Another Now Quotes

“And yet it bewildered him that people truly believed capitalism to be about making things or providing services at a profit. He found it extraordinary how most people disliked speculators but thought of them as peripheral, as harmless bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. They fail to recognize the very opposite is true, […] that enterprise long ago became a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. That, in reality, workers, inventors and managers resemble driftwood buffeted hither and thither on a manic torrent of runaway finance.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“What does it mean to be a proletarian, really? [...] It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think, while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value to exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I’ve seen it happen,’ he said. ‘But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity’s destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans. And these brilliant minds have been used to cajole governments into accepting their raids on the planet’s resources by creating markets for them: markets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants – phoney markets controlled by their employers! Unlike the East India Company, the Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“My dear Eva,’ Iris replied, ‘universities are not about imparting skills. They are about producing flexible minions dying to do as they are told. You are there to manufacture young people willing – desperate – to be moulded to their future bosses’ priorities. And the first step is to get them to swallow without question your faith that markets are as natural as gravity and profit the only worthy aspiration.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The moment American bankers stop lending dollars to Argentina, the country is unable to refinance its mountain of dollar debt. Again, Greece is similar. Even though it has the same currency as Germany, the euro, the chronic Greek trade deficit with Germany translates into a constant flow of loaned euros from Germany to Greece so that the Greeks can keep buying more and more German goods. The slightest interruption in the flow of new loans from the surplus country to the deficit country causes the whole house of cards to collapse. This is when the IMF steps in. Its personnel fly into Buenos Aires or Athens, take black limousines to the finance minister’s office and state their terms: we shall lend you the missing dollars or euros on condition that you impoverish your people and sell the family silver to our mates, the oligarchs of this country and the world. Or words to that effect. That’s when TV screens fill with images of angry, and often hungry, demonstrators in Buenos Aires or Athens. Time and again history has shown that the periodic economic recessions that result from trade imbalances poison the deficit country’s democracy, incite contempt for its people in the surplus country, which then prompts xenophobia in the deficit country. Simply put, sustained trade deficits – and surpluses, their mirror image – never end well.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The real force that pushed history to breakneck velocity […] was not the share market. Share markets were simply not liquid enough to bankroll Edison-sized ambitions. At the turn of the 20th century […] neither the banks nor the share markets could raise the kind of money needed to build all those power stations, grids, factories and distribution networks. To get those vast projects off the ground, what was required was an equivalently-sized network of credit. Hand-in-hand, shareholding and technology led to the creation of shareholder-owned mega banks, willing to lend to the new mega firms by generating a new kind of mega debt. This took the form of vast overdraft facilities for the Thomas Edisons and the Henry Fords of the world. Of course, the money they were lent did not actually exist… yet. Rather, it was as if they were borrowing the future profits of their mega firms in order to fund those mega firms’ construction.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“That a system evolved in a given environment only proves it’s best at replicating itself in that environment. […] That doesn’t make it a system that we should want to live in, nor, more importantly, is it any indication of its ability to survive over the longer term. Environments change, sometimes rapidly, sometimes because of the system’s own ill-effects. Out-competing other systems rather than living harmoniously with them can eventually be self-destructive. Viruses are a good case and point. [...] The question is not whether share-trading and capitalism have out-competed other systems up until now, but whether their effects are consistent with their hosts’ survival.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The right to issue unlimited quantities of anonymously tradable shares, along with the institution of a liquid market for them, created something new: corporations with power so immense, it dwarfed that of their countries of origin, and could be deployed in faraway places assiduously to exploit people and resources. Shareholding and well-governed share markets fired up history, separating ownership from the rest of the East India Company’s activities unleashed a fluid, irresistible force. Unchecked, the East India Company grew more powerful than the British state, answerable only to its shareholders. At home, its bureaucracy corrupted and largely controlled Her majesty’s government. Abroad, its 200,000-strong private army oversaw the destruction of well-functioning economies in Asia and a number of Pacific islands and ensured the systematic exploitation of their peoples.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The East India Company was no apparition though; it was the template for many subsequent corporations […] Liberals betray themselves […] the moment they turn a blind eye to this kind of hyper-concentrated power. […] This is why trading in apples does not come even close to trading in shares. Large quantities may produce, at worse, lots of bad cider, but large amounts of money invested in liquid shares can release demonic forces that no market or state can control.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy […] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighborhood butchers, bakers and brewers, so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks, the Amazons, which know no neighbors, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments [the other book by Adam Smith] and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“What does it mean to be a proletarian, really?’ Costa continued, without waiting for a reply. ‘Let me tell you. From bitter experience. It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value into exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Scores of Mexicans gathered in the shadow of the US—Mexican border wall, weighing up the risk of scaling the barbed wire, while trucks laden with car parts, computers and beer passed freely into US soil. Africans drowned in their thousands in the Mediterranean as they attempted to follow the vegetables their continent exported to Europe. In the name of refashioning the world as a borderless global village, globalization was building new fences and reinforcing older ones everywhere.