David F. Ruccio — Varoufakis’s Marx

This is an important post. This the clearest and best assessment of Yanis that I have seen, largely in his own words. It also explains why YV is a "pseudo-Marxist." He is a realist who understands Marx rather than a Marxist revolutionary. That is his strength or weakness, depending on one's point of view.

Relatively few realize that Marx was actually the real liberal who recognized that  human freedom is the basis of advancing civilization — as did Hegel for that matter, from whom Marx inherited the dialectic as Hegel had inherited from the ancient Greeks. But Hegel did not write on economics. 

Although even though Marx ended up writing on economics, he was chiefly a philosopher and his doctorate was in philosophy. Marx approached his work in terms of the enduring questions with a few toward creating a systematic approach to them based on the paradoxes of the human condition that develop historically — the apparent contradictions that drive and historical dialectic based on an internal logic that is actually consistent, even though it appears to be contradictory at turning points. Every question generates answers and the answers generate further questions. Now we would call this a complex adaptive system characterized by reflexivity (feedback) and emergence (innovation).

This is the basis not only of the human condition, which is "experimental" and adaptive, but also the historical dialectic that operates on the basis of exploring the range of possibilities. Like a homing device, humanity oscillates among options in his search for the target, which is distributed freedom rather than the freedom of a few.

Yanis understand this, and understand that the neoliberals are not actually liberal at all. They are not for distributed freedom but plutonomy on the back of labor.

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Varoufakis’s Marx
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame