Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 46

From an imagined hi-tech rebellion to the GameStop incident: Lessons for collective action in the 21st Century – Der Freitag

When in 2008 I heard that Lehman Brothers collapsed, and thousands of its staff were laid off, I allowed myself a fantasy. I imagined that one of the laid off financial engineers, whom for some reason I named Esmeralda, would turn into a dissident. That, incensed with the way she had been discarded by the same bosses who had enticed her into a lucrative career making weapons of mass financial destruction, Esmeralda would contact people like herself to form the Crowdshorters. Their purpose? To stop the central banks from bailing out the investment banks and the hedge funds by targeting, or ‘shorting’, the structured derivatives that had brought the calamity of 2008 upon an unsuspecting world – instruments like the CDOs that the authorities were trying to resuscitate.In my fantasy this is how the Crowdshorters would do it: Using their financial expertise, Esmeralda and her comrades would look inside derivatives crucial to the survival of large banks and hedge funds with a view to identify the payments whose delay would cause the derivatives to lose value. Then, they would approach the people who were due to make these payments (e.g. a water bill, an insurance premium) and plead with them to delay the payment. As for any late payment fee incurred, the Crowdshorters would compensate them with money already crowdsourced with small donations from millions of common people desperate to punish bankers and hedge funds.Back then, in 2008, as the spirit of Occupy Wall Street soared, I was convinced that millions would be eager to be part of such a well-orchestrated, rolling crowdshorting assault on the repulsive financiers. The key to the fictitious movement’s potential success was the Lilliputian Principle: each making a tiny sacrifice which, multiplied by millions of participants, is enough to bring capitalism down – or, at least, to prevent the American and European authorities from bailing out the bankers at the expense of the many.More recently, I decided to retrieve my fantasy and to incorporate it in ANOTHER NOW: Dispatches from an alternative present – a political science fiction novel. (*) And that’s where I thought the story would end. Until a few days ago, I received a message from an American reader that read: “Are you following the GameStop saga? Your Crowdshorters have been in action!” It was a gross exaggeration. Nevertheless, elements of my fantasy were in evidence.What had apparently transpired was that, over a couple of days, 4.4 million people used a Reddit page to coordinate their modest individual purchases of GameStop shares with a view to bankrupting two Wall Street hedge funds which were shorting those same shares. In short, the crowd attempted to short the shorters. And they succeeded, causing both hedge funds to file for bankruptcy! That’s where the similarity with my Esmeralda’s Crowdshorters ends. The Reddit crowd were not targeting capitalism in general and most of them were profit seekers. Nevertheless, many of them were driven also by an ethical drive to ‘sock it’ to the hedge funds. At the end of the day, while the GameStop incident was not a revolutionary moment, it did point to new forms of collective action for the 21st Century. One day, maybe we shall look back on it as the equivalent of 19th Century’s trades unionism.(*) ANOTHER NOW will be soon published in German by Kunstmann. Also, you may watch an intimate presentation of the motivation that led me to writing it here.

For Der Freitag’s site, click here.

MeRA25: Not just another political party – How DiEM25’s transnational radical politics entered Greece’s Parliament

