Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 7

Η απελευθέρωση των Παλαιστίνιων ως προαπαιτούμενο για την απελευθέρωση Ισραηλινών & Ευρωπαίων: Δήλωση Γ. Βαρουφάκη στην έναρξη της Ομάδας της Χάγης 31-1-2025

Εννέα κυβερνήσεις υπέγραψαν πριν λίγο, στη διπλανή αίθουσα, την Διακήρυξη της Ομάδας της Χάγης με την οποία δεσμεύονται για κυρώσεις κατά του Ισραήλ έως ότου πάψει τη γενοκτονία, καταργήσει το Απαρτχάιντ και τηρήσει το Διεθνές Δίκαιο.Εκπροσωπώντας χώρες της Αφρικής, της Ασίας και της Λατινικής Αμερικής, αντιπροσωπεύουν τόσο την κοινή γνώμη του Παγκόσμιου Νότου όσο και την πλειοψηφία στην Δύση που δεν εκφράζεται από κυβερνήσεις που τόσο ξεδιάντροπα στηρίζουν τη συνεχιζόμενη γενοκτονία του παλαιστινιακού λαού. Χαιρετίζουμε αυτές τις εννέα πρωτοπόρες κυβερνήσεις και ενθαρρύνουμε και άλλες να τις ακολουθήσουν.Ιδιαίτερη σημασία έχει ότι πρόκειται για εννέα κυβερνήσεις που εκπροσωπούν λαούς που γνωρίζουν στο πετσί τους τι σημαίνει να είσαι θύμα του αποικιοκρατικού σωβινισμού. Οι λαοί του Παγκόσμιου Νότου κατανοούν καλύτερα από τον καθένα τον πραγματικό λόγο πίσω από την γενοκτονική μανία του Ισραηλινού καθεστώτος απέναντι τους Παλαιστίνιους. Ξέρουν γιατί το αίτημα των κατακτημένων για ισότητα και δικαιοσύνη σπέρνει πανικό στις καρδιές των κατακτητών – γιατί ακούν οι κατακτητές τους κατακτημένους να απαιτούν δικαιοσύνη και ερμηνεύουν την απαίτηση αυτή ως αμφισβήτηση της νομιμότητας των ιδιοκτησιακών τους δικαιωμάτων επί της γης που υπεξαίρεσαν.Γνωρίζοντας άριστα ότι, αφού πρώτα την ανακήρυξαν terra nullius («γη κενή, γη δίχως ανθρώπους») για να κλέψουν την γη τους, η ψυχή των κατακτητών και των απογόνων τους πλημμυρίζει με ανασφάλεια. Ο φόβος θεριεύει μέσα τους καθώς ένα ερώτημα τους κρατά άγρυπνους τη νύχτα, ωθώντας τους να υποστηρίζουν τη συνέχιση της Κατοχής, του Απαρτχάιντ, της εθνοκάθαρσης, ακόμη και της γενοκτονίας: «Αν τους δώσουμε πραγματική εκεχειρία, αν τους αφήσουμε να αναπνεύσουν, δεν θα ανασυνταχτούν ώστε να μας κάνουν ό,τι τους κάνουμε τόσες δεκαετίες εμείς;»Υπό αυτή την έννοια, η Διακήρυξη της Ομάδας της Χάγης δεν αποτελεί απλά μια ισχυρή πράξη αλληλεγγύης προς τους Παλαιστίνιους, αλλά εξυπηρετεί, επίσης, τον σκοπό της απελευθέρωσης των Ισραηλινών από την μόνιμη ανασφάλεια που δηλητηριάζει τις ψυχές τους και τους απαγορεύει να ζουν «καλά καγαθά» πάνω στα ερείπια του πολιτισμού ενός άλλου λαού.Η δήλωση της Ομάδας της Χάγης έχει επίσης ιδιαίτερη σημασία για εμάς στην Ευρώπη. Κοιτάξτε τι συμβαίνει σε αυτή την χώρα, στην Ολλανδία. Κοιτάξτε τι συμβαίνει σε αυτή την ήπειρο, την Ευρώπη. Είμαστε παγιδευμένοι στη στασιμότητα, την αποβιομηχάνιση, τη διαρκή λιτότητα για τους πολλούς που δεν μπορούν να τα βγάλουν πέρα ενώ ζουν εν μέσω θεαματικών επιδείξεων ακραίου πλούτου. Και ποιος θερίζει τη συγκομιδή της αναπόφευκτης δυσαρέσκειας; Η Ακροδεξιά βέβαια που ενισχύει παράλληλα τον αντισημιτισμό, την παλαιστινιοφοβία, κάθε είδους ρατσισμό και σωβινισμό. Μαζί της οι έμποροι όπλων και οι λοιποί πολεμοκάπηλοι, των οποίων η δύναμη και οι τραπεζικοί λογαριασμοί διογκώνονται καθώς βοούν τα βούκινα των πολέμων – στην Ανατολική Ευρώπη, στη Μέση Ανατολή, εναντίον της Κίνας, για να μην αναφερθώ στη χυδαία αναφορά στους κατατρεγμένους που διασχίζουν τη Μεσόγειο ως «στρατό εισβολής».Να γιατί το πρόταγμα μιας δίκαιης ειρήνης στη Μέση Ανατολή, που είναι ο στόχος της Προοδευτικής Διεθνούς που πρωτοστάτησε στην σύγκλιση της Ομάδας της Χάγης, δεν αφορά μόνο την απελευθέρωση των Παλαιστινίων αλλά είναι και μια ευκαιρία να απελευθερωθούν οι Ισραηλινοί από το φόβο, να αποδράσουν οι λαοί της Ευρώπης από τον εγκλωβισμό τους στον αυταρχισμό, στη στασιμότητα, στον διαρκή πόλε μο. Μια ελεύθερη Παλαιστίνη είναι προϋπόθεση για μια ελεύθερη Ευρώπη, μια ελεύθερη Δύση, έναν κόσμο που να αρχίζει να βγάζει ξανά νόημα.

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Yanis Varoufakis in conversation with Francesca Albanese

Shortly after the Gaza ceasefire deal was signed, I had the pleasure of a conversation with Francesca Albanese, the UN Rapporteur on Palestine. The occasion was MeRA25’s National Convention (Jan 2025) where this video was screened. Enjoy our conversation and, in particular, Francesca’s inimitable capacity to talk like a dispassionate lawyer and, at once, a compassionate human being.

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Cloud Capital vs AI: What DeepSeek means for technofeudalism & the New Cold War

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, this week changed the global AI landscape, not to mention caused $1 trillion losses in the New York stock exchange and the NASDAC. In the process, it demonstrated the difference between cloud capital, which drives technofeudalism onward and upward, and AI-services, which were always a bubble waiting to burst. What remains to be seen is DeepSeek’s impact on the New Cold War between the US and China which, from its beginning, was motivated by the clash between US and Chinese cloud capital.DeepSeek, as we all know by now, is China’s response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Its models perform as efficiently as their US counterparts. The difference is that DeepSeek is offered for free, making money only by selling services to developers – not to the public – at a fraction of the price OpenAI charges!The gist of DeepSeek’s arrival on the AI scene is a sudden transition from proprietary to open source technology. It is, therefore, no great wonder that, the moment DeekSeek became the most downloaded app on the Apple Store, it pulverised the market capitalisation of the, hitherto overinflated, US Big Tech companies.But how did this happen? How is a private commodity suddenly being offered for free? And does this mean that technofeudalism is in trouble?To begin with it is important to note AI was never a proprietary technology in itself. The underlying code has always been open source. What made AI quasi-private was the way these models were trained using huge amounts of privatised (that is stolen from us) data. A leaked Google memo in 2017, that was widely discussed in the industry at the time, but also widely refuted, explained:“If an open source LLM trained for a few million dollars outperforms the effectiveness of proprietary models… There will be no firewall to safeguard OpenAI either.”DeepSeek pierced the US AI companies’ bubble by decommodifying the results of the model’s training, shifting them from behind a paywall to the public arena. Within days, developers around the world started building their own models on top of DeepSeek’s.This is was the nightmare for US Big Tech’s AI service providers who offered the results of prompts as a commodity, in the form of subscriptions. DeepSeek-type applications can now produce high-quality translations for free and, in so doing, undermine companies specialising in, for example, translation services, such as Germany’s Deepl. In the broader scheme of things, this means that the morsels of cloud capital that Europe owns has lost its market value.Nevertheless, and this is a huge nevertheless, it is only AI-as-a-commodity that has lost its (grossly exaggerated) value. In sharp contrast, cloud capital utilised not as a commodity producing piece of tech but as produced means of behavioural modification is not at all threatened by companies like DeepSeek. And since technofeudalism is powered by cloud capital working that way, rather than commodity-like AI services of the ChaptGPT type, our technofeudal order is not threatened by competitors such as DeepSeek.To help understand the difference between cloud capital and AI-based commodified services it helps to compare and contrast Alexa and ChatGPT. Alexa is not offering you a commodified service. It is your free pretend-slave. Unlike ChatGPT you do not pay a subscription to Amazon for the right to order Alexa to order you milk or to switch off your lights. Instead, you train Alexa to train you to train it to know you so that it wins your trust with good recommendations so that it can modify your behaviour – ‘encourage’ you to buy a commodity from Amazon.com, with Bezos retaining up to 40% of the price you pay (as a cloud rent). In short, the work that Alexa performs for you is not a commodity, unlike ChatGPT which works to sell you a commodity. In other words, ChatGPT is subject to market competition, to the likes of DeepSeek, but Alexa is not. This is why OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker, is seriously damaged by the emergence of DeepSeek but Amazon is not.Thus, my basic point: Cloud capital is in a league of its own, beyond market competition from DeepSeek-like upstarts, because its power lies in its capacity to modify our behaviour and remove us from any market (e.g., to shift us from real markets to cloud fiefs like Amazon and Alibaba).In conclusion, cloud capital’s capacity to drive technofeudalism is not challenged by companies like DeepSeek. Only companies like OpenAI, which invested so much and so foolishly in providing a commodified service, stand to lose enormously. Yet another sign that capitalism is dead at the hand of cloud capital while technofeudalism is going from strength to strength and, as it does so, fuels even further the New Cold War between the US and China which in my book, Technofeudalism, I have explained away as the clash of the two huge concentrations of cloud capital: the American dollar-denominated super cloudalist power and the Chinese yuan-denominated one.Speaking of this New Cold War, which I have argued is mostly fuelled by the clash between American and Chinese cloud capital, I wonder what impact DeepSeek’s success will have on the US government. Silicon Valley and Washington DC had convinced themselves that America had a huge AI lead over China. Now, a tiny Chinese company has destroyed that confidence by producing on a shoestring better AI tech than Silicon Valley had imagined possible. I can almost hear the whirring inside the heads of people in power on both America’s East and West Coast thinking that if the Chinese can do this out of the blue, what else can they do tomorrow? It is reminiscent of the Sputnik moment, isn’t it?It will be interesting to see how Trump reacts to this threat to companies American AI companies, especially since Elon Musk understands, and has spoken out against, the folly of commodifying AI services rather than going full on technofeudal.These are interesting times, in the traditional Chinese sense of the phrase.For more, watch this space…

