Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 23

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.

For the Project Syndicate site click here

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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.

For the New Statesman site click here

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Discussing Technofeudalism, Ukraine & Britain with David McWilliams in Kilkenny – audio

David McWilliams and I sat down in front of a splendid, heartwarming, boisterous Kilkenomics audience to talk about Technofeudalism but also Ukraine, Britain and Europe. The ersatz audio recording is not of the highest quality (sorry!) but it is not terrible either (especially if you have a good headset). Apologies for this but one of the merits of Kilkenomics is that events are not professionally recorded – the philosophy, which I applaud, is ‘be there or be square’…

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Should electricity markets be reformed or disbanded? My debate with Michael Liebreich on Cleaning Up

The other day, Michael Liebreich and I had a lively discussion on his CleaningUp podcast provoked by my call “to blow up the electricity markets”. It was fun but, of course, fell short of a comprehensive analysis of the complex issues pertaining to the political economy of electricity generation and distribution. Following our debate, Michael posted his verdict on it and, in particular, his “four key takeaways”. To further the debate, I have added a comment after each of Michael’s “takeaways”, plus a brief postscript. Hope you enjoy the debate’s afterlife…TAKEWAWAY No.1Michael Liebreich: Varoufakis’s core argument for nationalisation was that electricity is a natural monopoly because there is only one wire into each house, and therefore that the electricity market is a “fake market” constructed by (corrupt) politicians which does nothing but enrich (rapacious) oligarchs. He appeared not to have thought deeply about the value chain of the electrical system, using the “single wire” argument to demand nationalisation of the whole system, from generators to retailers. He dismissed out of hand the idea that the “single wire” could be competently regulated.Yanis Varoufakis: There were three planks to my core argument that any electricity market is bound to be a pseudo-market plagued by a propensity toward a natural and grossly inefficient monopoly – Michael only acknowledged the first one.The ‘single wire’ feature; i.e., electricity comes into your home or business out of a ‘single wire’ in the wall.Electricity is a totally, undeniably homogeneous, undifferentiated good; in other words, there can be zero competition between providers over its qualityWhile electricity is an essential input into every single aspect of a modern home’s or business’ activities (from cooking to surfing the net), electricity has no close, or even distant, competitors (Unlike a cable or optic fibre internet connection which one can bypass by turning their smartphone into a hotspot, for most people today electricity can never be accessed except through that one wire from the wall)If my argument relied only on (1), it would have been open to the charge that telephony & internet services spring out of a single wire too. But it is doesn’t only rely on (1)! In combination with (2) and (3), the natural monopoly proclivities of any electricity market are indisputable. The reason I dismiss the idea of efficient regulation, is that (without even referring to the clear and present danger of regulatory capture) it is demonstrably impossible – not just hard.To begin with, recall that an electricity market is not like the market for food, metals, maritime services etc., which existed well before any government had a view about them. The single wire point [see (1) above] means that the government must create, or simulate, an electricity pseudo-market. Electricity markets are, in other words, government creations. Furthermore, features (2) and (3) above guarantee huge powers of rent extraction by the few firms that will produce the nation’s electricity. A natural oligopoly of producers manufacturing a homogeneous product inexorably breeds cartel-like behaviour.As for the retail providers, who compete to buy electricity from this cartel to sell it on to consumers, they too are (by design) a constructed oligopsony whose competition with one another is limited to two dimensions: Billing and hedging. Of those two dimensions, the public may benefit only from smart billing (e.g., rates that react to market conditions second by second – see Takeaway 2 below). In contrast, hedging that uses electricity derivatives provided in the same way and by the same banks that sold Lehman’s its CDOs, leads – and can only lead – to an unmitigated catastrophe: As long as their bets pay off, the companies make a nice little earner but when, eventually, their derivatives have their Lehman’s spasm, they run to the Treasury cap in hand for huge bailouts.In conclusion, contrary to Michael’s ‘takeway’, only a shallow, highly ideological touching faith in the superiority of markets (aided by taking shots at a straw-man version of the above argument) can lull anyone into the illusion that electricity pseudo-markets can be regulated in the public interest. They cannot – a conclusion