Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 41

Discussing events in Palestine with Ilan Pappé

In the context of a long discussion organised by the University of Exeter, on the transition from capitalism to technofeudalism, we dedicated 15′ discussing recent events in Palestine/Israel and the manner in which the Israeli state is pursuing its Apartheid policies both within Israel and the Occupied TerritoriesFor the broader discussion click here.

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O Ιλάν Παππέ κι ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης συζητούν τα γεγονότα στην Παλαιστίνη

Συζήτηση στο πλαίσιο εκδήλωσης του Πανεπιστήμιου του Exeter, το οποίο οργάνωσε μακρά συνομιλία μας με θέμα τον μετασχηματισμό του καπιταλισμού σε τεχνοφεουδαρχία, με τον Ιλάν Παππέ αφιερώσαμε 15′ στις πρόσφατες εξελίξεις στην Παλαιστίνη και στον τρόπο του εξελίσσεται η προσπάθεια του Ισραηλινού κράτους να επεκτείνει τους θεσμούς του Απαρτχάιντ τόσο εντός του Ισραήλ όσο και στα Κατεχόμενα από το 1967.]Για ολόκληρη την συζήτησή μας πατήστε εδώ.

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Η “Μητσοτάκης Α.Ε.” στο πλευρό του Ισραηλινού Απάρτχαϊντ

Όταν το καθεστώς του Απάρντχαϊντ στην Ν. Αφρική βιαιοπραγούσε εναντίον των μαύρων πολιτών, μαντρώνοντας τους σε υπαίθριες φυλακές και δυναμιτίζοντας τα σπίτια τους, προκαλούσε βίαιες συρράξεις στο Σοβέτο και αλλού. Οι κυβερνήσεις που αγκάλιαζαν το ρατσιστικό καθεστώς έψαχναν τρόπο να μην αναφερθούν στο Απάρντχαϊντ καταδικάζοντας τους μαύρους διαδηλωτές.Το ίδιο ακριβώς κάνει σήμερα η “Μητσοτάκης Α.Ε.”: Με μια χυδαία ανακοίνωση του Υπουργείου Εξωτερικών, αγνοεί το Απάρντχαϊντ που στήνει το κράτος του Ισραήλ, π.χ. τις πρόσφατες εκδιώξεις δεκάδων οικογενειών από την γειτονιά Σέικ Τζάρα της κατεχόμενης Αν. Ιερουσαλήμ, και καταδικάζει την βία που η πρακτική κι η ιδεολογία του ισραηλινού Απάρντχαϊντ προκάλεσε. Όταν η αλήθεια υποκαθίσταται από την σιγή, η σιγή ψεύδεται. Κι όταν το ψέμα υποβοηθά την ολοκλήρωση μιας εθνοκάθαρσης, τότε εκείνοι που σωπαίνουν γίνονται συνεργοί.

 

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When the truth of Israel’s Apartheid is replaced with missile and assorted violence data reporting

Imagine if reports of riots in Soweto against Apartheid never mentioned Apartheid but only concentrated on the violence of the youths or the loss of life and property caused by militant blacks. This is what we are being treated to today in Western media reports ftom Palestine.When the truth is replaced by silence, a dissident once said, the silence is a lie. And when this lie concerns ethnic cleansing of a native population, and the installation of an apartheid state, those who knowingly perpetuate the lie are participants in the crime.Look at our news feed from Palestine and Israel: They report on the violence as events unconnected to their cause: the wilful attempt to evict dozens of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, in order to hand over their homes to Israeli settlers. The Israeli apartheid policies, and the settler ideology behind them, go unreported.Every time a TV station, a commentator, a politician or a government spokesperson reports on these events without a mention of the ideology and practices of apartheid that caused them, they become accomplices to a horrendous crime.

 

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mέta – DiEM25’s & MeRA25’s Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation premiers tonight, 13th May, at 19.00CET

Imagine the world anew, together.  Thursday 13 May 2021, at 19.00CET (17.00GMT, 20.00 Athens time), streaming at mέta’s YouTube channel and at facebook.com/meta.cpc .Through a sequence of intensifying crises, capitalism has already morphed into a dystopian postmodern, hi-tech version of feudalism. Postcapitalism is, thus, already here. Through art and research, argument and poetry, mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, works to break with a dystopic present to imagine the world anew – to grasp our present historical moment so as to help radical progressive movements find a path from the emergent dismal postcapitalism to one worth fighting, and living, for.Set up by DiEM25, and its Greek electoral wing, MeRA25, mέta is our new Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation to whose launch/premiere everyone is invited tonight. The hybrid event will include short presentations of the people and visions behind mέta as well as artistic performances. During the launch you will be treated to messages from mέta’s Advisory Board members sharing their views on postcapitalism, including:Noam Chomsky (Linguist, philosopher, MIT)Brian Eno (Musician)James K. Galbraith (Economist & Professor of Government, University of Austin, Texas)Antara Haldar (Empirical Legal Studies, University of Cambridge)Srećko Horvat (Philosopher, writer and activist)Anish Kapoor (Sculptor)Ken Loach (Filmmaker)Beral Madra (Art critic and curator)Preethi Nallu (Writer and researcher)Shirin Neshat & Shoja Azari (filmmakers and visual artists)Nikos Papastergiadis (Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne)Mari Velonaki (Social Robotics Researcher, University of New South Wales & media artist)Nikos Theocharakis (Professor of economic theory, University of Athens)Paul Tyson (Senior Research Fellow, IASH, University of Queensland)Yanis Varoufakis (MP, MeRA25 Secretary, Economics professor, University of Athens).The artistic performances featured will be by theatre group Astronauts , Angeliki Nikolakaki & Tina Gourtzi, and Vassilis Koundouris & Violet Louise of Studio19.A brief introduction to mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation We are already in the early stages of an era that can only be described by that which it succeeds: we live in postcapitalist times. They may turn out dystopic, utopic or anything in between. Through art and research, argument and poetry, mέta, the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation, works to break with a dystopic present to imagine the world anew – to grasp our present historical moment so as to help radical progressive movements find a path from the emergent dismal postcapitalism to one worth fighting, and living, for.The Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation –mέta– was established in 2020 as a not-for-profit research organisation in order to facilitate the exchange of ideas in a radical direction and to support the pan-European movement DiEM25, the Greek political party MeRA25, and the Progressive International (all of which are represented in mέta’s Steering Committee). mέta seeks to employ a dual approach, combining the academic/political/educational with the cultural and the artistic. mέta’s activities include research and publishing initiatives, the organisation of festivals, seminars, workshops and events –academic and cultural/artistic alike– focusing on the political, social, economic, ecological and cultural dimensions of the challenges we face at the national, European, and global level. Its current Steering Committee includes Danae Stratou (Chair), Professor Sissy Velissariou (Vice-Chair), Eleni Spetsioti (Secretary), Michael Hatzitheodorou (Treasurer), Ivana Nenadović and David Adler (members). More on its international Advisory Board may be found here.