Note: The lack of a protective wall for US Big Tech is changing the landscape in the stock markets as well. Hardware companies, such as Nvidia, which produces microchips, will not be affected in the long term. But companies that rely on the commercialisation of software face Armageddon. For the rest of the economy, these changes will be momentous. AI seems to be becoming more accessible – which helps small and medium-sized enterprises but not necessarily employment, as the expansion of AI may well accelerate job losses. Furthermore, greater diffusion of AI will increase demand for electricity. In a Europe in the clasps of an electricity cartel, the increase in electricity prices hits people’s incomes even harder and highlights more strongly the need to de-commoditise and socialise not only AI but also the production & distribution of electricity.

 

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China’s Trump Dilemma – Project Syndicate

ATHENS – With Donald Trump back in the White House, the high tariffs he has pledged to slap on Chinese imports are not China’s greatest concern. China’s leaders understand that tariffs are more significant for Trump as political and symbolic moves than as economic weapons that will seriously impede China’s growth and development.The real dilemma facing China centers on whether or not to decouple its economy from the dollar-dominated international monetary system by turning the BRICS group of major emerging economies into a Bretton-Woods-type arrangement. The answer will depend not on tariffs or the fate of TikTok but on whether the China hawks in Trump’s administration railroad him into a confrontation that transcends tariffs and embraces financial sanctions.Tariffs are overrated as a weapon to subdue China, especially when they are combined with promises of large tax cuts and radical deregulation at home. After all, both moves are likely to raise US profits and share prices, accelerating the influx of foreign capital into the US. While the federal budget deficit will grow, the dollar will continue to strengthen – and mitigate the negative effect of tariffs on Chinese exports – so long as investors believe that the rise in the yield of US Treasuries will not overshadow the rise in US stock indices. The gap between domestic savings and investment – the root cause of the US trade deficit vis-à-vis China and Europe – will widen.Trump is facing a difficult trilemma: Can he combine high tariffs, a weaker dollar, and the greenback’s continued global hegemony? Having studied the 1985 Plaza Accords carefully, Chinese leaders anticipate that Trump will try to do to them what Reagan did to the Japanese 40 years ago. In other words, China can choose its poison: a massive appreciation of the renminbi or massive tariffs on Chinese imports. But this brings us to the political and geostrategic dimension of the problem.Trump understands that China is not Japan, whose post-war Constitution was written by US officials and a country where 55,000 US military personnel are stationed. Moreover, China is no longer as dependent on the US market as it used to be, having diversified and made its products and fully-owned supply chains indispensable worldwide.The chance that China will roll over and accept sharp renminbi appreciation to avoid Trump’s tariffs is vanishingly small, to put it mildly. Chinese officials know very well that the revaluation of the yen under the Plaza Accord was instrumental in permanently derailing Japan’s industrial and financial ascendancy.Still, even if Trump knows that China will not acquiesce by revaluing the renminbi to avoid his high tariffs, he will still impose them for political and symbolic reasons. Then, a negotiation will commence and a compromise, involving slightly lower tariffs, will be struck.As James K. Galbraith predicts, the impact of these tariffs on Chinese manufacturers will be modest as world trade recalibrates, with the US buying more from Vietnam and India while Chinese exports to Europe and the rest of the world skyrocket. If there is one economic bloc that will suffer massive economic losses as a result of Trump’s tariffs, it is the European Union – not China.Likewise, the ever-higher digital-technology wall between China and the US is already benefiting large companies in both countries. In China, hordes of engineers are already making enormous strides in manufacturing advanced microchips that China would never have produced without the New Cold War that Trump started during his first term – a policy that President Joe Biden maintained, and even escalated.Meanwhile, America’s combination of concentrated cloud capital, strength in digital research and development, and Trump’s tariffs have already motivated European firms to redirect their investment funding to the US. In short, Europe, not China, has cause to despair at the prospect of Trump’s tariffs.This is not to say that China has no reasons to fret. The big question is whether the US China hawks will be placated enough by high tariffs and anti-Chinese bombast or whether, as is likely, their bellicosity will develop a self-propelling dynamic. More precisely, will they convince Trump to move from mere import tariffs to the type of financial sanctions that the US and the EU imposed on Russia?If they do, the Chinese government will need to resolve its great dilemma sooner rather than later. Should it pre-empt financial sanctions by seeking to turn the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and four new members) into a Bretton-Woods-like monetary system, with the renminbi at its heart and the Chinese trade surplus as its backstop? Or should it remain within the broader dollar system and play for time until the US internal contradictions play out?So far, China has kept the brakes on. While developing various payment systems, it is not pushing the BRICS to evolve into a monetary system. BRICS Pay, for example, is a fascinating experiment in combining blockchain technology with cross-border central planning to create a payments system that ends the West’s monopoly on wire transfers. But, as all payments are still denominated in different currencies lacking a common backstop, BRICS Pay is as close to being a monetary system as the dominant SWIFT interbank payments system is to mimicking the eurozone.To turn the BRICS into a serious challenger of the dollar-based international monetary system, China would have to make its surpluses available to the BRICS so that the rupees Russia receives for its oil exports to India can be exchanged at a quasi-fixed rate for renminbi to be spent on Chinese goods – pretty much what the US did in the 1950s and 1960s to backstop the Bretton Woods system.This would be a giant step for China to take and a serious challenge to the dollar’s dominance. Whether China will take it will depend on geopolitics, not economics.

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10 ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ 2015 – Επεισόδιο 1ο: Ήταν προδιαγεγραμμένη η ήττα μετά την νίκη της 25 Ιανουαρίου;