borne out by the present sorry state of the privatised electricity markets in the UK and beyond.TAKEWAWAY No.2Michael Liebreich: Varoufakis also dismissed the idea that there was anything innovative about any private players in the electrical system. He dismissed the software developed by Greg Jackson of Octopus Energy, my guest on Episode 39 of Cleaning Up to deliver time-of-day pricing as something a graduate student working for a national utility could have coded. This mirrors the failure of Professor Mariana Mazzucato, my guest on Episode 67 of Cleaning Up, to acknowledge the innovation and risk-taking involved when private players build teams, secure and integrate technologies, navigate regulations and meet market needs.Yanis Varoufakis: I do not dismiss the useful innovations in the field of software billing technologies that people like Greg Jackson and hundreds of others have contributed. My point about smart graduate students being able to code such billing software is neither a put down line (unless one wishes to dismiss the ingenuity of graduate students) nor an argument for keeping everything within employees of a government-run enterprise.My vision for a publicly owned electricity network is not a throwback to the statist 1970s but a vision in tune with a modern electricity commons in which graduate students, good people like Greg Jackson, indeed anyone who wants to have a go, can innovate and peddle their software. How? Take the Apple Store or Google’s Play Store. These software outlets offer the opportunity to countless developers to peddle applications that allow us, the general public, better to utilise our phones, computers, home appliances etc. Since I do not want to see any oligarch own these digital outlets, and take issue with the 30% fees-rent Apple charges, I would love to see them owned by the public. A digital commons, where all sorts of innovative developers can sell their software free from the tyranny either of the state or of some Big Tech mogul.Come to think of it, is this not how Web1.0 came about? Was it not set up by governments (from the Pentagon to our non-profit universities) so that thousands of developers would furnish us with open protocols thus creating an Internet Commons – which then Big Tech took over and wrecked (Web2.0)?In short, my vision is one of a new electricity commons that is, at once, a corporate-free zone and a boisterous ecosystem for private developers. This is a far cry from the antiquated statist that Michael tried to portray me as.TAKEWAY No. 3Michael Liebreich: Although I felt no listener could come away believing that Varoufakis had a credible plan for managing the electrical system if he were able to nationalise it, I was wrong. Early comments on social media made it clear that many found his arguments persuasive and believe that the current price spike is driven purely by corruption and the profiteering of middlemen. Which is a salutary reminder to all of us technocrats that energy is deeply political and irrational. No matter how obvious the optimal engineering or policy design might be, some, maybe even a majority, will refuse to accept it.Yanis Varoufakis: It is not for me to tell listeners or readers what to believe. What I do know is that the great bulk of the price spikes in electricity prices is driven by vile speculation in the derivatives markets. I also know that, while the UK sources (on average) its electricity from home grown energy sources, the prices Britons pay have spiked just as much in the UK as they did in countries like mine which rely on imported energy sources. This proves beyond reasonable doubt that the commodification of electricity (not merely its privatisation) exposes a nation’s electricity output to financialised racketeering.In short, energy is always deeply political. Especially in societies exploited by corporations whose rent-seeking strategy relies heavily on (a) hiding its rent extraction under a veil of market fundamentalism and (b) presenting anyone who rejects its market fundamentalist propaganda as… irrational.TAKEWAY No. 4Michael Liebreich: Our conversation was in some ways just the latest round of the Revolution or Reform debate from the early 1970s between radical left professor Herbert Marcuse, promoting revolution, and critical rationalist Sir Karl Popper arguing for reform. Do you get a better outcome by breaking everything and starting again, or by fixing flaws in the current system? That same debate characterises the broader fight between those espousing degrowth (revolution) versus sustainable growth (reform).Yanis Varoufakis: While honoured by the comparison to Herbert Marcuse, I fear that our debate is far less heroic. The world has changed since the early 1970s. The old arguments between socialists and free-marketeers are buried under the rubble of the Left’s 1991 defeat and the free-marketeers’ 2008 thrashing. Since 2009, permanent socialism for corporations and permanent austerity for the vast majority has created a toxic environment in which the only winners are nasty rent-extracting corporations and hopeless masses. People like Michael and myself have no right to pretend that we are taking further the exciting debates of intellectuals who lived at a time when free-market capitalism was still a possibility and socialism was challenging it.