Η Αλήθεια Μετά τον Τραμπ – από την στήλη μου στο 24 | 7

Οι αντίπαλοι του Ντόναλντ Τραμπ τον αποκαλούν ψεύτη. Το πρόβλημα όμως είναι ότι ο Τραμπ είναι κάτι πολύ χειρότερο από ψεύτης. Ο Νίξον έλεγε ψέματα για να θάψει αλήθειες, το ίδιο κι ο Κλίντον και πολλοί άλλοι. Όχι, το πρόβλημα με τον Τραμπ είναι ότι μέσα σ’ ένα χείμαρρο ψεύδους που έβγαινε από το στόμα του που και που ξεστόμιζε κάποιες σημαντικές αλήθειες που κανείς Πρόεδρος των ΗΠΑ δεν θα τόλμαγε να αποκαλύψει – π.χ. την απόρριψη της κυρίαρχης άποψης ότι η παγκοσμιοποίηση ωφελεί όλους ή την ομολογία του ότι επιχείρησε να μειώσει τα κονδύλια των Αμερικανικών Ταχυδρομείων ώστε να εμποδίσει ψηφοφόρους των Δημοκρατικών να ψηφίσουν επιστολικά!Οι επιστήμονες έχουν λόγο να χαίρονται που ο Τραμπ ηττήθηκε, κρίνοντας από την έκφραση ανακούφισης του επικεφαλής των Αμερικανών επιδημιολόγων που, πλέον, μπορεί να παρουσιάζει από το βήμα του Λευκού Οίκου τα τελευταία δεδομένα της εξέλιξης της πανδημίας χωρίς να φοβάται. Άλλο όμως αυτό κι άλλο να αναμένουμε πως η αλήθεια θα πάρει την εκδίκησή της, ή θα ανακάμψει συνολικά, τώρα που ο Τζο Μπάιντεν μετακόμισε στον Λευκό Οίκο.Πολλοί φιλελεύθεροι αρέσκονται να χρησιμοποιούν την αλληγορία της ελεύθερης αγοράς. Βλέπουν τις αντικρουόμενες απόψεις σαν προϊόντα τα οποία κομίζουμε στην μεγάλη αγορά των ιδεών η οποία λειτουργεί ως μη συγκεντρωτικός μηχανισμός αποτίμησή τους – ως εάν η αξία της κάθε άποψης να προσδιορίζεται αυτόματα μέσα από τις δυνάμεις της ζήτησης και της προσφοράς που, τελικά, αποφαίνονται για το ποια άποψη επικρατεί και ποια εξαφανίζεται μέσα στην αρένα του σκληρού ανταγωνισμού.Δυστυχώς, καμία τέτοια ελεύθερη αγορά δεν αναδεικνύει την αλήθεια. Αντίθετα με τα κινητά και τις φράουλες, η χρησιμότητα μιας θεωρίας δεν μπορεί να κριθεί από τους καταναλωτές της. Η αλήθεια του Δαρβινισμού, ή της Θεωρίας της Σχετικότητας, ή της υπόθεσης του Κέινς πως η νομισματική πολιτική καθίσταται ανεπαρκής όταν το επιτόκιο τείνει στο μηδέν, δεν μπορούν να αξιολογηθούν από τον μέσο άνθρωπο στη βάση της προσωπικής της εμπειρίας. Αυτός είναι ο λόγος που εκχωρούμε τον έλεγχο αυτών των θεωριών σε (εκ κατασκευής) μη δημοκρατικούς θεσμούς.Πανεπιστήμια και ερευνητικά κέντρα αναλαμβάνουν να φιλτράρουν το ψεύδος από τις διάφορες θεωρίες κρατώντας – ελπίζουμε – μόνο ιδέες και θεωρίες που ανταποκρίνονται στην αλήθεια. Σε αντίθεση με την αλληγορία της ελεύθερης αγοράς, αυτό το, ας το ονομάσουμε, Θετικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα λειτουργεί συγκεντρωτικά με επιλεγμένους ειδικούς να οργανώνουν τη διαδικασία του φιλτραρίσματος.Ανθρώπινο είναι η κάθε επιστήμων να θέλει να δει την αγαπημένη της θεωρία να επιβιώνει του φιλτραρίσματος. Όμως, τα αυστηρά πρωτόκολλα του Θετικο-Επιστημονικού Συμπλέγματος σχεδιάστηκαν ώστε οι επισφαλείς θεωρίες να καταρρέουν μπροστά στα αμείλικτα εμπειρικά δεδομένα. Πρόκειται για την ιεραρχική επιστημονική διαδικασία που, μαζί την εμπορευματοποίηση που γέννησε τον καπιταλισμό, πυροδότησε την τεχνολογική επανάσταση και απελευθέρωσε τις κοινωνίες από την φεουδαρχία και τις θρησκόληπτες προκαταλήψεις.