Βδομάδα προς βδομάδα τα γεγονότα μιας συγκλονιστικής Ελληνικής ΆνοιξηςΣτις 25 Γενάρη 2025 συμπληρώνονται 10 χρόνια από την συγκλονιστική εκλογική ήττα της Διεθνούς Ολιγαρχίας που στην Ελλάδα εκπροσωπείτο επάξια από το Μνημονιακό μπλοκ. Έξι μήνες μετά, το ίδιο βράδυ που ο λαός τίμησε εκείνη την πρωτοφανή ρήξη με ποσοστό 62% στο Δημοψήφισμα της 5ης Ιουλίου 2025, η Συνθηκολόγηση και η μετέπειτα Προσχώρηση του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ στην Διεθνή Ολιγαρχία επανέφερε στα «πράγματα» το κατεστημένο που ηττήθηκε τόσο την 25η Γενάρη όσο κι εκείνο το βράδυ. Από τότε, το κατεστημένο πασχίζει, με απύθμενο ρεβανσισμό και μαύρη προπαγάνδα, να δαιμονοποιήσει εκείνη την μοναδική στιγμή που τρόμαξε τόσο πολύ αντικρύζοντας έναν ταλαιπωρημένος λαό που έπαψε να το ακούει.Τιμώντας εκείνη την κορυφαία στιγμή Ελπίδας, Προοπτικής και Αντίστασης, και τον γενναίο λαό που την έφερε, για τους επόμενους έξι μήνες θα δημοσιεύω εδώ, μια φορά την εβδομάδα, αποσπάσματα από το βιβλίο μου ΑΝΙΚΗΤΟΙ ΗΤΤΗΜΕΝΟΙ που θυμίζουν και αναλύουν τι συνέβη ακριβώς 10 χρόνια πριν, στην διάρκεια της ανεπανάληπτης εκείνης Ελληνικής Άνοιξης.Ξεκινώ σήμερα, μερικές ημέρες πριν την 10η Επέτειο από την νίκη του τότε ΣΥΡΙΖΑ επί του Μνημονιακού μπλοκ, με την απάντηση στο βασικό ερώτημα που τίθεται από αντιπάλους και συνοδοιπόρους: Ήταν μονόδρομος η Συνθηκολόγηση; Υπήρχε εναλλακτική; Η πιο κάτω απάντηση περιέχεται στον Πρόλογο του ΑΝΙΚΗΤΟΙ ΗΤΤΗΜΕΝΟΙ)Ήταν μονόδρομος η Συνθηκολόγηση; Υπήρχε εναλλακτική;Η Ελλάδα, από τη στιγμή που το κράτος πτώχευσε το 2010, ήταν αντιμέτωπη με τρεις πιθανές καταστάσεις:Πρώτον, τη χρεοδουλοπαροικία, στο πλαίσιο της οποίας ζούμε από τότε υπό τον ζυγό μη βιώσιμων δανείων, μόνιμης λιτότητας και δίνης ύφεσης-χρέους-ακρίβειας.Δεύτερον, ένα Grexit, που θα ερχόταν είτε εξ ατυχήματος είτε λόγω πολιτικής απόφασης των δανειστών ή των Αθηνών.Τρίτον, μια βιώσιμη συμφωνία βασισμένη στην αναδιάρθρωση του χρέους, εντός του ευρώ.Το εάν η αντίσταση της Άνοιξης του 2015 ήταν μάταιη ή όχι εξαρτάτο από το εάν θεωρούσαμε την έξοδο από το ευρώ χειρότερη προοπτική από τη μονιμοποίηση της χρεοδουλοπαροικίας μέσω 3ου μνημονίου.Ο λόγος για τον οποίο οι μνημονιακές κυβερνήσεις δεν είχαν καμία ελπίδα να εξασφαλίσουν τη βιώσιμη συμφωνία είναι ότι εξόρκιζαν το Grexit και προέκριναν αντ’ αυτού, και χωρίς δεύτερη συζήτηση, την παραμονή της χώρας σε καθεστώς μόνιμης χρεοδουλοπαροικίας.Γνωρίζοντας ότι οι μνημονιακές κυβερνήσεις αντιμέτωπες με το Grexit θα έλεγαν «ναι σε όλα», οι δανειστές δεν είχαν παρά να τις σπρώξουν στα πρόθυρα του Grexit ώστε να αντηχήσει το «ναι σε όλα» στην Ολομέλεια και στους διαδρόμους της Βουλής μας.Ακριβώς γι’ αυτό τον λόγο, από την πρώτη μέρα που συνάντησα τον Αλέξη Τσίπρα, το μήνυμά μου ήταν ότι, για να αξίζει τον κόπο να πάρει τα κλειδιά του Μαξίμου, έπρεπε να φοβάται τη μονιμοποίηση της χρεοδουλοπαροικίας μας (δηλαδή το 3ο μνημόνιο) περισσότερο απ’ ό,τι φοβόταν το Grexit: Μόνο έτσι υπήρχαν πιθανότητες για την πολυπόθητη βιώσιμη συμφωνία χωρίς Grexit! Μόνο έτσι δε θα μπλόφαρε λέγοντας στους δανειστές ότι τα μνημόνια τελείωσαν.Γιατί; Επειδή αν πραγματικά προτιμάς το Grexit από το 3ο μνημόνιο, μόνο τότε δεν είναι μπλόφα να λες ότι, βρέξει χιονίσει, δεν υπογράφεις 3ο μνημόνιο! Κι οι δανειστές; Θα ενέδιδαν ποτέ στην απαίτηση για σοβαρή και έγκαιρη αναδιάρθρωση του χρέους (προαπαιτούμενο για βιώσιμη συμφωνία); Ναι, εφόσον ταυτόχρονα:(α) γνώριζαν ότι, αντιμέτωποι με το δίλημμα Grexit ή συνθηκολόγηση (και αποδοχή της χρεοδουλοπαροικίας),  εμείς προτιμούσαμε το Grexit(β) έκριναν ότι ένα Grexit θα τους κόστιζε τελικά (σε οικονομικούς και πολιτικούς όρους) πιο πολύ από το να ενδώσουν στη σοβαρή και έγκαιρη αναδιάρθρωση του χρέους την οποία απαιτούσε η επιθυμητή βιώσιμη συμφωνία.Συνοπτικά, στη Μνημονιακή Ελλάδα υπήρχαν τρεις βασικές απόψεις- θέσεις – τις οποίες αποτυπώνει ο πιο κάτω πίνακας:(α) Η πεποίθηση του Μνημονιακού τόξου ότι η παραμονή στο ευρώ άξιζε τα ισόβια στη φυλακή οφειλετών στην οποία μας έβαλε η τρόικα.(β) Η πεποίθηση των θιασωτών της δραχμής ότι βιώσιμη συμφωνία εντός ευρώ δεν μπορεί να υπάρξει και, συνεπώς, το Grexit είναι η μόνη εναλλακτική στη χρεοδουλοπαροικία.(γ) Η μεσαία οδός (που νόμισα ότι ήταν κοινός τόπος μου με τον Αλέξη Τσίπρα και την ηγετική ομάδα του Σύριζα) η οποία μπορούσε να μας οδηγήσει σε βιώσιμη συμφωνία εντός της ευρωζώνης εφόσον εμείς θεωρούσαμε ό,τι χειρότερο το 3ο μνημόνιο και οι δανειστές φοβόντουσαν πιο πολύ το περίπου 1 τρισ. ευρώ που θα κόστιζε το Grexit απ’ ό,τι το πολιτικό κόστος του «να τα βρουν» με μια ελληνική κυβέρνηση της Αριστεράς.Ιδού λοιπόν το κλειδί της ερώτησης: «Ήταν μάταιη η διαπραγμάτευση;» Εφόσον προτιμούσαμε το Grexit από το 3ο μνημόνιο, όχι, δεν ήταν μάταιη. Αυτός άλλωστε ήταν ο λόγος για τον οποίο το σύνθημα με το οποίο κερδίσαμε τις εκλογές του Γενάρη 2015 ήταν: «Συμφωνία βιώσιμη μέσα στο ευρώ, αλλά όχι όλα για το ευρώ!» Κατεβήκαμε στις εκλογές (τουλάχιστον έτσι νόμισα) αποφασισμένοι να καταδείξουμε στους δανειστές την ειλικρινή μας διάθεση να εργαστούμε για την επίτευξη έντιμης επίλυσης του ελληνικού ζητήματος διαμηνύοντάς τους, παράλληλα, ότι –ενώ δεν απειλούμε με Grexit– ήμασταν έτοιμοι, ακόμα κι εάν εκείνοι μας απειλούσαν με Grexit, να απαντήσουμε σε επιθετικές τους κινήσεις (π.χ. κλεισίματος των ελληνικών τραπεζών) με ανάλογα και εύλογα αντίποινα (κούρεμα ομολόγων SMP της ΕΚΤ, ενεργοποίηση παράλληλου συστήματος πληρωμών κτλ.).Δυστυχώς, μετά την συνθηκολόγηση, ακούμε και διαβάζουμε καλοπροαίρετους σχολιαστές, ακόμα και πολλούς που διάκεινται επικριτικά απέναντι στην επιλογή Τσίπρα να ενδώσει στην τρόικα, και να αποκαλέσει την Ελληνική Άνοιξη «αυταπάτη», οι οποίοι αναρωτιούνται: «Και τι να έκανε όταν κατάλαβε ότι ο εχθρός [σημ.: εννοούν τον Σόιμπλε] επιζητούσε την εφαρμογή της απειλής μας, του Grexit; Να αποδεχόταν την καταστροφή που θα έφερνε το Grexit; Να συνέχιζε να μπλοφάρει με τους δανειστές, όπως ο Βαρουφάκης;»Δυστυχώς, η ήττα φαίνεται πως έφερε αμνησία ως προς το διακύβευμα της Άνοιξης, τους στόχους και τα μέσα μας!Πολύ πριν κερδίσουμε τις εκλογές, προειδοποιούσα τον Αλέξη να μη διανοηθεί καν να μπλοφάρει απειλώντας μ’ ένα Grexit το οποίο δεν είχε σκοπό να εφαρμόσει. Είχα μάλιστα γίνει και δυσάρεστος, καθώς, από το 2012, επέμενα ότι, την επομένη των εκλογών τις οποίες θα κέρδιζε, θα ερχόταν αντιμέτωπος με μια τρόικα που θα τον έσπρωχνε τεχνηέντως στο χείλος του Grexit, ώστε να διαπιστώσουν οι δανειστές αν εννοούσε αυτά που έλεγε.Πρόσθετα μάλιστα ότι η βιωσιμότητα της Ελλάδας εντός του ευρώ απαιτούσε από εκείνον, εκείνη τη στιγμή, να προτιμήσει το επαπειλούμενο Grexit από τη συνθηκολόγηση. Μόνον τότε μπορεί να υποχωρούσαν, δίνοντας στη χώρα τις ανάσες που χρειαζόταν, και άξιζε, εντός της ευρωζώνης.Είχα δίκιο όμως, το 2012, ή το 2015, ότι η βίαιη έξωσή μας από το ευρώ ήταν, παρά το τεράστιο κόστος της, προτιμότερη από τη συνέχιση των μνημονίων και του καθεστώτος χρεοδουλοπαροικίας που αυτά μας επιβάλλουν;Το σχετικό κόστος του GrexitΤο μέγα ερώτημα ήταν το εξής: Τι θα ήταν καλύτερο τον Ιούλιο του 2015; Ένα Grexit, το οποίο δε θέλαμε; Ή το 3ο μνημόνιο, εναντίον του οποίου εξεγερθήκαμε;Η απάντηση απλή: Το Grexit!Ναι, το κόστος θα ήταν σημαντικό. Το 2012 είχα μάλιστα χρησιμοποιήσει ακραίες εκφράσεις, λέγοντας ότι ένα Grexit θα μας πήγαινε πίσω στη νεολιθική εποχή. Όμως από τότε επέμενα: Αν δεν ήμασταν διατεθειμένοι να πούμε «όχι» σε νέα μνημονιακά δάνεια, ακόμα και υπό την απειλή του Grexit, η τρόικα θα συνέτριβε τη χώρα αφήνοντάς την εκτεθειμένη σε ένα μελλοντικό Grexit το οποίο θα ερχόταν όταν και εάν θα συνέφερε τους δανειστές, και με τη χώρα σμπαραλιασμένη. Όπερ και εγένετο! (Βλ. παρακάτω το γράφημα όπου φαίνεται η ραγδαία πτώση των εισοδημάτων την περίοδο 2012-2015.)

