Yanis Varoufakis (Athens, 1961) turns on the laptop which starts the zoom that illuminates the camera in the studio of his home in Athens. One of the best-known and most influential economists in the world extends a friendly greeting to the other side. For the first time in many years – he had promised his wife Danae – he took a few days’ vacation in the Aegean in August. But a month later, the agreed day is on time. “I’ve picked up the tools again.” “Let’s go there,” he says. Let’s start with memory.
Varoufakis studied at Moraitis private school and then completed two postgraduate degrees in mathematics and economics at the universities of Essex and Birmingham. He has taught in Australia and the United States and has taught economics at the University of Athens since 2000. But his life, and why not his “myth,” comes from politics. From January to July 2015 he was Greek Finance Minister. Days of Stone – his confrontation with Wolfgang Schäuble, the former finance minister of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, is already told in economic history books and discussed in the film Behaving Like Adults (2019). by director Costa-Gavras – endless months of Greek state crisis. When the Troika (European Central Bank, ECB, International Monetary Fund and European Commission) squeezed every euro out of the Greek people with their bailout conditions. Citizens voted against social suffering – called austerity – that would last for years. Varoufakis resigned after five months in office.
In February 2016 he founded the movement Democracy in Europe 2025 (DiEM25) and in March 2018 – as a former member of the left-wing Syriza party – MeRA25, the “political branch” of the movement. Return to the Greek Parliament. Since then, the “libertarian Marxist” – as he defines himself with a clear sense of provocation – has also had success on the shelves of bookstores. Adults in the Room (Behave as adults, Deusto-Verlag) and And the Weak Suffer What They Must? (And Do the Poor Suffer What They Owe?, Deusto) were bestsellers. He has also published Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism, The Global Minotaur (El minotauro global, Capitan Swing publisher) and Technofeudalism. What Killed Capitalism (just published in English by Random House and will be published in Spain by Deusto in February 2024 under the title Tecnofeudalismo. The secret successor to capitalism).
One of his latest articles is brilliantly titled: “Let the Banks Burn.” He has also coined terms for an era: “cloud capitalism,” “modern colonialism,” “de-dollarization,” “global austerity,” “morality Hazard,” “behavior change,” or “techno-feudalism.” Although he does not intend it, many of his paragraphs are somewhat imbued with the pessimism of the philosopher Emil Cioran (1911-1955) and his temptation to exist: “Writing is a question of life or death.”
Without a doubt, his latest book also has the horizon of a certain sadness. It arose from a conversation many years ago, in 1993, in Paleo Faliro’s house with his communist father Giorgios. I tried connecting to the internet. “Now that computers are communicating with each other, will this network make it impossible to overthrow capitalism?” “Or will it finally reveal its Achilles heel?”
Questions. Or have you already shown it?
Answer. Amazon’s Alexa, for example, is nothing more than a portal that hides a centralized totalitarian system created to please its owner, Jeff Bezos. He does four things at once. It trains us to tell him what we want. It sells us directly what we know we “want” regardless of any real market. It lets us reproduce its assets in the cloud (that is, it is a giant behavior change machine) because it uses our labor to publish reviews or rate products without compensation. And finally, it collects huge returns from the capitalists who are in this network, generally 40% of the sales price. This is not capitalism. Welcome to techno-feudalism!
Q What is your hypothesis?
R. Capitalism is now dead. It has been replaced by the techno-feudal economy and a new order. At the heart of my thesis is an irony that may sound confusing at first, but is clearly expressed in the book: What is killing capitalism… is capitalism itself. Not the capital we have known since the beginning of the industrial age. But a new form, a mutation, that has grown over the last two decades. Much more powerful than his predecessor, who killed his host like a stupid and overzealous virus. Why is that happend? For two main reasons: the privatization of the Internet by the USA, but also by the large Chinese technology companies. As did the way Western governments and central banks responded to the great crisis of 2008.
Capitalism was replaced by a techno-feudal economy and a new order
Varoufakis’ latest book warns of the impossibility of today’s social democracy or the false promise that the crypto world represents. “Behind the crypto aristocracy, the only real beneficiaries of these technologies have been the very institutions these crypto evangelists actually wanted to overthrow: Wall Street and the Big Tech conglomerate.” For example, “JP Morgan and Microsoft recently joined forces to to create a “blockchain consortium” based on Microsoft data centers with the aim of strengthening their power in the financial services sector,” the former minister writes in Technofeudalism.
Q We are on our way to 600 days since the start of the war in Ukraine. What do you think and what impact does this have on the economy?