 

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Iran’s Revolutionary Moment as the Internationalist Left’s Great Challenge – by Shoja Azari

Shoja Azari , is an Iranian visual artist and filmmaker based in New York, working with Sherin Neshat, his life-long partner and comrade, on art projects of note and substance. Their last project is   Land of Dreams , a magnificent new film set in the United States but ever so redolent of meaning viz. the New Iranian Revolution that Shoja writes about below. After demonstrating how central developments in Iran have been in world affairs since the 1950s, and especially since 1979, Shoja asks the largest and most pertinent of questions: Will the international left once again betray the Iranian people? To which question I would add: Will the international left once again betray itself by betraying the Iranian people? The 1979 Iranian revolution coincided with the emergence of the neoliberal order and the domination of financial capitalism in the world. Today’s new revolutionary movement coincides with financialised capitalism’s deepest, most profound, crisis since the 1920s.When the 1979 revolution entered its final stages, and the demise of Shah’s regime seemed inevitable, the US and the West, at the height of the cold war, aligned with the most reactionary factions within the movement, namely, the Islamic fundamentalists led by Khomeini. At the same time, intellectuals and the left until then, the vanguard of the revolution, under the Soviet and Maoist rubric of the fight against Imperialism, found Khomeini’s anti Imperialist posturing in line with their goals and a necessary step in the revolution’s success.The Shiite Islamic republic was born with its misguided ambition of resurrecting Islamic civilization by adopting, on the one hand, an anti-imperialist rhetoric while, with the other hand, crushing the left and its opposition to theocracy. Ten years later, the Soviet Union had fallen and the neoliberal order was celebrating “The End of History” under the cloud of a rapid expansion, and domination, of financial capital. Among the poor and devastated masses of the Muslim world, the Islamic rhetoric of Iran’s regime seemed like a rare source of emancipatory hope. This, in turn, reinforced and legitimized the Islamists’ predatory expansion in the region inevitably leading to a confrontation with its historical Suni rival and the rise of Isis. Before long, the Islamic Republic faced war on all fronts.It is essential to understand that the Islamic Republic is a system born out of crisis and maintained by instigating crisis. Because of its anachronistic nature, it oscillates between contradictions within and without that it can neither manage or resolve. The truth is that, despite its irrationality, its backwardness, its reliance on a growing rentier class, Iran’s development since the 1979 revolution has been in line with the new, neoliberal type of capital accumulation. The bitter rivalry between the regime’s so-called reformist and conservative factions has been a push and pull on the nature and path of integration into the world system.A privatization process has been in full swing since the 1990s, with the reformist faction envisioning foreign investment and integration into the world market (essentially the European Union and the UK) as the only vehicle for containing the crisis. At the same time, the conservative coalition under the military’s dominance (IRGC and Basij), by establishing and controlling a labyrinth of mired enterprises, aim at expansion into regional markets and align itself with China and Russia in accordance to the shifting global geopolitical landscape. The end result has been deregulation, removal of subsidies and an inevitable popular backlash demanding social justice.The accumulation of wealth and capital under the control of a mafia of the so-called private enterprises, directly in cahoots with the military and government, has resulted in dire poverty, exploitation, child and enslaved labour, and devastation of the environment in Iran. It is, thus, important for Western left-wingers to understand how capital accumulation, neoliberal-style, even in its hybrid Iranian form, is at the heart of the class war and the tensions raging within Iran today. Leftists, worldwide, must not be misled by the anti-imperialist, anti-US posturing into thinking of the vicious Iranian regime as a potential ally.Looking at the evolution of the regime’s internal tensions, in 2021 the IRGC consolidated its power and, as a result, the conservative faction put the final nail into the coffin of the reformists, who until then had played a critical role in inspiring false hope and providing limited legitimacy to the regime. The West’s systemic crisis in 2008, to this day, its deepening during the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine have emboldened the theocratic rule to bolster its alliance with China and Russia with the hope of circumventing its internal crisis. What the rulers of the Islamic Republic fail to see is the all-encompassing nature of the neoliberal’s systemic crisis, that has as its integral part China, is a significant factor in perpetuating the war in Ukraine. Consequently, due to this unholy alliance and consolidation of power, Iran now stands on the verge of a new revolution.The current Iranian uprising has entered its second month, with women and the youth front and center leading the movement. What distinguishes this uprising from numerous others in the past four decades is not only its leadership, but its radical nature. Whereas prior protests were local, concerning multiple cultural, ethnic, and economic grievances by different groups, this one is significant for its unifying character and aim of dismantling the regime. Every indication points to the burgeoning momentum toward a full-scale social revolution and reorganization of society on a different scale and order that can offer a new development model and inspire the Global South and beyond. Iran stands at a particular historical juncture imbued with the opportunity to exploit the engulfing neoliberal crisis and the redrawing of the world’s geopolitical map. Can the international left seize this opportunity to shed its old and tired shell and imagine a novel narrative that can inspire the youth of Iran, who are the movement’s driving force? Can “Another Now” be at hand for Iran?Let’s take a close look at the anatomy of this historic opportunity. Ironically, the reactionary and anachronistic nature of the Islamic Republic has given it semi-autonomy from the financial capital which has penetrated, and subjugated, almost every nation and enterprise around the world to the wizardry of Wall Street bosses. As I already explained, this does not mean