Η διακύμανση του τριμηνιαίου ελληνικού εθνικού εισοδήματος σε ευρώ για την περίοδο 2007-2017 – με τη συμπαγή γραμμή να καταδεικνύει τον κινούμενο μέσο όρο (διάρκειας ενός έτους) [στοιχεία ΕΛΣΤΑΤ, επικαιροποιημένα τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2017]. Οι δύο διακεκομμένες χρονοσειρές αποτελούν εκτιμήσεις (μία ουδέτερη και μία απαισιόδοξη) του μέσου όρου του ΑΕΠ μετά από ένα Grexit τον Ιούλιο του 2015. Οι εκτιμήσεις βασίζονται σε προβολές επί των ελληνικών μακροοικονομικών δεδομένων έξι επεισοδίων σπασίματος σταθερών νομισματικών ισοτιμιών (Βρετανία 1931, 1992, Ιταλία 1992, Μεξικό 1994, Βραζιλία 1999, Αργεντινή, 2002), λαμβανομένης υπ’ όψιν της προϋπάρχουσας εσωτερικής υποτίμησης (ιδίως στην περίπτωση της Ελλάδας).

Στις αρχές Ιουλίου του 2015, την εβδομάδα του Δημοψηφίσματος, ο πρωθυπουργός βρέθηκε αντιμέτωπος με την απειλή του Grexit σε μια συγκυρία όπου, μεσοπρόθεσμα, η συνθηκολόγηση και το 3ο μνημόνιο ήταν χειρότερη επιλογή από την αποδοχή του Grexit. Μην ξεχνάμε ότι τα capital controls που μας επέβαλε η τρόικα, και τα οποία πάσχισα με νύχια και με δόντια να αποτρέψω τους πεντέμισι μήνες της υπουργικής μου θητείας, είχαν ήδη βγάλει –στην ουσία– τη χώρα από τη νομισματική ένωση δημιουργώντας, ντε φάκτο, δύο νομίσματα: τα «χάρτινα», κανονικά, ευρώ και ένα παράλληλο νόμισμα, τα ευρώ που είχαν εγκλωβιστεί στις ελληνικές τράπεζες και, άρα, είχαν μικρότερη αξία (καθώς δεν μπορούσαν απρόσκοπτα να βγουν στο εξωτερικό).Με το κλείσιμο των τραπεζών, οι πολίτες έμαθαν το πλαστικό χρήμα, όπως θα μάθαιναν να χειρίζονται και το παράλληλο σύστημα πληρωμών που θα μας έδινε, κατ’ αρχάς, τη δυνατότητα να παραμείνουμε τύποις στο ευρώ για κάποιους μήνες  και, εν τέλει, αν το Βερολίνο επέμενε στο Grexit, θα μπορούσε να αποτελέσει τη βάση για νέο νόμισμα. Με αυτά τα δεδομένα, και σε συνδυασμό με τις προβλέψεις του 3ου μνημονίου περί μονιμοποίησης της λιτότητας (έως το 2060), υπερφορολόγησης των αδυνάμων, χυδαίας νέας εκχώρησης του εθνικού (δημόσιου και ιδιωτικού) πλούτου και της εθνικής κυριαρχίας στους δανειστές και στα λοιπά αρπακτικά και της συνεχιζόμενης εις το διηνεκές μετανάστευσης νέων ανθρώπων, το αρνητικό σοκ ενός Grexit θα ήταν αδιαμφισβήτητα προτιμότερο!Τι θα συνέβαινε στην ελληνική οικονομία στην περίπτωση του Grexit εν μέσω θέρους του 2015; Το πιο πάνω γράφημα παραθέτει δύο εκτιμήσεις (βλ. διακεκομμένες καμπύλες): Η πιο αισιόδοξη εκτίμηση βασίζεται σε απλή προβολή της ιστορικής πορείας του εθνικού εισοδήματος χωρών που βίωσαν το απότομο και βίαιο σπάσιμο σταθερών ισοτιμιών (βλ. Βρετανία 1931, 1992, Ιταλία 1992, Μεξικό 1994, Βραζιλία 1999, Αργεντινή 2002). Και η πιο απαισιόδοξη εκτίμηση βασίζεται στην υπόθεση ότι, λόγω της ανυπαρξίας εγχώριων χαρτονομισμάτων, η άμεση μείωση του εθνικού μας εισοδήματος θα ήταν η διπλάσια εκείνων των συγκεκριμένων ιστορικών επεισοδίων.Ακόμα και με βάση το απαισιόδοξο σενάριο διαφαίνεται ότι η ανάκαμψη θα ξεκινούσε την άνοιξη του 2016, ότι έναν χρόνο μετά το σοκ του Grexit θα είχε αποσοβηθεί και, από το 2017, οι ρυθμοί ανάκαμψης θα ήταν εντυπωσιακοί, θέτοντας την ελληνική οικονομία σε τροχιά που καθιστά τη σημερινή μας κατάσταση αποτελμάτωσης και σταδιακής ερημοποίησης ακόμα πιο θλιβερή.Το κόστος του Εξάμηνου Ιανουαρίου-Ιουλίου 2015Στην προσπάθεια αμαύρωσης της αντίστασης του ελληνικού λαού, στη διάρκεια εκείνης της Άνοιξης του 2015, καταβλήθηκαν φιλότιμες προσπάθειες από την τρόικα εσωτερικού και εξωτερικού να παρουσιαστεί ως αυταπόδεικτο το ψεύδος ότι το πρώτο εξάμηνο του 2015, η Ελληνική Άνοιξη, σταμάτησε την ανάπτυξη που είχε αρχίσει το 2014 και κόστισε στην οικονομία έως και 200 δισ. ευρώ. Μια ματιά στο ίδιο γράφημα (βλ. πιο πάνω) αποκαλύπτει την πραγματικότητα, η οποία αρνείται πεισματικά να συμμορφωθεί «προς τας υποδείξεις» της τρόικας εσωτερικού και εξωτερικού.Η εικόνα του συνολικού εισοδήματος της χώρας (του λεγόμενου Ακαθάριστου Εγχώριου Προϊόντος), εκφρασμένου σε ευρώ, είναι ξεκάθαρη. Η μείωσή του αρχίζει με την παγκόσμια χρηματοοικονομική κρίση του 2008 και, από τότε, μέχρι και τις αρχές του 2014, επιταχύνεται ραγδαία, με μια συνολική απώλεια της τάξης του 25% και άνω. Από τα μέσα του 2014 περνάμε από τη ραγδαία πτώση στην αποτελμάτωση: πιο ήπιες μειώσεις του συνολικού εισοδήματος, οι οποίες, όμως, συμπίπτουν με μεγάλες μειώσεις τιμών (αποπληθωρισμός της τάξης του 2% και άνω). Εν συντομία, το 2014 δεν υπήρξε καμία ανάκαμψη, πόσο μάλιστα ανάπτυξη. Αυτό που υπήρξε ήταν παγίωση της κρίσης, αποτελμάτωση και παγίδευση της κοινωνίας στην αυτοτροφοδοτούμενη δίνη ενός μη βιώσιμου χρέους – ύφεσης-λιτότητας.Αντίθετα, λοιπόν, από το αφήγημα της ολιγαρχίας, σύμφωνα με το οποίο ο «ανόητος» λαός ψήφισε Σύριζα τον Γενάρη του 2015 «παρά την ανάκαμψη», η πραγματικότητα καταδεικνύει ότι ο ελληνικός λαός ψήφισε την κυβέρνησή μας επειδή όχι μόνο δεν υπήρξε καμία ανάκαμψη το 2014 αλλά, επιπλέον, δεν μπορούσε άλλο να ανεχτεί τις ανοησίες περί Greekcovery, Greek Success Story κτλ., στις οποίες, προσβλητικά, τον εξέθετε ένα καθεστώς υπό πανικό.Όσο για το «κόστος» της Ελληνικής Άνοιξης, το πιο πάνω γράφημα είναι εξίσου αποκαλυπτικό: Απλώς δεν προέκυψε ποτέ τέτοιο κόστος! Σε όρους συνολικού εισοδήματος, αν μη τι άλλο, από τις αρχές του 2015 παρατηρούμε μια διαρκή σταθεροποίηση. Μήπως όμως το 2015 αυξήθηκε το χρέος; Όχι, δεν αυξήθηκε ούτε το χρέος. Όταν παρέλαβα το Υπουργείο Οικονομικών, το δημόσιο χρέος ήταν στα 317 δισ., ενώ το παρέδωσα, έξι μήνες μετά, στα 307 δισ., δηλαδή επί της ουσίας στο ίδιο, κατά τι χαμηλότερο, μη βιώσιμο επίπεδο.Μήπως το νέο χρέος που μου καταλογίζουν προστέθηκε λίγο αργότερα; Ούτε αυτό στέκει: Από το τέλος του 2014 έως την 1η Απριλίου 2016 το δημόσιο χρέος αυξήθηκε, σύμφωνα με τη Eurostat, μόνο κατά 1,5 δισ.Τότε, τα 86 και 100 δισ. που «μου» χρεώνουν οι κ.κ. Στουρνάρας και Ρέγκλινγκ πώς προέκυψαν; Πολύ απλά: Πήραν το μη βιώσιμο μέρος του δημόσιου χρέους, το οποίο επέμενα ότι αν δεν κουρευτεί θα μετακυλιστεί με νέα μη βιώσιμα δάνεια, και αφού βοήθησαν να εμποδιστεί το κούρεμά του (κάτι που απαιτούσε την απομάκρυνσή μου από το Υπουργείο Οικονομικών και την ήττα της Ελληνικής Άνοιξης), εξασφάλισαν όχι μόνο ότι θα μετακυλιστεί με νέα μνημονιακά δάνεια αλλά και θα χρεωθεί σ’ εμένα – και βέβαια στον «ανόητο ελληνικό λαό» που μας ψήφισε!Δεν είναι εντυπωσιακό; Το μη βιώσιμο χρέος που εκείνοι συσσώρευσαν πριν από το 2015 αποφάσισαν και διέταξαν να χρεωθεί στην Ελληνική Άνοιξη, στην εξέγερση ενός λαού εναντίον του συγκεκριμένου μη βιώσιμου χρέους! Ο Γιόζεφ Γκέμπελς θα ήταν περήφανος που η τέχνη της θεμελίωσης μιας προπαγάνδας σε γιγαντιαία ψεύδη ζει και βασιλεύει.Εν κατακλείδιΤο 2015 υπήρχε τρόπος να αποδράσει η χώρα από τη φυλακή του χρέους παραμένοντας παράλληλα στο ευρώ: να φοβόταν η ηγεσία μας  το 3ο μνημόνιο περισσότερο απ’ ό,τι φοβόταν το Grexit!Η αυταπάτη της ηγεσίας του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ ότι η Ελληνική Άνοιξη ήταν καταδικασμένη στην ήττα, και ότι ροκάνισε πολύτιμο χρόνο, ενώ το 3ο μνημόνιο ήταν μονόδρομος, αποτελεί ίσως το  δεινότερο πλήγμα που έχει καταφερθεί τα τελευταία 50 χρόνια όχι μόνο στην Ελλάδα αλλά και στην υπόθεση της Αριστεράς διεθνώς.

