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Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis Books

Finance Minister of Greece

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“There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class. A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan. A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them. And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way. But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.”

PovertyCapitalismClass WarfareAusterity
Book:Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
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“Like any ecosystem, a modern economy cannot survive without recycling. Just as animals and plants are continually recycling the oxygen and carbon dioxide that the other provides, so too must workers recycle their wages by spending them in shops and businesses recycle their revenues by spending them on salaries if both are to survive. And just as in our ecosystems, in which a failure of recycling leads to desertification, so when recycling breaks down in the economy we end up with a crisis that results in devastating poverty and deprivation.”

MoneyCapitalismRecyclingMarketsEconomic CrisisEcosystem
Book:Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
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“Tapi apa yang wajib kita lakukan agar terjadi evolusi karakter dan hasrat? Konflik adalah jawaban singkatnya. Ya, kita punya kewajiban terhadap karakter kita untuk berkonfrontasi dengan dunia dan penolakannya dalam menganugerahkan seluruh keinginan kita seketika, sekaligus konflik dalam diri kita yang dimungkinkan oleh kapasitas kita untuk berpikir sendiri. Aku ingin X tapi apakah sebaiknya Aku ingin X? Kita benci terhadap kekangan tapi pada saat yang sama mengerti bahwa kekangan membebaskan kita, jika pun hanya dengan membantu mempertanyakan motif-motif kita sendiri. Dengan kata lain, kebahagiaan autentik adalah sesuatu yang mungkin tanpa ketidakpuasan maupun kepuasan. Alih-alih diperbudak oleh kepuasan, kita membutuhkan kebebasan untuk tidak terpuaskan.”

HappinessSatisfactionSelf Conflict
Book:Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails
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“Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy […] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighborhood butchers, bakers and brewers, so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks, the Amazons, which know no neighbors, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments [the other book by Adam Smith] and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors.”

CapitalismCorporationsLiberalismShareholdersAdam SmithJoint StockCapitalist Property Rights
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“What does it mean to be a proletarian, really? [...] It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think, while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value to exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.”

CapitalismExploitationAlienationMarxismProletariatFrankensteinKarl MarxWage LaborCommodity FetishismSocialims
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“Oltre ad avvertirci che ogni nuova epoca forgiata da qualche tecnologia rivoluzionaria produce una generazione che “mai passerà un giorno immune da fatica e dolore, struggendosi anche di notte”, Esiodo ci ha anche lasciato un’allegoria cruciale: quella di un’aristocrazia di dèi che dimorano al di sopra delle nuvole che circondano il monte Olimpo, aggrappandosi gelosamente al loro esorbitante potere su noi mortali.”

TecnologiaLavoroGreciaAristocraziaEsiodo
Book:Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo
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“All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). However, the feedback between the two processes grew to new heights in the Age of Capital. The rise of commodification, which also led to the flourishing of finance, coincided with a subtler, more powerful, form of consent. And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.”

CapitalismFinancial CrisisManufacturing Consent
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
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“Up until the end of the 16th century, even global trading outfits like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources that none could accomplish in isolation. But then, on the September 24, 1599, in a half-timbered building off Moorgate Fields, not far from where Shakespeare was struggling to complete Hamlet, something momentous happened. A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. Once could own a piece of the company without being involved of it, indeed without even telling anyone. The first global joint-stock company was thus born, undoubtly Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.”

CapitalismCorporationsLiberalismEast India CompanyJoint StockShareholdingCapitalist Property Rights
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“The right to issue unlimited quantities of anonymously tradable shares, along with the institution of a liquid market for them, created something new: corporations with power so immense, it dwarfed that of their countries of origin, and could be deployed in faraway places assiduously to exploit people and resources. Shareholding and well-governed share markets fired up history, separating ownership from the rest of the East India Company’s activities unleashed a fluid, irresistible force. Unchecked, the East India Company grew more powerful than the British state, answerable only to its shareholders. At home, its bureaucracy corrupted and largely controlled Her majesty’s government. Abroad, its 200,000-strong private army oversaw the destruction of well-functioning economies in Asia and a number of Pacific islands and ensured the systematic exploitation of their peoples.”

CapitalismCorporationsLiberalismEast India CompanyJoint StockShareholdingCapitalist Property Rights
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“The East India Company was no apparition though; it was the template for many subsequent corporations […] Liberals betray themselves […] the moment they turn a blind eye to this kind of hyper-concentrated power. […] This is why trading in apples does not come even close to trading in shares. Large quantities may produce, at worse, lots of bad cider, but large amounts of money invested in liquid shares can release demonic forces that no market or state can control.”

