Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 22

Europe, the War in Ukraine, Technofeudalism & the challenges ahead – at the 2022 Global Investment Forum

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Greece’s Varoufakis brings his anti-establishment party to Italy – POLITICO

Yanis Varoufakis tried to rescue Greece from the austerity imposed by the liberal establishment. Then he wanted to rescue the whole EU. Now the motorbike-riding, leather jacket-wearing former Greek finance minister has turned his attention to Italy. “If ever there was a moment it is now,” the economist told POLITICO in an interview to mark the Italian launch of his pan-European political party, Mera25.The radical-left party was launched in the incongruously grand surroundings of the former Roman Aquarium, a 19th century exhibition space and cultural center, with cameos by Mera25’s celebrity backers Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and composer Brian Eno, who dialed in by video link.

As part of the leftist Syriza-led Greek government in 2015, Varoufakis battled the so-called troika and Europe-imposed austerity. While the Greek government eventually capitulated, Varoufakis quit government and founded a cross-border far-left political movement. As well as Waters and Eno, supporters include activist Julian Assange, film-maker Ken Loach, philosopher Noam Chomsky and Pamela Anderson of Baywatch fame.

Varoufakis clearly relishes the star-studded connections. “I just received [Eno’s] latest album with a dedication for me,” he reveals.

You might expect a self-styled “erratic Marxist” to be dismayed by the recent elections in Italy, which returned a government led by Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Brothers of Italy. But while he expresses concern for the possible ramification for minorities, Varoufakis reckons the result shows that the time to radically rethink Europe’s political and economic system has arrived.

The vote shows that Italian voters, rejecting decades of center left and center right governments that have accepted “soul-crushing” EU policies and structures that kept Italy down, are willing to try anything, he claims.

But as Meloni too has made what Varoufakis terms “a Faustian pact” with the establishment, signaling that she will work with Europe and be loyal to NATO, in order to gain power, she will inevitably be unable to keep her electoral promises, he argues. The resulting vacuum “will create space for a transnational progressive party offering something completely different,” in the heart of Europe.

The need for transnational politics is demonstrated by the global nature of recent crises.

“The debt crisis, banking crisis, climate crisis, geopolitical, energy, war, health,” Varoufakis says. “None of this can be sorted out at national state level.”

Mera25’s policies, decided by its 150,000 members in a Europe-wide ballot, include a federal EU republic and replacing energy markets with a common green grid.

Varoufakis said Diem 25, his first attempt at cross-border politics, failed due to the left’s fragmented nature | Angelo Carconi/EPA-EFE

If Varoufakis had his way NATO would be dead and buried. “[It] has no business existing. It is an affront to the idea of the European Union to designate our security to a foreign power with antithetical interests to our own,” he says.

Instead, Europe should be responsible for its own defense, with its own military, he insists. Until Europe abandons NATO “we will be completely subservient to the interests of the U.S.”

Sending more arms to Ukraine is “the definition of madness” and sanctions “are a joke,” he said. Russia’s war-chest, buoyed by high energy prices, has only grown since the invasion of Ukraine. “If you want to massage your conscience for moral reasons I can understand that, but sanctions are not working and will never work.”

As much as Italians are unlikely to see the need for yet another radical left party, Varoufakis’ views could resonate with a part of the Italian electorate. A majority of Italians oppose sending arms to Ukraine, and sanctions, a position that is likely to find further support as energy costs fuel resentment over the winter.Varoufakis acknowledges that Mera25 hasn’t yet taken off.He says that his initial run at cross-border politics, a movement intended to unite existing progressive forces, called Diem 25, failed, because of the fragmented, parochial nature of the left. Months spent trying to unite the Italian left ahead of the 2019 European elections, made him lose the will to live, he said. After a year and a half of failure he decided to focus on a party that would run in elections instead.It narrowly missed being elected to the European Parliament in Germany, but counts its entry into the Greek parliament as a win, especially as the party has been “attacked brutally” by former comrades in the left-wing Syriza party. “They tried to eradicate us as we were spoiling the broth for them.”Varoufakis reflects: “By no means are we successful but we have to start somewhere … We are not trying so much to maximize votes but to start a conversation. … We want to demonstrate what transnational politics looks like.”

For the POLITICO.EU site please click here.