The post 10 ΧΡΟΝΙΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ 2015 – Επεισόδιο 1ο: Ήταν προδιαγεγραμμένη η ήττα μετά την νίκη της 25 Ιανουαρίου; appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Rachel Reeves’ unbearable acquiescence to the City bankers – UNHERD

The curse of finance ministers whose country’s business model is broken is that they are powerless to transform the economy, yet too powerful not to take the blame. But when the economy is merely stagnating, not yet in free-fall, preventing the descent into a financial crisis should require no more than average competence. Sadly, the evidence so far suggests that Rachel Reeves cannot even meet this low bar.Seeking to combine the image of a radical reformer with the reputation of a safe pair of hands, Reeves began her litany of mixed messages before she moved into 11 Downing Street. While she acknowledged the “severe damage” inflicted by George Osborne’s austerity programme, she adopted his austerian language to liken Britain to a person who had “maxed out the credit card”. Then, once in the Treasury, she demonstrated how using such language leads inexorably to a contractionary fiscal programme. Turning John Maynard Keynes’ dictum “Anything we can actually do, we can afford” into its opposite (“If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it”), Reeves embarked on an austerian downward spiral.First came expenditure caps on caring for the elderly, which would save the measly amount of £1 billion annually. Having warmed up, she followed with the termination of winter-fuel payments for pensioners, shortly before one of recent history’s coldest winters. Along with cancellations of urgent hospital and railway works, these cuts saved another £5 billion, with a further £16 billion tax rises in the works. Then, in her autumn mini budget, Reeves broke her promise not to touch National Insurance Contributions by extracting an additional £25 billion from employers. Hoping to frame this final measure as pro-labour, her tactic fell terribly flat once workers realised they would be paying for most of it in the form of dampened wages.By that stage, the new Chancellor was caught in the same doom cycle that typified Osborne’s tenure: each austerian measure meant to rein in the deficit boosted the borrowing requirement, spooked debt markets, elevated interest payments, reduced its fiscal space and caused the Chancellor to seek more austerian measures which, in turn, deepened the economy’s stagnation. And so it would go on.Tory critics have taken Reeves to task for being too ready to talk Britain down. But they seem to have forgotten that her claim of inheriting a £22 billion black hole from the Tories was a faithful imitation of Osborne’s strategy to blame his austerity, in turn, on the “scorched earth” situation he had inherited from Labour. The Tories have also accused her of being insufficiently austerian, which is disingenuous: if deeper austerity were the right remedy, why was the doom loop under Osborne just as bad? If anything, deeper cuts in expenditure today would only worsen Reeves’s predicament.Obviously, the Tories are trying to exploit Reeves’s woes. But what is truly startling about her stewardship of the Treasury is both how faithfully she has stuck to Mr Osborne’s playbook, and how similarly the UK economy has reacted. And this despite the quite monumental difference in the circumstances the two Chancellors inherited as they took office. Soon after his appointment, Osborne received a windfall from the Bank of England — in total, £124 billion was transferred from the Bank of England to the Treasury between 2010 and 2020. In sharp contrast, Rachel Reeves will be sending to the Bank of England £34 billion of taxpayer money every year for the next four years! To see why we need to recall what happened after the financial collapse of 2008.From 2009 to 2022, in addition to the taxpayers’ bank bailouts and ultra-low interest rates, the Bank of England created £875 billion with which to buy government bonds from the bankers. The idea was to flush the banks with cash in the hope that they would then hand it out in loans to stressed households and firms during the Great Recession. In the process, the Bank of England made money from the interest rate difference — between the ultra-low official interest rates it was paying banks for the money they kept in their Bank of England accounts and the higher interest accrued by the government bonds. Hence the £124 billion windfall which the Bank of England transferred to the Treasury.However, the situation was reversed after 2022. With the pandemic disrupting supply chains and triggering inflation, the Bank of England raised interest rates tenfold so as to restrain credit and reduce the demand for goods and services, in the hope that prices would stop rising. At the same time, to restrict further the quantity of money in the economy, the Bank of England began selling the government bonds it had purchased back to the bankers thinking that, with every such sale, the money paid by the banker to the Bank of England for the bonds was removed from the monetary system.And there’s the rub: Bonds come with fixed interest rates during their lifetime. So, when the Bank of England official interest rates rise, pushing all rates higher across the economy, an older bond with a fixed lower interest rate becomes less attractive and its price falls. Having raised interest rates, the Bank of England had effectively pushed down the value of the older bonds it was selling off, thus inflicting large losses on itself. And it was not only on itself. It was also on the tax payer because, back in 2016, Philip Hammond, one of Reeves’ Tory predecessors (who was at the time receiving windfall monies from the Bank of England), had committed the Treasury to indemnify the Bank of England for any future losses. Reeves, unwilling to reverse Hammond’s commitment, is now paying the price.This is why every year for the next four years she will be putting aside the £25 billion she took out of the economy by raising National Insurance Contributions, adding that to the £5 billion she saved from cutting pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, throwing in also the £1 billion she cut from the social care for the elderly bill, and adding another £3 billion from some other source for good measure. Then, she will transfer that £34 billion bundle to the Bank of England to compensate it for the money it had passed on to the City’s bankers. Every year. For four years at least. All because of a flawed set of monetary rules in which interest accrues on the bankers’ reserves which they keep at their Bank of England accounts.Could a different set of monetary rules avoid this fiscal madness? Here are two steps the monetary authorities could have taken: First, the central bank could refrain from selling government bonds at knockdown prices — instead hold them to maturity. Second, don’t pay bankers the high official interest rate on every pound they choose to hoard at the central bank.Indeed, many leading central banks do exactly that: they hold bonds to maturity and pay the bankers the going interest rate only for part of their deposits, the rest at zero. This is precisely how the European Central Bank (which, by the way, no one can accuse me of being a lackey of) avoided major losses when deflation gave way to inflation. There are no good arguments for why the Bank of England should not follow the ECB’s example — except that the City bankers would not like it.And only a cowardly Chancellor would think this was a good enough reason to maintain a £34 billion subsidy for the banking sector every year. And not for any improved services but just for being around and ready to bank whatever the state is prepared to send their way. Is there a better example of such fiscal irresponsibility or, more accurately, madness?Some may ask whether Rachel Reeves is really to blame, especially given the supposed independence of the Bank of England. But this question is founded on a widespread albeit erroneous understanding of the Bank of England’s independence. It does indeed set interest rates independently of the government. And if they err by setting interest rates too high or too low, it is unfair to blame the Chancellor. But the issue here is not the level of interest rates. It is, rather, the mindless fire sale of government bonds; the high interest accrued to bankers’ money; and, crucially, the assumption that the taxpayer will have to indemnify the Bank of England for whatever losses it suffers as if it were any other private company or bank. All three issues are in the remit of Parliament and fall under the Chancellor’s responsibility to legislate for the common good. In short, they could be otherwise.Just look at Reeves’ predecessors. Philip Hammond promised to indemnify the Bank of England in case it lost money from its government bond purchases. Before him George Osborne and Alistair Darling legislated that the Bank of England could print money for the bankers but not for households, against the advice of the not-exactly-leftist International Monetary Fund. And last, but certainly not least, Rachel Reeves has decided not to legislate away the stealthy subsidy to the bankers, adopting instead their inane, self-evidently self-serving arguments and refusing to follow the more sensible ways of the ECB or of the Swiss authorities. Chancellors, in short, cannot hide their responsibility behind a distortion of the notion of central bank independence.Taking a broader perspective, ever since Margaret Thatcher vandalised Britain’s ailing heavy industry and replaced it with a vicious financial system that generated growth as long as society’s common wealth was liquidated, it was only a matter of time before a global financial crisis would bring Britain to its knees. Following the 2008 crash, overgenerous money printing for the bankers and austerity for everyone else trapped the UK into a low-wage, low-productivity, low-growth, low-take-home-pay, low-rent equilibrium. That is why, for a while now, Britain has felt like an advanced rentier society that has run out of rents.As the last election loomed, you had to be unjustifiably optimistic to expect Labour to fix Britain’s broken business model. Nothing in their Manifesto warranted such hopes. Nevertheless, it was not too much to expect minimal levels of competence and enough courage from a new Chancellor to rescind an annual handout of £34 billion to bankers already flash with taxpayer cash. Alas, it is now evident that, overpowered by an urge to be liked by the City, Blackrock, the Davos crowd, Reeves has fallen into a black hole largely of her own making.John Kenneth Galbraith once quipped that “[t]he process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled”. Today, it is hard not to be repelled by how Britain’s scarce fiscal resources are sacrificed on the altar of the Chancellor’s cravenness.

