Cometh the hour - Village Magazine

70 March 2015

INTERNATIONAL

Also in this section:

Euro – Ireland’s biggest mistake? 74

UNprecedentd opportunities 77

Cometh

the hour

where was

the man?

Confessions of an

erratic Marxist in the

midst of a repugnant

European crisis

March 2015 71

UROPE is experiencing a slump that diﬀers sub-

stantially from a ‘normal’ capitalist recession, of

the type that is overcome through a wage squeeze

which helps restore proﬁtability. This secular, long-

term slide toward asymmetrical depression and

monetary disintegration puts radicals in a terri-

ble dilemma: Should we use this once-in-a-century capitalist

crisis as an opportunity to campaign for the dismantling of the

European Union, given the latter’s enthusiastic acquiescence

to the neoliberal policies and creed? Or should we accept that

the Left is not ready for radical change and campaign instead

for stabilising European capitalism?

This paper argues that, however unappetising the latter

proposition may sound in the ears of the radical thinker, it is

the Left’s historical duty, at this particular juncture, to stabi-

lise capitalism; to save European capitalism from itself and

from the inane handlers of the Eurozone’s inevitable crisis.

Drawing on personal experiences and his own intellectual

journey, the author explains why Marx must remain central

to our analysis of capitalism but also why we should remain

‘erratic’ in our Marxism. Furthermore, the paper explains

why a Marxist analysis of both European capitalism and of the

Left’s current condition compels us to work towards a broad

coalition, even with right-wingers, the purpose of which ought

to be the resolution of the Eurozone crisis and the stabilisa-

tion of the European Union. In short, the paper suggests that

radicals should, in the context of Europe’s unfolding calamity,

work toward minimising the human toil, reinforcing Europe’s

public institutions and, therefore, buying time and space in

which to develop a genuinely humanist alternative.

Capitalism had its second global spasm in 2008, setting oﬀ

a chain reaction that pushed Europe into a downward spiral

that is currently threatening Europeans with a vortex of

almost permanent depression, cynicism, disintegration and

misanthropy.

Europe’s present crisis is not merely a threat for workers, for

the dispossessed, for the bankers, for particular groups, social

classes or, indeed, nations. No, Europe’s current posture poses

a threat to civilisation as we know it.

If my prognosis is correct, and the European crisis is not

just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome as the rate

of proﬁt picks up following the inevitable wage squeeze, the

question that arises for radicals is this: Should we welcome this

wholesale subsidence of European capitalism, as an oppor-

tunity to replace capitalism with a better system? Or should

we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for

stabilising European capitalism? My answer has been une-

quivocal over the past three year and its nature is betrayed by

the above-mentioned list of diverse audiences that I sought to

inﬂuence. Europe’s crisis is, as I see it, pregnant not with a pro-

gressive alternative but with radically regressive forces that

In May 2013 Yanis Varoufakis, then an economics professor, addressed the 6th Subversive Festival in Zagreb. Far from

being subversive he shows the dangers of radicalism, Marxist radicalism, without a strategy for implementation. The

speech its notable for its honesty and its defeatism. It was inevitable Syriza fuelled by the intellect of Varoufakis, would

lead Greece to Eurodefeat, albeit defeat with honesty. And honesty is not integrity.

This is an edited version of the speech.

have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath while

extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for genera-

tions to come.

For these views I have been accused, by well meaning radical

voices, as ‘defeatist’; as a latter-day Menshevik who tirelessly

strives in favour of schemas the purpose of which is to save

the current indefensible European socio-economic system. A

system representing everything a radical should admonish

and struggle against: an anti-democratic, irreversibly neo-lib-

eral, highly irrational, transnational European Union that has

next to no capacity to evolve into a genuinely humanist com-

munity within which Europe’s nations can breathe, live and

develop. This criticism, I confess, hurts. And it hurts because

it contains more than a kernel of truth.

Indeed, I share the view of this European Union as a fun-

damentally anti-democratic, irrational cartel that has put

Europe’s peoples on a path to misanthropy, conﬂict and perma-

nent recession. And I also bow to the criticism that I have been

campaigning on an agenda founded on the assumption that the

Left was, and remains, squarely defeated. So, yes, in this sense,

I feel compelled to acknowledge that I wish my campaigning

were of a diﬀerent ilk; that I would much rather be promot-

ing a radical agenda whose raison d’être is about replacing

European capitalism with a diﬀerent, more rational, system

– rather than merely campaigning to stabilise a European capi-

talism at odds with my deﬁnition of the Good Society.

At this point, it is perhaps pertinent to issue a second-order

confession: to confessing that… confessions tend to be self-

serving. Indeed, confessions are always on the verge of what

John von Neumann once said about Robert Oppenheimer, upon

hearing that his former director at the Manhattan Project had

turned anti-nuclear campaigner and had confessed to guilt

over his contribution to the carnage in Hiroshima and in Naga-

saki. Von Neumann’s caustic words were:

“He is confessing to the sin in order to claim the glory.”