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Summing up my take on crypto, followed by a live debate

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The Techno-Feudal Method to Musk’s Twitter Madness – Project Syndicate op-ed

Immediately after taking over Twitter and pronouncing himself Chief Twit, Elon Musk affirmed his commitment to safeguarding the platform as the “public square” where anything and everything is debated. It was a smart tactic, because it successfully diverted the public’s attention from what Musk is really up to.ATHENS – Elon Musk had good reasons to feel unfulfilled enough to buy Twitter for $44 billion. He had pioneered online payments, upended the car industry, revolutionized space travel, and even experimented with ambitious brain-computer interfaces. His cutting-edge technological feats had made him the world’s richest entrepreneur. Alas, neither his achievements nor his wealth granted him entry into the new ruling class of those harnessing the powers of cloud-based capital. Twitter offers Musk a chance to make amends.YANIS VAROUFAKIS explains that the issue is neither vanity nor public service, but rather the need to acquire cloud capital.Since capitalism’s dawn, power stemmed from owning capital goods; steam engines, Bessemer furnaces, industrial robots, and so on. Today, it is cloud-based capital, or cloud capital in short, that grants its owners hitherto unimaginable powers.Consider Amazon, with its network of software, hardware, and warehouses – and its Alexa device sitting on our kitchen counter interfacing directly with us. It constitutes a cloud-based system capable of probing our emotions more deeply than any advertiser ever could. Its tailor-made experiences exploit our biases to produce responses. Then, it produces its own responses to our responses – to which we respond again, training the reinforcement-learning algorithms, which trigger another ripple of responses.Unlike old-fashioned terrestrial or analogue capital, which boils down to produced means of manufacturing things consumers want, cloud capital functions as a produced means of modifying our behavior in line with its owners’ interests. The same algorithm running on the same labyrinth of server farms, optic fiber cables, and cell-phone towers performs multiple simultaneous miracles.Cloud capital’s first miracle is to get us to work for free to replenish and enhance its stock and productivity with every text, review, photo, or video that we create and upload using its interfaces. In this manner, cloud capital has turned hundreds of millions of us into cloud-serfs – unpaid producers, toiling the landlords’ digital estates and believing, like peasants believed under feudalism, that our labor (creating and sharing our photos and opinions) is part of our character.The second miracle is cloud capital’s capacity to sell to us the object of the desires it has helped instill in us. Amazon, Alibaba, and their many e-commerce imitators in every country may look to the untrained eye like monopolized markets, but they are nothing like a market – not even a hyper-capitalist digital market. Even in markets that are cornered by a single firm or person, people can interact reasonably freely. In contrast, once you enter a platform like Amazon, the algorithm isolates you from every other buyer and feeds you exclusively the information its owners want you to have.Buyers cannot talk to each other, form associations, or otherwise organize to force a seller to reduce a price or