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What to watch out for in the unfolding Palestinian genocide – a video briefing on 9th Jan 2025

Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace in oblivion and disengagement. But, it is not only ethically wrong to surrender to despair – it is also factually wrong that nothing good can be expected. Things change every day and, yes, the seeds of hope are already planted on the blood soaked soil of the ancient land of Palestine. They may be only seeds, but that’s how new life is born.So, let’s take a look at the seeds of hope that are taking root underneath the rubble.1. Israel is not winning on the battlefieldGaza has been destroyed. Its population is on death row. And yet the smart people in the Israeli military know full well that the destruction they wreaked does not translate into a victory. Fifteen months after they re-invaded the open prison that has been the Gaza strip since 1948, they still cannot control more than a small portion of it at a time. Armed resistance, including the regular blowing up of Israel’s mighty tanks, is continuing. Israeli military officers also know that their political leaders’ stated aim, of eradicating Hamas, can never be demonstrably achieved, however many Hamas fighters they kill. As a former Israeli general put it to me: “Even if we kill most the Gazans before we declare victory, a single teenager raising the Hamas flag over a pile of rubble will prove that we failed.”Similarly in Lebanon. Yes, Israel has killed much of the Hezbollah leadership and, yes, the ceasefire it imposed on Hezbollah succeeded in stopping the Hezbollah missile launches in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance further south. However, the ceasefire was also forced upon Israel by its army’s inability to venture without massive losses by more than a few kilometres into Lebanese territory. And, lest we forget, it is simply not true that Hezbollah had to accept the ceasefire because its missile arsenal was destroyed: Israel signed the ceasefire hours after missiles hit Haifa, and indeed Tel Aviv.The past year, in other words, will be remembered as a cruel paradox: Israel destroyed Gaza and much of South Lebanon, mainly from the air, but failed abysmally to control the ground. The time is fast approaching when Israeli society will realise that the thousands of Israeli soldiers who died or were seriously injured were the victims of a leadership that, ultimately, placed the Israeli people’s interests very low in their own list of priorities. This is also confirmed by the readiness of Israel’s government to lie through its teeth about its own casualties on the battlefield: compare the low number of casualties officially admitted with the more than twenty thousand soldiers that Israel’s health authorities say have been admitted to veteran rehabilitation centres.2. Israel’s economy has entered a ‘spiral of collapse’Turning now to the medium and long term impact of the war on Israel’s economy (which is of great importance from the perspective of the apartheid state’s capacity to reproduce itself through war and devastation financially), it is instructive to read a letter signed by Israeli economists, including Dan Ben-David who explain how Israel’s economic miracle hinges on a hi-tech sector that numbers at most 300 thousand people (including doctors, scientists, academics etc.) His point? If only 10% of these people leave the country, say thirty thousand, Israel’s already hugely indebted economy will fade. In Ben-David’s even starker words,“We won’t become a third world country, we just won’t be anymore. Only 0.6% of the population are doctors, but who trains them? The senior staff in research universities are 0.1% of the people. High-Tech workers are 6% of the population. Altogether it’s 300,000 people. It’s enough that a critical mass of this group chooses not to be here tomorrow morning, and the State of Israel leaves the developed world.”Are they leaving? You bet they are – leaving behind them more influential, more dominant than ever before the low-productivity bigots who are driving the fascist settler movement. And, the more dominant these low-productivity bigots are in government and in society, the greater the exodus of the high-tech, secular more liberally minded Israelis. This is the definition of a spiral of collapse.Israel has lost in the court of public opinion – the illusion of a liberal democratic state is goneMeanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians, and in particular the manner in which so many Israeli soldiers and politicians celebrate it in videos, speeches and posts, has claimed what is left of the illusion of Israel as a European liberal democracy embedded in a hostile Middle East. That illusion has been a central underpinning of the propaganda that helped Israeli lobbyists succeed in Washington and Europe. Now it is gone. It has drowned in the sea of flesh and blood the Israeli military has strewn all over Gaza – and the trail of destruction, hatred and viciousness that the settlers have unleashed in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Once Israel’s cleverly constructed reputation was gone, sullied, it cannot be reclaimed. And that is good news in the sense that the first step toward a just peace is the ethical fall from grace of the aggressor.The situation in the Occupied TerritoriesTurning now to the situation in the West Bank, it is heart-wrenching to watch the non-stop violence against the Palestinians living under brutal apartheid conditions there. The violence against them comes from three quarters: From the Israeli military. From Israeli settlers. And, most tragically, from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) own security forces who are, in the midst of the genocide of their people by the apartheid state, are cooperating fully with the security forces of that apartheid state. Why the army is doing this, we know. Why the settlers are doing it, we also know. But why is the leadership of the PA doing it?This is not the first time the PA has cooperated fully with the Israeli occupiers who steadfastly reject any prospect of a Palestinian state – the stated objective of the PA. Sure enough, the PA’s leadership have been doing this for years. But, now, in the face of the fully-fledged genocidal campaign by Israel, the PA’s excuses are becoming transparent. The unelected, unrepresentative, patently corrupt leadership of the PA is behaving as if to impress Netanyahu and Trump that they can do their dirty work for them, with a veneer of legitimacy courtesy of being Palestinians themselves. That they have a role to play. It is a pathetic plea to the genocidal US-Israeli establishment to give them a job to do against the Palestinian Resistance now that the Palestinian people has seen through them. Nothing else explains why they are turning even against Fatah members who continue to resist in Jenin and elsewhere.This is the saddest, most depressing, aspect of the Palestinian tragedy. So I shall not dwell on it further except to reiterate the urgent need for the election of a representative and thus legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people. No peace can be imagined, let alone negotiated, otherwise. I hope and trust that the Palestinians will find a way to speak with one non-sectarian voice. Nothing short of succeeding in this will curb the genocide they face. As for the rest of us, we must stand by to help give this voice, their voice, a chance to be heard.SummaryTo sum up, days before Donald Trump enters the White House – a man who has never not liked any war crime aimed at eradicating the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinians as a people native to Palestine – we are at a crossroads. Mega Death and uber destruction on the ground wreaked by a US-armed and EU-supported Israel. A spiral of collapse within Israel’s social economy. Arab countries split between complicit regimes and enraged citizens. A Global South that is becoming increasingly powerful and intolerant of the Western-Israeli self-awarded right ethnically to cleanse the non-Jewish native population. And a Western public opinion that can no longer pretend to not know. What is the upshot of these ingredients?If I were to issue an educated guess, it would be this: Things will get even worse for the Palestinians in the short run. But, in the longer run, the possibility of liberation, of a just peace for both Palestinians, who refuse to go gently into the good night, and for Israelis, who understand the trap into which Netanyahu has ensnared them, seems stronger than it has been for thirty years.

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Musk, Trump and the Broligarchs’ novel hyper-weapon – Le Monde 4-1-2025, full original English version

