Tag Archives: DiEM

I had no doubt Donald Trump would win, just like I had no doubt Brexit would happen, so maybe I’m not as shell-shocked as you,” says Yanis Varoufakis. The former Greek finance minister is speaking to me several days after the Republican candidate’s historic victory. He doesn’t sound smug about being so prescient, more resigned, deflated, defeated. The left has been here before. Over the course of an hour-long conversation, Varoufakis soothed my caffeine-jangled nerves with the thought...

[Originally published here] The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism’s international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time...

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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...

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...