Atossa Araxia Abrahamia — Yanis Varoufakis’s Internationalist Odyssey

Longish backgrounder on an emerging political force on the left. The Overton window had been shifting right for decades. Now it seems to be shifting left again.

The Nation
Yanis Varoufakis’s Internationalist Odyssey
Atossa Araxia Abrahamia

Yanis Varoufakis on Progressive Internationalism

Building broad-based coalitions takes time, and for now, the Progressive International is just a website with some inspiring language and a video. Its membership is also very Eurocentric. But Varoufakis hopes it will blossom into a global movement that helps leftists create coherent platforms, policies, and parties to defeat the “nationalist international” masterminded by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
The logic is simple. Financiers have long had global networks; now, right-wing authoritarians do too, with coordinated social-media strategies and deep pools of dark money funding campaigns and disrupting elections around the globe. It’s time for the left to go on the offensive and reclaim its tradition of internationalism: in Varoufakis’s words, to “mobilize workers, women, and the disenfranchised around the world” to prevent outright fascism from taking hold. This means local action, but it also means dreaming big.

It’s a fuzzy plan, of course, and one that Varoufakis’s critics deem implausible. Aren’t ideas like “democratizing” the European Union and making global finance more “progressive” oxymorons? How will a ragtag group of leftists dream up a new monetary system and an ecological New Deal for the whole world when Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil call the shots?Then again, pockets of the left—and even popular officials like potential 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders—are starting to rally behind an internationalism that seeks to displace the right’s authoritarian nationalism with a more egalitarian vision of global politics. “In order to effectively combat the rise of the international authoritarian axis, we need an international progressive movement…that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power,” Sanders wrote in The Guardian in September….

Yanis Varoufakis proposes a progressive internationalism to oppose both neoliberal globalization as corporate totalitarianism and nationalist internationalization as incipient fascism as a new program for a united international Left that transcends the old Marxist-Leninist internationalism. Bold.

Yanis Varoufakis
Our progressive internationalism – The Nation

Also

DiEM25’s European New Deal plan can succeed where Macron and Piketty failed – The Guardian

Also

“Why we need a Progressive International”. With Christiane Amanpour on CNN Int

Marx Today

As the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth gets closer, a host of conferences, articles and books on the legacy of Marx and his relevance today are emerging – including my own contribution. The most interesting was a speech last week by the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney in his homeland of Canada....

Michael Roberts Blog
Marx 200: Carney, Bowles and Varoufakis
Michael Roberts

See also

The Guardian — The Long Read
Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out

also

Naked Keynesianism
On the blogs - Labor Theory of Value (LTV) Edition
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

Lars P. Syll — Marx predicted the present crisis – and points the way out

Self-identified "erratic Marxist" Yanis Varoufakis. He absolutely and totally understands Marx and Engels' fundamental assumption (freedom and happiness) and method (engagement).

Most either miss this or obscure it intentionally. 

Psychologist Erich Fromm got it in his Marx's Concept of Man (1961). He begins the work with a section entitled,  The Falsification of Marx's Concepts, which reveals the caricature of Marx that has been created as a straw man to attack.

Like the anarchists whom Marx opposed and debated with, he was a libertarian of the left that looked forward to humanity transcending oppression based on class structure and class rule. 

Between demonizing Marx and glorying him, the middle way is to see his work for what it is and the assumptions on which it is based. While the significance of Marx and Engels  is mostly historically now, they are also two of the giants on whose shoulders we stand, like it or not.

But bourgeois liberalism expressed through various forms of capitalism views that degree of honest inquiry as threatening, just as monarch and aristocracy correctly viewed advocates for bourgeois liberalism and their works as threatening to what is now the old order.

As with all that have gone before who have contributed to the endowment of knowledge, the intelligent approach is learn from Marx, both positive and negative, and to adapt this to contemporary conditions and the opportunities and challenges they present.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Marx predicted the present crisis — and points the way out
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

See also

The tractability hoax in modern economics

Michael Roberts — Memoirs of an erratic Marxist [Yanis Varoufakis]

Varoufakis more erratic than Marxist?

Roberts contends that there is no solution for Greece within the structure of capitalism as institutionally dominant. Varoufakis's memoir bears this out.

