Yanis Varoufakis
@yanisvaroufakis • 1,184,749 subscribers
Economics professor, quietly writing obscure economic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe's inane handling of an inevitable crisis
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![Hello, this is Yanis Varoufakis with a piece of news that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so scary. This morning, two policemen appeared on my doorstep to serve a summons ordering me to the police headquarters to be interrogated by the Greek DEA, our drug busting police department. Not as a witness, expert or not, but as the accused. Accused of what? Shortly after New Year’s, I appeared on a podcast organised by young people to answer their questions on everything that concerns Gen Z today: social media, the meaning of life, their job prospects, what I call technofeudalism etc. At some point, they asked me if I had ever used drugs. Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable “I didn’t inhale”?), I said I had. Apart from pot, I told them, I had one experience of taking ecstasy in Sydney 36 years ago. It was pleasant, I danced for 16 hours effortlessly but then, I added, it gave me a migraine for a week – and so I never used again. That was my introduction to making the point that, however pleasant drug taking may seem, there is a price to pay. And that the ultimate price is dependence, addiction – “the end of liberty”, I said emphatically. Do you see where this is going? Yes, the Greek police have opened an investigation of me under the charge of... aiding and abetting the narco-mafia. [Do me a favour folks: Please don’t tell Trump, OK?] Seriously now, at a time of war, genocide, stupendous exploitation and so on, my little trouble with the inane Greek police is neither here nor there. But it is important. Here, in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality and freedom. We don’t. Dark forces are at work, pushing us into a postmodern version of the Dark Ages. So, beware, people! They are out to take away the last remnants of autonomy and freedom we have left. Resistance is, literally, existence.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2012165031517999263/amplify_video_thumb/2012162178397474816/img/jPRe8Aj-9EiN1aIq.jpg)
Hello, this is Yanis Varoufakis with a piece of news that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so scary. This morning, two policemen appeared on my doorstep to serve a summons ordering me to the police headquarters to be interrogated by the Greek DEA, our drug busting police department. Not as a witness, expert or not, but as the accused. Accused of what? Shortly after New Year’s, I appeared on a podcast organised by young people to answer their questions on everything that concerns Gen Z today: social media, the meaning of life, their job prospects, what I call technofeudalism etc. At some point, they asked me if I had ever used drugs. Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable “I didn’t inhale”?), I said I had. Apart from pot, I told them, I had one experience of taking ecstasy in Sydney 36 years ago. It was pleasant, I danced for 16 hours effortlessly but then, I added, it gave me a migraine for a week – and so I never used again. That was my introduction to making the point that, however pleasant drug taking may seem, there is a price to pay. And that the ultimate price is dependence, addiction – “the end of liberty”, I said emphatically. Do you see where this is going? Yes, the Greek police have opened an investigation of me under the charge of... aiding and abetting the narco-mafia. [Do me a favour folks: Please don’t tell Trump, OK?] Seriously now, at a time of war, genocide, stupendous exploitation and so on, my little trouble with the inane Greek police is neither here nor there. But it is important. Here, in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality and freedom. We don’t. Dark forces are at work, pushing us into a postmodern version of the Dark Ages. So, beware, people! They are out to take away the last remnants of autonomy and freedom we have left. Resistance is, literally, existence.
Yanis Varoufakis2,227,178 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
Breaking: Israel has. just raided vessels of the Sumud flotila off Cyprus. Many more are continuing their journey to Gaza. Time to rise up against Israel's assumption that it has a god given right to the Mediterranean, to violate Int Law at will, to complete the genocide. .
Yanis Varoufakis297,286 görüntüleme • 28 gün önce
A message regarding Iran and the popular rebellion DiEM25, and I personally, are in full solidarity with Iranians resisting theocratic brutality — especially women, workers, students. We don’t forget: WOMAN-LIFE-FREEDOM, but also minorities risking everything for dignity and freedom. At the same time, I reject cynical attempts by foreign powers, the United States and Israel in particular, to hijack this uprising for their regime-change agendas or the return of Reza Pahlavi, the brutal Savac, the awful legacy of his father’s regime. Foreign interference doesn’t a legitimate uprising make. But nor does foreign interference make an uprising illegitimate. What it does do is that it makes its political independence more vital. Real solidarity means amplifying Iranian voices that are for Iran, not foreign powers; not the CIA or Mossad. Real solidarity means opposing war and coercive sanctions that punish ordinary people. Real solidarity means refusing externally curated “leaders”. As our governments continue to toe Washington’s line, the task is to pressure, inform, and educate — and extend concrete support to Iranians pursuing their own vision of a free Iran. History shows that regimes fall — sometimes with catastrophic results for the people, sometimes with beneficial results for the people. History also shows that oppressed peoples have no choice other than to rebel so that today’s popular struggle can become tomorrow’s organised force for political liberation.