PREMIERE CREDITS

The premiere’s production team is directed by Vassilis Koundouris and Violet Louise of Studio19. Performances directed by Dimitris Zografakis. Introductory animation by Yokanima (Yorgos Karagiorgos).

PRESS CONFERENCE

Following the premiere/launch, a live press conference will follow (in Greek only) at Ilissia Theatre (Athens) where the press will put questions to a panel comprising Danae Stratou (Chair), Sissy Velissariou (Vice-Chair), Sotiris Mitralexis (Academic Director), Nikos Kanarelis (Cultural Director). Host: Kostas Raptis — Press Officer

WEBSITE: http://metacpc.org

POSTAL ADDRESS: mέta, 15 Mavrommateon Street, Athens 10434, Greece

 

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ANOTHER NOW: Why a science fiction novel on the alternatives to capitalism we could have had today? – Festival of Debate

In conversation with Sara Hill, Festival of Debate, SheffieldImagine a world with no banks. No stock market. No tech giants. No billionaires. Imagine if Occupy and Extinction Rebellion actually won.ANOTHER NOW, my political science fiction novel, examines what such a world would look like through the eyes of three characters: Iris, a disillusioned Marxist-Feminist. Eva, a former banker neoliberal economics professor. And Costa, a brilliant techie who, now, struggles to keep Big Tech’s hands off his technologies.In this discussion, Sara and I explored what a contemporary postcapitalist world might be like, how immune patriarchy and racism might prove to the death of capitalism, the role of markets in postcapitalist society and, last but not least, how far we are prepared to go to democratise our economic sphere.

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The Eternal Marx: Reviewing Shlomo Avineri’s KARL MARX: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

