Yanis Varoufakis: Thoughts for the Post-2008 World

Click here for the pdf of the article that resulted from the talk below and which was published in the Australian Journal of Political Economy  [embedded content]

Yes, the Spanish general election campaign has begun and the forces of regression have chosen to begin their smear campaign by targeting Ada Colau, the Mayor of Barcelona and one of DiEM25 initiators. The charge? That she spent local government money to bring me to Barcelona. Of course, that this is a lie does not concern the right wing Ciudadanos folk who, at once, profess to clean up politics and smear comrades like Ada Colau. And now the truth (for those who crave the facts): I was,...

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FOR THE PUBLISHED VERSION IN SPANISH, CLICK HERE. For the original Q&A (in English)… -Has Europe become a new bureaucracy? Are we governed by technocrats? As you describe them in the book, European Union and the European Central Bank have turned into completely inefficient organizations. Have they?  The Commission was, from the beginning, devised as the bureaucracy to run the affairs of a heavy industry central European cartel. This is not new. What is newer is the ECB that was...

Thanks to Mark Carrigan for posting this (based on this article in The Guardian). “This isn’t a new idea” writes Mark,”but I’ve rarely encountered it expressed so concisely: The idea that individuals create wealth and that all governments do is come along and tax them is what Varoufakis calls “a preposterous reversal of the truth”. “There is an amazing myth in our enterprise culture that wealth is created individually and then appropriated by the state to be distributed. “We are...

A few weeks ago, The Guardian asked a number of authors to write an intimate letter to… Britain (Dear Britain,…) explaining why we want ‘her’ to stay in the EU. Here are two of those letters, written by two DiEM25 initiators: Slavoj Žižek and yours truly Slavoj ŽižekSlovenia Dear Britain, When Stalin was asked in the late 1920s which is worse, the right or the left, he snapped back: “They are both worse!” And this is my first reaction to the question of whether or not to leave the EU. I...

by Victoria Bateman Source: iStock Written by the anti-austerity rebel economist and former finance minister in Greece’s Syriza government, this is not simply a book about the modern-day problems of Yanis Varoufakis’ native country. Neither is its object of study the plight of the eurozone. What this ambitious book aims to provide is a history of our entire global financial order – and not just in the present but for the past century. For most of us, the phrase...

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