Yanis Varoufakis549,625 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
Hello friends. I am Yanis Varoufakis stealing a few of your moments to tear up, in front of you, the invitation to appear in the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week to present my new book RAISE YOUR SOUL. I was looking forward to returning to Adelaide for what has been for decades a brilliant festival of books, ideas and debate. No longer. The Zionist Lobby destroyed it. By forcing the Board to disinvite fellow author Randa Abdel-Fattah. By identifying even Bob Carr, the former Premier of NSW and Australia’s former foreign minister, an individual “of concern”. By forcing the Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, my marvellous, Jewish friend Louise Adler, to resign, they left me with no option other than to tear up my coveted invitation in public. As Louise says, friends and colleagues in the arts, beware of the future. They are coming for you.
Yanis Varoufakis427,286 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
BREAKING: Israeli jailers are torturing, smashing the teeth, attacking the body, of Marwan Barghouti - the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, the leader who can lead Palestinians and Israelis to a Just Peace (watch the video by Knesset member Ofer Cassif). Free Marwan Now! #FreeMarwan
Yanis Varoufakis500,460 görüntüleme • 6 ay önce
A video-text summary of my argument that we now live in the age of TECHNOFEUDALISM (in 16', 2000 words): Wherever we turn, we witness the triumph of capital. Capital has prevailed everywhere: in warehouses, factories, offices, universities, public hospitals, the media – in space but also in the microcosm of genetic engineering. So, how do I dare claim that capitalism has been killed? By whom? The deliciously ironic answer is that capitalism was killed by its own hand… by capital! If I am right, the issue is not what AI will do to us in the future but what has already happened: Capital became so dominant that it mutated into a variant so toxic that, like a stupid virus, it killed off its host, capitalism, replacing it with something far, far worse. This new mutant capital, that killed capitalism, lives in the proverbial cloud – so, let us call it cloud capital. What is cloud capital? What makes it so different? Cloud capital, of course, does not really live up in the cloud. It lives down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and of course it lives on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest. Unlike traditional capital, from fishing rods to the steam-engines of the Industrial Revolution to today’s modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce anything – it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. That’s what Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant or Apple’s Siri is: It is a produced means of behavioural modification. It is a machine, a piece of capital, which we train to train us to train it to determine that which we want. And, once we want it, the same networked machine sells it to us, directly, bypassing markets. As if that were not enough, the same machinery succeeds in making us sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour. We are sustaining it as we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants, photos - we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs! Meanwhile, in the factories and the warehouses, where waged proletarians work under increasingly precarious conditions, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us directly – those algorithms are deployed, usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists, to make proletarians, workers in the warehouses, in the factories work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time. I started by saying that wherever we turn, we stumble on the triumph of capital. But it is cloud capital that is the real winner. It is amazing how it performs, at once, five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: Cloud capital grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, that which is going to satiate the desires it made us have. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs. Is it surprising that the owners of this cloud capital – let’s call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt power to extract? To extract gargantuan surplus value from proletarians; untold quantities of free labour from almost everyone; and mind-numbing cloud rents from vassal capitalists – from sellers? Is it a wonder that they are vastly more powerful than Henry Ford or Rupert Murdoch could ever be? “Hang on”, I hear you say. “Is Jeff Bezos really different to Henry Ford? Aren’t they all a species of monopoly capitalists? Monopolists?” No, is not a monopolistic capitalist enterprise. The moment you enter you have exited capitalism altogether! Sure enough, the place is teaming with buyers and sellers. So, yes, it is an enormous trading platform but, no, a market it certainly is not! One man called Jeff owns everything. But he is much, much more than a mere monopolist. Jeff doesn’t own the factories that produce the stuff sold on his platform by traditional capitalists who have to use it to ply their trade. What he does own is more important: Jeff owns the algorithm that decides which products you see and which you don’t – the very algorithm that you have trained to know you perfectly so that it matches youwith a seller, whom it also knows perfectly well, with a view to maximising the probability that every such