Op-ed
Cloudalists: Our New Cloud-based Ruling Class – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 12/04/2022
Capital is everywhere, yet capitalism is on the wane. In an era when the owners of a new form of “command capital” have gained exorbitant power over everyone else, including traditional capitalists, this is no contradiction. ATHENS – Once upon a time, capital goods were just the manufactured means of production. Robinson Crusoe’s salvaged fishing […]
Why Stop at the Russian Oligarchs? Project Syndicate op-ed
, 12/04/2022
At a time when Russian bombs are destroying Ukrainian cities, there is good reason to focus on the oligarchs supporting the Kremlin. But do American multi-billionaires and Saudi princes enjoy less political clout, stash less money abroad, and use their influence any better? ATHENS – No sooner had Roman Abramovich, newly targeted by the United […]
Putin’s criminal invasion, Europe’s response, America’s role – AVVENIRE interview (English version)
, 05/03/2022
Avvenire wanted to know my opinion of Putin, of his invasion, of Europe’s and America’s role, of what this war means for Europe and, of course, they wanted me to explain my support for a diplomatic solution based on the idea of an independent, free, neutral Ukraine. Here is the original English text. What is […]
How the euro divided Europe, and why countries like Bulgaria should not join – Project Syndicate, Oxford Union video & Keynote audio
, 26/01/2022
This January marked the 20th anniversary of euro notes and coins circulating. In an op-ed published by Project Syndicate I argue that the euro was an unmitigated failure even by the criteria of its architects. This is an updated analysis of a keynote I delivered a few years ago at the Oxford Union – see […]
Why We Must Challenge Zuckerberg’s Ring of Power – Project Syndicate
, 26/01/2022
Learning to appreciate that control is an illusion is hard, especially when we are prepared to sacrifice almost everything, to pay any price, to control others. But if we are to stop others—Mark Zuckerberg, for example—from controlling us, it is a lesson we must learn. Once upon a time, in the ancient kingdom of Lydia, a […]
On Brexit and the task of confronting technofeudalism – Interview in The Morning Star
, 03/01/2022
ONE YEAR since the final deal for Brexit was announced, it remains one of the most divisive political subjects for a generation. Perhaps unknown to most, the incendiary B-word had its genesis in the term “Grexit” — coined during tumultuous years after the 2008 credit crunch when a Greek exit from the EU was speculated, […]
Defining wealth in 65 words for SPEARS magazine
, 27/12/2021
Spears asked me, and three others, to define WEALTH in fewer than 70 words. Their rationale was that, at the time of Spear’s founding, in 2006, there were fewer than 1,000 billionaires world-wide; their combined net worth a little under $3 trillion. Today, there are 2,755 billionaires, according to Forbes, and they have a collective […]
The West’s Wasted Year – Project Syndicate
, 06/12/2021
A year that began hopefully is ending grimly. Western political elites, unable (and perhaps unwilling) to turn a deadly pandemic and climate crisis into a life-preserving opportunity, have only themselves to blame. ATHENS – The silver lining in the gloomy cloud of the pandemic was the opportunity it gave the West to mend its ways. […]
A Progressive Monetary Policy Is the Only Alternative – Project Syndicate
, 06/12/2021
Torn between inflationary jitters and fear of deflation, central bankers in the major advanced economies are taking a potentially costly wait-and-see approach. Only a progressive rethink of their tools and aims can help them play a socially useful post-pandemic role. ATHENS – As the coronavirus pandemic recedes in the advanced economies, their central banks increasingly […]
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 […]