Op-ed
LA STAMPA interview on the Italian edition of ANOTHER NOW: From Marinnetti & the Sex Pistols to Hephaestus & favourite books
, 17/11/2021
On the occasion of the publication of my ANOTHER NOW in Italian (Un Altro Presente), La Stampa put to me some quirky and irreverent questions. Just in case you wanted to read them, and my answers, in the English original, here they are. Have fun! Marinetti and the Sex Pistols are milestones for Costa: is […]
What’s behind the Cop26 fraud? – The Guardian
, 16/11/2021
There are three reasons Cop26 proved such a spectacular debacle: A planet-wide collective action problem over “free-riding”. A global coordination failure. And… capitalism! “Make no mistake, the money is here, if the world wants to use it,” said Mark Carney, the former Bank of England Governor who today serves as UN climate envoy while also representing […]
What’s behind our #yourNHSneedsYou campaign: DiEM25 ushering in a new way of doing progressive politics – The New Statesman
, 06/11/2021
A new campaign to save the NHS from privatisation-from-within (#yourNHSneedsYou) is going from strength to strength in the UK. In this New Statesman article, Yanis Varoufakis, Nathalie Bennett and John McDonnell explain why and how the NHS is being eaten up from within by Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Business more generally. What makes […]
Merkel’s tenure condemned Germany to wealth-fuelled decline & the EU to debt-fuelled stagnation – JACOBIN
, 28/09/2021
Angela Merkel’s tenure will be remembered as Germany’s, and Europe’s, cruelest paradox. On the one hand, she dominated the continent’s politics like no other peacetime leader — and is leaving the German chancellery considerably more powerful than she had found it. But the way she built up this power condemned Germany to secular decline and […]
Angela Merkel’s austerity condemned Europe and Germany to decline – The New Statesman
, 28/09/2021
At the height of the eurozone crisis, one of Angela Merkel’s close advisers explained to me her driving ambition: to bequeath to her successor a stronger chancellery than she inherited. If so, as Merkel prepares to retire, she should be delighted. Germany’s trade surpluses, and thus political clout, are far greater now than when she took office […]
Gillian Tett & Yanis Varoufakis, through their books Anthrovision & Another Now, revisit capitalism – An IQ2 event, live and in situ, Union Chapel, London, Monday 4th Oct 2021
, 20/09/2021
SPEAKERS Yanis Varoufakis: Greek MP & former finance minister of Greece and author of Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present Gillian Tett: Chairman of the US editorial board and U.S editor-at-large at the Financial Times Gillian Tett is the pioneering columnist who has spent the last decade documenting the rise of ‘conscious capitalism’, a movement led […]
My farewell to Mikis Theodorakis – Der Freitag
, 09/09/2021
I must have been 6 or 7 years-old when I got whiff of the significance of Theodorakis’ music. It was around 1968 when my parents warned me not to tell anyone at school or in the neighbourhood that they owned records of his – and certainly not to admit that we listened to them. “Even […]
Lessons from this summer’s calamitous Greek forests inferno – The Guardian
, 31/08/2021
After the second world war, Greece’s countryside experienced two debilitating human surges – an exodus of villagers, then a most peculiar human invasion of its fringes. These two surges, aided by a weak state and abetted by the climate crisis, have turned the low-level drama of naturally redemptive forest fires into this summer’s heart-wrenching catastrophe. […]
A central bank cryptocurrency to democratise money – Project Syndicate & Jordan Times
, 02/08/2021
The history of money has been the history of the struggles to control the payment system and the money tree. Today, with control over both resting in the hands of bankers, central banks’ efforts to boost business end up amplifying inequality while failing to address either economic stagnation or the looming climate disaster. The time […]
Central bank independence is a myth. What about green central banking? – op-ed in Green Central Banking
, 10/07/2021
Last week the ECB announced its new policy of ‘going green’. How can a conventional central bank do this? Only by discriminating against bonds and equities issued by companies damaging the environment that it accepts as collateral, or which it buys, in return for loans ‘greening’ its purchase/acceptance policy. Is ‘green central banking’ a move […]
Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 05/07/2021
This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism. This is a large claim that […]
Revisiting the causes & effects of Brexit – New Statesman video interview
, 24/06/2021
Here I am conversing with New Statesman’s George Eaton, reflecting on five years since the EU referendum, Scottish independence, a UK progressive alliance, and whether the EU can stay relevant post Brexit. Lest I be misunderstood, viz the New Statesman’s title: Given the EU’s post-2008 trajectory, & its behaviour more recently, if I were a […]
Austerity’s hidden purpose – Project Syndicate/Katmandu Post
