Quotessence
Home / Authors / Yanis Varoufakis
Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis Quotes

Finance Minister of Greece

Filter quotes by topic

AllCapitalismTecnofeudalesimoJoint StockCapitalist Property RightsLiberalismShareholdingCorporationsEast India CompanyEconomiaCrisisEconomicsFinancial CrisisGreekWall StreetAmazonAusterityBordersCapitalismoCdoCountry

Famous Yanis Varoufakis Quotes

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image

“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
Create image