improve quality. Sellers, too, are in a one-to-one relation with the algorithm and must pay its owner to complete a trade. Everything and everyone is intermediated not by the disinterested invisible hand of the market but by an invisible algorithm that works for one person, or one company, in what is, essentially, a cloud-fief.Musk is perhaps the only tech lord who had been watching the triumphant march of this new techno-feudalism helplessly from the sidelines. His Tesla car company uses the cloud cleverly to turn its cars into nodes on a digital network that generates big data and ties drivers to Musk’s systems. His SpaceX rocket company, and its flock of low-orbit satellites now littering our planet’s periphery, contributes significantly to the development of other moguls’ cloud capital.But Musk? Frustratingly for the business world’s enfant terrible, he lacked a gateway to the gigantic rewards cloud capital can furnish. Until now: Twitter could be that missing gateway.Immediately after taking over and pronouncing himself Chief Twit, Musk affirmed his commitment to safeguarding Twitter as the “public square” where anything and everything is debated. It was a smart tactic which successfully diverted the public’s attention to an endless global debate about whether the world should trust its foremost short-form forum to a mogul with a history of playing fast and loose with the truth in that same forum.The liberal commentariat is fretting over Donald Trump’s reinstatement. The left is agonizing over the rise of a tech-savvy version of Rupert Murdoch. Decent people of all views are deploring the terrible treatment of Twitter’s employees. And Musk? He seems to be keeping his eye on the ball: In a revealing tweet, he confessed his ambition to turn Twitter into an “everything app.”An “everything app” is, in my definition, nothing less than a gateway into cloud capital that allows its owner to modify consumer behavior, to extract free labor from users turned into cloud serfs, and, last but not least, to charge vendors a form of cloud rent to sell their wares. So far, Musk has not owned anything capable of evolving into an “everything app” and had no way of creating one from scratch.For while he was busy working out how to make mass-produced electric cars desirable and to profit from conquering outer space, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Facebook, and Tencent’s WeChat were wrapping their tentacles firmly around platforms and interfaces with “everything app” potential. Only one such interface was available for purchase.Musk’s challenge now is to enhance Twitter’s own cloud capital and hook it up to his existing Big Data network, while constantly enriching that network with data collected by Tesla cars crisscrossing Earth’s roads and countless satellites crisscrossing its skies. Assuming he can steady the nerves of Twitter’s remaining workforce, his next task will be to eliminate bots and weed out trolls so that New Twitter knows, and owns, its users’ identities.In a letter to advertisers, Musk correctly noted that irrelevant ads are spam, but relevant ones are content. In these techno-feudal times, this means that messages unable to modify behavior are spam, but those that sway what people think and do are the only content that matters: true power.As a private fief, Twitter could never be the world’s public square. That was never the point. The pertinent question is whether it will grant its new owner secure membership in the new techno-feudal ruling class.