How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? By merely posing his dazzling question in 1952, Aneurin Bevan captured liberal democracy’s greatest paradox. Today, in the era of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and their Big Tech brethren, Bevan’s time-honoured paradox has only grown preposterously.Observing the emergent broligarchy’s elaborate conspiracy to extract as much wealth and power as they can from Donald Trump’s second coming, it is justifiable to feel sick in the stomach. Men of tremendous wealth, with a history of treating the mothers of their children sadistically, of endorsing books  justifying torture and the elimination of human rights, of making zillions from government and military procurement while tirelessly working toward disbanding government programs that offer a sliver of protection to the poor, have decamped at Mar-a-Lago kissing Donald Trump’s ring and preparing for direct government power.From their perspective, the deal they cut with Donald Trump is an incredible bargain with a rate of return that no conventional business can hope to emulate. For a few hundred million dollars that they invested in Trump’s re-election, within minutes of his victory they amassed extra wealth to the tune of hundreds of billions. To be precise, the value of Thiel’s Palantir shot up by 23% while Musk’s Tesla saw its stock rise by 40% to a capitalisation level higher than most of the rest of the global car industry combined.For a few crumbs off their table, that they ploughed into the Trump campaign, the Big Tech brotherhood are in the process of receiving three amazing gifts: Gargantuan government contracts. A tremendous goldrush following the elimination of regulations that will allow them a gloves-off onslaught against the public’s concerns over their ways and wares (e.g., autonomous vehicles, rogue AI bots and drones, massive increases in electricity consumption). And, lastly, immense state-sanctioned bargaining power in their dealings with workers, suppliers, competitors and the rest of us.And then there are, of course, the non-trivial concerns about their broader ambitions. Thiel’s favourite book is, reportedly, The Sovereign Individual. Its authors, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, literally and without the slightest hint of irony liken the broligarchs to the Olympian gods before going on to argue that it is only right and proper that they dominate the world. “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies”, they proclaim. As for Thiel himself, his explanation of why he likes this shoddy book so much is that it offers an “accurate” prediction of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” What Thiel neglected to say, of course, is that his dream is not one in which exorbitant power has withered but, rather, that it is a dream in which men like him monopolise it. At least he is honest enough to acknowledge that his version of freedom is incompatible with democracy.But is any of this truly novel? However reprehensible the broligarchs’ practices and convictions might be, is it not possible that we are surrendering to a recollection of the past that is so recklessly optimistic that, by contrast, the present looks like a deterioration, when it is nothing but a recapitulation of our past? After George W. Bush violated the Geneva Convention, even the US constitution, to legalise endless torture in Guantanamo Bay, American friends lamented the loss of America’s innocence. I could not agree with them. Was America’s innocence not lost during the Civil War? The Spanish-American War? The Prohibition? Hiroshima? McCarthyism? Vietnam? The assassination of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? The Oklahoma bombings? Surely, an innocence so casually lost can be fairly easily recovered! Are we not doing the same now, appearing astounded that a bunch of oligarchs are going through the same revolving doors connecting Big Business and government?In many ways, we have seen it all before. John D. Rockefeller, one of America’s original robber barons, headed a dynasty that makes Musk’s look amateurish, including a media mogul son and a grandson who would become Vice President. Thomas Eddison had an elephant executed in public, electrocuting him with George Westinghouse’s alternating current, to sway government in favour of his direct currency electricity generation system. Henry Ford bought a newspaper to strong-arm mayors and city councils into ripping streetcars off city streets to make way for Ford cars and buses.Back then, Big Business did not enjoy the power of the internet but they had other ways of shaping our political, philosophical and cultural milieu. Have we forgotten how the oligarchs, e.g., the Koch brothers, spent decades funding the Atlas Network and the Mont Pellerin Society to turn neoliberalism into a universal creed that disguises a cruel class war against the majority as a campaign for freedom? Or how Goldman Sachs supplied Bill Clinton’s administration with its own CEO to be the Treasury Secretary that eliminated all the regulations which impeded Wall Street’s worst excesses?That’s all true. However, there is a superpower, a hyper-weapon, that the broligarchy possess today that their Big Business and Wall Street predecessors did not. It is a form of capital that never existed until recently: cloud capital which, of course, does not live up in the clouds but down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest.Unlike traditional capital, from steam-engines to modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce commodities. Instead, it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. These produced means of behavioural modification train us to train them to determine what we want. And, once we want it, the same machines sell it to us, directly, bypassing markets. In this light, cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, what it made us want. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us to sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour: As we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants and photos, we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs while, in the factories and the warehouses, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us are deployed – usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists – to make them work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time.Unsurprisingly, the owners of this cloud capital, the cloudalist broligarchy, enjoy a hitherto undreamt power to extract: untold quantities of free labour from almost everyone in addition to mind-numbing cloud rents from vassal capitalists and, of course, surplus value from proletarians. Especially now that they have purchased a seat at Trump’s presidential table, their power is one that a John D. Rockefeller, a Henry Ford, even the still active Rupert Murdoch, would have given an arm and a leg to have.Returning to Bevan’s brilliant question, today it is easier to see how wealth persuades poverty to give up its freedom and, instead, to serve the broligarchs-in-charge: via their cloud capital that has a capacity, unlike any hitherto form of capital or government department, to shape our behaviour automatically and directly. Nothing short of a revolution can restore any hope of personal agency, let alone of democracy.

For the Le Monde site, where this article was originally published, please click here.

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Star Trek: A humanist communist manifesto for our times – UNHERD