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“BEWARE THE POWER TO CREATE MONEY FOR IT DOES TO ETHICS THAT WHICH WATER DOES TO SALT”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more it's captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“All capitalism proved itself capable of after 2020 — just as after 2008 — was a fascinating reversal of natural selection: the larger an institution's failure and the steeper it's financial losses, the greater it's capacity to appropriate society's surplus bailouts.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Liberalism's fatal hypocrisy,' said Iris, 'was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers and brewers, so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders, we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all values that liberals like you, Eva, claim to cherish.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“As share prices rise, the money men ratchet up immense profits, leaving bankers with a juicy cut. And when the bubble bursts, the bankers dial the number of their favorite politician, whose campaign they featherbedded, and, before anyone notices, their losses are transferred to the taxpayer — many of whom the banks evict from their homes after foreclosing on their mortgages.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“the Other Now was brimming with features that any liberal would find hard to resist: an absence of income and sales taxes; the freedom of workers to move from company to company while taking their personal capital with them; the curtailment of large companies’ market power; universal freedom from poverty, but also from a welfare state demanding that benefit-recipients surrender their dignity at the door of some social security office; a payments system that was free, efficient and which did not empower the few to print money at the expense of the many; a permanent auction for commercial land that exploited market forces to the full in the interests of social housing; an international monetary system that stabilized trade and the flow of money across borders; a welcoming attitude to migrants based on empowering local communities and helping them absorb newcomers.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“When we reconfigure societies to put exchange at their centre, Thomas, we violate our nature. Humans thrived by hunting together, cooking communally, making music and telling stories around a blazing fire at night. Sure, the societies that replaced these communal practices with market exchanges unleashed great powers, allowing them to overwhelm others that did not. But there was a price to pay. Market exchange dissolves what makes us human. It is why our souls feel sick. By allowing exchange value to triumph over doing things together for their own sake – for the sheer hell of it – we end up crying ourselves to sleep at night. It’s what depresses us and enriches the self-help gurus and big pharma.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“In direct contradiction of the myth promoted by capitalists and rentiers that wealth is produced by individuals, only to be collectivized by the state through taxation, the reality, Iris argued, is that wealth, like language, can only be produced collectively. Only then is it privatized by those with the power to do so.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“If we are to carry around a number,’ Costa acknowledged, ‘it might as well convey our socialworthiness, not our creditworthiness. A number that is produced transparently, collectively and by randomly chosen fellow citizens – not by the bankers’ handmaidens.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Science fiction is the archaeology of the future, a leftist philosopher once said. It is now on the verge of offering the best documentary of our present.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“(...) by the time she had combed them for a third time, the absurd idea was firmly planted in her mind: a proper market revival requires the end of capitalism.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“As a physics major, before getting her hands dirty in New York, she had assumed that money is printed by a nation’s central bank, from where it is distributed to commercial banks. But while this is indeed how cash is created, cash accounts for only 3 per cent of all money. What of the remaining 97 per cent? Surprise and then foreboding were the reactions of every student to whom she had explained how the missing 97 per cent was created – and by whom: not by central banks but by commercial and investment bankers. At this point, her students would ask, ‘Without access to state-sanctioned printing presses, how do private bankers create money?’ ‘Simple,’ she would reply. ‘Every time a banker approves a loan of, say, one million dollars for Jack, a typical business customer, the banker just types 1,000,000 on Jack’s bank statement. However incredible it may seem, that’s all it takes. Bankers create money by granting loans by typing in some numbers!’ The crucial thing, she would explain, is that these numbers are typed into a shared database – or ledger – to which only the bankers have access. When their customers transfer this ‘money’ between them – when Jack transfers numbers from his account to the account of a supplier, say Jill, or of a builder, say Bob, or of a worker, say Kate, and when in turn, Jill, Bob and Kate transfer their numbers on, in the same way, to others to whom they owe money – these numbers simply migrate from one cell in the database to another. For this system to be sustainable, and not merely a pyramid scheme, there is a single condition: that, somewhere down the line, the one million dollars which some banker typed into existence on Jack’s behalf results in new goods and services whose total market value exceeds one million dollars. It is from this surplus that the banker takes his interest and Jack his profit. This is what Iris was referring to as a fool’s wager when she said that bankers plundered value from the future, or when Costa had once claimed that capitalism, like science fiction, trades in future assets using fictitious currency. It is in their nature that the wealthier bankers become by creating money, the more money they tend to create. The danger of such a system, of course, is that the banks end up typing into existence sums of money vastly larger than the market value of the goods and services created as a result of Jack, Jill, Bob and Kate’s endeavours. At the point when the bankers have collectively created money sums greater than the resulting values, the present can no longer repay the future for the money it borrowed from it. The moment Jack, Jill, Bob and Kate get a whiff of this, they may demand their bank balances in cash, sensing that the total value on the bankers’ database is lower than the actual value of their customers’ assets. ‘At that point, a bank run sets in,’ Eva would tell her students, ‘and that’s when the system comes crashing down.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Inconvenient laws are meant to be broken,’ said Thomas. ‘You weren’t caught, so you did the right thing.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“A contemporary commentator drew an analogy between the East India Company’s ownership structure and the River Thames’ splendid flux, which leaves it ‘still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance.’ Once the property rights over a firm become detached from the people that set it up and work in it, it becomes a corpus in flux. It acquires a liquid life of its own, it can grow out of any human proportion. Indeed, like a river, it becomes potentially immortal.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present