Αν ο Τραμπ απεδείχθη επικινδυνότερος ενός απλού ψεύτη, αυτό συνέβη επειδή βρήκε τρόπο να εκμεταλλευτεί το γεγονός ότι, στον χώρο της οικονομικής πολιτικής, για πολλά χρόνια τώρα, χτίζεται ένα κακέκτυπο του Θετικο-Επιστημονικού Συμπλέγματος – ας το ονομάσουμε Οικονομικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα. Πίσω από κάθε οικονομική ή κοινωνική πολιτική που διαφεντεύει τις ζωές μας κρύβεται κάποια οικονομική θεωρία της οποίας την αποδοχή εξασφαλίζει το Οικονομικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα μέσα από μια διαδικασία φιλτραρίσματος που είναι εύκολο να την μπερδέψουμε με το φιλτράρισμα που πετυχαίνει στις θετικές επιστήμες το Θετικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα.Πράγματι, το Οικονομικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα απονέμει ακόμα και Νόμπελ. Κι όμως: Δεν έχει καμία σχέση με το Θετικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα το οποίο όντως φιλτράρει το ψέμα αναδεικνύοντας την αλήθεια. Επιτρέποντας το ψέμα να θριαμβεύει μέσα από διαδικασία που μοιάζει επιστημονική, χωρίς να είναι, το Οικονομικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα απεδείχθη ο καλύτερος – αν και ακούσιος – σύμμαχος του Τραμπ και όλων εκείνων των υποστηρικτών του που αφήνονται σε θεωρίες συνομωσίας.Τρεις είναι οι πυλώνες κάθε θεωρίας συνομωσίας: Πρώτον, προσφέρει την ικανοποίηση που φέρνει η πεποίθηση ότι καταλαβαίνεις κάτι σημαντικό το οποίο οι υπόλοιποι αγνοούν.  Δεύτερον, σε ενισχύει αρκετά ώστε να απορρίπτεις τους ειδικούς ως υπηρέτες άνομων συμφερόντων που έχουν συμφέρον να ψεύδονται. Και, τρίτον, τους καθιστά κοινωνούς ενός σκοπού μεγαλύτερου από τον εαυτούλη τους και κόντρα σε εχθρό που δεν θα σταματήσει σε τίποτα για να κρατήσει την αλήθεια στο σκοτάδι.Έχει ενδιαφέρον ότι αυτοί οι τρεις πυλώνες είναι οι ίδιοι που στήριξαν την επιστημονική επανάσταση;. Ο Γαλιλαίος, π.χ., ήξερε πως διέθετε γνώση ανώτερη των ιεροεξεταστών (ότι η Γη περιστρέφεται γύρω από τον άξονά της) οι οποίοι δεν θα σταματούσαν σε τίποτα για να τον αποτρέψουν από το να πει την αλήθεια. Βέβαια, η διαφορά των επιστημονικών θεωριών από τις θεωρίες συνομωσίας έγκειται στην διαδικασία εμπειρικής απόρριψής τους. Στις θετικές επιστήμες όταν παρατηρούμε συμβάντα  που η θεωρία δεν προέβλεπε, η θεωρία μπαίνει στο καλάθι των αχρήστων. Σε αντίθεση, οι συνωμοσιολόγοι δεν φοβούνται τα εμπειρικά δεδομένα καθώς δεν υπάρχει κάτι που μπορεί να συμβεί το οποίο η θεωρία συνομωσίας τους να μην το «εξηγεί».Οι οικονομικές θεωρίες, δυστυχώς, είναι πιο κοντά στις θεωρίες συνομωσίας παρά στις θετικές επιστήμες. Αυτό συμβαίνει για τον εξής απλό λόγο: Πάρτε την μετεωρολογία. Ο καιρός δεν ενδιαφέρεται για τις θεωρίες και τις μετεωρολογικές προβλέψεις μας για αυτόν. Ο καιρός θα είναι αυτός που είναι. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι αν ένα μετεωρολογικό προβλεπτικό μοντέλο καταφέρει να προβλέψει τον καιρό, είναι καλό και χρήσιμο – έχει προσεγγίσει την αλήθεια. Αν όχι, απορρίπτεται. Κάτι τέτοιο δεν ισχύει όταν αντί για τον καιρό προσπαθούμε να προβλέψουμε οικονομικά φαινόμενα.