ mess, is led by politicians who share neither Keynes’s aims nor his innovative approach to public finance. Judging by Reeves’s recent performance, they seem to care more about the fiscal hawks in their midst and in the Tory press. So much so that, to prove their mettle as bona fide austerians, they adopt the most pernicious allegory to have disgraced economic thinking.

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, author and secretary-general of MeRA25. His latest book is Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

For The Guardian’s site, click here

 

 

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«Σκληρό Μαρκάρισμα» : Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης – Βασίλης Σκουρής (σεζόν #2, επεισόδιο #2)

Μια πραγματικά εφ’ όλης της ύλης ωριαία συνέντευξη στο πρόσφατο ΣΚΛΗΡΟ ΜΑΡΚΑΡΙΣΜΑ – μιας σειρά που δημιούργησε το ΜέΡΑ25 για να απαντήσει στη μιντιακή συστημική μονοφωνία, με συνεντεύξεις όπως έπρεπε να είναι, χωρίς ταμπού και υπαγορευμένες ερωτήσεις.Για την ανασυγκρότηση του ΜέΡΑ25«Μπαίνοντας στη μάχη δε συζητάς για την ήττα», ήταν η απάντηση του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη στην πρώτη ερώτηση του Βασίλη Σκουρή αναφορικά με το ενδεχόμενο αποτυχίας στις επερχόμενες ευρωεκλογές. Πάντως, ο γραμματέας του ΜέΡΑ25 δεν απέφυγε να αναφέρει ότι, μετά την αποτυχία των εκλογών του 23, όλοι και όλες στο ΜέΡΑ25 μπήκαμε σε μια τρίμηνη ενδοσκόπηση, με ενδελεχή συζήτηση σχετικά με τα λάθη μας, μια διαδικασία που βοήθησε ώστε σήμερα, μετά από ένα ξεκαθάρισμα, να μπορούμε να πούμε ότι κάνουμε πράξη το σύνθημά μας, “για τους ανθρώπους, όχι για τα αξιώματα”.Για την Κεντροαριστερά και την πολιτική κυριαρχία της ΔεξιάςΓια την έλλειψη μιας μεγάλης προοδευτικής αντιπολίτευσης, ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης εξήγησε το μηχανισμό της πολιτικής χρεοκοπίας του ΠΑΣΟΚ και του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Για το μεν ΠΑΣΟΚ η διαδικασία αυτή ξεκίνησε από τη διαφθορά της εποχής Σημίτη και ολοκληρώθηκε με την υπογραφή του πρώτου Μνημονίου, για τον δε ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, η διαδικασία ξεκίνησε με την συνθηκολόγηση του 2015. Το ότι τα αποτελέσματά της δεν φάνηκαν άμεσα όπως περίμενε, οφείλεται μόνο στα βαθιά αντιδεξιά αντανακλαστικά ενός μεγάλου μέρους της ελληνικής κοινωνίας. Το γεγονός όμως ότι ο ΣΥΡΙΖΑ αποτελεί τον μεγαλύτερο χορηγό της ΝΔ είναι αδιαμφισβήτητο: από το 2019 είχαμε επισημάνει ότι, έχοντας νομοθετήσει όλη τη μνημονιακή υποδομή, δεν θα μπορεί να αντιπολιτευτεί τη ΝΔ που θα την εφαρμόζει, όπερ και εγένετο.Μάλιστα η συνθηκολόγηση του 2015 αποτέλεσε το χορηγό της δεξιάς παλινόρθωσης και στην Ευρώπη, πράγμα που πιστοποιείται από την τύχη των Podemos και του Die Linke που είχαν συνδεθεί στενά με τον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ και είχαν επενδύσει πολιτικά στο παράδειγμα εκείνης της ελληνικής άνοιξης. Αυτός είναι και ο λόγος της κριτικής μας στον Αλέξη Τσίπρα, όχι κάποια προσωπική πικρία.Έπειτα, ο γραμματέας του ΜέΡΑ25 εξήγησε τους λόγους της ιδεολογικής και πολιτικής κυριαρχίας της Δεξιάς αυτή τη στιγμή στη χώρα. Με την προοδευτική αξιωματική αντιπολίτευση πολιτικά αυτο-υποθηκευμένη και με τη συγκυρία του covid να δίνει ανέλπιστο δημοσιονομικό χώρο, ο Μητσοτάκης γίνεται κυρίαρχος (χωρίς βέβαια να παραβλέπεται η μιντιακή υπεροπλία της ΝΔ). Αυτή η κυριαρχία Μητσοτάκη αποτελεί λόγο μεγάλων πανηγυρισμών για την ολιγαρχία, καθώς η χώρα έχει γίνει πεδίο τεράστιας κερδοφορίας, με τα funds να αγοράζουν δάνεια και δημόσια περιουσία σε εξευτελιστικές τιμές και να τα εκποιούν με μυθικά ποσοστά κέρδους.Στη συνέχεια, απάντησε στην ερώτηση του τι εννοεί όταν λέει “Μητσοτάκης ΑΕ”. Εκεί έδωσε ένα χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα που είχε καταγγείλει και από το βήμα της Βουλής, ότι δηλαδή στα funds που λεηλατούν τα σπίτια του κόσμου, συμμετέχει ενεργά ο κοινωνικός κύκλος του πρωθυπουργού. Αυτό που είναι τραγικό, τόνισε ο γραμματέας του ΜέΡΑ25, είναι ότι ο κ. Μητσοτάκης δεν απάντησε, γνωρίζοντας αυτό που έγινε την επόμενη μέρα: Πλήρης αποσιώπηση μιας τόσο σοβαρής καταγγελίας, που σε άλλη χώρα θα είχε ρίξει την κυβέρνηση, από τα ολιγαρχικά ΜΜΕ.