Shlomo Avineri’s recent biography demolishes the charge that Karl Marx was a self-hating anti-Semite. And by dragging Marx, kicking and screaming, back into the Rhinish Jewish community that shaped him, Avineri yields new insights pertinent to today’s global challenges.Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, Yale University Press, 2019.The problem with egotists is that they are not particularly good at being selfish. They can accumulate wealth, legal rights, and power, but, in the end, they are pitiable figures who cannot know fulfillment. This assessment of the “egotistic man,” whom he defines as “an individual withdrawn behind his private interests and whim and separated from the community,” is the gravamen of Karl Marx’s critique of possessive individualism – the moral philosophy underpinning capitalism’s oeuvre.As I read Shlomo Avineri’s exquisite recent biography of Marx, I became increasingly troubled by the image of an individual “separated from the community.” But the individual I was thinking about was Marx himself: the wandering revolutionary who, expelled from his native Germany and forced to leave Brussels and Paris, died, stateless, in liberal Victorian England. Suddenly, an inconvenient question occurred to me.Why did I always find Shakespeare’s presentation of Shylock and Caliban particularly objectionable (in The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, respectively)? Was it merely the identification of nastiness with a Jewish entrepreneur and a black man?No, there was more to it. After all, countless white Christian Shakespearean characters are viler than these two. What pained me about Shylock or Caliban was their excruciating isolation. Shakespeare depicts them as “separated from their community,” forced by their solitude to represent their whole community – a fundamentally racist presentation, because there can be no such thing as a representative Jew, black, Greek, or American.Avineri addresses precisely this irreducible separateness with a brilliant biography that drags Marx, kicking and screaming, back into the Rhinish Jewish community that shaped him. One can respect Marx’s desire to renounce his cultural heritage and to be judged as a cosmopolitan, global thinker. But Avineri deserves our gratitude for placing Marx in the context he chose to leave behind, not least because, beyond the purposes of yet another reinterpretation of Marx’s thought, this perspective yields new insights pertinent to today’s global challenges.Marx’s Jewish Life Avineri is sensitive to the objection that, because Marx’s was by no means a conventional Jewish life, it was inappropriate to include his biography in Yale University Press’s “Jewish Lives” series. But the concern is misplaced. There is no contradiction in saying, in the same breath, that one detests and adores one’s family, in which case it is doubly incumbent upon a biographer to investigate that family’s influence on the subject. Likewise, there is no contradiction in being a Jew who never espoused a “Jewish life” but whose life is uniquely shaped by the experience of Judaism.And that experience was undoubtedly Marx’s own. The grandson of two rabbis, and the brother of the rabbi of Trier, Marx was the son of a learned, successful lawyer who converted to Christianity to obtain a passport. Marx’s father used that passport to travel to Holland to marry a rabbi’s daughter and, more pressingly, to continue practicing law upon his return. At age nineteen, Marx dedicated poems to his father with verses like these:Your awakeningIs an endless rising, …Your risingAn endless falling. I must play dark, I must play light,Till bowstrings break my heart outright.For a famously angry writer who delighted in exposing absurd ignominies, Marx’s choice never to write a single line about the humiliation imposed upon his father, and countless others of their community, is as revealing as Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous dog that did not bark in the night.Combining legitimate speculation regarding the influence on Marx of his Jewish community’s experiences with a fine analysis of Marx’s engagement with Hegel’s philosophy and the political economy of capitalism, Avineri enables us to reframe the concepts Marx bequeathed us. Moreover, Avineri’s biography is mercifully free of others’ tiresome penchant to “discover” the “true” Marx. And Avineri bends over backwards, gracefully, to give Marx the benefit of the doubt and to distinguish him from appalling adherents that important thinkers often attract and do not deserve.The book is full of gems. We learn, for example, that had it not been for the short-lived emancipation of Rhineland’s Jews by French revolutionaries, the official ideology of the Soviet Union and China might have been known as Levyism-Leninism. The French required emancipated Jews to adopt a non-denominational surname, and Karl’s grandfather chose Marx.In addition to the anecdotes, there are also deeper sources of elucidation. For example, Avineri advances the credible theory that, unlike Prussian Jews, who were never emancipated by the French, the cause of the great preponderance of radical socialist Rhinish Jews was the experience of de-emancipation after Napoleon’s defeat. The implication is that a swiftly withdrawn taste of freedom fires up rebellious minds.This also explains why Marx, who left Prussia-dominated Germany at the age of 25 and did not miss, nonetheless remained nostalgic toward his native Rhineland. While careful to state the speculative nature of his hypotheses, Avineri enriches our thinking simply by posing them.Perhaps the greatest insight Marx left us regarding capitalism’s impact on humanity is the concept of alienation. Preceding social systems may have been more oppressive or exploitative, but only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from their labor, so divorced from its products, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what they think and do. Capitalism, in short, turns us all into some version of Shylock or Caliban – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves. By re-establishing the connection between Marx’s life and his Jewish roots, Avineri has, however belatedly, lessened Marx’s own alienation.Jewish Emancipation/Human LiberationThe only text Marx wrote that explicitly concerns his Jewish community’s status within a Christian Europe struggling to invent its version of the liberal state was his pamphlet On the Jewish Question . Unsurprisingly, Avineri uses it to frame his reconstruction of the life of the essay’s 25-year-old writer, who was transcending the long shadow that Hegel’s philosophy had cast upon him and his circle.Marx wrote On the Jewish Question in response to two essays by Bruno Bauer, a central figure in this circle. Bauer, a former student of Hegel’s whom Marx had followed to Bonn, possibly in search of a teaching position, had introduced Marx to other young Hegelians, like Moses Hess, a founder of Labor Zionism.The essence of Bauer’s attack on the Jewish community was banal: To qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Today, similar views take a slightly more entertaining form, as when British acquaintances tell me they will consider British-born Pakistanis to be full-fledged subjects of the realm only when they cheer for England in a cricket match against Pakistan.Young Marx, I believe, would never have bothered penning a response to Bauer’s abhorrent claim were it not for its delicious Hegelian pedigree. Bauer used the same Hegelian concepts Marx strove to weave into a universal emancipatory narrative to argue that Jews could qualify for equal rights only by renouncing Judaism, like Marx’s father.Because no one in Germany was politically emancipated, Bauer asked, “How are we to free you, Jews?” He then concluded that Jews were egotistical to demand a special emancipation for themselves, as Jews, when Germans had not been emancipated. As Germans, Jews had a duty to help emancipate all Germans and human beings more broadly, not agitate for their rights as Jews.Looking back at Bauer’s shoddy argument, I was reminded of similar arguments regarding Jews, blacks, and feminists advanced in the 1970s and 1980s by essentially good people who thought of themselves as Marxists. Like Bauer, hardline Western Communists and defenders of the Soviet Union would argue that Jews, blacks, and women (gays and lesbians were not even included) had a duty to stop whining about their oppression and join in the construction of socialism. All their particular problems would be solved once universal proletarian emancipation was achieved.Avineri is excellent at separating Marx from authoritarians who traded in his name during the twentieth century. But I wish he had accounted for the manner in which Marx’s attack on Bauer’s position inspired many Soviet Jews, and Marxist-feminist women, to struggle against the Bauerite turn of Marxism-Leninism.Marx’s passionate demolition of Bauer’s Hegelian argument is a sight for sore eyes:“If Bauer asks the Jews: Have you, from your standpoint, the right to want political emancipation? We ask the converse question: Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion?… Just as the state evangelizes when, although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.”Retrieving the best features of Hegel’s dialectic, Marx combines a commitment to religious freedom of Jews, as well as of Christians, with his wholesale rejection of Hegel’s presumption that the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, blacks, LGBT people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that.Freedom will be ours only after we recognize our “own powers as social powers,” Marx writes in On the Jewish Question, and we no longer separate social power from ourselves “in the shape of political power.” Only then “will human emancipation have been accomplished.” And for that to happen, capitalism must be transcended.If Marx had stopped writing after completing its first part, On the Jewish Question would today be considered a compelling defense of the rights of European Jews. Alas, Marx went on to pen the second part as if he were determined to foreclose any doubt that he was a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew.“What is the secular cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his secular God? Money…what, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism. The monotheism of the Jew, therefore is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism is the principle of civil society… Money is the jealous God of Israel, in the face of which no other God may exist. Money degrades all the Gods of man and turns them into commodities… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the God of the real world. The bill of exchange is the real God of the Jew. His God is only an illusory bill of exchange… The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”While contemporary readers can only despair at these words, Avineri struggles to defend Marx against the charge of anti-Semitism. He argues, for example, that Marx used “Judentum” (Judaism) as code for capitalism in order to evade censorship, and that he believed it would bolster the credibility of his attack on Bauer to show that he defended Jewish emancipation despite lacking sympathy for the Jews or their religion. While there may be some truth to both explanations, I have a different interpretation – one based on Marx’s proclivity for carelessly brilliant analysis fueled by unrestrained anger.Pure evil did not enrage Marx. What angered him were people or forces with a capacity to do good that, instead, harmed humanity. Capitalism angered him not so much because it was exploitative, but because it dehumanized and alienated us despite being a progressive force.Marx’s venom against Bauer reflects disappointment that such a clever man should fashion a misanthropic treatise out of Hegel’s dialectic. As Jenny von Westphalen, his long-suffering loving wife, reveals in her letters, Marx’s worst rages targeted his “own” and those he believed should have known, or done, better. Consider, in this light, his vicious attack on a poor trade unionist, known as Citizen Weston, who dared wonder aloud if striking in support of wage increases might cause inflation that eats into workers’ real income.Seen through this lens, Marx’s tirade against the “jealous God of Israel” ceases to be unquestionably anti-Semitic. Why were so many Jews drawn to commerce and banking? Banned from extensive land ownership in a feudal Europe where power depended on it, Jews were forced to earn a living through trade. The establishment of international trade routes then sowed the seeds of commodification in Europe, which eventually spurred the transition from feudalism to capitalism.At this point, dispossessed peoples who by necessity happened to occupy the nodes of international commerce (including Jews, diaspora Greeks, and Armenians) became the first to benefit financially from the transformation of profit into an end in itself. Jews had an additional advantage: Unlike Christians, they were allowed to charge interest. Once debt became the major driving force of production and capital accumulation, Jewish wealth soared.Marx’s scornful references to monotheism in On the Jewish Question were followed, a few months later, by his description of capitalism’s driving force as “a universal energy which breaks every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond.” What is that energy? Profit-seeking. His subtle point here is that, before capitalism, the human soul was pushed around by countless, often contradictory, passions. Money was always valued, but only as a means to satisfy other cravings. Greed always existed, but was expressed in separable quests for honor, land, glory, conquest, chivalry, and the submission of others. What the commodification of everything (that is, capitalism) did was to reduce all passions to a single one: the passion for profit. For the first time, profit maximization could be assumed to be what motivated everyone.As capitalism spread throughout Europe, all sorts of polytheisms boiled down to the worship of a single god: Money. Because of a historical accident, stemming from the Jews’ exclusion from land ownership, Marx’s monotheistic community suddenly found in its hands many of the levers of increasingly lucrative finance and trade. In the same way that English happened to be propelled to the status of lingua franca (a development that had nothing to do with something innate in its grammar or syntax), Europe’s new divinity, monetized profit, became associated with the God of Israel.Never too careful with his language, or sensitive to the perils of generalization, Marx did not care enough to shade his argument in On the Jewish Question to acknowledge that European Jews’ marginalization prepared them not only for the role of banker, merchant, and entrepreneur, but also for that of wretched proletarian. Thessaloniki, a majority-Jewish city even when it was annexed by Greece in 1912, is a good example: Jews controlled trade but were also the most exploited of workers (who, led by Abraham Benaroya, founded the Greek communist movement).Despite his outrageous phrases in the second part of On the Jewish Question, Marx was capable of passionate solidarity with poor Jews. In a newspaper column quoted by Avineri, Marx goes to great lengths to defend Jerusalem’s Jewish community with words that shatter any accusation of consistent anti-Semitism:“Nothing equals the misery and suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town… (they are) constant objects of Mussulman [Muslim] oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks [Eastern Orthodox Christians], persecuted by the Latins [Roman Catholics], and living only upon the scant alms transmitted by their European brethren…attracted to Jerusalem… to die on the very place where the redemption is to be expected.”When the Judaism-capitalism nexus is seen from this perspective, and mindful of his strong support for Jewish religious freedom, we begin to see that there is nothing anti-Semitic in the proclamation with which Marx concludes On the Jewish Question: “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”The Highest Stage of Liberalism Marx retains the power to teach us the importance of properly identifying, and resolving, contradictions. He opposed colonialism without naively idealizing the colonized, whom he felt free to lambast for perpetrating various forms of nastiness toward weaker social groups and neighboring peoples.Marx appreciated the importance of identity without endorsing identity politics. He described women’s battle against patriarchy as the first class struggle, and marriage as a vile property contract, but maintained a belief in the possibility of romantic love. He used offensive language against Jewish bankers but sprang to the defense of Baron Rothschild when, as a Jew, Rothschild was denied a seat in the British Parliament.When it came to what would follow capitalism, Marx wrote like an incensed liberal. He abhorred the prospect of “barracks communism” and its promise of “common pots and dormitories, control commissioners and control offices, the regulation of education, production, consumption – in one word, control of all social activity; and at the same time, there appears Our Committee, anonymous and unknown, as supreme authority.” Could a libertarian find more powerful words to lampoon Soviet or Maoist collectivism?“But what about Marx’s call for the dictatorship of the proletariat?” I hear readers ask. Here, it is worth recalling that in the nineteenth century, it was liberals who opposed democracy, denigrating it as the dictatorship of the majority. Marx turned the liberals’ disdain for the demos on its head, telling them: Yes, we are democrats. And, as Aristotle defined it, democracy is a regime in which government is controlled by the poor, who are always the majority.Under capitalism, democracy can only be, in nineteenth-century liberals’ language, the dictatorship of the proletariat. And how is it to be realized? Once universal suffrage and a parliamentary path became a possibility, Marx turned against violent means, warning Parisian workers six months before the Paris Commune in 1871 that “insurrection would be an act of desperate folly.”Moving from the political to the personal, Marx censured naive Hegelians for whom oppression, even depression, was a state of consciousness to be overcome by another, opposing, state of consciousness. He drove the point home that industrial-scale personal misery reflected society-wide alienation.Telling people they must overcome it through an act of individual willpower is cruel. Neither therapy nor pills nor motivational tapes can help those forced into what the late David Graeber called soul-destroying “bullshit” jobs, and whose entertainment comprises working for free for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in a manic quest for likes and shares. “The realm of freedom,” Marx wrote in Das Kapital, Vol. III, “begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.”Marx’s denunciation of morality had a powerful ethical purpose, as did his attitude toward religion. Marx anticipated a society in which humans are no longer “oppressed creatures” inhabiting a “heartless world,” and thus in need of an opium-like palliative to lessen their “real suffering.” But he would come down on Richard