Michael Roberts Blog
Memoirs of an erratic Marxist

Michael Robert

Yanis Varoufakis — To prevent Brexit from turning nasty, progressive internationalists must come close to winning 10 Downing Street

Heaven forbid. The Left needs to get over its Trotskyism in the service of capitalism rather than socialism. That's neoconservatism and liberal interventionism. Why in the world should "progressives" be supporting this?

Yanis Varoufakis
To prevent Brexit from turning nasty, progressive internationalists must come close to winning 10 Downing Street

Michael Hudson — Review of James Galbraith, Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice (2016)

Galbraith expressed his “epiphany” already in 2010 that a “market-based” solution was a euphemism for anti-labor austerity and a reversal of political democracy. “In a successful financial system, there must be a state larger than any market. That state must have monetary control – as the Federal Reserve does, without question, in the Untied States.” 

That was what many Europeans a generation ago expected – for the EU to sponsor a mixed public/private economy in the progressive 20th-century tradition. But instead of an emerging “European superstate” run by elected representatives empowered to promote economic recovery and growth by writing down debts in order to revive employment, the Eurozone is being run by the troika on behalf of bondholders and banks. ECB and EU technocrats are serving these creditor interests, not those of the increasingly indebted population, business and governments. The only real integration has been financial, empowering the ECB to override national sovereignty to dictate public spending and tax policy. And what they dictate is austerity and economic shrinkage.…

“Europe has devoted enormous effort to create a ‘single market’ without enlarging any state, and while pretending that the Central Bank cannot provide new money to the system.” Without monetizing deficits, budgets must be cut and the public domain sold off, with banks and bondholders in charge of resource allocation.

As long as “the market” means keeping the high debt overhead in place, the economy will be sacrificed to creditors. Their debt claims will dominate the market and, under EU and ECB rules, will also dominate the state instead of the state controlling the financial system or even tax policy.

Galbraith calls this financial warfare totalitarian, and writes that while its philosophical father is Frederick Hayek, the political forbear of this market Bolshevism is Stalin. The result is a crisis that “will continue, until Europe changes its mind. It will continue until the forces that built the welfare state in the first place rise up to defend it.”

To prevent such a progressive policy revival, the troika promotes regime change in recalcitrant economies, such as it deemed Syriza to be for trying to resist creditor commitments to austerity. Crushing Greece’s Syriza coalition was openly discussed throughout Europe as a dress rehearsal for blocking the Left from supporting its arguments. “Governments from the Left, no matter how free from corruption, no matter how pro-European,” Galbraith concludes, “are not acceptable to the community of creditors and institutions that make up the European system.” …

Galbraith’s month-by-month narrative describes how the IMF and ECB overrode Greek democracy on behalf of creditors and privatizers. They sought to undermine the Syriza government from the outset, making Greece an object lesson to deter thoughts by Podemos in Spain and similar parties in Portugal and Italy that they could resist the creditor grab to extract payment by a privatization grab and at the cost of pension funds and social spending. By contrast, conciliatory favoritism has been shown to right-wing European parties in order to keep them in power against the left.…

The arena of conflict and rivalry has shifted from the military to the financial battlefield. Along with the IMF and ECB, central banks across the world are notorious for opposing democratic authority to tax and regulate economies. The financial sector’s policy of leaving money and credit allocation to banks and bondholders calls for blocking public money creation. This leaves the financial sector as the economy’s central planner. 

The euro’s creation can best be viewed as a legalistic coup d’état to replace national parliaments with a coterie of financial managers acting on behalf of creditors, drawn largely from the ranks of investment bankers. Tax policy, regulatory and pension policies are assigned to these unelected central planners. Empowered to override sovereign self-determination and national referendums on economic and social policy, their policy prescription is to impose austerity and force privatization selloffs that are basically foreclosures on indebted economies. Galbraith rightly calls this financial colonialism.…

At first glance the repeated “failure” of austerity prescriptions to “help economies recover” seems to be insanity – defined as doing the same thing again and again, hoping that the result may be different. But what if the financial planners are not insane? What if they simply seek professional success by rationalizing politics favored by the vested interests that employ them, headed by the IMF, central bankers and the policy think tanks and business schools they sponsor? The effects of pro-creditor policies have become so constant over so many decades that it now must be seen as deliberate, not a mistake that can be fixed by pointing out a more realistic body of economics (which already was available in the 1920s).…

The EU cannot be “fixed” by marginal reforms. Greece’s treatment shows that it must be recast – or else, countries will start leaving in order to restore parliamentary democracy and retain what remains of their sovereignty. The financial sector’s ideal is for economies centrally planned by bankers, leaving no public infrastructure unappropriated. Privatized economies are to be financialized into opportunities to extract monopoly rent.