Για την Ευρώπη και τις ΕυρωεκλογέςΣτην ερώτηση για την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση, ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης είπε πως λειτουργεί ως διευθυντήριο ενός καρτέλ, όπου η δημοκρατία είναι εξοβελισμένη. Ο αγώνας για να μην αφήσουμε την Ευρώπη να παραμένει έτσι, εξηγεί τη συμμετοχή μας σε όλα τα ευρωπαϊκά τεκταινόμενα, άρα και τις ευρωεκλογές.Στη συνέχεια εξήγησε το μηχανισμό μέσα από τον οποίο η Ακροδεξιά έφτασε να είναι προ των πυλών ή και εντός της εξουσίας σε πολλές ευρωπαϊκές χώρες. Από τη μία η σοσιαλδημοκρατική αριστερά σε χώρες όπως η Γαλλία και η Γερμανία, άφησε τις τράπεζες να κάνουν πάρτι χωρίς να κληθούν ποτέ να πληρώσουν τα σπασμένα των στοιχημάτων τους σε τοξικά παράγωγα. Από την άλλη η αριστερά με τη μορφή του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ συνθηκολόγησε με τα μνημόνια που διέσωσαν αυτές τις τράπεζες σε βάρος του λαού. Έτσι ο μόνος που έμεινε να διεκδικεί την ταμπέλα του αντισυστημισμού ήταν η ακροδεξιά. Η οποία βέβαια, είναι ανά πάσα στιγμή έτοιμη να συνεργαστεί με τη δεξιά όταν η ολιγαρχία κρίνει ότι αυτό είναι απαραίτητο.Απέναντι σε αυτό τον κίνδυνο, ούτε η σοσιαλδημοκρατία ούτε η κεντροαριστερά μπορεί να είναι η απάντηση. Αντίθετα, η απάντηση για εμάς βρίσκεται στην αγωνιστική αριστερά στην οποία θέλουμε να παίξουμε ενωτικό ρόλο.Για τα ιδιωτικά πανεπιστήμιαΤο επόμενο κομμάτι της συνέντευξης ήταν για το καυτό θέμα των ιδιωτικών πανεπιστημίων. Εκεί ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης πρώτα αποδόμησε το διπλό μύθο που καλλιέργησε η κυβέρνηση και τα ΜΜΕ, ότι δήθεν στην Ευρώπη υπάρχουν πολλά και καλά ιδιωτικά πανεπιστήμια και ότι στην Ελλάδα θα επενδύσουν πανεπιστήμια όπως το Harvard. Ο αληθινός στόχος της κυβέρνησης είναι αφενός η εξυπηρέτηση των κολλεγίων, σε συνδυασμό με την ΕΒΕ, και αφετέρου η εκ των έσω άλωση του δημοσίου πανεπιστημίου.Στη νεολαία που βρίσκεται ήδη σε διαδικασία αποχώρησης από τη χώρα, η κυβέρνηση λέει ότι για να μείνεις εδώ πρέπει να γίνει μέρος ενός διεφθαρμένου συστήματος όπου το πορτοφόλι της οικογένειάς σου καθορίζει το αν θα μπεις στην ιατρική ή όχι. Γιαυτό τα παιδιά είναι τόσο εξοργισμένα.Η δημόσια πανεπιστημιακή εκπαίδευση είναι στο στόχαστρο γιατί η άρχουσα τάξη της χώρας μας δεν συνδέεται μαζί της με κανέναν τρόπο: τα παιδιά της, τα στέλνει να σπουδάσουν στο εξωτερικό χωρίς να περάσουν καν από τις λυκειακές σπουδές που περνάνε τα άλλα παιδιά, μιας και κάνουν ΙΒ (international bacaleaureat). Επειδή όμως τα δημόσια πανεπιστήμια έχουν φτιαχτεί με το μόχθο των Ελλήνων και έχουν αξίες που αξίζει να διατηρηθούν, εμείς και η νεολαία θα τα υπερασπιστούμε με κάθε τρόπο, ακόμα και με καταλήψεις.Για την «πρόθυμη» εξωτερική πολιτικήΤέλος, στην επισήμανση του Βασίλη Σκουρή ότι η Ελλάδα είναι ο πιο πρόθυμος σύμμαχος της Δύσης στις τελευταίες πολεμικές αναμετρήσεις, ο γραμματέας του ΜέΡΑ25 δήλωσε:Νιώθω βαθιά ντροπή ως πολίτης που η Ελλάδα σήμερα είναι πιο εξαρτημένη από τα ξένα κέντρα από ότι ήταν το 2015. Αυτό το βλέπουμε από την τρόικα που υπαγορεύει οικονομική πολιτική, τις ΗΠΑ που υπαγορεύουν τη στάση μας στην Ουκρανία και το παλαιστινιακό. Οι κυβερνήσεις των τελευταίων χρόνων δεν έμαθαν το μάθημα του Ανδρέα Παπανδρέου, ότι τους yesmen δεν τους υπολογίζει κανείς, άρα αν είσαι τέτοιος δεν υπηρετείς τη χώρα. Ακόμα, ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης υπενθύμισε ότι, σύμφωνα με τη συνθήκη της Ρώμης, ο κ. Μητσοτάκης και οι υπουργοί του είναι υπόλογοι στο Διεθνές Ποινικό Δικαστήριο για την ηθική υποστήριξη που παρέχουν στη γενοκτονία, κάτι που το ΜέΡΑ25 είχε επισημάνει από τον Οκτώβριο.

Θέλεις να μαθαίνεις για τις δράσεις του ΜεΡΑ25; Γράψου εδώ.

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