Έχεις αναρωτηθεί αναγνώστη πως είναι δυνατόν δυο Νομπελίστες οικονομικών να θεωρούν τσαρλατάνο ο ένας τον άλλον; Αυτό δεν συμβαίνει στη Φυσική ή στη Χημεία. Ο λόγος είναι ότι στα οικονομικά δεν υπάρχει τρόπος να απορριφθεί καμία θεωρία – όπως ακριβώς είναι αδύνατον να απορριφθεί μια θεωρία συνομωσίας ή να πειστεί μία θρησκευόμενη ότι το Χ φαινόμενο αποδεικνύει την ανυπαρξία του θεού της. Παραδείγματος χάριν, τί θα γίνει νομίζεις αν αύριο η Goldman Sachs προβλέψει πως το Χρηματιστήριο Αθηνών θα πέσει; Θα πέσει, ακόμα κι αν οι της Goldman Sachs εξέδωσαν την ανακοίνωσή τους επειδή είχαν πιει λίγο παραπάνω ή για πλάκα. Και αντίθετα: Προβλέπει ένας συγκοινωνιολόγος μεγάλο μποτιλιάρισμα σε κεντρική οδό, οι οδηγοί αποφεύγουν την οδό αυτή και, έτσι, η πρόβλεψη δεν επιβεβαιώνεται. Να δύο παραδείγματα, ένα όπου μια θεωρία επιβεβαιώνεται παρά το γεγονός ότι ήταν σαθρή κι ένα δεύτερο όπου μια θεωρία καταρρίπτεται παρά το γεγονός ότι ήταν δυνητικά σωστή.Να γιατί οι κοινωνικές και οικονομικές θεωρήσεις δεν μπορούν να ελεγχθούν εμπειρικά. Να ο λόγος που, όπως οι θεωρίες συνομωσίας, οι διαφορετικές σχολές οικονομικής σκέψης (μονεταρισμός, Κεϊνσιανισμός, Μαρξισμός κλπ) δύνανται η κάθε μία να εξηγήσει κάθε τι που παρατηρούμε. Συνεπώς, όπως κι οι θρησκείες, το ποια οικονομική σχολή σκέψης επικρατεί δεν είναι αποτέλεσμα επιστημονικής διαδικασίας αλλά αποτέλεσμα κοινωνικών συγκρούσεων μεταξύ ομάδων ή τάξεων που κρύβουν τα συμφέροντά τους πίσω από οικονομικά δόγματα.Εδώ ακριβώς κρύβεται το μυστικό του Τραμπ. Για δεκαετίες πριν την εκλογή του το 2016, εκατομμύρια Αμερικανοί άκουγαν τους «ειδικούς» να τους εξηγούν γιατί οι πολιτικές που κατέστρεφαν τις ζωές τους είχαν περάσει μέσα από το επιστημονικό φίλτρο του Οικονομικο-Επιστημονικού Συμπλέγματος. Επρόκειτο για εγκληματικό ψέμα, το οποίο επέτρεψε στον Τραμπ να εργαλειοποιήσει την απόγνωσή τους εναντίον του κατεστημένου – και, γενικότερα, εναντίον της επιστήμης.Ευτυχώς, ο Τραμπ έφυγε. Όμως, υπό την κυβέρνηση Μπάιντεν, ενισχύεται κι άλλο το Οικονομικο-Επιστημονικό Σύμπλεγμα που, ακούσια, έδωσε εκείνο το πάτημα στον Τραμπ. Η νέα Αμερικανική κυβέρνηση βρίθει από τους ίδιους «ειδικούς» που προώθησαν τις ψευδείς οικονομικές προφητείες οι οποίες ενίσχυσαν το άνισο, εκμεταλλευτικό, ανορθολογικό κοινωνικο-οικονομικό σύστημα που γέννησε γενικευμένη δυστυχία και, έτσι, τον… Τραμπισμό.Η «κανονικότητα» επέστρεψε στον Λευκό Οίκο. Ο Τζο Μπάιντεν θα προσπαθήσει να μην πει ψέματα, προτιμώντας απλά να εξοικονομεί την αλήθεια – όπως όλοι οι προκάτοχοι του Τραμπ. Όμως, παράλληλα, ο Μπάιντεν δεν θα πει ποτέ τις εκρηκτικές αλήθειες που ο Τραμπ, που και που, ξεστόμιζε. Έτσι, η αλήθεια θα παραμείνει πολιορκημένη από δυο μεριές: Από τους «ειδικούς» της νέας κυβέρνησης. Και από τον Τραμπισμό, το κίνημα που γέννησαν οι κοινωνικά αβάστακτες πολιτικές τις οποίες αυτοί οι ίδιοι «ειδικοί» οικοδόμησαν σε οικονομικά ψεύδη.

