Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis managed to stir a great deal of controversy in a documentary aired in Germany Today on Tuesday evening. “Clever people in Brussels, in Frankfurt and in Berlin knew back in May 2010 that Greece would never pay back its debts. But they acted as if Greece wasn’t bankrupt, as if it just didn’t have enough liquid funds,” he told the documentary, sparking annoyance. His blunt comments sparked a German media backlash that didn’t attack his comments per se but his personality.
This is Yanis Varoufakis with a message from the Progressive International and DiEM25. This Black Friday, Friday, the 27th of November 2020 we’re asking you to refrain from buying anything from Amazon.com. We’re asking you to not even visit Amazon.com on that day. Just for one day. By Yanis Varoufakis, published on DiEM25,. This is an interesting Global Call to Action. This is a strategy I have long advocated in other campaigns so I hope they do this again. I also published a WW article describing some of the local protests against Amazon in the US.
His crime of focusing on reality and stating the obvious is seen by EU media as an attack on Greece’s EU partners. Once considered by Bild as a “sex machine”, he is slowly being represented as a Marxist economists in need of “psychiatric help”.
An article by Jan Fleischhauer in Der Spiegel refers to Varoufakis as a paranoid man who sees “imaginary enemies” who are multiplying and diagnoses the Greek FinMin as a man who suffers from a “psychosis”. The columnist mocks that Varoufakis, an expert in game theory, “is unable to understand matters and his (own) environment.” “Doctor” Fleischhauer refers to Marxist Psychiatrist David Cooper (1931-1986), who ran an experimental unit for young schizophrenics in a revolutionary ‘anti-hospital’, and states that Cooper said that “schizophrenia was a social product that could be cured only with revolution.” The columnist sees an uncanny reflection of these words in the moves of the Radical Left Coalition (SYRIZA) and concludes by stating, “SYRIZAa is not crazy, but capitalism surrounding it.”
Bild, too, refers to Greek government “madness”, stating, “The Greek government is behaving as if everyone must dance to its tune. But there must be an end to this madness. Europe must not be made to look stupid.”
Not just the media…
Most Eurozone finance ministers openly believe that Varoufakis has turned out to be a sui generis. Terms such as “naive”, “inadequate” and a “special case” are now being used outright by EU ministers of the united EU. The most verbal of the EU FinMins is none other than the great “Europeanist”, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who has an obsession with Varoufakis in a barrage of interviews where he claims that his Greek counterpart is “naive” and how “sorry” he feels for Greeks. On Tuesday, Schaeuble blamed Varoufakis for behaving in a “foolishly naive way” and reflected the views of Der Spiegel – or vise versa – that Varoufakis is “looking for enemies.”
Slovakian Finance Minister Peter Kažimír, asked about his views on Varoufakis’ letter to the Eurogroup, quipped “I am not Minister of Culture in order to judge the literary style.”
After reports that Schaeuble had requested the removal of Varoufakis as minister and ironic statements all-round, the Greek government’s statement refering to an “organized plan to besmirch Varoufakis” did not go unnoticed in Brussels as Greece is left isolated within the EU. European officials state that the Greek government is constantly pointing fingers of blame to “Brussels”, “Berlin” and EU policies in an effort for Tsipras to clear himself from his own failure to deliver his pre-election promises. EU officials maintain that it is extremely difficult for Tsipras and Varoufakis to explain to the Greek people that the hopes and dreams of an end to austerity that they had promised had been “silly” at best.
Yanis Varoufakis Slot Machines
I suspect that one of the most enduring legacies of the Greek crisis may be the making of Yanis Varoufakis into a global opinion leader.
Yanis Varoufakis Wife
It is a curious phenomenon. Varoufakis was the leading Greek negotiator in a round of talks with the European Union that can euphemistically be considered not a great success – from the Greeks’ own perspective.
Varoufakis and the Syriza government came to power after the general elections in late January. Insofar as the Greek economy is concerned, before they won the election forecasters expected positive growth: instead, they reduced the economy to shambles. They bet on their capacity to twist the wrists of European leaders, over “austerity”. They failed.
It doesn’t seem to matter at all.
I actually had a moment of sympathy for Varoufakis, after listening to this excellent EconTalk. I’ve since read a Varoufakis’ text that is supposed to be both personal and theoretical, these “Confessions of an erratic Marxist in the midst of a repugnant European crisis“. This is basically a talk that Varoufakis gave in 2013.
Here Varoufakis fashions himself as a new Keynes, convinced that “the Left’s historical duty, at this particular juncture, is to stabilise capitalism; to save European capitalism from itself and from the inane handlers of the Eurozone’s inevitable crisis”.
Varoufakis quotes a lot of science fiction, from Star Trek Voyager (I thought nobody really liked that!), to The Matrix, a movie he considered “overshadowed” by Karl Marx:
…the machines were soon to discover that humans do not last long when their spirit is broken and their freedom utterly deprived. (…) So, the machines obliged us with what Marx would have called a ‘false consciousness’. They forced not only nutrients into our bodies but also illusions that our spirit craved into our minds. Ingeniously, they attached electrodes to our skulls with which they fed, directly into our brain, a virtual, yet utterly realistic, life that, as humans, we could cope with. While our bodies were still brutally plugged into their power generators, feeding them with electricity sourced from our body heat, the machines’ computer program known as The Matrix filled our minds with an imaginary, illusory yet very ‘real’ ‘normal’ life. That way our bodies, oblivious to reality, could live for decades, to the great utility of the machines responsible for generating enough power to sustain their new world.
(…) The Matrix is no futurology. It has been part of our reality for a while now! It is a top-notch documentary of our era or, to be more precise, of the tendency of our era to bleach out of human labour all those characteristics that prevent it from becoming fully flexible, perfectly quantified, infinitely divisible. As for Marx, his role was to provide us with the option of the ‘red pill’; a chance to stare in the face, without the soothing illusions of bourgeois ideology, the ugly reality of a system that produces crises and deprivation as a matter of course, by design, and certainly not by accident.
You can read the whole thing. Varoufakis makes a good point on the European Union’s group thinking (“Both Soviet and EU apparatchiks share a Christian sects’ determination to acknowledge facts only if they are congruent with prophesy and their sacred texts.”) and says plenty of rather bizarre things: from Thatcher having “carefully engineered” recessions to Marx not having been dialectic enough because he did not predict “the possibility that the creation of a workers’ state would force capitalism to become more civilised”.
Yanis Varoufakis Daughter
All in all, the Varoufakis essay seems to be one of those cases in which confusion can be mistaken for profundity by superficial readers. This would not hurt him. Plus, he is considered an enemy of some people lots of newspapers’ readers love to loathe: Mrs Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.
In his “Confessions”, Varoufakis (who seems to be quite a patrician himself) wrote that “we must avoid becoming like the socialists who failed to change the world but succeeded in improve… their private circumstances”.
Yanis Varoufakis Net Worth
And yet, good for him, this is exactly the outcome of his short time in Greek government. As a Minister, he has nothing to exhibit as success. But an intense countenance, an elaborately casual look, and his colourful prose makes him a perfect fit for the world of celebrities. I suppose this is another proof of the immense powers of “commodification” of global capitalism.