Dawkins-like religious atheists like a ton of bricks. Disrespecting the faithful, denying them the right to practice their religion with dignity, was repugnant to him.As Avineri argues, respect for religious freedom, and for the faithful, was for Marx the litmus test of civilized society. When Marx criticized organized religion, he was taking aim at oppressive relations between humans, rather than humans’ relationship with any god they happened to embrace. “The criticism of Heaven becomes the criticism of Earth,” he wrote poignantly. His compassion toward the faithful did not stop him from advocating his own atheism:“The struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against the world in which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”Nationalist Means to Internationalist Ends As with religion, the nature of labor, and the historical role of capitalism, Marx appreciated the contradictions oozing out of the idea of nationhood. Nation-states were being established, for the first time, during his formative years. German unification was all the rage, dominated by the same Prussia that expelled him as a threat to the emergent Germany.Marx looked at these developments and, atypically, kept his cool. He arrived at a pragmatic, instrumental, assessment not too distant in spirit from that of Jawaharlal Nehru’s aphorism: “Nationalism is good in its place, but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian.”Concerned, above all else, with working-class unity, Marx supported the formation of nation-states as a means of eliminating borders between pathetic fiefdoms that kept workers divided. While the unification of Germany held many dangers, it created a large unified market within which millions of workers could build solidarity while the capitalists mechanized production in preparation for a future proletarian takeover.But Marx was less open to the creation of smaller nation-states, such as in the Balkans, that could sustain neither large proletariats nor significant capital accumulation. German nationalism, unlike Croatian or Greek nationalism, was acceptable insofar as German nationalism could be seen as a first step toward socialist internationalism.Avineri contrasts Marx’s attitude toward the national question to that of Hess, who once admiringly described Marx as “…the synthesized embodiment of Rousseau, Voltaire, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel.” Hess, who, unlike Marx’s father, never converted to Christianity, later published an influential proto-Zionist text calling for a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Avineri shows how Marx and Hess embarked from similar theoretical starting points before embodying two opposed socialist traditions: Marx’s internationalist socialism, which sought to contain nationalism, and Hess’s socialist nationalism, according to which national consciousness trumped proletarian solidarity.Avineri clearly thinks that history has vindicated Hess, not Marx. Notwithstanding Marx’s re-assessment of the nation-state’s significance after the Revolutions of 1848, Avineri believes that Marx underestimated the importance of nationalism. Those of us engaged today in building a pan-European, transnational progressive movement, and even a Progressive International, are painfully familiar with this charge. There are good reasons for criticizing Marx, and people like me, for inattentiveness to national sensitivities, but not for the reasons given by Avineri.When thousands of refugees flooded Greece in the summer of 2015, the fact that the Greeks themselves were feeling colonized by the troika (EU, ECB, IMF) of Greece’s lenders triggered a rapid political sea change. Following the betrayal of the 62% of Greeks who rejected the troika’s blackmail (“accept new austerity and fresh extend-and-pretend loans or we shut down your banks”) in a referendum that July, the non-nationalist spirit of patriotic resistance to international finance gave way to xenophobia.The difficult challenge for internationalist progressives is to give voice to those who feel like refugees in their own country without turning against foreign refugees or workers struggling to make ends meet in places like Germany. While this remains an unmet challenge for Marxists, Avineri’s inference that nationalism offers a safer route to emancipation than internationalism seems to me both problematic and wrong.Nationalism, even in its most civilized civic form, turns on a process of exclusion. The appeal to a shared national identity is an invitation to enshrine arbitrary criteria of who is worthy of inclusion in the national community, like the criterion Bauer wielded against the emancipation of Jews.Marx’s defense of the Jews’ political rights was, after all, an argument illustrating the limits of political emancipation within the framework of post-Christian nation-states. Ensuring equal rights, he argued, is a universal problem whose “solution” cannot be found within any nation-state, however enlightened. A Jew, or indeed a Palestinian, can be granted equal rights in some nation-state and yet remain oppressed and the subject of systematic, even if covert, discrimination.In this sense, the struggle for human emancipation cannot be left to any nation-state. It remains humanity’s universal task. Whatever that means in practice, I must confess to disappointment at Avineri’s silence regarding the place of Palestinians not just in the Occupied Territories but, more interestingly, within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. I say this because Avineri served as director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and, given this background, what he has to say is important.In his Epilogue, Avineri describes his understandable glee when, once upon a time in Nairobi, he won an argument by quoting Marx to a Soviet delegation, from a pamphlet published in Moscow no less. This reminds me of dissident graffiti I spotted on a wall in Warsaw back in 1984, at a time when the communist regime had imposed draconian martial law on behalf of the Soviet Union. It read:A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations – Friedrich Engels, Speech on Poland, 1847Would Avineri care to extend such Marxist irony to Israel? How does he feel about the late Edward Said’s view, also informed by Marx’s dialectical approach, that the only solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a common, secular state?High MarxA renewed interest in Marx is not new. In October 1997, a New Yorker article tagged a profile of him with the heading “The Next Thinker.” Avineri concurs: “What Plato has been to classical philosophy,” he writes, “Marx is to modern studies in the humanities.” Even though I would have preferred a comparison with Aristotle, my main disagreement with Marx’s latest, commendably sympathetic, biographer concerns the relevance of his economic analysis.Avineri takes for granted an old assertion that, however accurate Marx’s economic analysis might have been in the 1840s, today’s “global free market system is very different from the sort of capitalism [Marx] described in the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital.” Elsewhere, I have argued that the opposite is true.In Marx’s time, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented, and timid. It was nothing like the dynamic, globalizing, superstition-demolishing capitalism described in the Communist Manifesto. And here lies the delicious irony: For capitalism to become truly and triumphantly global, the regimes that pledged allegiance to Marx and Engels’s Manifesto first had to be torn asunder, so that two billion Russian, Eastern European, Chinese, and Indian workers could join the capitalist labor market, while Wall Street and City of London bankers were tearing up all fetters placed upon them by New Dealers and bygone social democrats.It is only now, especially after the long crisis that began in 2008 and was given a new boost by COVID-19, that Marx’s historical and economic analyses of capitalism are coming into their own. It is only now that a showdown between the two great camps he had foreseen (of the ultra-rich and precarious laborers) is pushing humanity on the edge of a genuinely new world. While there is no guarantee that the future will not be at once post-capitalist and dystopian, Marx shows why business as usual is impossible.As we struggle to make sense of this transformation, and our personal role in it, Avineri’s book offers poignant reminders of the power of unlikely friendships during periods of rapid social change. He has unearthed evidence that Marx spent several summers taking the waters at Carlsbad with Heinrich Graetz, author of the multi-volume History of the Jewish People and a pillar of Zionism. Though Avineri has no idea what they discussed during long strolls in the Bohemian countryside, it is comforting to imagine major arguments might have combined with mutual appreciation between two men whose writings shaped history from opposite sides of a crucial intra-Jewish division.Turning back, one last time, to the tension between national aspirations and internationalism, the axis around which much of Avineri’s Karl Marx revolves, it is comforting to recount the resolution proposed by Indian author Rabindranath Tagore:“I am proud of my humanity when I can acknowledge the poets and artists of other countries as my own. Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.”Marx’s capacity to acknowledge other peoples’ philosophers, poets, and artists was inexhaustible. Now, through Avineri’s fine effort, we finally know more about his connections with other remarkable representatives of the Jewish experience from which he emerged – and to which he contributed.