*Το άρθρο αποτελεί απόδοση της μηνιαίας στήλης του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη στο Project Syndicate για το 24 | 7

Was the GameStop episode a version of ANOTHER NOW’s Crowdshorters-in-action ? On Channel 4 (video)

Further to this post, in which I compare my ANOTHER NOW‘s fictional Crowdshorters with the crowd that used Reddit to collude so as to defeat the hedge funds shorting GameStop, you can now watch my brief debate with Frances Coppola on Channel 4. Was that episode of broader interest? Is this a new phenomenon of political significance? Does it challenge capitalism (which I argue has already morphed in a Technofeudalism that must be challenged ASAP)?

Did we see yesterday something like ANOTHER NOW’s Crowdshorters in action ? You be the judge!

In my ANOTHER NOW I imagined a new type of resistance movement that uses the tools of finance to bring down capitalism and create a democratic market socialist economy in its stead. I called them CROWDSHORTERS. Yesterday, I received many messages suggesting that the CROWDSHORTERS are emerging for real, with the Reddit group that supported GameStop kickstarting the movement. Is there a smidgeon of truth in this? Judge for yourselves. Look at this FT piece, or this Guardian article, and then read the following extract from ANOTHER NOW. Can’t wait for your reactions…Extract from ANOTHER NOW’s Chapter 4 entitled “How Capitalism Died”…In the Other Now, the Ossify Wall Street movement, as it was known, sprang up in New York City just as Occupy Wall Street had in Our Now. However, over there it went global under the name Ossify Capitalism, or OC for short. At the time Costa had been excited by Occupy Wall Street and its various equivalents worldwide: the Indignados in Spain, who in their tens of thousands took over the plazas of the main Spanish cities; the Greek Aganaktismenoi, who made Syntagma Square their own for three joyous months in the spring of 2011; the Nuit Debut gatherings a few years later in Paris. Alas, that early promise fizzled out as fast as it materialized – especially after the surrender of the Obama administration to Wall Street in early 2009 and of the Greek leftist government to the oligarchy-without-frontiers in the summer of 2015. The great difference between the two movements was that the OC rebels recognized the futility of occupying spaces – squares, streets or buildings.‘Capitalism does not live in space but in time and in the ebb and flow of financial transactions,’ was how Esmeralda, one of its impromptu leaders, put it. The team she led was known as the Crowdshorters. According to Kosti, it was the first group to demonstrate the vulnerability of financialized capitalism and the power of a well targeted digital rebellion. Its first success came when it took direct aim at the financial instruments of mass destruction that played such an important role in causing the 2008 global crash: collateralized debt obligations.These CDOs were a form of synthetic debt with which Eva would have been intimately familiar, having played a part in their manufacture while at Lehman. They can be imagined as boxes in which their creator places many tiny chunks of debt: a few pounds of the mortgage owed by Jill to her local bank, a few yen owed by Toyota to a Japanese pension fund, a few euros owed by a Greek bank to a German one, a few dollars owed by the US Federal Government to JP Morgan, and so on. Each CDO was filled with countless chunks of different types of debt, each with its own risk of default and interest rate.The great selling point of CDOs was the fiction that they were a safe bet. Since they contained so many different pieces of debt owed by such a diversity of people and organizations, buyers were told that there was no chance that more than a few of those chunks would turn sour at once. Moreover, each CDO was so complex it was impossible for any human, even its creator, to estimate its value, so there was no real limit to what it could sell for: those who created, sold and traded in CDOs simply let the market decide, and no one in the market could argue that they knew any better. They were an invention worthy of a Bond villain, the ideal snake oil: pieces of paper that were, at once, completely opaque and yet apparently safe and lucrative. The false sense of security they offered led to far higher demand – and far higher prices – than CDO creators expected. Observing bankers’ surprise at the high prices, others flocked in to place their orders, boosting prices ever higher.With so much money being made, the bankers who had created the CDOs soon forgot their original purpose: to offload bad debt onto gullible victims. Unable to stand by as others profited from their creations, bankers like Lehman lost their faculties and began to buy back their CDOs. The more they bought, the higher the already stratospheric prices went, the greater the paper value of their stacks of CDOs, and the larger their bonuses. Delirious with their profits, the bankers borrowed mountains of money from each other to buy even more CDOs.In short, the bankers fell headlong into their own trap. And when all of the bad debts inside those CDOs turned sour and the bottom fell out of the market in 2008, the financiers fell into a bottomless pit of their own making. As they sank, the politicians and the major central banks – the Fed, the Bank of England, the ECB and all the rest – rushed in to re-float them. That’s when Esmeralda’s Crowdshorters struck.Techno-rebelsEsmeralda, like Eva, had worked for one of the large financial houses until just before the crash, and thus understood their inner workings well. Using her expertise, her Crowdshorters undermined the central