For the Project Syndicate site click here.

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Το Twitter ως το εισιτήριο του Elon Musk στο Πάνθεον της Τεχνοφεουδαρχίας – 247 News

Αμέσως μόλις εξαγόρασε το Twitter και αυτοανακηρύχθηκε σε Chief Twit, ο Elon Musk δήλωσε πως δεσμεύεται να προστατεύσει τη φύση της πλατφόρμας ως μια «δημόσια πλατεία» όπου συζητούνται τα πάντα. Ήταν μια έξυπνη τακτική γιατί απέσπασε επιτυχώς την προσοχή του κοινού από τις πραγματικές του προθέσεις.Ο  Elon Musk  είχε κάθε λόγο να νιώθει ένα κενό που θα γέμιζε η αγορά του Twitter για 44 δισεκατομμύρια δολάρια. Ήταν πρωτοπόρος στις ηλεκτρονικές πληρωμές, ανέτρεψε όσα ξέραμε στο χώρο της αυτοκινητοβιομηχανίας, έφερε την επανάσταση με τα διαστημικά ταξίδια και πειραματίστηκε ακόμα και με φιλόδοξες διασυνδέσεις εγκεφάλου-υπολογιστή. Τα τεχνολογικά του επιτεύγματα τον αναγόρευσαν στον πλουσιότερο επιχειρηματία στον κόσμο. Παρ’όλα αυτά,ούτε τα επιτεύγματά του ούτε η περιουσία του του εξασφάλισαν την είσοδο στη νέα άρχουσα τάξη εκείνων που εκμεταλλεύονται τις δυνάμεις του κεφαλαίου που βασίζεται στο υπολογιστικό νέφος (cloud). Το Twitter προσφέρει στον Musk την απόλυτη ευκαιρία να το διορθώσει αυτό.Από την αυγή του καπιταλισμού, η εξουσία ήταν συνυφασμένη και εξαρτώμενη από την κατοχή κεφαλαιουχικών αγαθών. Ατμομηχανές, υψικάμινοι χάλυβα, βιομηχανικά ρομπότ και ούτω καθεξής. Σήμερα, το κεφάλαιο που εδρεύει στο υπολογιστικό νέφος, ή εν συντομία το κεφάλαιο του υπολογιστικού νέφους, είναι αυτό που παρέχει στους ιδιοκτήτες του ασύλληπτες εξουσίες.Ας σκεφτούμε την  Amazon , με το δίκτυο λογισμικού, υλικού και αποθηκών της – και τη συσκευή Alexa που βρίσκεται στον πάγκο της κουζίνας μας και συνδέεται απευθείας με εμάς. Αποτελεί ένα σύστημα που βασίζεται στο υπολογιστικό νέφος, ικανό να επηρεάζει τα συναισθήματά μας πιο ουσιαστικά από ό,τι θα μπορούσε ποτέ οποιοσδήποτε διαφημιστής. Οι εξατομικευμένες εμπειρίες του εκμεταλλεύονται τις προδιαθέσεις για να παράγουν αντιδράσεις. Στη συνέχεια, παράγει τις δικές του αντιδράσεις στις αντιδράσεις μας-στις οποίες ανταποκρινόμαστε ξανά, εκπαιδεύοντας τους αλγόριθμους ενίσχυσης-μάθησης, οι οποίοι πυροδοτούν μια άλλη ακολουθία αντιδράσεων.Σε αντίθεση με το παλιομοδίτικο επίγειο ή αναλογικό κεφάλαιο, το οποίο συνοψίζεται σε παραγόμενα μέσα παραγωγής προϊόντων που επιθυμούν οι καταναλωτές, το κεφάλαιο του υπολογιστικού νέφους λειτουργεί ως παραγόμενο μέσο τροποποίησης της συμπεριφοράς μας σύμφωνα με τα συμφέροντα των ιδιοκτητών του. Ο ίδιος αλγόριθμος που τρέχει στον ίδιο λαβύρινθο από servers, καλώδια οπτικών ινών και πύργους κινητής τηλεφωνίας πραγματοποιεί πολλά θαύματα ταυτόχρονα.