CapitalismCorporationsLiberalismFree MarketEast India CompanyJoint StockShareholdingCapitalist Property Rights
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“A contemporary commentator drew an analogy between the East India Company’s ownership structure and the River Thames’ splendid flux, which leaves it ‘still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance.’ Once the property rights over a firm become detached from the people that set it up and work in it, it becomes a corpus in flux. It acquires a liquid life of its own, it can grow out of any human proportion. Indeed, like a river, it becomes potentially immortal.”

CapitalismLiberalismEast India CompanyJoint StockShareholdingCapitalist Property Rights
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key. Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing? They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […] Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.”

DebtFinancial CrisisAusterityFinance CapitalismCapitalist BureaucracyPrivate Banking
Book:Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment
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“You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons. First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation. Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract. Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made. So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home. What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit. By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.”

Financial CrisisBanksGreat RecessionCredit CrunchBank Bailout
Book:Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
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“Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.”

Cold WarMccarthyismRed ScareTruman Doctrine
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
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“Il socialismo a favore dei finanzieri fece sorgere un altro agglomerato di sovrani della finanza capaci di rivaleggiare con i cloudalisti - tre aziende statunitensi con poteri superiori a quelli della private equity e di tutti i capitalisti terrestri messi insieme: Black Rock, Vanguard e State Street. Queste tre aziende, i Big Three come sono conosciuti nei circoli della finanza, di fatto posseggono il capitalismo americano. No, non sto esagerando.”

CapitalismoVanguardTecnofeudalesimoFinanzaBlack RockBig ThreeCapitalismo AmericanoState Street
Book:Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo
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“I veicoli elettrici sono meccanicamente molto più semplici da progettare. La maggior parte del loro valore aggiunto - e il profitto che consentono - deriva dal software che le governa e connette l'auto al cloud e dai dati che derivano da questo. La grande inflazione, in altre parole, sta costringendo l’industria tedesca a produrre beni che si affidano molto di più al capitale cloud che a quello tradizionale. Il problema allora è questo: paragonati ai loro corrispettivi americani e cinesi, i capitalisti tedeschi non sono riusciti a capire abbastanza in fretta i benefici dell’ investire nel capitale cloud- del diventare cloudalisti- e sono rimasti molto indietro in questa nuova partita. In termini pratici, si stanno mettendo fuori da una posizione competitiva. Incapaci di raccogliere sufficienti rendite cloud, i plusvalori tedeschi soffriranno e così sarà per l’economia dell’ Unione Europea - e la sua cittadinanza- dipendente dai plusvalori tedeschi.”

TeslaEconomiaTecnologiaTecnofeudalesimoAuto ElettricheGermaniaUnione EuropeaVeicoli Elettrici
Book:Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo
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“The notion that elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy, indeed any policy, is a gift to [founder and leader of Singapore] Lee Kuan Yew supporters or indeed the Chinese communist party, who also believe this to be true. There is of course a long tradition of doubting the efficacy of the democratic process. But I would like to think that his tradition has been expelled long ago from the heart of Europe. It now seems that the euro crisis has brought it back. I urge you all to band together in a collective bid to resist it. Democracy is not a luxury to be afforded to the creditors and denied to the debtors. Indeed, it is the lack of democratic process in the heart of our monetary union that is perpetuating the euro crisis. Then again, I might be wrong. Colleagues, if you think that I am wrong, if you agree with Wolfgang, then I invite you to say so explicitly by proposing that elections should be suspended in countries like Greece until the country's programme is completed. What is the point of spending money on elections and asking our people to get all fired up to elect governments that will have no capacity to change anything?”

DemocracyElectionsEconomic Policy
Book:Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment
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“The CDOs that sliced up and then spliced together disparate debts belonging to a heterogeneous multitude of families and businesses were put together on the basis of certain formulae, whose purpose was, supposedly, to calculate their value and their riskiness. These formulae were developed by financial engineers working for Wall Street (e.g. for J. P. Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, etc.). To render the formulae solvable, certain assumptions had to be made. First and foremost was the assumption that the probability that one slice of debt within a CDO would go bad was largely unrelated to the probability of a similar default by the other slices in the same CDO. That is, it was assumed that what happened in 2007–08 was…impossible! That it was unnecessary to factor in the possibility of some crisis, during which Bob lost his house for reasons that increased the chances that Jane would lose her job and eventually also default on her mortgage.”

Wall StreetNeoclassical Economics2008 Financial CrisisCdo
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
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“And yet it bewildered him that people truly believed capitalism to be about making things or providing services at a profit. He found it extraordinary how most people disliked speculators but thought of them as peripheral, as harmless bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. They fail to recognize the very opposite is true, […] that enterprise long ago became a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. That, in reality, workers, inventors and managers resemble driftwood buffeted hither and thither on a manic torrent of runaway finance.”