banks’ efforts surgically and stylishly. They realized what few understood: by privatizing everything, capitalism had made itself supremely vulnerable to financial guerrilla attacks. Specifically, Esmeralda recognized that the creation of CDOs out of plain debt – a process known hubristically and ironically as securitization – afforded the perfect opportunity for a peaceful grassroots revolution.in Croydon or small businesses in Preston was owed to some private corporation. However, the corporation had pre-sold these payments ages before to some financier. What exactly had the financier bought? The right to collect the future revenue streams from the little people. And what did the financier do with that right? Sliced it up into tiny chunks and placed them in different CDOs, which in turn were sold on to other financiers – globally!Esmeralda and her comrades had the technical skills to unpick the contents of every CDO. Painstakingly, they wrote software that could identify precisely which chunk of debt within each CDO was owed by which household, when each chunk of a bill or a debt repayment was due, to whom it was owed, and who owned the specific CDO at every point in time. Using this vast database of information, they were then able to contact households – most of which were outraged by the bankers’ behaviour and the bailouts they were set to receive – and invite them to participate in low-cost, targeted, short-term payment strikes – or crowdshorting as Esmeralda called these campaigns.The Crowdshorters’ pitch to residents was simple. In fact, one of the first of them – a circular sent by Esmeralda to Yorkshire residents – is now commemorated in the Other Now on a plaque that adorns the Houses of Parliament in London:Help us bring down those profiting from your exorbitant water bill while you are struggling to put food on the table. just delay paying your water bill for two months, and don’t worry about the late payment fee. we are crowdsourcing funds to compensate you. united we stand, divided we fall!Similar plaques are on display in the entrance to the Capitol building in Washington DC, even the Greek parliament on Syntagma Square. The uptake was breathtaking. People all over the UK, soon the world, began to take great pleasure in tracking, and heeding, the Crowdshorters’ calls. Their meticulously coordinated payment strikes caused cascades of crashes in the CDO market which spilled over into the major stock exchanges. Within three weeks, the central banks realized it would be impossible to re-float the bankers’ trillions of dollars’ worth of securitized debt while, at the same time, the privatized utilities were going bust and demanding bailouts too.Unable to convince Congress to pump the missing trillions into Wall Street for a second and then a third time in the space of a few months, the US Federal Government had to allow Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the other behemoths to be wound down. The repercussions were immense. Europe’s banks, which were in a far worse state than America’s, shut up shop too. The City of London was in meltdown. Governments were forced to nationalize the failing utilities. The Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, even the People’s Bank of China, had no alternative but to step into the void and provide citizens with bank accounts – the first stirrings of PerCap.While they played a central role in sinking global finance, Esmeralda and her Crowdshorters could not have sparked the OC revolution on their own. Wrecking an already collapsing Wall Street was one thing; ossifying capitalism was quite another. This is where other techno-rebels came into the picture.Recognizing pension funds as the largest shareholders in the great corporations, a band of radicalized traders working out of Mumbai’s financial centre and calling themselves Solidarity Sourcing Proxies – Solsourcers for short – decided it was time to target globalization’s most ludicrous racket. Drawing inspiration from the Crowdshorters, the Solsourcers invited people to nominate companies with the worst record of zero-hours contracts, low pay, carbon footprints, working conditions and the tendency to ‘downsize’ in order to boost their share prices. Millions of people from all over the world pitched in to name the worst offenders. Then the Solsourcers organized the mass withholding of pension contributions to the pension funds that owned shares in those companies. The mere rumour that the Solsourcers had targeted a particular pension fund turned out to be enough to send its shares crashing and to cause an exodus of worried investors from equity funds related to it. The Solsourcers eventually needed only to send to a pension fund a list of the companies it wanted it to divest from, and the fund would do so immediately, lest its incoming pension contributions dried up.Realizing their power, the Solsourcers spread their wings globally and began to make more ambitious and highly sophisticated demands, not merely for divestment from unscrupulous employers and environment-destroying corporations, but for reforms to corporate law. Inspired by a flat management structure pioneered by a corporation based near Seattle, they managed to take the first steps towards prescribing by law the corporate model one person one share one vote.By early 2010, the Solsourcers had been joined by another group of techno-rebels. Calling themselves Bladerunners in homage to Rick Deckard, the fictional character whose job in a famous 1982 sci-fi movie was to hunt down and kill androids, they thought of themselves as neo-Luddites, even choosing as their patron figure Lord Byron, the poet laureate of the original Luddite movement…

