Though, sadly, it is now too late to explain to his father in person, Varoufakis’s new book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism answers the question in the form of an extended reflection addressed to his father.
Ahead of Greece’s general election on Sunday, the business press claims that the country is bouncing back from its years of austerity. Yanis Varoufakis tells Jacobin why, for ordinary Greeks, the situation is only getting worse.
Progressive economist Yanis Varoufakis recently gave a talk in Geneva on ways to improve the global economy in the face of growing crises. Dr Jerca Legan reports.
Creating a new international economic order “sounds like an impossible dream,” said the former Greek finance minister, but “not more impossible than the principle of one person, one vote, or of the end of the divine right of kings once sounded.”
Since capitalism’s dawn, power stemmed from owning capital goods; steam engines, Bessemer furnaces, industrial robots, and so on. Today, it is cloud-based capital, or cloud capital in short, that grants its owners hitherto unimaginable powers.
Varoufakis says a history of market liberalization and reliance on cheap Russian gas has left the continent scrambling, in turn pushing up energy costs in the Global South as richer European countries buy up other sources of energy. “Yet again, Europe is exporting misery to the rest of the world,” says Varoufakis, a member of the Greek Parliament and former finance minister. His latest piece for Project Syndicate is “Time to Blow Up Electricity Markets.”
Today’s German elections mark the effective end of Angela Merkel’s 16-year rule. Yanis Varoufakis ( Australian) writes for Jacobin about how she became Europe’s most dominant peacetime leader — at the expense of Europe itself.
Hoping to show Europeans they have an alternative to the prevailing system of “authoritarianism” and austerity, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has announced a new cross-continent movement with a “simple, common agenda:” To democratize Europe. The movement, known as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (or DiEM 25), will be launched on February 9 at Berlin’s Volksbühne theater.
Barely a week after receiving a mandate from parliamentary electors to combat the Brussels-driven austerity that has wrecked Greece’s economy and afflicted its population for half a decade, Syriza Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis confirmed his party’s intentions to fight EU oppression by saying he would not negotiate with representatives of Greece’s “hated troika of lenders.”
“We respect institutions but we don’t plan to cooperate with that committee,” Varoufakis said, referring to the auditors who review Greece’s accounting on behalf of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “Our first action as a government will not be to reject the rationale of questioning this program through a request to extend it.”
Varoufakis, an academic with the University of Athens, had just emerged from a talk in Athens on Friday with Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the Eurogroup of EU finance ministers. In a visibly tense press conference alongside Dijsselbloem, Varoufakis added that Greece would not seek an extension to its $270 billion bailout.
“This platform enabled us to win the confidence of the Greek people,” he said.
As The Guardian noted in its report on the conference, Greece has lost more than a quarter of its GDP as a result of budget cuts and tax increases “enforced at the behest of creditors.”
Varoufakis and Greece’s new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, said their government would deal only with individual institutions and ministers within the EU.
Varoufakis made headlines just before the election when he promised to “destroy the basis upon which they have built, for decade after decade, a system, a network that viciously sucks the energy and economic power from everybody else in society.” He made the statement in replying to a journalist who asked: “What will you do to [Greece’s] oligarchy, concretely?”
For standing his ground against intransigent EU officials indifferent to the suffering of their fellow Europeans, we honor Yanis Varoufakis as our Truthdigger of the Week.
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