that Iran is immune to neoliberal-style capital accumulation, in line with the global paradigm,  exacerbating class conflict and environmental destruction. In the past four decades, the Islamic Republic has crushed all opposition and undermined all civil and labour organizations through its embedded fascistic organizations employing paramilitary lumpen gangs and revolutionary guards. Let us not forget that the success of Islamists in hijacking the 1979 revolution was mainly due to their ability to a fascist-style mass mobilization with religious zeal to overpower descent with brutality instigating fear. Even as the regime lost the masses, it has institutionalized its terror gangs in a labyrinth of inconspicuous force utilising multiple command centers.The lack of viable opposition, political parties, and civil or organized labour may make the path of the revolution costly and arduous. Still, it opens up the opportunity for a new narrative and the possibility of novel civil society organization. Given our experiences with from Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and current movements in Latin America and elsewhere, the left should not only acknowledge the nature and reality of these contemporary movements but see it in accordance with the shifting paradigm and the necessity of envisioning the future society at large. If successful, these rather unarticulated youth-led movements can finally culminate in a full-scale social revolution, turning Iran into a genuine laboratory for dreaming about the future.The revolutionary movement in Iran lacks vertical integration and classic leadership. Yet, one month in its making, it demonstrated a high degree of organization and the presence of multiple leadership centers. The revolutionaries in Iran have learned through experience that the only way they can fight the fascistic operation of the regime is through a war of attrition. Youth groups in multiple locations in the cities and throughout the country often assemble at night, take control of the streets, and, in many instances, engage the police in battle. Almost every university in the country has become the scene of daily demonstrations spreading fast to high schools. The regime, frustrated and unable to quell this asymmetrical battle, has become increasingly more brutal, beating, kidnapping, and opening fire on children. Despite the regime’s crackdown on newspapers and bloggers and shutting down the internet, the news, images, and videos spread wide and fast, uniting people in their rage against the regime and shattering its religious base. In solidarity with the youth, workers in many industries are on strike, though with a lack of unions and strike funds, this can be challenging unless circumvented through international solidarity.The killing of the 17 years old Mahsa Amini ignited the current unrest. Besides awakening the youth, it provided an important symbol that helped congeal a sense of unity throughout Iran. Amini was a young woman but also a Sunni Kurd. Besides the oppression of women, the regime has brutally suppressed Kurds, Sunnis, and all national minorities in Iran. The government’s propaganda machine, sowing the fear of the country’s disintegration, had managed to manufacture silent consent among the majority population. The sympathy for the young woman’s brutal killing on her visit to the capital, Tehran, mitigated the ethnic divide at once. The Kurdish slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” was immediately adopted as the revolution’s national anthem.Even more surprising was how the killing of Mahsa Amini and the slogan “Woman. Life. Freedom.” hit a sensitive cord internationally. #Mahsa Amini and the accompanying slogan broke all Twitter records, passing 200 million retweets in less than two weeks. Celebrities, politicians, sports champions, state ministers, and people from all walks of life poured their support internationally. The news of killing and brutality coming from the Islamic Republic has been abundant to a numbing degree for many years – without progressives taking much notice in the West? What was it that resonated with this particular killing?With the rise of right-wing neofascist movements in America and Europe, the organized assault on women and minority rights, the increase in surveillance, and the curbing of freedoms, it is no surprise that the plight of youth in Iran resonates deeply with a cornered populace around the world. “Woman. Life. Freedom.” can be viewed as an all-inclusive moto uniting all the demands of the working class without regressing to old cliches that can neither capture the realities of today’s struggle nor stimulate the imagination to move away from the most divisive trap of identity politics. What remains of the nonconformist left today is either stuck in the past or receding in closed academic circles as warriors defending identity and social justice devoid of class struggle.Today, the youth in Iran and the global south have much more in common with their counterparts in Europe, America, China, and Russia than any generation before them, for the apparent reason of internet and social media connectivity. They share the fear of the environmental catastrophe awaiting them, not as citizens of their respective countries but as a human race. They share their disdain for the gerontocracy that rules the planet and has appropriated the resources and the wealth. They value creativity and experience over consumption. In small ways, they have created a shared value economy. Perhaps, ill-fated and naive, their adaptation of bitcoin and cryptocurrency points to their international solidarity, their disappointment with the neoliberal order, and their knowledge and opposition to the power of the financial oligarchy.It is important to point out that the workers in Iran have assembled and are on strike under the banner of “Woman. Life. Freedom,” confirming the youth’s leadership. These youth are the future working class and have already realized and are forming international solidarity. They rightly know that the oligarchs of all nations are cashing out in unison and are fully united in turning the world into a global police state to keep in check the increasing precariat masses locked in their borders and subjugated.The current revolutionary movement in Iran is a wake-up call to the left. It calls for international solidarity and opportunity for “Another Now” as Iran gears up for the possibility of yet another social revolution. The oligarchs, harmonious with their state representatives in the West, have been waiting for forty years and are lining up to take advantage of Iran’s vast market while the left watches from the sidelines.Will the left once again betray the revolutionary aspiration of the Iranian people?