Thankfully, I am no Oppenheimer and, therefore, it will not

be too hard to avoid confessing to various sins as a means of

self-promotion but, rather, as a window from which to peruse

my view of a crisis-ridden, deeply irrational, repugnant Euro-

pean capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should

be avoided at all cost. It is a confession with which to convince

radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest Euro-

pean capitalism’s free-fall in order to buy the time we need to

formulate its alternative.

When I chose my PhD thesis, I intentionally concentrated

on a method within which Marx was not simply wrong, he was

irrelevant. When I landed my ﬁrst economics lectureship in

Britain in 1978, the implicit contract between my university

and me was that the sort of economics I would teach our stu-

dents would be as far removed from Marxism as is humanly

possible. I moved to England six months or so before Mrs

Watching

the Labour

government

disintegrate

led me to the

thought that

perhaps

Mrs Thatcher’s

victory would

be a good

thing

“

72 March 2015

INTERNATIONAL YANIS VAROUFAKIS

Thatcher’s victory that changed Britain forever. Watching

the Labour government disintegrate, under the weight of its

degenerate social democratic program, led me to an error of

the ﬁrst order: to the thought that perhaps Mrs Thatcher’s vic-

tory would be a good thing, delivering to Britain’s working and

middle classes the short, sharp, shock necessary to reinvigor-

ate progressive politics. To give the Left a chance to re-think

its position and to create a fresh, radical agenda for a new type

of eﬀective, progressive politics.

Even as unemployment doubled and then trebled, under Mrs

Thatcher’s radical neo-liberal ‘interventions’, I continued to

harbour hope that Lenin was right: “Things have to get worse

before they get better.”

As life became nastier, more brutish and, for many, shorter,

it occurred to me that I was tragically in error: things could

get worse in perpetuity, without ever getting better. The hope

that the deterioration of public goods, the diminution of the

lives of the majority, the spread of deprivation to every corner

of the land would, automatically, lead to a renaissance of the

Left was just that: hope!

The reality was, however, painfully diﬀerent. With every

turn of the recession’s screw, the Left became more intro-

verted, less capable of producing a convincing progressive

agenda and, meanwhile, the working class was being divided

between those who dropped out of society and those co-opted

into the neoliberal mindset. The notion that the deterioration

of the ‘objective conditions’ would somehow give rise to the

‘subjective conditions’ from which a new political revolution

will emerge was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of

Thatcherism were the spivs, extreme ﬁnancialisation, the

triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fet-

ishisation of housing and… Tony Blair.

Instead of radicalising British society, the recession that

Mrs Thatcher’s government so carefully engineered, as part

of its class war against organised labour and against the public

institutions of social security and redistribution that had been

established after the war, permanently destroyed the very

possibility of radical, progressive politics in Britain. Indeed,

it rendered impossible the very notion of values that tran-

scended what the market determined as the ‘right’ price.

The lesson that Mrs Thatcher taught me the hard way,

regarding the capacity of a long lasting recession to under-

mine progressive politics and to entrench misanthropy into

the ﬁbre of society, is one that I carry with me into today’s

European crisis. It is, indeed, the most important determinant

of my stance in relation to the Euro Crisis that has occupied my

I feel Marxism

in my bones

every time I

am engaged

in any form

of intellectual

pursuit

“

March 2015 73

time and thinking almost exclusively over the past few years. It

is the reason why I am happy to confess to the sin that is appor-

tioned to me by radical critics of my ‘Menshevik’ stand on the

Eurozone: the sin of choosing not to propose radical political

programs that seek to exploit the Euro Crisis as an opportu-

nity to overthrow European capitalism, to dismantle the awful

Eurozone, and to undermine the European Union of the cartels

and the bankrupt bankers.

Yes, I would love to put forward such a radical agenda. But,

no, I am not prepared to commit the same error twice. What

good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promot-

ing an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned

while falling headlong into Mrs Thatcher’s neo-liberal trap?

Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dis-

mantling of the Eurozone, of the European Union itself, when

European capitalism is doing its utmost to undermine the

Eurozone, the European Union, indeed itself?

When I moved to Australia in 1988, unbeknownst to me,

I was recruited by the right wing of the Sydney University

Economics Department in order to keep out of the Faculty

another candidate whose former supervisor was thought

of (quite rightly!) as a dangerous Marxist. Later I moved to

Greece where I (foolishly) became, quite oﬃcially, an advisor

of George Papandreou – the man whose government was to

mediate Greece’s passage to Hell a few years later. Even though

I had resigned as Mr Papandreou’s adviser early in 2006, and

turned into his government’s staunchest critic during his mis-

handling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my interventions

in the public debate on Greece and Europe (e.g. the Modest

Proposal for Resolving the Euro Crisis, that I co-authored and

have been campaigning in favour of) does not have a whiﬀ of

Marxism in it.