The gauntlet has been thrown down, posing a question today much like that of the 1930s: Will the alternative to austerity, debt deflation and the resulting economic breakdown be resolved by a pro-labor socialist alternative, or will it lead to a victory by anti-European right-wing parties?….

Not difficult to see where this is headed. The Left and it's chance and blew. Now it the Right's turn.

Michael Hudson
Review of James Galbraith, Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice (2016)

Bill Mitchell — The struggle to establish a coherent progressive position continues

There was an interesting article from Spanish political scientist (and economist) Vicente Navarro (August 4, 2016) – Is The Nation-State And Its Welfare State Dead? A Critique Of Varoufakis – which contested the former Greek finance mininster’s claims that the “nation state is dead” and so pan-international movements are required to restore democracy and provide a bulwark against global capitalism. I have a lot of sympathy for Navarro’s argument given that the topic is closely related to current book manuscript I am working on with Italian journalist Thomas Fazi on the reasons that the Left have vacated the progressive space and adopted neo-liberal economic positions that guarantee its steady demise as a political force. So in that context, the work of the former finance minister in trying to revive a Left narrative is admirable but, as Navarro notes, is misguided. DiEM25 is not likely to form a basic of a progressive manifesto for the future…

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The struggle to establish a coherent progressive position continues
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Will Denayer — Why Varoufakis’ DiEM2025 is fighting the wrong fight

As Lapavitsas explains, the Syriza leadership convinced itself that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of financial and political unrest. The mastermind of this strategy was Yanis Varoufakis. He negotiated with the lenders for more than six months. But Greece could not negotiate effectively without an alternative plan, including the possibility of exiting the euro zone. Creating its own liquidity was the only way to avoid the Troika’s headlock. That would be far from easy, of course, but at least it would have offered the option of standing up to the catastrophic bailout strategies. The Syriza leadership would have none of it (see here).

‘SYRIZA failed,’ writes Lapavitsas, ‘not because austerity is invincible, nor because radical change is impossible, but because, disastrously, it was unwilling and unprepared to put up a direct challenge to the euro. Radical change and the abandonment of austerity in Europe require direct confrontation with the monetary union itself. For smaller countries this means preparing to exit, for core countries it means accepting decisive changes to dysfunctional monetary arrangements….

The post argues that Varoufakis is a utopian (which he admits) and also a poor strategist in spite of being an expert in game theory.

While the post is a bit long, the latter part summarizes Bill Mitchell's argument, so it is worth reading to the end. Thomas Fazi, who is also mentioned, is co-author with Bill of a forthcoming book on globalization and the nation state.

flassbeck economics international
Why Varoufakis’ DiEM2025 is fighting the wrong fight
Will Denayer

Alexandra Rosenmannt — Noam Chomsky Reveals The Hypocrisies of Capitalism in the Financial Capital of the World

Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis at the NY Public Library.

AlterNet
Noam Chomsky Reveals The Hypocrisies of Capitalism in the Financial Capital of the World Alexandra Rosenmannt

Voters hit hardest by free-trade economics are rebelling against the status quo. We can use that energy to build a powerful, grassroots movement for democracy.

With More Americans Going Far Left (And Right), an Anti-Corporate Agenda Takes Shape
David Korten / Yes! Magazine

Yanis Varoufakis — In conversation with Noam Chomsky, at the New York Public Library

Yanis Varoufakis
In conversation with Noam Chomsky, at the New York Public Library

Yanis Varoufakis — How Do the Economic Elites Get the Idea That They ‘Deserve’ More? Lessons from Game Theory

The ‘haves’ of the world are always convinced that they deserve their wealth. That their gargantuan income reflects their ingenuity, ‘human capital’, the risks they (or their parents) took, their work ethic, their acumen, their application, their good luck even. The economists (especially members of the so-called Chicago School. e.g. Gary Becker) aid and abet the self-serving beliefs of the powerful by arguing that arbitrary discrimination in the distribution of wealth and social roles cannot survive for long the pressures of competition (i.e. that, sooner or later, people will be rewarded in proportion to their contribution to society). Most of the rest of us suspect that this is plainly false. That the distribution of power and wealth can be, and usually is, highly arbitrary and independent of ‘marginal productivity’, ‘risk taking’ or, indeed, any personal characteristic of those who rise to the top. In this post I present a body of experimental work that argues the latter point: Arbitrary distributions of roles and wealth are not only sustainable in competitive environments but, indeed, they are unavoidable until and unless there are political interventions to keep them in check.…