‘The Future of the EU after Brexit’ – Video of keynote & a Q&A with Lord Lamont, Economics Research Council

Why we need Jeremy Corbyn’s PEACE & JUSTICE PROJECT – video of my presentation

From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism – Tübingen University talk

A lecture organised by University of Tübingen economics students, delivered on Monday February 3, 2020, on the theme “From an Economics without Capitalism to Markets without Capitalism”. Mainstream economic models lack some important features of really-existing capitalism, including money, time and space. Its models offer ideological cover for a capitalist system that has usurped competitive, free markets. The result? Unbearable inequality, climate catastrophe and permanent stagnation. A fork on the road is approaching: It will take us either into deeper stagnation and environmental degradation or to a society with markets but no capitalism. Prof. Yanis Varoufakis talks about the future of our economy and the current state of economics with special regard to pluralism in economics. Source: https://timms.uni-tuebingen.de/tp/UT_…

Greece’s slide to parliamentary dictatorship – video

My statement in the Greek parliament after MeRA25 MP Aggeliki Adamopolou was shockingly stripped of her Parliamentary immunity for daring to criticise the police in a speech she gave in Parliament. Greece is now a dictatorship under parliamentary cloak.

Identity, solidarity and DiEM25

If I were a transgender person and a bunch of Lefties dared lecture me that the exploitation of factory workers by capitalists is more important than my daily struggle tο function as a transgender person, I would tell them to get lost. No one has the right to tell those who are hurt, terrified, exploited or oppressed that their pain, fear or persecution is politically less important than some other type of repression.Discrimination, we must not forget, divides and multiplies. It does so automatically because in so doing it gains evolutionary stability. The exploitation of a group is reinforced when its exploited members (eg. workers) get the feeling that they are not at the bottom of the pecking order but that there is a subset of their group (e.g. workers’ wives) that they can exploit. This pattern becomes even more entrenched when the subset of the exploited group is further bisected (e.g. between black and white workers’ wives). And so on.Other patterns of discrimination can emerge from utterly arbitrary differences that, logic dictates, should be irrelevant. Left-handed schoolchildren, for example, have for centuries found themselves in lesser social roles, often grossly discriminated against — so much so that their lives are marked into old age. In laboratory experiments that I conducted in the 1990s, assigning a random colour to otherwise identical participants generated significant discrimination within minutes, with holders of one of the colours emerging spontaneously as the dominant group. (See here for a broad discussion and here for the relevant academic paper.)In short, in every society hitherto, discrimination digs in by constantly inventing new divisions and opportunities for oppression. Even to imagine that there exists some objective metric by which to compare the different groups’ pain or deservedness, is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is any attempt to compare your predicament to that of people of another group exposed to a different oppression. Finally, it is for each and every differently oppressed person to decide which type of oppression to rage against and how to fight for their future. The Left’s old argument, which I remember encountering as a teenager, that first we build socialism and then all other oppressions wither is not just stupid — it is oppressive.SolidarityConsider the extreme case of a black middle-class Harvard student. While it is meaningful, and statistically accurate, to say that it is easier these days for a black person to enter Harvard than for a poor person, it is both unhelpful and wrong to compare and contrast the two types of experience. Who are we to say that the black middle-class Harvard student’s terror at being stopped by police, and subjected to the ignominy reserved for blacks, is more or less crushing than the despair of a white poor person who did not get into Harvard but is attending Community College and works at some Amazon warehouse to make ends meet? Once we get bogged down in such comparisons, we lose the plot. Which