Yanis Varoufakis: Thoughts for the Post-2008 World

Why is America still important? Below I copy the answer I gave in 2011 in the last chapter of The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy. (For those not familiar with the economic meaning of my Minotaur allegory, read this.) Today, as the Trump Presidency looms, I fear that that conclusion is even more pertinent…  [Excerpt from Chapter 9] The omens are not good. Never before have so many powerful people understood so little about what the world economy needs...

How owning our Resentment can save Australian Politics In this piece, Paul Tyson, honourary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, outlines his take on the rise of rightwing populist resentment, as a powerful political force, from an Australian perspective. Professor Robert Solomon notes that we all experience strong emotional responses to being the victim of an injustice. Solomon singles out three responses in particular: anger, contempt and resentment. Crucially, these...

I had a bet with my American friend Stewart Brand that Trump would win. He wrote to me this morning: “You called it right. And I called it wrong. Groan. Now the weirdness!” I wrote back to him: “Welcome to the post-Liberal world. I think I know exactly how you feel – I remember the morning after Brexit, and the realisation that I lived in a country I didn’t really know anything about. It’s a genuine revolution – but one we didn’t recognise because we had nothing to do with starting it. We...

Donald Trump’s victory marks the end of an era when a self-confident Establishment preached the end of history, the end of passion and the supremacy of a technocracy working on behalf of the 1%. But the era it ushers in is not new. It is a new variant of the 1930s, featuring deflationary economics, xenophobia and divide-and-rule politics. Passion has returned to politics but not in a way that will help the 80% left behind since the 1970s. Passion is now fuelling misanthropy. Passion is...

By Thomas Seibert and Yanis Varoufakis, members of DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective As in the case of Brexit, we refuse to respond in a binary manner (remain or leave, Clinton or Trump) to the question facing voters.For us, Clinton and Trump are the two sides of the same effaced coin, redolent of the fading illusions of global capitalism’s neoliberal turn. The virulent clash between them, just like the clash between David Cameron and Boris Johnson in the Brexit campaign, is masking the...

[Originally published in Zocalo] British citizens took to the polls to cast their “Leave” ballots—and their grievances—in the now-infamous Brexit vote last June, seeking to escape the overarching power of the European Union. Their triumph stunned British and global elites, but shouldn’t have; the odds were stacked in the Leave camp’s favor. The groundwork for the Brexit debacle was laid the previous summer when Europe crushed the progressive pro-European SYRIZA government elected in...

¿Viene La Junta sólo a cobrar? o en su lugar ¿Viene a ejecutar un plan de saqueo de recursos y re-estructuración del marco de derechos y relaciones laborales en favor de los grandes dueños del capital? Si alguien se auto-proclama "la persona más capacitada", debe tener en cuenta y denunciar este clásico esquema de saqueo de la deuda soberana, a menos que se favorezca estas políticas a favor de un modelo Neoliberal en el Mercado Global.

History may repeat itself but never as quickly or as mindlessly as it does within Europe’s social democratic family. Spain’s socialists jettisoned Pedro Sánchez to allow Mariano Rajoy to form government as if in a bid to replicate the disappearing act of their Greek counterparts, the once formidable PASOK. In 2011, after having backed the calamitous troika Greek ‘program’, PASOK’s socialists jettisoned George Papandreou, their leader, to facilitate the formation of an essentially...

ATHENS – The right to laziness has traditionally been only for the propertied rich, whereas the poor have had to struggle for decent wages and working conditions, unemployment and disability insurance, universal health care, and other accoutrements of a dignified life. The idea that the poor should be granted an unconditional income sufficient to live on has been anathema not only to the high and mighty, but also to the labor movement, which embraced an ethic revolving around reciprocity,...

Have you wondered why politicians aren't what they used to be, why governments seem unable to solve real problems? Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, says that it's because you can be in politics today but not be in power — because real power now belongs to those who control the economy. He believes that the mega-rich and corporations are cannibalizing the political sphere, causing financial crisis. In this talk, hear his dream for a world in which capital...