Evonomics
How Do the Economic Elites Get the Idea That They ‘Deserve’ More? Lessons from Game Theory
Yanis Varoufakis

Norbert Häring — A Greek conspiracy: How the ECB crushed Varoufakis’ plans

A central bank governor in Athens conspires with the President of the Republic to sabotage the negotiation strategy of his government to weaken it in its negotiations with the European Central Bank. After the government has capitulated, this governor, who is a close friend of the new finance minister and boss of the finance ministers wife, and the President of the Republic travel together to the ECB to collect their praise and rewards. This is not an invention, this is now documented.…

Real-World Economics Review Blog
A Greek conspiracy: How the ECB crushed Varoufakis’ plans
Norbert Häring, Handelsblatt

The Man Who Knew Too Much — Francisco de Zarate interviews Yanis Varoufakis

The interview was conducted by Francisco de Zarate, a journalist and comic writer with the Argentine newspaper Clarin, and illustrated by Fernando Calvi.

Jacobin
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Francisco de Zarate interviews Yanis Varoufakis

Alexrpt — Varoufakis, ‘During my time working in the Eurozone, I encountered evil that would be impossible to make up’

Yanis on the warpath.

Red Pill Times
Varoufakis, ‘During my time working in the Eurozone, I encountered evil that would be impossible to make up’
Alexrpt

Conn M. Hallinan — Europe’s New Barbarians

On one level, the recent financial agreement between the European Union (EU) and Greece makes no sense: not a single major economist thinks the $96 billion loan will allow Athens to repay its debts, or to get the economy moving anywhere but downwards. It is what former Greek Economic Minister Yanis Varoufakis called a “suicide” pact, with a strong emphasis on humiliating the leftwing Syriza government. 

Why construct a pact that everyone knows will fail?

Dispatches from the Edge
Europe’s New Barbarians

Conn M. Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, “A Think Tank Without Walls, and an independent journalist. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He oversaw the journalism program at the University of California at Santa Cruz for 23 years, and won the UCSC Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teaching Award, as well as UCSC’s Innovations in Teaching Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award. He was also a college provost at UCSC, and retired in 2004. He is a winner of a Project Censored “Real News Award,” and lives in Berkeley, California.

ht Clonal

Yannis Palaiologos — Parallel currency would have led to Grexit, says Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs confirms Yanis Varoufakis's side of the story.

ekathimerini
Parallel currency would have led to Grexit, says Jeffrey Sachs
Yannis Palaiologos
ht Clonal

Jacques Sapir — What future for Varoufakis?

Yanis Varoufakis is in the process of becoming an important figure in Greek political life and beyond. In the break-up process affecting Syriza, which seems now well underway [1], he will be called to play a major role, together with the former Minister of energy, Panayiotis Lafazanis, and the President of the Parliament, Mrs Zoe Kostantopoulou. But Yanis Varoufakis has also indubitably become a major figure for the Left which is critical of the Euro and someone who will be an important factor in the political reconfigurations which are in the offing. There are good reasons for this.….

What future for Varoufakis?
Jacques Sapir · 15 août 2015
Translated by Anne-Marie de Grazia

ht Conal

Yanis Varoufakis Vindicated, while Lagarde emerges a loser? – David Marsh in MarketWatch

In his Monday column on MarketWatch David Marsh entitled his opinion piece: “Varoufakis vidicated, while Lagarde emerges as a loser”. Of course the point is not whether I have, or have not, been vindicated. The crucial issue concerns the viability, or otherwise, of the latest Greek deal. From day 1 I have been arguing that Ms Christine Lagarde has an interest in a negotiating impasse (between Greece and its creditors) so that she does not have to confess to the simple fact that the IMF’s staff will rebel if she signs another unsustainable loan agreement with a country whose debt is as unpayable as they come. For David’s analysis, read on…

Yanis Varoufakis
Vindicated, while Lagarde emerges a loser? – David Marsh in MarketWatch

'I'm here to stay' — Theodora Maios interviews Yanis Varoufakis for Neos Kosmos

Details.

Neos Kosmos
'I'm here to stay'
Theodora Maios of Neos Kosmos interviews Yanis Varoufakis

ht Clonal