The above review was originally published in Project Syndicate.

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Football Takes Capitalism Out of Bounds – Project Syndicate

Europe has discovered its moral Rubicon, the frontier beyond which commodification becomes intolerable. The line in the sand that Europeans refuse to cross, come what may, has just been drawn.We bowed to bankers who almost blew up capitalism, bailing them out at the expense of our weakest citizens. We turned a blind eye to wholesale corporate tax evasion and fire sales of public assets. We accepted as natural the impoverishment of public health and education systems, the despair of workers on zero-hour contracts, soup kitchens, home evictions, and mind-numbing levels of inequality. We stood by as our democracies were hijacked and Big Tech stripped us of our privacy. All of this we could stomach.But a plan that would end football as we know it? Never.Last week, Europeans showed the red card to the moguls – and their financiers – who tried to steal the beautiful game. A potent coalition of conservatives, leftists, and nationalists, uniting Europe’s north and south, rose up in opposition to a secret deal by the owners of many of the continent’s richest football clubs to form a so-called Super League. To the owners – including a Russian oligarch, an Arab royal, a Chinese retail magnate, and three American sports potentates – the move made obvious financial sense. But from the perspective of the European public, it was the last straw.Last season, 32 clubs qualified to play in Europe’s Champions League, sharing €2 billion ($2.4 billion) in revenues from television rights. But half of the clubs, teams like Real Madrid and Liverpool, attracted the bulk of the European television audiences. Their owners could see that the pie would increase substantially by scheduling more derbies between the likes of Liverpool and Real Madrid, rather than matches featuring lowly sides from Greece, Switzerland, and Slovakia.And so it was that the Super League proposal was hatched. Instead of sharing €2 billion between 32 clubs, the top 15 clubs calculated they could divide €4 billion among themselves. Moreover, by creating a closed shop, with the same clubs every year, regardless of how well they perform in their national championships, the Super League would remove the colossal financial risk that all clubs face today: failing to qualify for next year’s Champions League.From a financier’s perspective, kicking out the laggards and forming a closed cartel was the logical next step in a process of commodification that began long ago. Here was a deal that would quadruple future income streams and remove risk by turning those streams into a securitized asset. Is it any wonder that JPMorgan Chase rushed in to finance the deal with a golden-handshake offer of €300 million to each of the 15 clubs that agreed to leave the Champions League behind?Whereas the Brexit saga lasted years, this particular breakaway attempt collapsed within two days. Whatever the financial logic behind the Super League, its plotters had failed to consider an intangible yet irresistible force: the widespread conviction among fans, players, coaches, communities, and entire societies that they, not the tycoons, were the true owners of Liverpool, Juventus, Barcelona, and the rest.And who could blame the owners for not seeing it coming? No one protested when they floated their clubs’ shares on stock exchanges alongside McDonald’s and Barclays. For years, fans watched passively as oligarchs poured billions into a few leading clubs, killing off all real competition by packing their rosters with the world’s great players.But while the European public could tolerate that the probability of a laggard ever winning anything had fallen close to zero, the Super League would officially take that chance the rest of the way. Maximizing profits would now mean the formal extinction of the possibility even to dream that a lowly team like Stoke City or Athens’ Panionios could one day win the Champions League. The complete elimination of hope, however distant capitalism had rendered it, provided the spark that stopped football’s oligarchy in its tracks.Meanwhile, in the United States, even cynical sports moguls understand that free-market capitalism chokes competition. The US National Football League is a paragon of aggressive competitiveness, and not only because super-fit players sacrifice their health for wealth, acclaim, and a shot at Super Bowl glory. The NFL is competitive because it imposes on its teams a strict salary cap, while the weakest are guaranteed their pick of the best rookie players. American capitalism sacrificed the free market to save competition, minimize predictability, and maximize excitement. Central planning lives in sin with unbridled competition – directly under the spotlight of American show business.If the objective is an exciting, financially sustainable football league, the American model is what Europe needs. But if Europeans are serious about their claim that the clubs ought to belong to the fans, players, and communities from which they draw support, they should demand that clubs’ shares be removed from the stock exchange and the principle of one member-one share-one vote is enshrined into law.The crucial question of whether the oligarchy should be regulated or dismantled extends well beyond sports. Will US President Joe Biden’s spending and regulation agenda suffice to rein in the unbridled power of the few to destroy the prospects of the many? Or does genuine reform demand a radical rethink of who owns what?Now that Europeans discovered their moral Rubicon, the time may have come for a broader rebellion that vindicates Bill Shankly, the legendary Liverpool manager and staunch socialist. “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death,” Shankly famously said. “I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

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Ποδόσφαιρο – Καπιταλισμός 1Χ2