match, transaction, will generate, for Jeff, the highest rent that Jeff can charge the seller for what you buy: up to 40% of what you pay is pocketed by Jeff, the cloudalist! The mind rebels at the enormity but also the radical novelty of this kind of exploitation: The same algorithm that we help train in real time to know us inside out - that same algorithm both modifies our preferences and administers the selection and delivery of commodities that will satisfy these preferences. If you and I were to type “electric bicycles” or “binoculars” while in you and I would get totally different recommendations. In a traditional market or shopping mall it would be as if you and I were walking next to each other, our eyes trained in the same direction, the same shop window, but we were to see different things depending on what Jeff’s algorithm wants each one of us to see. Everyone navigating around – except Jeff Bezos of course – everyone in is wandering around in algorithmically constructed isolation as if in a Panopticon where, unable to see each other, we only see Jeff’s all-seeing algorithm or, more accurately, only what his algorithm allows us to see with a view to maximising his cloud rent – which is, of course, today’s version of the ground rent that the feudal lords used to extract from their vassals and their peasants. This is not capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to technofeudalism! How did cloud capital kill capitalism? How did it rise up? Who paid for it? Capitalism, lest we forget, had two pillars: markets and profit. Of course, markets and profit remain ubiquitous. Nevertheless, cloud capital has evicted both markets and profit from the centre of our socioeconomic system, pushing them out to its margins, and replacing them: Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by cloud fiefs – digital trading platforms like or Alibaba which, as we saw, look like, but are not, markets. And Profit? The fuel of capitalism? Well, that has been replaced by its feudal predecessor: rent. But, specifically, a new form of rent, a cloud rent that must be paid for access to those cloud fiefs or digital platforms. But how did cloud capital emerge?It began life in the late 1990s when the original Internet, which was a Commons – it functioned as a capitalism-free-zone – that original Internet, Internet 1.0 if you want, was privatised by the emergent Big Tech. Who paid for the trillions it cost to manufacture and to accumulate cloud capital so quickly in the hands of so very few cloudalists? The startling answer is: The G7 countries’ central banks, mostly! How did that happen? Well, by accident, or – to be more precise – by… crisis! After the financial sector collapse of 2008, our central bankers printed up to $35 trillion to bail out the bankers at a time when the governments were subjecting our peoples to harsh austerity. Capitalists were clever enough to foresee that the many would be too impecunious to buy their stuff. So, instead of investing, they took the central bank money to the stock exchange and the bond markets, where they bought shares, bonds – along with yachts, art, bitcoin, NFTs any ‘asset’ they could lay their hands on. The only capitalists who actually invested in capital were Big Tech owners. For example, 9 out of every 10 dollars that went into creating Facebook came from these central bank monies! That’s how cloud capital was financed and how the cloudalists became our new ruling class. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. These old-fashioned, terrestrial capitalists continue to extract surplus value from waged labour, but they are no longer in charge, as they used to be. They have become vassals in relation to the owners of cloud capital, of the cloudalists. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour — in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance to do it. But surely, someone will say, this is still capitalism, isn’t it? So, you are still unconvinced? I know, it is hard to part with the term, with the word, capitalism. It is not just liberals who think of capitalism like fish think of the water they swim in – as natural. Socialists too need to feel that our purpose in life, the reason we landed on this Earth, is to overthrow capitalism. The news that I bring that capital beat us to it, and now we have something worse in capitalism’s place, that news is hard to accept. Indeed, it is mostly my fellow-travelling leftist friends who try to dissuade me – to convince me that, yes, cloud capital may be important but “this is still capitalism mate”. Let’s call it rentier capitalism or monopoly capitalism, they suggest. But that simply will not do! Cloud rent is not like ground rent, because it requires massive investment in new tech. And it is not monopoly rent either, because Bezos and Zuckerberg, instead of monopolising markets to sell their manufactures (like Ford and Eddison did), Bezos and Zuckerberg have replaced markets and have no interest in manufacturing anything (unlike Henry Ford and Thomas Eddison). How about surveillance capitalism? Again, no, it won’t do. Cloudalists do not simply use algorithms to brain wash us on behalf of advertisers in an otherwise capitalist setting. No, cloud capital reproduces itself through our free-labour, it directly exploits waged labour, and it squeezes cloud rents from vassal capitalists in trading platforms that are not markets. This is not capitalism folks! Any kind of capitalism. But what about the observation that technofeudalism is parasitic on the