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Our Task? To Inspire the Rebellion against the Legalised Robbery of People & Earth, even if it is too late – Reply to Chomsky, Fuentes & McPherson

Have we, humans, passed the point of no return down the path to ecological ruin? Does ruin-without-end loom black across the land, the air, the oceans? I hope not but, regardless, I don’t think it matters. What matters is what we do. And how we do it. From now on. Until our last breath.Sure enough, three centuries of industrialisation dictated by the logic of capital pushed us into a hideous predicament: Whatever we do from now on may, I acknowledge, prove insufficient for preventing the collapse of organised human society. Even so, radical humanists ought to think it necessary to do our best to resist civilisational collapse. As an old-school Marxist once taught me, what is necessary is never unwise, never futile, never worthless – even if it is as hard to accomplish as hitting a bullet with another bullet fired from a handgun while riding a runaway horse.I am no climate scientist, so I shall say nothing about our proximity to the point of no return. Instead, I shall focus on the political economy of what it means to do our best in view of our capacities and in the face of ecological and civilisational collapse. My focus shall be on what we can do, as activists, to help translate humanity’s remaining capacities into the necessary praxes, into the collective actions that will permit us jointly to say: “We did our damned best!”Two are our greatest obstacles: Baseless optimism is one. And self-indulgent pessimism is the other. In fact, I would go so far as to proscribe prognosis altogether. Prediction is not our friend. We know everything we need to know in order to act: humanity is on a path to ruin without any guarantee that we can turn back. That’s enough knowledge. Unlike astronomers seeking to predict the trajectory of a faraway comet, our current task is not, and should never be, to predict the trajectory of climate change. Astronomers have the luxury of knowing that the phenomenon they study (the comet) doesn’t give a damn about their predictions of its trajectory. We don’t have this luxury. Our predictions, to the extent that enough people take them seriously, are crucial determinants of what people do. Thus, the phenomenon we are struggling to fathom and control (e.g., humanity-driven climate change) cares deeply about our predictions and, in an infinite regress, is bound violently to react to them – rendering our predictions useless and, potentially, causing us to lose any control over the phenomenon we might have had.What should our task be, once forecasting is out? My answer is: To end the legalised robbery of people and Earth fuelling climate catastrophe and the broader ecocide. Even if it is too late, at least let’s go out with a revolutionary bang. Let the last feeling we have be that we did what we could, albeit belatedly. To accomplish this, we must inspire the multitudes to join our rebellion.  But to inspire them, we need to articulate a Program that addresses people’s hearts and minds. What should that Program consist of? This is the pressing question.Our Program should avoid excessive optimism and the insinuation that climate change is a technical problem calling for a technical fix. Smart technological solutions funded by clever public finance will not save the Earth just because they are feasible (even if they are!). Equally, it would be a terrible defeat for progressives to dismiss the capacity of science, technology and public finance to be part of a Program that succeeds in saving humanity and the planet. Giving up on humanity and its collective ingenuity may be tempting in times like the present, when war is once more turbocharging the fossil fuel industry. Alas, such defeatism is impermissible for progressives. This, our darkest hour, is precisely the time when we, progressives, radicals and revolutionaries, must give back rational hope to those who have been deprived of it.Which brings me to the debate between, on the one hand, Noam Chomsky and, on the other, Miguel Fuentes and Guy McPherson. As ever, when it comes to passionate debates between radicals whose objectives coincide but who disagree regarding strategy and constraints, it is important to take a step back so as to appreciate the room for synthesis. In the following paragraphs, I shall attempt such a dialectical synthesis for one purpose: to establish the common ground that is a prerequisite for a common Program that inspires the multitudes to coalesce internationally so as to end the legalised robbery of people and Earth.Let me begin with Noam’s position, which I understand intimately having myself been a proponent of a Green New Deal since 2001. A large public investment in humanity’s green transition (Noam suggested 2%-3% of global GDP, I raise this to at least 5%) can make a decisive dent in our collective carbon footprint. Public financial instruments can be constructed to mobilise these funds globally. Exponential technological advancements in solar, wind, green hydrogen, organic agriculture etc. are feasible. Technically (both in terms of engineering and public finance), an effective green transition is possible without a revolution, under the present global exploitative system. However, the operative word here is: Technically.Politically, I cannot see how the current oligarchy-without-frontiers will allow the green transition to happen. Green Keynesianism will not work for the reasons Michal Kalecki gave decades ago to explain why the original Keynesianism would never be allowed to run its course: Because, even if the bourgeoisie panics and adopts Keynesian (today Green Keynesian) policies to save its skin, the very moment these policies begin to bear fruit, and well before they do their job, the ruling classes will abandon them in favour of their usual extractive, austerity-driven policies. It is in the capitalist class’s nature to block the very road that leads to its own salvation.So, why do people like Noam Chomsky and myself still put forward Green New Deals or Green Keynesian-like policy proposals? Are we so naïve as to imagine that our sensible arguments will win over the capitalist oligarchy? I assure you dear reader that we have no such illusions. No, the reason we do it is because their mere advocacy is full of revolutionary potential. Let me explain this by comparing three different strategies of how to approach the many who are impervious to the language of us radical leftists – with a view to mobilising them. Compare and contrast three things we could say to them:Strategy 1: “Nothing will save humanity except revolutionary socioecological changes that include (A) the socialisation of property rights over the means of production and (B) painful decisions on how to de-grow our economy in favour of Nature and of our cultural and spiritual lives. Join us!”Strategy 2: “Humanity is doomed. We are past the point of no return. The collapse of our ‘civilisation’ is inevitable. Let’s embrace collapse and see how best to organise whatever life survives within the ruins.”Strategy 3: “Here is a bunch of policies that can be implemented today, even under the existing system, to shift massive funds to the green transition, to provide basic public goods to everyone, especially in the Global South, to eradicate unpayable debts, to pay you a basic income wherever you live on the planet etc.”Strategy 1 involves telling people out there the naked truth about the need for a revolution which they, nevertheless, are unprepared psychologically to fathom, let alone to stage. Indeed, Strategy 1 will cause anyone who is not already a card-carrying revolutionary to yawn and move on, with their heads tilted to the floor, unable to muster any enthusiasm for joining us to rebel against the systematic looting of people and planet. Similarly with Strategy 2, which will probably only benefit psychoanalysts whose clientele will burgeon, not to mention end-of-the-world prophets of doom whose congregations will grow. Only Strategy 3 stands a chance of mobilising those whom we, the radical left, have failed to mobilise. Here is why.If the policies of our Green New Deal make sense in the mind of reasonable people who are discontented with the grim social and ecological realities surrounding them (yet who are no revolutionaries), it should be possible to convince them that these policies, technically, can be implemented immediately. Without a revolution. Within the current system (like, for example, Roosevelt’s neutering of the banking sector did not require a prior overthrowing of capitalism). Once this realisation is planted in people’s heads, it is plausible that a radical question will hit them: “If these things could be done today to benefit humanity, without some socio-ecological revolution, why on earth are the authorities not doing them?” It is at that point that the ears and minds of the many will be readied for the explanation which only radicals can offer them: That, yes, though technically feasible, these policies are ignored by an establishment solely interested in profit that is maximised by methods that destroy lives, ecosystems, capitalism’s own sustainability even. That will be the point when we, radicals, will get our chance to influence the many, to radicalise them.****As I was reading Miguel Fuentes’s and Guy McPherson’s rejoinders to Noam Chomsky, I was struck and concerned by their embrace of defeat. Sure enough, I understand their radical rejection of baseless optimism and of those who treat ecological disaster as a technical problem. On the other hand, it seems to me that if civilisational collapse is the answer, we are asking the wrong question. That if the Left must fall back onto a neo-Malthusianism, which places its hope on death as the only possible cure to the plague that is humanity, we have lost our way. We, the Left, were defeated at a planetary scale in 1991, and since then we have been failing to recover, despite the occasional revolutionary moments that revived our spirits temporarily. But, vengeance and defeatism are lazy forms of grief. Giving up on humanity because humanity gave up on us, on the Left, is an affront to the values the left was born to serve.Wishful thinking, of a Keynesian or social democratic kind, is not the answer either. Without a socio-ecological revolution humanity is doomed. Green Keynesianism will never be implemented to any degree equal to the task. As for the green technologies developed under capitalism, which could make a difference (e.g., green hydrogen), they will never be developed fully by a system which has a natural propensity to continue cannibalising what remains of our commons. The delicious irony is that for a fully-fledged Green New Deal to be implemented a revolution must precede it. And there’s the rub: For a revolution to precede any Green New Deal, we need rational rage to overcome the hearts and minds of people who are not yet revolutionaries. To engender this rational rage, the many need to be exposed to our Green New Deal policy proposals, to be convinced by them before watching the establishment shoot these proposals down. Then and only then might the rational rage that is necessary to motivate them crawl up their spine, bolstering it enough to cause them to join us in rising up, en masse, against the incessant looting of people and Earth.