Την περασμένη εβδομάδα, η Ευρώπη ανακάλυψε τα όρια της ανοχής της. Την ηθική της ραχοκοκκαλιά. Το σύνορο πέραν του οποίου θεωρεί ανυπόφορη την περαιτέρω εμπορευματοποίηση των αξιών. Την λεπτή κόκκινη γραμμή που οι Ευρωπαίοι αρνούνται να περάσουν, ό,τι και να τους τάξουν.Μπορεί να σκύψαμε το κεφάλι στους τραπεζίτες που τίναξαν στον αέρα τις οικονομίες μας, μεταφέροντας κυνικά τις γιγάντιες ζημιές τους στους ώμους των πιο ευάλωτων Ευρωπαίων. Μπορεί να κάναμε τα στραβά μάτια στην μαζική φοροδιαφυγή της ολιγαρχίας και στο ξεπούλημα της δημόσιας περιουσίας. Μπορεί να αποδεχθήκαμε ως “φυσιολογική” την αποψίλωση της δημόσιας παιδείας ή των εθνικών συστημάτων υγείας, την απόγνωση εργαζόμενων χωρίς συλλογικές συμβάσεις, τα συσσίτια, τις εξώσεις και τους πλειστηριασμούς, μεγέθη ανισότητας που ζαλίζουν το νου και παγώνουν την καρδιά. Μπορεί να μείναμε βουβοί την ώρα που η δημοκρατία μας σερνόταν στο απόσπασμα και η Σίλικον Βάλεϊ λεηλατούσε τα προσωπικά μας δεδομένα.Όλα αυτά τα ανεχθήκαμε ως πολιτισμένοι ευρωπαίοι. Όμως το σχέδιο για την απόδραση δεκαπέντε κορυφαίων ποδοσφαιρικών ομάδων από το Champions League, και την δημιουργία της Super League; Ποτέ!Πράγματι, την περασμένη εβδομάδα, οι ευρωπαίοι έδειξαν κόκκινη κάρτα στους κροίσους-ιδιοκτήτες των ομάδων, και τους τραπεζίτες τους, οι οποίοι προσπάθησαν στα μουλωχτά να οικειοποιηθούν το “όμορφο άθλημα” – όπως το ονομάζουν οι Άγγλοι ποδοσφαιρόφιλοι. Ένα αυθόρμητο και, όπως αποδείχθηκε, πανίσχυρο μέτωπο κατάφερε να ενώσει βορειοευρωπαίους και νοτιοευρωπαίους, αριστερούς, δεξιούς και κεντρώους, εθνικιστές και κοσμοπολίτες, άνδρες και γυναίκες. Μαζί, αυτή η πανευρωπαϊκή παλλαϊκή εξέγερση ανέτρεψε την καλά σχεδιασμένη συνομωσία των μεγαλομετόχων να ιδρύσουν την περίφημη Super League.Η συγκρότηση της Super League από τις κορυφαίες ευρωπαϊκές ποδοσφαιρικές ομάδες ήταν, στα μάτια των ιδιοκτητών τους (στους οποίους συμπεριλαμβάνονται ένας σεΐχης, ένας Ρώσος ολιγάρχης, ένας “βασιλιάς” του κινεζικού λιανεμπορίου, και τρεις μεγιστάνες του αμερικανικού αθλητισμού), το πιο λογικό επόμενο επιχειρηματικό βήμα. Στα μάτια όμως της ευρωπαϊκής κοινής γνώμης, ήταν η χαριστική βολή – η κίνηση που έκανε να ξεχειλίσει το ποτήρι της οργής με την εμπορευματοποίηση.Την περασμένη αγωνιστική περίοδο, οι 32 ομάδες που προκρίθηκαν στο Champions’ League μοιράστηκαν μεταξύ τους €2 δις τηλεοπτικών δικαιωμάτων. Όμως μόνο οι μισές από αυτές, π.χ. η Ρεάλ Μαδρίτης, η Λίβερπουλ, έλκυσαν τα μάτια των περισσότερων τηλεθεατών. Οι ιδιοκτήτες τους υπολόγισαν, σωστά, πως η “πίτα” θα αυξανόταν σημαντικά αν, αντί για αγώνες ομάδων όπως η Ρεάλ κι η Λίβερπουλ με ομάδες όπως η Σέλτικ και ο Ολυμπιακός, προσέφεραν στο τηλεοπτικό κοινό περισσότερα ντέρμπι τύπου Ρεάλ-Γιουβέντους, Λίβερπουλ-Μπαρτσελόνα κλπ.Μετά από δύο χρόνια μυστικών διαπραγματεύσεων, το σχέδιο αποστασίας των μεγάλων ομάδων ολοκληρώθηκε. Αντί να μοιράζονται €2 δις με άλλες 17 φτωχότερες ομάδες, οι 15 ομάδες που θα συμμετείχαν στη νέο Super League θα μοιράζονταν μεταξύ τους €4 δις. Επί πλέον, εξασφαλίζοντας σε αυτές τις 15 ομάδες την συμμετοχή τους στην Super League χρόνος-μπαίνει-χρόνος-βγαίνει, ανεξάρτητα από το πως πάνε στα εθνικά τους πρωταθλήματα, θα εξαφανιζόταν το κολοσσιαίο οικονομικό ρίσκο που αντιμετωπίζει κάθε ομάδα σήμερα: την πιθανότητα να μην καταφέρει να προκριθεί του χρόνου στο Champions’ League.Από την σκοπιά του επιχειρηματία-ιδιοκτήτη, η “αποβολή” των φτωχότερων ομάδων κι η δημιουργία ενός κλειστού καρτέλ ήταν η λογική προέκταση μιας διαδικασίας εμπορευματοποίησης που ξεκίνησε προ πολλού. Επρόκειτο για κίνηση που τετραπλασιάζει τα μελλοντικά εισοδήματα των μεγάλων ομάδων την ώρα που αφαιρεί το επιχειρηματικό ρίσκο και επιτρέπει την εκ των προτέρων πώληση (υπό τη μορφή παραγώγων) αυτών των εξασφαλισμένων μελλοντικών χρηματικών ροών. Αυτή η προοπτική ήταν που έκανε την JP Morgan, με το που πήρε χαμπάρι το σχέδιο για Super League, να εμπλακεί στην συμφωνία προσφέροντας ένα δωράκι της τάξης των €300 εκατομμυρίων ως δέλεαρ σε κάθε μία από τις 15 ομάδες που θα εγκατέλειπαν το Champions’ League για την Super League.Εκεί που μια προηγούμενη προσπάθεια αποστασίας από τους ευρωπαϊκούς θεσμούς πήρε πέντε δύσκολα χρόνια για να ευοδωθεί (το Brexit!), η απόδραση των 15 της θνησιγενούς Super League απέτυχε εντός 48 ωρών. Ο λόγος; Όσο έντεχνα και να είχαν σχεδιάσει την απόδρασή τους, οι συνωμότες δεν υπολόγισαν έναν μεγάλο, σιωπηλό αλλά ακαταμάχητο αντίπαλο: την διαδεδομένη πεποίθηση παικτών, οπαδών, προπονητών, τοπικών κοινωνιών και λαών ολόκληρων ότι εκείνοι, κι όχι οι μεγαλομέτοχοι, είναι οι πραγματικοί ιδιοκτήτες της Λίβερπουλ, της Γιουβέντους, της Μπαρτσελόνα κλπ.Ποιος όμως μπορεί να κακίσει τους μεγαλομετόχους που δεν προέβλεψαν τον ξεσηκωμό; Που να το φανταστούν; Κανένας δεν είχε αντιδράσει παλαιότερα όταν οι μετοχές των μεγάλων ομάδων μπήκαν στα χρηματιστήρια δίπλα σ’ εκείνες των Μακντόλαντς και της Φολκσβάγκεν. Για χρόνια πολλά οι ποδοσφαιρόφιλοι θριαμβολογούσαν όταν οι ολιγάρχες έριχναν δισεκατομμύρια, σκοτώνοντας κάθε έννοια πραγματικού συναγωνισμού έτσι όπως συγκέντρωναν τα ταλέντα του κόσμου όλου στις ομάδες τους.Όμως, παρά το γεγονός ότι η πιθανότητα να στεφθεί πρωταθλήτρια Ευρώπης μια από τις δεύτερες ομάδες έχει εδώ και χρόνια αγγίξει το μηδέν, χωρίς να διαμαρτυρηθεί κανείς, η δημιουργία της Super League ξεσήκωσε θύελλα αντιδράσεων επειδή εκμηδένισε απόλυτα και επισήμως το όνειρο μιας ομάδας όπως η Στόουκ ή ο Πανιώνιος πως, κάποια μέρα, ίσως να αναδεικνύονταν πρωταθλητές Ευρώπης. Αποδεικνύοντας άλλη μια φορά πόσο ριζοσπαστικός αριθμός είναι το μηδέν, ο απόλυτος εκμηδενισμός της ελπίδας, όσο και να την είχε συρρικνώσει προηγουμένως ο ποδοσφαιρικός καπιταλισμός, ήταν το έναυσμα για την μικρή επανάσταση που ακινητοποίησε την ποδοσφαιρική ολιγαρχία.Στο μεταξύ στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες ακόμα και οι κυνικότεροι των μεγαλομετόχων κατανοούν ότι η ελεύθερη καπιταλιστική αγορά δολοφονεί τον ανταγωνισμό στα γήπεδα. Στο Αμερικανικό Ποδόσφαιρο, το NFL, παίκτες με εξαιρετική φυσική κατάσταση συγκρούονται αλύπητα, θυσιάζοντας συχνά την υγεία τους, πολεμώντας κυριολεκτικά για την νίκη και την δόξα που φέρνει η πρόκριση στο Superbowl. Όμως, για να γίνει συναρπαστικότερο το πρωτάθλημα, και να μην κερδίζουν οι ίδιες και οι ίδιες ομάδες, η ελεύθερη αγορά έχει καταργηθεί με δύο κανόνες: Πρώτον, καμία ομάδα δεν μπορεί να υπερβεί ένα συγκεκριμένο ποσό συνολικών μισθών. Και, δεύτερον, οι καλύτεροι παίκτες των χαμηλότερων κατηγοριών αναγκαστικά παίζουν την επόμενη χρονιά στην… χειρότερη ομάδα του πρωταθλήματος – με σκοπό να ενισχύονται οι αδύναμες ομάδες και, μαζί τους, το πρωτάθλημα ολόκληρο.Με άλλα λόγια, ο αμερικανικός καπιταλισμός θυσίασε την ελεύθερη αγορά για να σώσει τον ανταγωνισμό από την προβλεψιμότητα των αγώνων. Η ειρωνεία είναι ότι, στον αμερικανικό άκρως εμπορευματοποιημένο πρωταθλητισμό, και κάτω από τα φώτα της αμερικανικής σοουμπίζνες, ο κεντρικός σχεδιασμός συμβιώνει αμαρτωλά με τον αχαλίνωτο ανταγωνισμό.Αν ο στόχος είναι ένα συναρπαστικό, επικερδές, ευρωπαϊκό ποδοσφαιρικό πρωτάθλημα, η Ευρώπη δεν έχει παρά να ακολουθήσει το παράδειγμα του αμερικανικού NFL. Αν όμως οι Ευρωπαίοι σοβαρολογούμε όταν διατρανώνουμε ότι οι ομάδες πρέπει να ανήκουν στους παίκτες, στους οπαδούς, στους προπονητές, στις τοπικές κοινωνίες, στους λαούς που τις γέννησαν και τις στηρίζουν, τότε πρέπει να απαιτήσουμε οι μετοχές τους να βγουν από τα χρηματιστήρια και, εντός νέου πλαισίου εταιρικού δικαίου, να αποδοθούν στον κόσμο τους στην βάση της αρχής ένα-μέλος-μία-μετοχή-μία-ψήφος.Συμπερασματικά, το καίριο ερώτημα που ανέδειξε η μίνι-εξέγερση εναντίον της Super League την περασμένη εβδομάδα είναι αν θέλουμε απλά να βάλουμε όρια στην ολιγαρχία ή να την καταργήσουμε. Πρόκειται για ερώτημα που, βέβαια, δεν περιορίζεται στο ποδόσφαιρο. Πάρτε για παράδειγμα την ατζέντα επενδύσεων και περιορισμών στο μεγάλο κεφάλαιο που καταθέτει αυτή την εποχή στο Κογκρέσο η κυβέρνηση Μπάιντεν. Αρκεί για να περιορίσει την δυνατότητα των παντοδύναμων λίγων να καταστρέφουν τις προοπτικές των ανίσχυρων πολλών; Ή απαιτείται να ξανασκεφτούμε εκ του μηδενός τα ιδιοκτησιακά δικαιώματα επί όλων εκείνων των εργαλείων από τα οποία εκπορεύεται η πραγματική εξουσία των λίγων;Τώρα που οι ευρωπαίοι ανακάλυψαν την ηθική τους ραχοκοκκαλιά, έστω και στη σφαίρα του ποδοσφαίρου, ίσως ήρθε η ώρα για μια γενικότερη εξέγερση που να επιβεβαιώνει τον Μπιλ Σάνκλυ, τον δοξασμένο προπονητή της Λίβερπουλ αλλά και φανατικό σοσιαλιστή. “Κάποιοι πιστεύουν ότι το ποδόσφαιρο είναι θέμα ζωής και θανάτου”, είχε πει ο Σάνκλυ, προσθέτοντας: “Σας διαβεβαιώ ότι είναι πολύ, πολύ σημαντικότερο ζήτημα.”Το πιο πάνω άρθρο πρωτοδημοσιεύτηκε στην στήλη του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη στο News 247 και αποτελεί απόδοση της μηνιαίας στήλης του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη στο Project Syndicate με αρχικό τίτλο Football Takes Capitalism Out of Bounds