In view of this long path through academia and the policy

debates on Europe, one may be puzzled to hear me come out

of the proverbial closet as a Marxist. Such pronouncements

do not come naturally to me. I wish I could avoid hetero-def-

initions (i.e. being deﬁned by someone else’s worldview and

method). Marxist, Hegelian, Keynesian, Humean, I have a nat-

ural tendency to say that I am none of these things; that I have

spent my days trying to become Francis Bacon’s bee: a crea-

ture that samples the nectar of a million ﬂowers and turns it,

in its gut, into something new, something of one’s own, some-

thing that owes much to every single bloom but is deﬁned by

no single ﬂower.

Alas, this would be untrue and no ﬁt way to begin a…

confession.

In truth, Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspec-

tive of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day. It

is not something that I volunteer to talk about in ‘polite soci-

ety’ much these days because the very mention of the M-word

switches audiences oﬀ. But I never deny it either. In fact, after

a few years of addressing audiences with which I do not share

an ideological milieu, a need has crept up on me recently to talk

candidly about Marx’s imprint on my thinking.

To explain why, while an unapologetic Marxist, I think it is

important to resist him passionately in a variety of ways. To

be, in other words, erratic in one’s Marxism.

If my whole academic career largely ignored Marx, and my

current policy recommendations are impossible to describe

as Marxist, why bring up my Marxism now? The answer is

simple: Even my non-Marxist economics was guided by a

mindset inﬂuenced heavily by Marx. A radical social theorist

can challenge the economics mainstream in two diﬀerent

ways, I always thought. One way is by means of immanent crit-

icism. To accept the mainstream’s axioms and then expose

its internal contradictions. To say: “I shall not contest your

assumptions but here is why your own conclusions do not logi-

cally ﬂow on from them.”

This was, indeed, Marx’s method of undermining British

political economics. He accepted every axiom by Adam Smith

and David Ricardo in order to demonstrate that, in the con-

text of their assumptions, capitalism was a contradictory

system. The second avenue that a radical theorist can pursue

is, of course, the construction of alternative theories to those

of the Establishment, hoping that they will be taken seriously

(which is what later 20th Century Marxist economists have

been doing).

My view on this dilemma has always been that the powers-

that-be are never perturbed by theories that embark from

assumptions diﬀerent to their own. No established economist

will even pay attention to a Marxist or neo-Ricardian model

these days. The only thing that can destabilise and genuinely

challenge mainstream, neoclassical economists is the demon-

stration of the internal inconsistency of their own models. It

was for this reason that, from the very beginning, I chose to

delve into the ‘guts’ of neoclassical theory and to spend next

to no energy trying to develop alternative, Marxist, models of

capitalism. My reasons, I submit, were quite… Marxist.

I carried on teaching, at the University of Athens, quaint

(and admittedly vulgar bourgeois) subjects like Game Theory

and Microeconomics to a large number of Greek undergrad-

uates, who (unlike our brave and extremely well informed

graduate students) remained touchingly oblivious to the catas-

trophe about to befall them.

Back in 2002, well before the Global Crisis erupted, Joseph

Halevi and I tried to sound a warning – but we failed to make

an impact. Even though in 2006 I did my best to warn Greek

society, and anyone who would listen, of the impending disas-

ter, I shamefully remained part of Athens’ and Europe’s ‘polite

society’, not once taking to the streets.

When the Global Crisis erupted in 2008, and soon engulfed

the Eurozone, I began writing articles and making frantic

appearances in established and less mainstream media alike,

promoting a fundamentally bourgeois agenda for saving

capitalism from itself! When the going got really tough, at a

personal level, in Greece, I migrated to the USA and took up

an appointment at the University of Texas.

To this day, I am struggling to impress the powers-that-be

that they must urgently adopt speciﬁc bold policy recommen-

dations in order to prevent an inevitable crisis from crushing

capitalism. In summary, not one of my academic publications

can be thought of as explicitly Marxist, while my energies are

channeled into preventing capitalism’s collapse.

Nonetheless, all along, from my student days in Britain to

this very day, the only way I could make sense of the world we

live in is through the methodological ‘eyes’ of Karl Marx. In

itself, this ‘fact’ renders me a theoretical Marxist.

Moreover, I feel Marxism in my bones every time I am

engaged in any form of intellectual pursuit: from discuss-

ing the Arab Spring to debating the intricacies of Art with my

artist partner.

Furthermore, a democratic, libertarian, socialist future is

the only future that I would be willing to ﬁght for. A most pecu-

liar Marxist no doubt, but a Marxist nevertheless. •

Radicals

should work

toward

minimising the

human toil,

reinforcing

Europe’s

public

institutions

and, therefore,

buying time

and space

in which to

develop a

genuinely

humanist

alternative

“