plot? The plot which we should be following, namely building solidarity between people in the clasps of different types of pain, suffering and fear.Power has a capacity to unite, to become abstract and homogenous in proportion to how exorbitant it is. This is why in Davos there is very little discrimination. Black and white, American and African, male and female corporate executives band together with remarkable equanimity. They speak as if with one voice. They never antagonise each other or fall out. If you ask them pressing questions about the role of structured derivatives, central banks or private equity, they will all give you the same, more or less, answer.In sharp contrast, the powerless, the exploited and the suffering tend to disunity that renders them even less powerful. Each group, nursing its special pain, looks inwards and feels threatened both by the oligarchy and by other groups of disempowered people. It is in this manner that the poor and the disheartened are ‘persuaded’ to use their formal liberty (e.g. during elections) to keep wealth in power. Only solidarity across the ever-evolving archipelago of under-privilege can change this and challenge the oligarchy-without-frontiers.DiEM25

“We come from every part of Europe and are united by different cultures, languages, accents, political party affiliations, ideologies, skin colours, gender identities, faiths and conceptions of the good society.”— DiEM25 Manifesto

When we got together at the Volksbühne Theatre to inaugurate DiEM25 on 9 February 2016, we had indeed arrived from all over Europe, in difference but also in solidarity.We celebrated our gathering by committing to “treating non-Europeans as ends-in-themselves”, to remaining “…alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognising fences and borders as signs of weakness spreading insecurity in the name of security”; and to struggling together for a “…Liberated Europe where privilege, prejudice, deprivation and the threat of violence wither, allowing Europeans to be born into fewer stereotypical roles, to enjoy even chances to develop their potential, and to be free to choose more of their partners in life, work and society.”That was DiEM25 on the day it was born five years ago. This is DiEM25 today too. At a time when divisions (also known as culture wars) are wreaking havoc amongst progressive people who should know better, we have an opportunity to use our differences as building blocks of the one thing that can face down the dividing-and-multiplying oppressions spreading like rampant bushfires in our post-Covid-19 world:  Solidarity! To build solidarity, DiEM25 is constantly working for a common plan against every single oppression. Is such a common plan possible given the variety of oppressions? Of course it is. Green shared prosperity is technically possible and an excellent foundation of turning the tide of multiple oppressions to reveal a terrain on which different people can lead equally flourishing lives. However, it is one thing to say it is feasible and quite another to make it happen. For this we need common campaigns.And here is where progressives, and the Left in particular, are failing so badly today: On the one hand, we have the time-honoured divisions due to power-struggles over bureaucratic nation-state-based parties. And on the other hand, we have the tendency of different groups to separate their struggle from those of other groups. Also known as identity politics, this is the opposite of solidarity — a godsend to the Davos men and women whose power is thus guaranteed.That’s why DiEM25 is so important: Not only is it the only transnational European political movement (with a paneuropean manifesto, one set of detailed policies for the whole of Europe, a unique Feminism, Diversity and Disabilities Taskforce etc.), but it is also the foundation of the Progressive International which, in the last eight months, has shown what international solidarity means in practice.Through our Make Amazon Pay campaign, the Debt Justice Collective, our electoral observatories in Latin America, the farmers’ strike in India etc. we have demonstrated the one thing that matters: To liberate everyone, we must act globally against every single type of oppression, without privileging one type of suffering over another, by turning our sovereign and multiple identities into one tsunami of humanist solidarity.Carpe DiEM25!

Click here for the diem25.org page where the above was originally published.