R. My thoughts are the same as the first day Putin invaded Ukraine. It is a war that will end quickly if there is a peace agreement, otherwise it can last for decades. If things continue like this, there will be no winners, only losers. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead, hundreds of thousands of Russians are dead. It will impoverish Europe and make Africa even more miserable. The West must offer the Russian leader a very simple agreement. Back to the status before February 2022. In return, Ukraine will never be a member of NATO. It’s the Austrian solution – it’s part of Europe, it has an army, it’s a liberal democracy – but not the organization. It is the only option that meets Ukrainian interests and avoids sacrifice and impoverishment.
Varoufakis founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) in February 2016.
Q Europe is aging, growth is slowing, the economic center of the world is shifting to South Asia. What future awaits the continent? A luxury resort for millionaire foreigners on vacation?
R. There will be no breakup of the European Union. It was saved by Mario Draghi [expresidente del BCE] Thanks to the billion dollar injection. We are entering a period of decline. I met with the President of Mexico, López Obrador, a month ago and the European Union is none of their business. Of course they want to have good relationships and so on. But what matters to them is the United States and the BRICS countries [Brasil, Rusia, India, China y Sudáfrica]. Think about geopolitics, especially after the war in Ukraine. Think about NATO, whatever that is. It’s not European politics, it’s yours. Your Secretary General is the one who decides our policies. Imagine – I wish it were so – that there is a peace table tomorrow. Who would sit? Zelensky (Ukraine), Putin (Russia), Xi Jinping (China), Modi (India) and Biden (USA). Who would represent Europe? No one. We have no leaders. Poles, Estonians and Lithuanians do not trust Emmanuel Macron [presidente de Francia] still with Olaf Scholz [canciller alemán] because they think they are too close to Putin. Can you imagine a European Union represented by someone other than Germany or France? It’s worse than a crisis, we become irrelevant.
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Q Now some German politicians are recognizing the error of the austerity policy that you defended during the negotiations over the Greek rescue package.
R. They won’t say that until they retire. You should be judged by what you do when you are in administration. That’s what counts. I do not care about the rest. German Finance Minister Christian Lindner is pushing austerity measures. They will never admit that they are wrong. The German economic model is dying and Europe is following it. What are the industries of the future? Solar, wind, battery and software development. The EU doesn’t exist because it doesn’t invest anything. What do they do with China, which has an absolute monopoly on batteries?
Q Why is there no Metaverse or Amazon in Europe?
R. For the same reason: nobody invests. We wasted 14 years on austerity. The German mobile phone system is almost the same as that of the Third World. It is an underdeveloped country in terms of digitalization. With all the years of delay, you have approved a digitalization budget of 200 billion euros over the next five years. About 50,000 million less than expected. Did you know they still use fax?
“We don’t have Amazon because we lost 14 years to austerity”
Q What power do politicians have over large corporations?
R. Zero [hace el gesto con los dedos frente a la cámara]. Once upon a time politicians mattered. Franklin Roosevelt (USA), Willy Brandt (Germany), Harold Wilson (Great Britain) or even Nixon. You could change things. Seat people around the table. Now there are no more unions. There is no one to sit with them. But if you run into the system, you will be eliminated.
Q China, Singapore, India, Saudi Arabia and others have shown that it is possible to grow and create wealth by being, in practice, dictatorships, autarkies or nations with dubious respect for human rights, that is, without being democracies .
R. We forget history. Democracy was never part of capitalism. As early as the 19th century, the philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) defended liberalism against democracy in Great Britain. He respected property rights and freedom of expression… But liberalism was the opposite of capitalism. The official Chinese party says, well: we are liberal like the British. They recognize private property. If you have a house, they can’t take it away from you. You can accumulate as much money as you want and do business. This is liberalism. As long as you don’t say anything against the party. Is it so different in the UK? Did you see the coronation of Charles III? seen? A professor stood in front of the House of Commons holding up a blank banner. He was arrested for contempt of the king. Good. That’s not freedom of expression, is it? Is the United States a democracy? Oh really? You have a ruling party with two different faces. Trump was a poor excuse for a human being. He changed the North American Free Trade Agreement, abolished the nuclear deal Obama signed with Iran, and started the Cold War against China. Biden has arrived. He was supposed to be the anti-Trump. Has anything changed? No, it made it worse. The Cold War has intensified, hostility with Iran has increased, and Cuba is suffering a worse embargo than under the former president. Of course, I preferred having dinner with Biden rather than Trump. However, this is not what a democracy should be.
Q Is feminism compatible with the current economic system?
R. Capitalism only brings enormous, terrible burdens. One of them is the exploitation of women. Women can only be successful at the expense of other women. No, ultimately and in practice, feminism and democratic capitalism are incompatible.