capitalist sector within it? Yes, it is true. Were the conventional capitalists to die out, cloudalists would perish, unable to skim off cloud rents from the manufacturers. So what? After capitalism overthrew feudalism, capitalists were also parasitic on landowners, in the sense that, without private land producing food, capitalism would wither. Similarly, now: While the traditional capitalist sector feeds technofeudalism, it is cloud capital and cloud rent that dominate. Does it matter whether we call it technofeudalism or some form of capitalism? At this point, it is important to recall Marx’s maxim that the point is not to interpret but to change the world. So, does it matter if this is still capitalism or whether we call it technofeudalism? I think it does. Recognising that our world has become technofeudal helps us grasp the enormity of what it will take to organise the victims of exorbitant power, the exploited who, now, include not only waged labourers but also the hordes of cloud serfs who are reproducing the very cloud capital that keeps them in a state of deepening precarity. The concept of technofeudalism drives home the point that organising auto-workers and nurses, while still essential, is insufficient. It elucidates what it will take to organise the movements against the fossil fuel cartel when our means of communication are run on cloud capital primed to poison public opinion. It explains how the shift to electric cars caused German deindustrialisation, as profits due to precision mechanical engineering are being replaced by rents extracted by owners of the cloud capital keeping tabs on the drivers’ routes and in-cabin habits. Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter suddenly makes a lot more sense. Twitter for Musk is an interface between his mechanical capital stock at Tesla and SpaceX and cloud capital. The New Cold War between the USA and China, especially after the war in Ukraine, is explained as the repercussion of an underlying clash between two technofeudalisms, one whose cloud rents are denominated in dollars the other in yuan. Isn’t it mindboggling? It took mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks, and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? To create a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. To own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Once we have reclaimed our minds, we can put them collectively to work out a way to create a new cloud capital commons. It will be damned hard. But it’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artefacts from a produced means of behaviour modification to a produced means of human collaboration and emancipation. Cloud serfs, cloud proles and cloud vassals of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our mind-cloud chains! US Edition: UK Edition: Greek Edition:
Yanis Varoufakis1,815,787 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce
The speech that I could not deliver because German police burst into our Berlin venue to disband our Palestine Congress (1930s style). Judge for yourselves the kind of society Germany is becoming when its police bans the following words: Friends, Congratulations, and heartfelt thanks, for being here, despite the threats, despite the ironclad police outside this venue, despite the panoply of the German press, despite the German state, despite the German political system that demonises you for being here. “Why a Palestinian Congress, Mr Varoufakis?”, a German journalist asked me recently? Because, as Hanan Asrawi once said: “We cannot rely on the silenced to tell us about their suffering.” Today, Asrawi’s reason has grown depressingly stronger: Because we cannot rely on the silenced who are also massacred and starved to tell us about the massacres and the starvation. But there is another reason too: Because a proud, a decent people, the people of Germany, are led down a perilous road to a heartless society by being made to associate themselves with another genocide carried out in their name, with their complicity. I am neither Jewish nor Palestinian. But I am incredibly proud to be here amongst Jews and Palestinians – to blend my voice for Peace and Universal Human Rights with Jewish Voices for Peace and Universal Human Rights – with Palestinian Voices for Peace and Universal Human Rights. Being together, here, today, is proof that Coexistence is Not Only Possible – but that it is here! Already. “Why not a Jewish Congress, Mr Varoufakis?”, the same German journalist asked me, imagining that he was being smart. I welcomed his question. For if a single Jew is threatened, anywhere, just because she or he is Jewish, I shall wear the star of David on my lapel and offer my solidarity - whatever the cost, whatever it takes. So, let’s be clear: If Jews were under attack, anywhere in the world, I would be the first to canvass for a Jewish Congress in which to register our solidarity. Similarly, when Palestinians are massacred because they are Palestinians – under a dogma that to be dead they must have been Hamas – I shall wear my keffiyeh and offer my solidarity whatever the cost, whatever it takes. Universal Human Rights are either universal or they mean nothing. With this in mind, I answered the German journalist’s question with a few of my own: · Are 2 million Israeli Jews, who were thrown out of their homes and into an open air prison 80 years ago, still being kept in that open air prison, without access to the outside world, with minimal food and water, no chance of a normal life, of travelling