ProfitDebtSpeculationRentier ClassFinance CapitalismFinancial BubbleFictitious Money
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“Notice the irony: in a world ideologically dominated by monetary conservatism, and ringing with long sermons about the perils of printing money, the effective money supply had been turned over to privateers [private banks] bent on flooding the markets with money of their own making [ex. CDOs, which act as stores of value + means of exchange]. How did this differ, really, from handing the Fed’s printing presses over to the mafia? There is not much difference, is the honest answer.”

Wall StreetCdoPrivate Money
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
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“I warung, spiegasti, sono come i nostri chioschi in Grecia, che vendono a buon mercato qualsiasi cosa, da bevande, penne e giornali, a shampoo, aspirine e servizi telefonici. Ti potrebbe sorprendere sentire che la Bukalapak, un’azienda cloudalista indonesiana, sta rilevando oltre tre milioni e mezzo di warung, digitalizzando i loro servizi con l’obiettivo non solo di trasferire sul cloud i loro multiformi mercati locali, ma anche di finanziarizzare le comunità locali che dipendono da loro attraverso microcrediti usurari, costosi trasferimenti di contanti digitali e servizi bancari di base. Mai troppo lento a capire, Jeff Bezos ha inviato la Jeff Bezos Expeditions in Indonesia e nel 2021 ha iniziato a investire in un concorrente della Bukalapak.”

IndonesiaAmazonEconomiaTecnofeudalesimoJeff BezosBukalapakJeff Bezos Expeditions
Book:Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo
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“That a system evolved in a given environment only proves it’s best at replicating itself in that environment. […] That doesn’t make it a system that we should want to live in, nor, more importantly, is it any indication of its ability to survive over the longer term. Environments change, sometimes rapidly, sometimes because of the system’s own ill-effects. Out-competing other systems rather than living harmoniously with them can eventually be self-destructive. Viruses are a good case and point. [...] The question is not whether share-trading and capitalism have out-competed other systems up until now, but whether their effects are consistent with their hosts’ survival.”

CapitalismCompetitionVirusJoint StockShareholding
Book:Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
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“Indeed, a persuasive case can be made that [the Minotaur] played a major part in the defeat of America’s greatest foes – the Soviet Union and its satellites, as well as those non-aligned Third World regimes that had become too uppity in the 1960s. Key to this triumph was not so much the successful pursuit of the arms race, but rather the humble US interest rates – those very same rates whose phenomenal rise under Paul Volcker had assisted the Global Minotaur’s birth.”

Us ImperialismThird World Debt CrisisVolcker Shock
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
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“... toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult.”

EconomicsMarketsDerivativesEconomic Models
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
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“Se è corretta la mia ipotesi che il capitale cloud sta prevalendo sul capitale terrestre, risucchiando sempre più rendita cloud dalla catena del valore globale, allora l'Europa è in grossi guai. Perché non è la Cina. Non ha una sola azienda Big Tech che possa competere con quelle della Silicon Valley e i suoi sistemi finanziari sono in tutto e per tutto dipendenti da Wall Street.”

Silicon ValleyEconomiaWall StreetEuropaBig TechTecnofeudalesimoCinaFinanza
Book:Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo
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“Se non è un mercato capitalista, in cosa entriamo, buon Dio, quando andiamo su amazon.com ?” Mi ha chiesto qualche anno fa uno studente all’Università del Texas. “Una specie di feudo digitale” ho risposto d’istinto. “Un feudo post-capitalista, le cui radici storiche rimangono nell’Europa feudale, ma la cui integrità è oggi mantenuta da un tipo di capitale futuristico e distopico basato sul cloud”

AmazonCloudEconomiaTecnofeudalesimoFeudo Digitale
Book:Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo
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“Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.”

WorldLongPastGivenBornTechnologyRevolutionFunctionCrisisBraveStrikesCeaseLabourCyclesContractsNew WorldContrastKillersLong AgoAgricultureLaboratoryGermsIndustrial RevolutionBrave New WorldAntibiotics
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
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“Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no indsturial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.”

PeopleWayHas BeensMadePastWishRevolutionCrisisDemocraticPainfulLeapFarmingIndustrial RevolutionRecoil
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
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“European Union partners never said European Union partners're going to renege on any promises, European Union partners said that European Union partners promises concern a four-year parliamentary term, european Union partners will be spaced out in an optimal way, in a way that is in tune with our bargaining stance in Europe and also with the fiscal position of the Greek state.”

WayYearsSaidStatesTermFourPositionPromiseEuropeConcernUnionsPartnersGreekTunesFour YearsEuropean UnionStanceBargainingParliamentaryOptimal
Author:Yanis Varoufakis
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