, 20/05/2021
Back in the 1830s, Thomas Peel decided to migrate from England to the Swan River in Western Australia. A man of means, Peel took along, besides his family, ‘300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children,’ as well as ‘means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000.’ But soon after arrival, […]
Football Takes Capitalism Out of Bounds – Project Syndicate
, 04/05/2021
Europe has discovered its moral Rubicon, the frontier beyond which commodification becomes intolerable. The line in the sand that Europeans refuse to cross, come what may, has just been drawn. We bowed to bankers who almost blew up capitalism, bailing them out at the expense of our weakest citizens. We turned a blind eye to […]
A Covid-19 counterfactual for Europe – Project Syndicate
, 10/04/2021
Imagine that the coronavirus pandemic, rather than undermining confidence in the European Union, had strengthened it. Imagine that Covid-19 had persuaded EU leaders to overcome years of acrimony and fragmentation. Imagine that it had catalysed the emergence this year of a stronger, more integrated bloc to which the world looked for global leadership. Imagine. It […]
Draghi’s outrageous deployment of McKinsey, Europe’s predicament, DiEM25’s proposals – La Stampa
, 15/03/2021
Last week, upon hearing that Mario Draghi, as Italy’s new PM, employed McKinsey to advise the government on how to spend the billions of the EU Recovery Fund, I tweeted, in anger and frustration: So predictable, so sad: Mario Draghi hired McKinsey to ‘organise’ Italy’s distribution of the Recovery Fund monies. What next? Get the […]
The Goldilocks Stimulus Myth – Project Syndicate, The Kathmandu Post
, 09/03/2021
Both supporters and critics of US President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan assume that there is a dollar amount that is just right. In fact, no such figure exists: every possible stimulus size is simultaneously too little and too big. ATHENS – US President Joe Biden, facing the great challenge of stimulating his country’s […]
Capitalism has become Technofeudalism | UpFront interview on Al Jazeera
, 21/02/2021
A recent Oxfam study found that since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the world’s richest 10 billionaires have seen a wealth increase of half a trillion dollars – enough to pay for every person on the planet to get a vaccine. In this UpFront special, Marc Lamont Hill discusses with economist and former Greek […]
Η ανοσία στη Δημοκρατία ως η ρίζα των αστοχιών της ΕΕ – The New Statesman
, 14/02/2021
Το άρθρο πρωτοδημοσιεύτηκε στον New Statesman την 3η Φεβρουαρίου 2021 και παρουσάζεται εδώ σε μετάφραση της Ασπασίας Φεγγούλη. Προέκυψε από πρόσκληση του αρχισυντάκτη του New Statesman να σχολιάσω το εμβολιαστικό φιάσκο της ΕΕ . Από την άρνηση της πραγματικότητας στην απρόθυμη αποδοχή, από την απρόθυμη αποδοχή στις σημαντικές παρεμβάσεις και από κει στην πανωλεθρία: αυτή […]
The EU’s multiple failures are due to its immunity to democracy – The New Statesman
, 14/02/2021
From denial, to grudging acceptance, to substantial intervention, to debacle: that was the European Union’s trajectory once the storm that nearly consumed Wall Street in 2008 had crossed the Atlantic, starting the euro crisis. Twelve years later, the EU’s reaction to Covid-19’s arrival is following an ominously comparable trajectory. Eurosceptics take aim at the EU’s […]
Trumpism after Trump – NEWSWEEK magazine, interviewed by Basit Mahmood
, 12/02/2021
He’s been described as the George Clooney of the government, a rockstar politician who took on the EU and an “erratic Marxist.” Few politicians can hope – or fear – to achieve the levels of notoriety Yanis Varoufakis did in just six months while serving as finance minister of Greece. A world-renowned economist, Varoufakis now […]
From an imagined hi-tech rebellion to the GameStop incident: Lessons for collective action in the 21st Century – Der Freitag
, 12/02/2021
When in 2008 I heard that Lehman Brothers collapsed, and thousands of its staff were laid off, I allowed myself a fantasy. I imagined that one of the laid off financial engineers, whom for some reason I named Esmeralda, would turn into a dissident. That, incensed with the way she had been discarded by the […]
In conversation on the postcapitalist vision in my ANOTHER NOW – JACOBIN interview & DISSENS podcast
, 17/12/2020
State socialism has failed because of its authoritarian excesses, but the idea of socialism still offers the only alternative for a viable future – says Yanis Varoufakis. In 2015, in the midst of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, he became finance minister under Alexis Tsipras until he resigned after the referendum. In the meantime, he has […]
Designing a postcapitalist future in the midst of the pandemic – The Saturday Paper
, 10/12/2020
Doubts that our world is morally indefensible become unforgiveable when even the bankers of the ultra-rich, along with the bailiffs working diligently on their behalf, are panicking about excessive inequality. UBS recently reported that, between April and July 2020, as the pandemic’s first wave was surging, the collective stash of the world’s billionaires grew by […]