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Comradely disagreements between progressives over Ukraine & the New Cold War – Reply to Anthony Barnett

Anthony Burnett, a friend, comrade and collaborator, just published an article in openDemocracy, a splendid and much loved source of progressive ideas and material, to which he alerted me in a mail reading: “Dear Yanis, we disagree but in solidarity!” Since Anthony’s article mentions me, along with Jeremy Corbyn, in its subtitle, here I am, responding in the spirit of solidarity, affection and goodwill.Anthony’s article was in response to a petition I gladly co-signed that, in the face of a New Cold War and a collapsing climate, called for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine, for the aversion of another war over Taiwan, for the de-escalation of the New Cold War engulfing, primarily, the United States and China and, lastly, for a genuine global Green New Deal. That petition, it is perhaps helpful to note, was in the spirit of The Athens Declaration which I, Jeremy Corbyn and Ece Temelkuran issued on 13th May 2022 on behalf of DiEM25 and the Progressive International. Dear Anthony,Whenever you and I debate anything, the hardest part is to disentangle the things we agree on from our genuine differences. So, let me begin by pointing out four of your points with which I agree before homing in on our one major disagreement:“Any threat to use nuclear weapons is an outrage”.Obviously. Whether it is a panicky Putin who issues such threats, or North Korea, or the United States perpetually refusing to rule out a first strike, we must condemn every nuclear threat and any attempt to normalise nuclear weapon use.“Invading other countries is wrong… it is wrong for Israel in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza, and it must now be reversed in Ukraine.”Absolutely. This is how I put the same point on 5th March in an article entitled What we must do in the face of Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine : “When a country or region is invaded, I am overcome by one duty: To take the side of the people facing troops with direct orders to violate their homes, to bombard their neighbourhoods, to destroy the circumstances of their lives. Without hesitation. Unconditionally.”“If [Ukrainian] neutrality were guaranteed by military commitments from outside to safeguard the country’s independence in a way that satisfied the government in Kyiv, and did not deprive it of weapons for self-defence, then this would be reasonable.”Agreed. Here is the same idea as I put it in my aforementioned 5th March article: “[I]t must be an agreement guaranteed jointly by Washington and Moscow, guaranteeing an independent and neutral Ukraine as part of a broader agreement that de-escalates tensions with the Baltics, Poland, around the Black Sea, across Europe.”“Neutrality should not prevent Ukraine from joining the European Union if it so chooses (something even Putin’s Russia seems to have accepted). This, too, needs to be said.”This is also my position. From the first moment Putin invaded Ukraine, I have been arguing that to stand with Ukraine should mean, amongst other things, a commitment to empowering Ukrainians to integrate, if this is what they want, with Western Europe in the same way that Austria did during the Cold War: militarily neutral but with a boisterous democracy, strong economy, full political independence, and freedom “to truck, barter and exchange” with anyone they want.You warn leftists, like myself, of the danger that, while discussing Ukraine and the manner in which Russia, the USA and NATO are exploiting the war, we should avoid denying “Ukrainian agency and the commitment of a huge majority of Ukrainians to their country’s integrity and independence.”How can I disagree? As a Greek, I have had a gutful of Anglo-European orientalist, weaponised condescension that sought to explain to us Greeks our predicament – with a view to getting us to accept our ‘lot’. However, this is not an argument – as I am sure you agree – that we Greeks have never been manipulated by the Great Powers or, indeed, that non-Greeks like your good self should not have an opinion on Greek politics; including your right to tell me that I am wrong on Greek matters or even that I have been led astray. Maintaining the right balance between (A) respecting the agency of those in the eye of some distant storm and (B) defending our right, as internationalists, to treat another nation’s war or crisis as our own, is both hard and crucial – as I tried to explain in another article back in March entitled Westsplainers? Or genuine comrades? ****Dear Anthony,You chide our petition for not re-stating all the points above, focusing instead on the need for a new non-aligned Peace movement. I say ‘re-stating’ because these points were included in the preceding Athens Declaration, co-authored by Jeremy Corbyn, Ece Temelkuran and myself, whose opening lines were:“We stand with the people of Ukraine, as we stand with every people suffering invasion, displacement and occupation. We demand an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of Russian forces, and a comprehensive Peace Treaty guaranteed by the European Union, the United States and Russia in the context of the United Nations.”Should our latest petition have repeated these points? You think it should. We felt that, since brevity helps drive any petition, it was best to focus on stressing that more war, even if it is just, is not the answer to an endless European war (Ukraine) or to the US-China tensions over Taiwan or the South China Seas shipping routes. Which brings me to the one major disagreement between us.You are suggesting that the left must consider the United States a fading imperialist superpower which, despite its criminal past (from Vietnam and Pinochet to Iraq and its support of the Saudis etc.), is now democracy’s only remaining defender against China, Putin, the Tehran theocracy etc. This is the crux of our difference. I beg to differ both on your diagnosis (that the United States is a fading, weakened superpower) and your prescription (that the left must see the US as an ally against orchestrated misanthropy).In my estimation, the latest, inflationary, phase of the never-ending post-2008 economic crisis has reinforced US hegemony (and the power of Wall Street) over Western working classes and the developing world alike, while the war in Ukraine has wrecked all remaining hope of a sovereign EU that adopts an independent European foreign policy. As for the idea of the US being our ally against autocracy, my view is precisely the opposite: US policy is actively helping breed monsters to this day (from Putin in the 1990s to Bolsonaro more recently and, now, Meloni’s post-fascist government) while – as I am typing this – my comrade Julian Assange is rotting in Belmarsh, at the behest of the Biden administration, for having opened our eyes to US war crimes committed in our name and behind our backs.I could, of course, be wrong and I am sure you would have interesting rejoinders to offer. Thus, I would very much welcome a debate which would enable me to hear your reaction to my understanding of the New Cold War; for example, that China is too rich a socio-economic experiment to be either castigated as an imperialist autocracy or to be celebrated as a socialist success story; that Taiwan and Ukraine are profoundly different cases (since both Taipei and Beijing have traditionally claimed to represent the ‘true’ China); that Biden’s humiliation by the Saudis is nothing new (Remember how Saddam Hussein, also a US stooge for a long while, bit the hand that fed him?) etc. etc.****I shall close this letter with a comment close to my heart. It concerns our duty, as friends and comrades, to educate younger progressives on how to disagree with one another. Over the years, painfully aware of the left’s tendency to allow disagreements to degenerate into civil wars, I have endeavoured to desist from deploying inflammatory language when referring to comrades’ views I disagree with. Comrades like us must take a lead in demonstrating that it is possible vociferously to disagree without speaking of ‘betrayal’ or painting comrades we disagree with as (historically, analytically, strategically etc.) naïve. From this prism, the title and subtitle of your article was, I submit, not helpful.To end on a high note, and on a belief that unites us, I shall quote approvingly and in full your closing lines: “Our larger aim should be to welcome the emergence of democracy in Russia – maybe the last thing that the Western security establishment actually desires. The alternative is rule by a mobsters international, which would ensure that the world will fry. It is as important as that.”In solidarity, as everYanis Varoufakis

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My take on Georgia Melloni and her incoming government – LTIO clip

Italy is about to have a new far-right government under the self-declared Mussolini groupie Ms Georgia Meloni. In this LTIO episode (entitled Fascism: The Radical Centre’s Last Resort), with comrades Roger Waters, Ece Temelcuran and Frank Barrat), I share my thoughts on Meloni and Co.