Το πρώτο θαύμα του κεφαλαίου του υπολογιστικού νέφους είναι πως μας κάνει να εργαζόμαστε δωρεάν για να αναπληρώσουμε και να βελτιώσουμε το απόθεμα και την παραγωγικότητά του με κάθε κείμενο, κριτική, φωτογραφία ή βίντεο που δημιουργούμε και ανεβάζουμε, χρησιμοποιώντας τις διασυνδέσεις του. Με αυτόν τον τρόπο, το κεφάλαιο του υπολογιστικού νέφους έχει μετατρέψει εκατοντάδες εκατομμύρια από εμάς σε δουλοπάροικους – απλήρωτους παραγωγούς, που «καλλιεργούν» τα ψηφιακά κτήματα των ιδιοκτητών πιστεύοντας, όπως οι αγρότες την εποχή της φεουδαρχίας, ότι η εργασία μας (η δημιουργία και κοινοποίηση φωτογραφιών και απόψεων) είναι ίδιον του χαρακτήρα μας.Το δεύτερο θαύμα είναι η ικανότητα του κεφαλαίου του υπολογιστικού νέφους να μας πουλά το αντικείμενο της επιθυμίας που κατάφερε να ενσταλάξει μέσα μας. Η Amazon, η Alibaba και οι διάφοροι μιμητές τους ηλεκτρονικοί έμποροι σε κάθε χώρα, μπορεί να φαίνονται στο ανεκπαίδευτο μάτι σαν μονοπωλιακές αγορές, αλλά δεν πρόκειται για αγορές – ούτε καν για μια υπερκαπιταλιστική ψηφιακή αγορά. Ακόμη και σε μονοπωλιακές αγορές, οι άνθρωποι μπορούν να αλληλεπιδρούν σχετικά ελεύθερα. Αντιθέτως, μόλις μπει κανείς σε μια πλατφόρμα όπως η Amazon, ο αλγόριθμος σε απομονώνει από κάθε άλλο αγοραστή και σε τροφοδοτεί αποκλειστικά με τις πληροφορίες που θέλουν οι ιδιοκτήτες του να έχεις.Οι αγοραστές δεν μπορούν να συνομιλήσουν μεταξύ τους, ούτε να οργανωθούν με οποιονδήποτε τρόπο προκειμένου να αναγκάσουν έναν πωλητή να μειώσει μια τιμή ή να βελτιώσει την ποιότητα. Ομοίως και οι πωλητές έχουν μονόδρομη σχέση με τον αλγόριθμο και πρέπει να πληρώνουν τον ιδιοκτήτη του για να ολοκληρωθεί μια συναλλαγή. Τα πάντα και οι πάντες διαμεσολαβούνται όχι από το ουδέτερο αόρατο χέρι της αγοράς, αλλά από έναν αόρατο αλγόριθμο που λειτουργεί για ένα άτομο, ή μια εταιρεία, σε αυτό που ουσιαστικά είναι ένα τεχνοφέουδο.Ο Musk είναι ίσως ο μόνος ηγεμόνας της τεχνολογικής βιομηχανίας που παρακολουθούσε παθητικά από το περιθώριο τη θριαμβευτική πορεία αυτής της νέας τεχνοφεουδαρχίας. Η εταιρεία αυτοκινήτων του Tesla χρησιμοποιεί έξυπνα το ψηφιακό νέφος για να μετατρέψει τα αυτοκίνητά της σε κόμβους σε ένα ψηφιακό δίκτυο που παράγει BigData και συνδέει τους οδηγούς με τα συστήματα του Musk. Η εταιρεία πυραύλων του SpaceX και το σμήνος δορυφόρων χαμηλής τροχιάς της που ρυπαίνουν την περιφέρεια του πλανήτη μας, συμβάλλουν σημαντικά στην ανάπτυξη του κεφαλαίου υπολογιστικού νέφους άλλων μεγιστάνων.Αλλά δυστυχώς για το enfantterrible του επιχειρηματικού κόσμου, του έλειπε μια πύλη εισόδου στις γιγαντιαίες ανταμοιβές που μπορεί να προσφέρει το κεφάλαιο του υπολογιστικού νέφους. Μέχρι σήμερα: Το Twitter θα μπορούσε να είναι αυτή η πύλη που του έλειπε.Αμέσως μόλις το εξαγόρασε και αυτοανακηρύχθηκε σε Chief Twit, ο Musk δήλωσε πως δεσμεύεται να προστατεύσει τη φύση του Twitter ως τη «δημόσια πλατεία» όπου συζητούνται τα πάντα. Ήταν μια έξυπνη τακτική που έστρεψε με επιτυχία την προσοχή του κοινού σε μια ατέρμονη παγκόσμια συζήτηση σχετικά με το αν ο κόσμος θα έπρεπε να εμπιστευτεί το κορυφαίο φόρουμ του σε έναν μεγιστάνα γνωστό για τη χαλαρή σχέση του με την αλήθεια μέσα στο ίδιο αυτό φόρουμ.