On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC aired a Star Trek episode featuring a concept that clashed mercilessly with what had just happened in Vietnam: the Prime Directive – a general ban on its Starship captains from using superior technology (military or otherwise) to interfere with any community, people or sentient species, even if non-interference might cost them their own lives.Turning such a radically anti-imperialist ideology into the cardinal rule of the fictional United Federation of Planets, which American audiences identified as the logical extension of the United States of America, it would have been unsurprising if President Lyndon B. Johnson, or the Pentagon, had demanded Star Trek’s immediate cancellation. Happily, it didn’t. And so it was that, over the 939 episodes (across 12 different series) that followed, Star Trek’s Primary Directive allowed writers and directors to explore its political and philosophical repercussions, including ethical conflicts that led to its frequent violation though never its annulment.It also allowed for something else: the inference that this futurist Federation could never have matured enough to adopt the anti-imperialist Prime Directive before a humanist version of communism had been established on Earth!Star Trek’s libertarian communism versus authoritarian collectivismThat Star Trek depicts a communist society, without of course calling it that, is crystal clear. In a 1988 episode the USS Enterprise comes across a rusting old Earth vessel carrying cryogenic crypts containing human plutocrats who had paid large sums to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that aliens might find and cure them of whatever disease was killing them in 1988. After the crew of the Enterprise thawed and cured them, one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, a businessman, demands to contact his bankers and law firm back on Earth. Captain Jean-Luc Picard is left with no option but to break the news to him that, in the intervening three centuries, much has changed.Picard: People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We have eliminated hunger, want and the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.Offenhouse: You’ve got it all wrong. It has never been about possessions. It’s about power.Picard: Power to do what?Offenhouse: To control your life, your destiny.Picard: That kind of control is an illusion.Offenhouse: Really, I am here, aren’t I?Offenhouse’s allusion to the penchant for accumulation that underpins the will to power points to the reason why the Prime Directive is incompatible with the spirit of capitalism: As long as accumulation, fuelling the expansion of markets, is our society’s motivating force and ideology, imperialism is inevitable. To escape it, humanity must first eliminate scarcity of material goods – an elimination that, in The United Federation of Planets, was achieved on the back of the invention and widespread deployment of replicators: machines that convert plentiful green energy into any form of matter one desires, from food to gadgets to spaceships.This is not exactly a novel idea. In 350BC Aristotle had predicted that “…if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, “of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods;” if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”An avid Aristotelian himself, Karl Marx based his vision of a freedom-enhancing communist society, in which both the state and the market have withered, on machines like Star Trek’s replicators that liberate us from non-creative, soul-crushing labour. In one of his early writings, he imagines what will follow the invention of such machines:“In a communist society, where no one is confined to a single sphere of activity, but can excel in any field he wishes, society regulates total production, and thus I can do this today and that tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, look after cows in the evening, practise in theatre criticism after dinner – without having to be a hunter, fisherman, cowherd or theatre critic.” [The German Ideology, 1845]Marx’s words resonate when we meet Captain Benjamin Sisko’s father who, in the 24th Century, runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans only because he loves the look of appreciation in the face of neighbours who love his cooking, for free of course since money is now obsolete. They also resonate with Picard’s answer to Offenhouse who, upon hearing that he was to be sent back to an essentially communist Earth, asks glumly: “What will happen to me? There is no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How do I live? What is the challenge?” “The challenge Mr Offenhouse” replies Picard encouragingly, “is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself. Enjoy it!” Marx would have, I am in no doubt, applauded energetically.Joy is not a word that naturally rhymes with communism, at least the Soviet variety. But pleasure is central to Star Trek‘s version of communism, which rejects the notion that escaping the logic of accumulation requires individuals to submit to a collective. Star Trek‘s writers make this point brilliantly by contrasting the Federation, made up of creative individuals who are free to choose their projects and partners, with the Borg – a dystopian cyborg collective made up of drones linked together in a beehive-like social order that expands by assimilating every species it encounters.Eschewing lazy critiques of collectivism, Star Trek rejects it while also acknowledging its lure. When Captain Catherine Janeway rescues a Borg drone (Seven-of-Nine) from the Borg Collective, we are treated to her traumatic reintroduction to humanity. As she is weaned off the Collective, she experiences debilitating withdrawal symptoms, missing desperately the Collective’s voice in her head – a reminder of how authoritarianism can be dangerously attractive to the lonely. But also of how important it is to pay the price of personhood, even at the risk of loneliness which only friendship and creative work can counter.Star Trek’s Historical Materialist Theory of ChangeFor any manifesto to have practical utility, it must offer a theory of change, not just a vision of a splendid future. Star Trek does not shirk from this responsibility. While respecting the Prime Directive, the Federation keenly watches the evolution of primitive species around the galaxy for clues into humanity’s own history. Moreover, it offers a coherent theory of social evolution founded on solid historical materialist tenets.Consider, for example, the episode where the USS Voyager is locked in the gravitational field of a strange planet on whose surface time moves much faster than within the orbiting spaceship. Soon Captain Janeway and her officers realise that during each one of their minutes the backward humanoids on the planet experience 58 sunrises. Thus, the crew enjoy a bird’s eye view of that society’s evolution, as if observing it unfold on fast-forward.What they see is a rendition of humanity’s history – how technological innovations clash with superstitions and antiquated exploitative social relations bringing about revolutions, progress, but also wars and environmental disasters. At times, it seems as if the species under observation, like humanity, might destroy themselves. But, in a happy ending they too manage to overcome their imperialisms and their accumulative urges to press new technologies into the service of their common good – indeed, even to liberate Voyager, setting it free and on its way back home.Another narrative strategy for outlining how a luxurious, freedom-expanding communism arose by the 24th Century was to use time travel to go back to our near future. It turns out that the 21st Century was pretty brutish. In episodes screened in 1995 we learn, for example, about the Bell Riots of September 2024 which put paid to the system of apartheid in San Francisco where the city’s wretched, poor and sick had been hitherto walled off in a ghetto. That rebellion, along with a devastating World War 3, put humanity on course to eliminate nationalism, capitalism and, lastly, expansionism.Insights from the Federation’s edgesPerhaps the most interesting insights arrive when the screenwriters take us to the edge of the Federation where its explorers encounter, and often wage war against, other civilisations that are either at a more primitive stage of development or have created technologically advanced tyrannies.There, on the margin, alien species afford us opportunities for introspection, like the Bajorans who have just come out of the brutal occupation by the Cardassians – a supremacist species that ran Bajor like a penal colony complete with concentration camps and genocidal drives. In an episode which could easily be staged on the theatrical stage as a one-act play a Bajoran freedom fighter identifies a former Cardassian concentration camp monster and works tirelessly to bring him in front of a Federation-Bajoran War Crimes tribunal. With a soul-wrenching plot twist the script delivers an unexpected catharsis – a reminder that good science fiction is not so much about the future but rather an extraordinary tool for revisiting our past. Indeed, I can think of no other TV program which, within forty minutes, can better educate the young to the horrors of the Holocaust.Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station (DS9) where different species mingle to trade; a meeting point between the communist, post-money and post-waged labour Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station there is a sleazy bar ran by Quark, a Ferengi, who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until, that is, his brother, who also works for him, has had enough: He calls upon his fellow workers to form a union and strike for their basic rights. When his employer-brother tries to bribe him, he picks up a tablet and reads slowly from its screen something he has downloaded: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains!”For Quark, like for every other Ferengi, neoliberalism is more than an ideology or even a secular religion – it is also a culture, a way of being. Pitching their critique of neoliberalism at its most humourful, Star Trek’s writers portray the Ferengi as humanoids incapable of differentiating themselves from Homo Economicus. Judging from the lengths the scriptwriters went to compile all 285 of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Holy Book, they must have had enormous fun. Here is a sample: “Profit is its own reward” (41). “Feed your greed, but not enough to choke it” (43). “Expand or die” (45). “Exploitation divided by time equals profit” (54). “Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them” (111). “A wealthy man can afford everything except a conscience” (261). “War is good for business” (34). But, “Peace is good for business too” (35).To balance off the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny – the bureaucratic centralist version – Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet along with the USS Voyager’s abducted doctor who is forced to work in a hospital where, to his horror, he discovers that medical care is dished out strictly in proportion to the patient’s social worthiness index – a number compiled by a centrally-controlled computer whose coding is primed to reflect the bureaucracy’s valuation of each citizen’s worth.Environmental negative externalities also make an appearance near the borderlands beyond which the Federation’s jurisdiction ends. Two alien scientists, that had been lampooned as cranks, succeed in proving that Federation and non-Federation spaceships travelling at warp speed (i.e., faster than the speed of light) inflict serious damage on the fabric of the surrounding time-space continuum. When Captain Picard confirms the validity of their science, he strives to convince Starfleet that the time has come to reduce the damage by slowing down, or even immobilising, their spaceships. Echoing contemporary arguments against net zero legislation in Western countries (e.g., “If the Global South continue to burn coal, why should the West inflict upon itself massive costs for cutting down?”), the Federation’s government is reluctant to act unilaterally, unless non-Federation civilisations act too.AI and what it means to be humanIn truly Hegelian style, Star Trek interrogates our humanity by planting alien officers inside Federation spaceships so as to force humans to reflect in the eyes of beings with a philosophy and outlook that is sharply different to theirs (e.g., Vulcans, like Spok, Tuvok and T’Pol, who have a well-honed capacity to repress all emotion). However, the one face-off that is most pertinent to our own times, today, is what follows when Lt Cmdr Data is introduced on the bridge of USS Enterprise.Data is a supersmart android with no capacity to feel. Nevertheless, he is driven by a massive urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data studies carefully not only our behaviour but also our art, music, drama, literature. As a result, not only does he become a much appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from our perspective, a dramatis persona that, in the age of large language models and Chat-GPT bots, serves our thinking about AI well.Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights come to the fore. Does he have any? When a request comes from a Federation laboratory for Data to submit himself to it, for the purposes of being disassembled with a view to replicating him so that Starfleet can equip every starship with a Data, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and, thus, none of ‘him’ will be lost, Data raises a subtle objection that could have come straight from Noam Chomsky’s rejection of vulgar materialism: “There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure”, he tells the laboratory’s chief. When the latter shrugs his shoulders and suggests that, no matter what, Data has no choice but to obey, Captain Picard demands that the matter of whether Data has the right to refuse his dismantling be heard by a court – offering to be Data’s advocate.During the ensuing trial, the judge rules that the question before the court is whether Data is property or whether he has agency – or a soul, as she puts it more dramatically. The laboratory’s advocate proceeds to demonstrate that Data is a machine made of mechanical parts and sophisticated software which allows ‘it’ only to simulate sentience. As for ‘its’ refusal to submit, he rhetorically asks the judge: ““Would you permit the computer of your Starship to refuse a reset?” Picard realises that he is hitting a brick wall.During a recess, Picard has an epiphany of how to win the case, on Data’s behalf, after a chat with the ship’s bartender, a black woman played by Whoopi Goldberg. He decides to focus on Starfleet’s intention to replicate Data so as to manufacture an army of Datas. “Once we create thousands of Datas”, he asks the court, “is there a point when they become a race? And won’t we be judged by how we treat that race? Now tell me: What is Data? What is he?” “A machine” replies his adversary, to which Picard responds with his final pitch to the judge:“Your Honour, this courtroom is a crucible where we burn away irrelevances in order to be left with pure product, the truth, for all time. Sooner or later, this laboratory, or some other, will succeed in replicating Lt Cmdr Data. The decision you reach here today will determine how we regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of people we are. It will significantly redefine the boundaries of liberty and freedom, expanding it for some, savagely curtailing it for others. Are you prepared to condemn him, and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery?”Lastly, he throws a piercing look at the judge before concluding: “Starfleet was founded to discover new life.” Pointing at Data, he adds: “Well, there it is. Waiting.”Data’s trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android Commander is not sentient – and, thus, that Data has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism, acknowledging that AI capable of passing the Turing test and simulate sentient beings (as Chat-GPT does already) is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion that it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness – like Data (or, in another episode, the nanites who also evolved into sentience).More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and techno-phobia. For example, the Federation regulates genetic engineering heavily, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities, lest such technology fashions a supremacist sub-race (something that did happen in the 22nd Century triggering the eugenics wars). On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire (as it did in an episode narrating the evolution of a righteous rebellion by holographic AI beings into a dangerous fundamentalist religious sect), the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life – with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.Conclusion: The answer lies in politics, not technologyThe United Federation of Planets is no utopia. The enemy within, xenophobia, is there, dormant and ready to sully the Federation’s humanism; ready even to rescind the Prime Directive. When the crew of the USS Enterprise return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans attacks the ship’s Denobulan doctor in what was a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell hold the rest of humanity at ransom until all aliens leave Earth. And it is not just populist speciesist extremists that the Federation must reckon with: It is also its own secret services, outfits like Section 31 who pose a serious threat to its libertarian communism. And yet, as a defiant injection of hope, the Federation’s humanist communist values hold.The question is: Despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost one thousand episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through the maze of AI technologies, mass xenophobia, the New Cold War, the climate emergency etc.? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s left is that we need to avoid both a conservative techno-phobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ error of focusing on the technology and failing to appreciate that it all boils down to property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared dream that, by the end of the 20th Century, technological progress would have eradicated scarcity, poverty and exploitation. In The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he imagines a world where mankind’s ‘economic problem’ has been solved; that:“For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”The reason history disproved Keynes was not that humanity failed to invent the necessary technologies but, rather, because the property rights over the machines became ridiculously concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Is it any wonder that neither science nor compound interest delivered us from scarcity, poverty, exploitation and war? Is it any wonder that, instead of Keynes’ happy commonwealth, humanity had edged closer to an early Star Trek episode entitled The Cloud Minders, who live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines? (Nb. This episode inspired me to refer, in my Technofeudalism, to the Big Tech brotherhood as the cloudalists.)Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-fetishists. Cloud capital and AI is a necessary but insufficient condition for our liberation. To make it sufficient, it will take a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons. At the same time, as Star Trek poignantly shows, our liberation depends on not falling into the other trap of authoritarian collectivism.Today’s moribund left could do far worse than to take its cue from Star Trek‘s bold embrace of a humanist anti-authoritarian communism.

A shortened version of this article was published by UNHERD

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Trump, the Dollar and China: What to watch for in 2025

Trump wants to boost exports, bring back American jobs from overseas and reduce the trade deficit. To achieve this he needs a weaker dollar. Trump also wants a strong dollar and will not brook any challenges to its near monopoly of international payments. Can he possibly have both?Trump’s Problem No.1: His announced tariffs will most likely boost the dollar as a result of increased uncertainty globally. Even if he slaps large tariffs on imports, the increase in the dollar’s value will eliminate the downward pressures on imports and the US trade deficit.Trump’s Problem No.2: His announced large tax cuts for the rich will boost the influx of foreign capital into the US, further boosting the dollar and the gap between domestic savings & investment, which is the root cause of the US trade deficit.Trump’s Problem No. 3: The near monopoly of the US dollar over international transactions is what ensures the paradox that, whenever things go bad in the US economy, the dollar rises. If Trump were serious about the US trade deficit, and his stated objective of wanting to push the dollar down to make US exports more attractive, he should want to end the dollar’s global dominance. But that would spell the end of the United States as a global hegemon – something Trump does not want to see happen on his watch.Perhaps what might work for Trump would be something similar to what Ronald Reagan did to Japan in the so-called 1985 Plaza Accords: he gave them the ultimatum “appreciate your currency massively or face massive tariffs on your exports”. Can Trump do the same to China? China is no Japan – it will not roll over that easily.Talking of China, Beijing also faces a great dilemma in 2025 and beyond:To stay put and play for time until the US internal contradictions play out?Or to turn the BRICS into a Bretton-Woods-like system, with the yuan at its heart?Beijing has not made up its mind.In the next year, or years, we shall know the answers. Till then, be well.

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