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How the West poisoned its money – Project Syndicate op-ed

ATHENS – Capitalism conquered the world by commodifying almost everything that had a value but not a price, thus driving a sharp wedge between values and prices. It did the same to money. The exchange value of money always reflected people’s readiness to hand over valuable things for given sums of cash. But, under capitalism, and once Christianity accepted the idea of charging for loans, money also acquired a market price: the interest rate, or the price of leasing a pile of cash for a given period.After the 2008 financial crash, and especially during the pandemic, a strange thing happened: money held its exchange value (which inflation diminishes), but its price tanked, turning negative on many occasions. Politicians and central bankers had inadvertently poisoned “humanity’s alienated ability” (Karl Marx’s poetic definition of money). The poison they administered was the post-2008 policy, in Europe and the United States, of harsh austerity for most to finance socialism for the few.Austerity reduced public expenditure precisely when private expenditure was falling like a brick, accelerating the decline of the sum of private and public expenditure – which is, by definition, national income. Under capitalism, only Big Business has the capacity to borrow significant amounts of the money that lenders, mostly rich people with large savings, are willing to lend. This is why the price of money tanked after 2008: demand for it dried up, as Big Business responded to austerity’s calamitous effect on demand by canceling investments, even as the supply of money (to Big Business) burgeoned.Like stockpiles of potatoes that no one wants to buy at the prevailing price, the price of money – the interest rate – drops when demand for it lingers below the quantity available to be lent. But here is the crucial difference: Whereas a rapidly falling potato price cures quickly any over-supply problem, the opposite happens when the price of money falls fast. Instead of rejoicing that they can now borrow more cheaply, investors think: “The central bank must think things are grim to let interest rates drop so much. I won’t invest even if they give me free money!” Even after central bankers cut money’s official price sharply, investment failed to recover – and the price of money kept falling, until it reached negative territory.It was a strange situation. Negative prices make sense for bads, not goods. When a factory wants to remove toxic waste, it charges a negative price for it: its managers pay someone to get rid of it. But when central banks begin to treat money like car manufacturers treat spent sulfuric acid, or nuclear power station their radioactive wastewater, one knows that something is rotten in the kingdom of financialized capitalism.Some commentators now hope that Western money is being purified in the flames of inflation and interest-rate hikes. But inflation is not driving the poison out of the West’s money system. After more than a decade of addiction to poisoned money, no obvious detoxification method presents itself. Inflation today is not the same beast the West faced in the 1970s and early 1980s. This time around, it threatens labor, capital, and governments in ways that it could not 50 years ago. Back then, labor was organized enough to demand wage increases that averted a cost-of-living crisis, and neither states nor private corporations relied on free money to keep going. Today, there is no optimal interest rate that will restore the balance between money demand and money supply that does not trigger a massive wave of private and public bankruptcy. That is the long-term price of poisoned money.The US government faces the impossible dilemma of curbing domestic inflation and forcing Corporate America and many friendly governments into a solvency crisis that will threaten America’s own stability. Things are far worse in the eurozone, where policymakers refused to do the obvious once Europe’s banks had failed after 2008: establish a proper federation’s foundation – a fiscal union. Instead, they let the European Central Bank do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Only by poisoning its own money could the ECB keep the euro show on the road. Today, the ECB owns huge quantities of Italian, Spanish, French, even Greek debt that it can no longer justify holding as a means of achieving its inflation target, but which it cannot renounce without calling the euro’s existence in question.While pondering the unresolvable conundrum Europe and America face, this is perhaps a good moment to contemplate the deeper reason why money can be poisoned (which is not the same as being debased by inflation). A good start is to borrow Albert Einstein’s idea that we can make sense of light only of if we accept that it features two distinct behaviors: that of particles and that of waves.Money, too, has two natures. Its first nature, that of a commodity that we trade with other commodities, can never explain why money would ever acquire a negative price. But its second nature does: Money, like language, is also a reflection of our relation to one another and to our technologies. It echoes how we transform matter and shape the world around us. It quantifies our “alienated ability” to do things together, as a collective. Once we recognize money’s second nature, everything makes a lot more sense.Socialism for bankers and austerity for most of the rest thwarted capitalism’s dynamism, plunging it into a state of gilded stagnation. Poisoned money flowed in torrents, but not into serious investments, good jobs, or anything capable of re-animating capitalism’s lost animal spirits. And now that the specter of inflation hovers above us, no monetary policy can purify money, restore equilibrium, or channel investments where humanity needs them.

 

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