Οι Δημοκρατικοί δημοσιολογούντες τρέμουν την επιστροφή του Ντόναλντ Τραμπ στο τουίτερ. Η Αριστερά αγωνιά για την άνοδο ενός «Ρούπερτ Μέρντοχ της τεχνολογίας». Οι αξιοπρεπείς άνθρωποι ανεξαρτήτως ιδεολογιών αποδοκιμάζουν την κακομεταχείριση των υπαλλήλων του Twitter. Και ο Musk; Είναι απόλυτα αφοσιωμένος στο στόχο του: Σε ένα αποκαλυπτικό tweet, ομολόγησε τη φιλοδοξία του να μετατρέψει το Twitter σε «εφαρμογή για τα πάντα»Μια «εφαρμογή για τα πάντα» δεν είναι, κατά την άποψή μου, τίποτα λιγότερο από μια πύλη εισόδου στο κεφάλαιο του ψηφιακού νέφους που επιτρέπει στον κάτοχό της να τροποποιεί τη συμπεριφορά των καταναλωτών, να παράγει δωρεάν εργασία από χρήστες που έχουν μετατραπεί σε δουλοπάροικους του ψηφιακού νέφους και τέλος, να χρεώνει τους εμπόρους για το δικαίωμα να πουλήσουν τα προϊόντα τους στο ψηφιακό νέφος. Μέχρι στιγμής, ο Musk δεν είχε στην κατοχή του κάτι ικανό να εξελιχθεί σε μια «εφαρμογή για τα πάντα» και δεν είχε τα μέσα και την τεχνογνωσία να δημιουργήσει μια απ΄το μηδέμ.Όσο εκείνος ασχολούνταν με το πώς να κάνει ευπώλητα τα ηλεκτρικά αυτοκίνητα μαζικής παραγωγής και να θησαυρίσει από την κατάκτηση του διαστήματος, η Amazon, η Google, η Alibaba, το Facebook και το WeChat της Tencent τύλιγαν τα πλοκάμια τους γύρω από ψηφιακές πλατφόρμες με δυνατότητες «εφαρμογών για τα πάντα». Μόνο μία τέτοια πλατφόρμα ήταν διαθέσιμη προς πώληση.Η πρόκληση τώρα για τον Musk είναι να ενισχύσει το κεφάλαιο υπολογιστικού νέφους του Twitter και να το συνδέσει με το υπάρχον δίκτυό του από Big Data, εμπλουτίζοντας συνεχώς αυτό το δίκτυο με δεδομένα που συλλέγονται από τα αυτοκίνητα Tesla που διασχίζουν τους δρόμους της Γης και τους αμέτρητους δορυφόρους που διατρέχουν τους ουρανούς της. Αν υποθέσουμε ότι θα μπορέσει να κατευνάσει το εναπομείναν εργατικό δυναμικό του Twitter, το επόμενο καθήκον του θα είναι να εξαλείψει τα bots και να ξεριζώσει τα τρολ, έτσι ώστε το νέο Twitter να γνωρίζει και να κατέχει τις ταυτότητες των χρηστών του.Σε μια επιστολή προς τους διαφημιστές, ο Musk σωστά επεσήμανε ότι οι άσχετες διαφημίσεις είναι spam, αλλά οι σχετικές είναι «περιεχόμενο». Σε αυτούς τους τεχνοφεουδαρχικούς καιρούς, αυτό σημαίνει ότι τα μηνύματα που δεν μπορούν να τροποποιήσουν συμπεριφορές είναι ανεπιθύμητα, αλλά αυτά που επηρεάζουν το τι σκέφτονται και κάνουν οι άνθρωποι είναι το μόνο περιεχόμενο που έχει σημασία: η αληθινή δύναμη.Ως ιδιωτικό φέουδο, το Twitter δεν θα μπορούσε ποτέ να είναι η «παγκόσμια δημόσια πλατεία». Δεν ήταν ποτέ αυτό το ζητούμενο. To μόνο ερώτημα που έχει σημασία είναι εάν θα εξασφαλίσει στον νέο ιδιοκτήτη του την ιδιότητα μέλους στη νέα τεχνοφεουδαρχική άρχουσα τάξη. *Το πιο πάνω άρθρο πρωτο-αναρτήθηκε στο 247 News και αποτελεί απόδοση της μηνιαίας στήλης του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη στο Project Syndicate με αρχικό τίτλο “The Techno-Feudal Method to Musk’s Twitter Madness“.

