******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
What one believes shapes what one proposes. He's forthcoming about it.
Lest there be remaining ambiguity about who and what Varoufakis is and,
presumably, why he was chosen as Syriza's finance minister:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/yanis-varoufakis-convicted-high-treason-interview-greece-finance-minister-syriza
“I don’t believe that the time of depression is a revolutionary time,”
he says. “The only people who benefit are the Nazis, the racists, the
bigots, the misanthropes. Let’s be honest about this. Our left, our
radical party, did reasonably well, not because we were left but because
we managed to capture the imagination about the importance of ending the
extending and pretending, not because those who voted for us wanted
socialism.”
The irony, he says, is that he wanted to reform the Greek system to
stamp out tax avoidance and corruption. “I think we were the best chance
Europe had to fix the tax system in Greece,” he says, noting that it was
the old political establishment that had allowed, and personally
exploited, the widespread negation of tax payment.
His proposed policy was what he calls “standard Thatcherite or
Reaganesque” economics of reducing taxes to increase collection and
revenue. But again, he insists, the troika thwarted his plans because,
according to him, they wanted nothing short of “regime change”. Whether
or not this is true, and it’s impossible to verify, what is perhaps more
intriguing, and certainly more neglected, are the limitations of
Varoufakis’s ambitions.
For all the swagger and the willingness to “tell truth to power”, he has
little time for leftwing fantasies of revolution. Statou insists we take
a break and sets out a lunch of vegetarian moussaka, beans and salad.
But over a bottle of white wine Varoufakis tells me of his father, an
industrialist and unswerving leftwinger to this day, who was interned in
the 1940s during the Greek civl war, when communists and sympathisers
were locked up in their thousands.
He comes from radical traditions on both sides of his family, yet unlike
many anti-capitalists, he is clear-eyed that leftwing revolutions have
an appalling track record. “The idea that you allow capitalism to
collapse under its own contradictions and we storm the Winter Palace and
take over… well, we’ve tried that and the result was a dystopia.”
So what, then, is the future of radical politics if it’s not
overthrowing capitalism? Rather like Marx himself, Varoufakis is a
little vague about what comes next. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Marxism can be a sharp tool for diagnosis but, as so many of Marx’s
followers have proved, a depressingly blunt one when it comes to
prescription.
Our best hope, Varoufakis suggests, lies with the liberating effects of
hi-tech developments such as 3D printing, which will transform the means
of production and social relations. Or as he puts it in language that
could double as parody: “The social inefficiency of capitalism is going
to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism
engenders and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way
of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge.”
Leftwing parties still need to defend the poor and underprivileged, he
says, but they must also embrace young internet whiz-kids who don’t care
about the left or Marx or people like Varoufakis. “Unless the left does
that,” he says with a final flourish, “the left is doomed.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