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ΣΚΛΗΡΟ ΜΑΡΚΑΡΙΣΜΑ, Επεισόδιο 3ο: Η Μαριάννα Πυργιώτη ανακρίνει τον Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη

Στο τρίτο «Σκληρό Μαρκάρισμα» ο γραμματέας του ΜέΡΑ25 Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης απαντάει χωρίς περιστροφές στα ερωτήματα της δημοσιογράφου Μαριάνας Πυργιώτη και αναλύει θέματα της επικαιρότητας με αναφορές σε πρόσωπα και παραδείγματα.Αποσαφηνίζει ποιος είναι ο ρόλος του ΜέΡΑ25, πως έπρεπε να κινηθεί η ΕΕ εν καιρώ πανδημίας, μιλάει για το brexit και πως θα συμπεριφερόταν τώρα και ξεκαθαρίζει ότι είναι υπέρ μιας δημοκρατικής ομοσπονδίας. Ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης κάνει λόγο για το μεγάλο λάθος του Γιώργου Παπανδρέου, αναφέρεται στον τρόπο διακυβέρνησης του Κυριάκου Μητσοτάκη, σχολιάζει το οικονομικό πρόγραμμα του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ και απαριθμεί τα θέματα  για τα οποία δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει σημείο συμπόρευσης με την αξιωματική αντιπολίτευση.Ο Γραμματέας του ΜέΡΑ25 αναλύει το θέμα της «κακής τράπεζας» ενώ δεν διστάζει να πει ότι μαθαίνει πιο πολλά πράγματα από τη διάψευση παρά από την επιβεβαίωση και αποκαλύπτει ποιον νυν και ποιον πρώην υπουργό εκτιμά για τη δουλειά του και την  πορεία του στο χώρο δράσης του.

The post ΣΚΛΗΡΟ ΜΑΡΚΑΡΙΣΜΑ, Επεισόδιο 3ο: Η Μαριάννα Πυργιώτη ανακρίνει τον Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.