Capitalism only brings enormous, terrible burdens. One of them is the exploitation of women
If Yanis Varoufakis is one thing, it’s tough. Perhaps it comes from the time when his father Giorgios, a communist steel engineer, taught him the properties of metals in front of the fire of a red brick fireplace (in a modest house). It has served him well at training, in European politics or when a group of “hired thugs,” as Varoufakis put it, gave him a massive beating last March while the former minister was having dinner with several in the popular Athens district of Exarchia done by activists. Europeans. The “thugs” shouted at him and accused him of “selling himself out to the troika.” After the incident, the former finance minister ended up in the hospital. “We will not let them divide us,” he wrote on Twitter. “We continue!”
Giorgios was born in the 1920s and grew up in Cairo, Egypt. His parents were Greek before he went to the University of Athens to study chemistry. But he got caught up in the Greek Civil War (March 1946 – October 1949). He was arrested and interrogated by the police. He refused to denounce his fellow communists and spent four years in prison. Later, when he resumed his studies, a conservative woman noticed him. Her name: Eleni. Varoufakis’ future mother. In the end, her father’s ideas resonated with her and communism became the topic of her conversations.
Years later he asked his parents what freedom meant to them. His mother, he said, the opportunity to choose his partners and his own projects. His father replied: Time to read, experiment and write.
This teaching runs through all his books. Even in the worst of times. Giorgios, who was subject to the right-wing extremist regime, had many problems finding work. The secret police did everything they could to get him released. With some wealth – although the salary was less than he was entitled to – the Halyvourgiki steelworks hired him as assistant to the director. In a kind of delayed justice, he eventually became chairman of the board.
That was his environment. The prison, the hardship, the reprisals. But the regime soon collapsed. Perhaps thanks to this feeling that life is also about endurance despite everything, he has two doctorates (economics and mathematics), was a former finance minister or teaches courses in the USA, Australia or Athens. Everything happens in childhood. The rest is the unstoppable repetition of days. While teaching at the University of Sydney, he met Xenia’s mother Margarite, a professor of Greek-Australian history. They fell in love and married. They lived in Greece. But the relationship didn’t work out and they separated. Margarite returned to Australia not knowing she was pregnant. When he found out about this, he returned to Greece. They had to give themselves another chance. “However, the relationship didn’t work out. And she went back to Australia. It was a nightmare. Because I missed my daughter very much,” he commented in the Guardian. As a consolation, I put her to sleep via Skype at night.
In this fragile emotional state, she accidentally discovered the installation “Breathe,” a work by creator Danae Stratou, in an art gallery. A work in which water and earth breathe. He was impressed. They met at a dinner and fell in love. He now lives in Athens with Stratou’s two children. She – who took part in the 48th edition (1999) of the prestigious Venice Biennale – comes from a very wealthy family, thanks to the textile company Peiraiki-Patraiki, founded by her father Phaidron Stratos in the Peloponnese.
“I like that the Spanish coalition government is sticking together despite the problems”
Q Few economists doubt that today the family you are born into is more important to your success in life than all the effort you put into it.
R. That’s how it is. The lottery of birth. We live in very unequal societies. The biggest indicator of our future is the prosperity and situation of our families.
Q For the first time in decades of democracy, Spain has a government that represents a progressive coalition.
R. All the best. I like that they stay together despite the problems. But it will be impossible to change anything until there is a very clear answer to the question: what should happen to the European Union? Spain never received a response and it is a mistake.
Q In his book Talking to My Daughter (Conversaciones con mi hija, Destino-Verlag) he shows Xenia the threats of capitalism. What world do you think you will live in?
R. I never, ever, ever make predictions because if I were forced to answer you, my answer would be very sad. I certainly don’t think things will go well in the future. This is different than delivering weather news. Societies lack the right to predict, because what counts is the result of our actions, of what we do. We bear the moral duty to act.
Q In his new book, BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager by assets under management, is part of the problem. What do you think when you hear Larry Fink, its president, say that he will continue to invest in oil and gas because his clients demand it, despite his commitment to sustainable funds?
R. It’s right. The only solution is to dissolve the company.
Q Drastic.
R. Well, capitalism also needs to be dismantled. I’m on the left.
The sources from which your memories draw
Classical Greek myths, the Communist Manifesto (Marx), Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the television series Mad Men and the role of Don Draper, Star Trek, the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (John Keynes), the film Metropolis (1927) or the utopian treatise “The City of the Sun” by the Italian philosopher and Dominican Tommaso Campanella. The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis is able to construct a brilliant pattern from these different materials with which he narrates the world in which we live. The certain danger of big technology, the lack of support for the green transition, the war in Ukraine or the fact that social democracy is now impossible. This is the journey that he presents to the reader in his latest book “Tecnofeudalismo”. The Murder of Capitalism (Random House). It is not just an economics text. It is Varoufakis himself, his memories as a child, his relationship with his parents, learning critical thinking. The journey into the darkest night of the soul with one of the most luminous thinkers of our time. You already know. Whoever touches this book touches a person.
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