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Γιατί απαιτούμε την άρση της ασυλίας μας κόντρα σε ολιγάρχες τύπου Αλαφούζου

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Στο Κόκκινο 105,5 συζητώντας για την προοδευτική διακυβέρνηση

The post Στο Κόκκινο 105,5 συζητώντας για την προοδευτική διακυβέρνηση appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Μια εφ’ όλης της ύλης και της πολιτικής & οικονομική συγκυρίας συζήτηση στο “Ναυτεμπορική TV”

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The New Iranian Revolution as an opportunity for the Internationalist Left – Project Syndicate

Iran’s protesters will neither submit to the fascism hidden behind the regime’s pseudo-anti-imperialism nor surrender their country to the hegemony of the United States or their economy to financialized capital. The Western left should learn from them.ATHENS – Dealing with random, unprovoked abuse is never easy. But dealing with random, unprovoked praise can be even harder.An Athenian taxi driver, a Nazi sympathizer, told me recently, “I am a Golden Dawn voter, but I think the world of you.” I would rather that he had punched me in the stomach.I had the same sinking feeling the other day when I read far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s proposals for achieving peace in Ukraine – proposals not too dissimilar to what I have been suggesting since Putin’s repulsive invasion began. While Orbán, unlike the Golden Dawn voter, did not praise me personally, the revulsion was the same.Over the years, I have suffered immense discomfort when people whose analyses at least partly resonated with my own suddenly revealed themselves as fascist anti-Semites, unreconstructed Stalinists, loony libertarians, or, more recently, Trumpists. Fine treatises exposing bankers’ shenanigans degenerated into vile attacks on Jews. Critiques of the Gilded Age of early financialized capitalism turned into paeans for Uncle Joe. Forensic analyses of our central banks’ propensity to play fast and loose with our money concluded with crackpot cryptocurrency proposals redolent of the dangerous libertarian idea of apolitical money. And, last but not least, perfectly reasonable reproaches of “liberal” imperialism, or of the liberal establishment’s contempt for blue collar workers, became calls for erecting border walls, hounding brown people, or invading Congress.The sacred duty of spotting a fellow radical’s switch from humanism to misanthropy was brilliantly captured by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1925 movie  Battleship Potemkin . During a fervent demonstration against the brutality of the czarist army, Eisenstein depicts an agitator who, suddenly, tries to turn the demonstrators’ rage against the Jews – at which point he is shouted down by the other demonstrators. If only it were that easy!In 2011, I witnessed how hard it is. During the magnificent Athens demonstrations that brought tens of thousands of Greeks to Syntagma Square for 72 consecutive nights to protest the deliberate impoverishment of Greece by the now infamous troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), there were fascists lurking in our midst. Like the man in Eisenstein’s film, they incited the vast crowd with posters calling for the hanging of all members of parliament, depicting Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform and, ironically, using anti-Semitic tropes to represent Merkel’s local helpers.While the left-wing crowd learned to keep our distance from them, congregating in the lower part of Syntagma Square, I regretted that we never dealt with the fascists as decisively as the demonstrators in Eisenstein’s film. Worse still, the successive defeats the internationalist left has suffered over the decades have lured many to embrace the awful logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.In 1981, I joined a small London demonstration against Saddam Hussein, a Western darling at the time whose regime had recently invaded Iran on the West’s behalf. After being roughed up and briefly detained by police, I was taken to task by left-wing friends who called me naive for not seeing that our duty to the Palestinian cause was to support the only regime in the region willing to confront Israel.Some 22 years later, after a demonstration against the United States-led invasion of Saddam’s Iraq, another group of leftists took me to task for opposing the invasion. The possibility of condemning both the murderous Saddam and the catastrophic invasion to oust him was dismissed.The breakup of Yugoslavia created similar discomforts. In 1999, during the war over Kosovo, the left was split into two camps, both of which I detested. Some fell into the trap of backing the murderous regime of Slobodan Milošević as the last remaining impediment to US imperialism and German economic expansionism in the Balkans. Others portrayed the NATO bombings as a liberal intervention that was necessary to usher in democracy in the Balkans. They were lonely days for those of us who opposed with the same fervor Milošević’s fascism and NATO’s illegal bombing of Serb civilians.Perhaps the loneliest moment came in 2001, during a faculty board meeting at the University of Athens, when the chair tabled a request from Greece’s president that we award an honorary doctorate to Vladimir Putin, in exchange for a similar honor bestowed upon our president by Moscow State University. I was the minority of one who opposed the award on the grounds that Putin had the blood of over 200,000 Chechens on his hands, having bombed Chechnya mercilessly during a cruel war intended to bolster his grip on power.Learned left-leaning colleagues later reprimanded me for not recognizing that an autocratic pseudo-czar in Russia was a small price to pay for checking the spread of US power in Eastern Europe. Today, several Eastern European comrades portray me as Putin’s useful idiot for not believing that a never-ending war will bring about a democratic regime in Moscow.For years, I despaired that nothing can save the international left from the blind spots which cause progressives to lose our way time and again. Until now. The new Iranian revolution offers the international left an excellent opportunity.The women, students, and workers rising up across Iran are adamant: They will neither submit to the fascism hidden behind the regime’s pseudo-anti-imperialism nor surrender their country to the hegemony of the US or their economy to financialized capital.They are learning the hard way how to refuse misleading binary oppositions (neoliberalism-statism, imperialism-autocracy, patriarchy-consumerism). I hope and trust that they can teach us to do likewise. It is another reason why we must support their struggle.

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Rishi Sunak’s ‘grown-up’ austerity is designed to keep zombie capitalism alive

The demise of Trussonomics was a welcome victory for decency and common sense in a minor battle within a broader class war. Sadly, the class that Liz Truss tried to bolster with copious tax and regulatory gifts will win this war by deploying an even nastier, blunter, dirtier weapon: austerity.Britain’s wealthy owe a debt of gratitude to the Truss-Kwarteng circus. By destabilising the markets so spectacularly, and turning instability into the dragon that the latest Tory government must slay, they have released the “adults” – Treasury officials and the stealthier Tory class warriors behind Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt – from the political constraints imposed on them by an austerity-averse population.Under the Tories, all roads after the Covid-19 pandemic led to austerity. The only real difference among their squabbling crew concerned the chosen path, not the destination. As chancellor, Rishi Sunak understood the choice they were facing once the pandemic subsided and inflation surged.The first option was interest rates of above 6 per cent to contain inflation, which would, however, finish off the financial and corporate zombies on which his class depended for their wealth and power. The second option was punitive austerity that would achieve the same objective at lower interest rates made possible by the economy’s rapid slowdown.Sunak, along with the Treasury, clearly favoured the latter but Boris Johnson, savvy enough to sense that austerity was political poison, would not allow it.Borrowing from Johnson’s playbook, Truss defeated Sunak by campaigning against austerity while, furtively, planning to impose it later once her wealth transfer to the ultra-rich was complete. She and Kwasi Kwarteng knew that austerity would have to follow because they understood that the only way to stem inflation without austerity was to embrace a progressive agenda: higher green investment to reduce energy prices, a windfall tax on the banks’ profits, rent controls and new social housing.Long before “partygate” ended Johnson’s premiership, Sunak had embraced a clear sequence. Impose austerity to control inflation and deter workers’ wage claims and only then transfer more wealth to the rich via tax cuts.But Sunak’s embrace of fiscal conservatism made him an easy target for Truss. By reversing his proposed sequence of austerity first and tax cuts later, Truss succeeded in, at once, beating Sunak and becoming the shortest-serving prime minister ever.In fairness to Truss, most pundits also believed that the markets, lulled into a false sense of security after a dozen years of socialism-for-financiers, would remain calm for a few months by which time the Truss-Kwarteng duo would slowly but surely tighten the austerity screws as necessary. Setting aside some silly and easily avoidable errors, such as firing the Treasury’s Sir Humphrey and silencing the Office for Budget Responsibility, no one had an inkling of the landmine Truss’s reverse sequence would set off, causing enough market turbulence to test the nerves of even the International Monetary Fund.The landmine in question was, as we all know by now, the derivatives UK pension funds had massively invested in to hedge against inflation and higher interest rates – derivatives they could not afford except by borrowing against their stock of UK government gilts. When the news came in that Truss was planning to issue more gilts to pay for large tax cuts, without frontloading austerity, the price of gilts fell and, suddenly, pension funds had to post more cash to cover the debt they had incurred to buy the derivatives. In a state of panic, they sold the only liquid asset they had: gilts! And so the doom loop began until the Bank of England intervened and Liz Truss left 10 Downing Street in disgrace.Even before Sunak’s coronation, the Treasury had got itself a Chancellor of its liking: Hunt who was credited with calming the markets through austerian propaganda that everyone knows to be false: the imperative of balancing the books, the evil of unfunded commitments. The markets, undoubtedly, know that this government, just like previous ones, is never going to balance the books. They know that the point of fiscal policy is to keep the underfunding of government expenditure at a level consistent with long-term debt sustainability. So, why are they calmed by Hunt’s and Sunak’s austerian prose?The answer is that the corporate and financial zombies kept alive for so long by low interest rates need austerity. The alternative is interest rate rises that will drive a stake through their heart. By contrast, large cuts to the real value of Universal Credit payments will depress workers’ ability to demand higher wages and thus help the Bank of England suppress interest rates as it fights inflation. Austerity, through this prism, is a cynical means of shifting as much of the economic pain as possible from owners to non-owners, both in the labour and in the housing markets.Sadly, the living standards of the bottom 50% will not be the only victim. Investment in things Britain desperately needs will be the long-term casualty. By reducing public expenditure in real terms at precisely the moment private real expenditure is falling like a brick, the state accelerates the decline of economy-wide expenditures (i.e., the sum of private and public expenditure). But, in any economy, collective expenditure always equals collective income. Consequently, by choosing to suppress real wages and benefits via spending cuts, the Sunak-Hunt government signals to businesses that they would be mad to spend money into building up the capacity to produce stuff that consumers out there won’t have the money to buy. That’s how austerity slayed investment under George Osborne, but also across the Eurozone during decade following the 2008 financial crash.Watching this drama unfold from southern Europe, it is hard not to spot the similarity of Sunak to Mario Draghi and Mario Monti of Italy and Lucas Papademos of Greece. Besides sharing, along with Sunak, strong ties with Goldman Sachs, all these Prime Ministers were tasked by the “adults in the room” with imposing austerity on populations that never had a chance to vote for them.

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