anywhere, and bombed periodically for 80 years? No. · Are Israeli Jews being starved intentionally by an army of occupation, their children writhing on the floor, screaming from hunger? No. · Are there thousands of Jewish injured children no surviving parents crawling through the rubble of what used to be their homes? No. · Are Israeli Jews being bombed by the world’s most sophisticated planes and bombs today? No. · Are Israeli Jews experiencing complete ecocide of what little land they can still call their own, not one tree left under which to seek shade or whose fruit to taste? No. · Are Israeli Jewish children killed by snipers today at the orders of a member-state of the UN? No. · Are Israeli Jews driven out of their homes by armed gangs today? No. · Is Israel fighting for its existence today? No. If the answer to any of these questions was yes, I would be participating in a Jewish Solidarity Congress today. Friends, Today, we would have loved to have a decent, democratic, mutually-respectful debate on how to bring Peace and Universal Human Rights for everyone, Jews and Palestinians, Bedouins and Christians, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea with people who think differently to us. Sadly, the whole of the German political system has decided not to allow this. In a joint statement including not just the CDU-CSU or the FDP but also the SPD, the Greens and, remarkably, two leaders of Die Linke, joined forces to ensure that such a civilised debate, in which we may disagree agreeably, never takes place in Germany. I say to them: You want to silence us. To ban us. To demonise us. To accuse us. You, therefore, leave us with no choice but to meet your accusations with our accusations. You chose this. Not us. · You accuse us of anti-Semitic hatred o We accuse you of being the antisemite’s best friend by equating the right of Israel to commit war crimes with the right of Israeli Jews to defend themselves. · You accuse us of supporting terrorism o We accuse you of equating legitimate resistance to an Apartheid State with atrocities against civilians which I have always and will always condemn, whomever commits them – Palestinians, Jewish Settlers, my own family, whomever. o We accuse you of not recognising the duty of the people of Gaza to tear down the Wall of the open prison they have been encased in for 80 years – and of equating this act of tearing down the Wall of Shame – which is no more defensible than the Berlin Wall was – with acts of terror. · You accuse us of trivialising Hamas’ October 7th terror o We accuse you of trivialising the 80 years of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erection of an ironclad Apartheid system across Israel-Palestine. o We accuse you of trivialising Netanyahu’s long-term support of Hamas as a means of destroying the 2-State Solution that you claim to favour. o We accuse you of trivialising the unprecedented terror unleashed by the Israeli army on the people of Gaza, W. Bank and E. Jerusalem. · You accuse the organisers of today’s Congress that we are, and I quote, “not interested in talking about possibilities for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East against the background of the war in Gaza”. Are you serious? Have you lost your mind? o We accuse you of supporting a German state that is, after the United States, the largest supplier of the weapons that the Netanyahu government uses to massacre Palestinians as part of a Grand Plan to make a 2-State solution, and peaceful coexistence between Jews and Palestinians, impossible. o We accuse you of never answering the pertinent question that every German must answer: How much Palestinian blood must flow before your, justified, guilt over the Holocaust is washed away? So, let’ s be clear: We are here, in Berlin, with our Palestinian Congress because, unlike the German political system and the German media, we condemn genocide and war crimes regardless of who is perpetrating them. Because we oppose Apartheid in the land of Israel-Palestine no matter who has the upper hand – just as we opposed Apartheid in the American South or in South Africa. Because we stand for universal human rights, freedom and equality among Jews, Palestinians, Bedouins and Christians in the Ancient Land of Palestine. And so that we are even clearer on the questions, legitimate and malignant, that we must always be ready to answer: Do I condemn Hamas’ atrocities? I condemn every single atrocity, whomever is the perpetrator or the victim. What I do notcondemn is armed resistance to an Apartheid system designed as part of a slow-burning, but inexorable, ethnic cleansing program. Put differently, I condemn every attack on civilians while, at the same time, I celebrate anyone who risks their life to TEAR DOWN THE WALL. Is Israel not engaged in a war for its very existence? No, it is not. Israel is a nuclear-armed state with perhaps the most technologically advanced army in the world and the panoply of the US military machine having its back. There is no symmetry with Hamas, a group which can cause serious damage to Israelis but which has no capacity whatsoever to defeat Israel’s military, or even to prevent Israel from continuing to implement the slow genocide of Palestinians under the system of Apartheid that has been erected with long-standing US and EU support. Are Israelis not justified to fear that Hamas wants to exterminate them? Of course they are! Jews have suffered a Holocaust that was preceded with pogroms and a deep-seated antisemitism permeating Europe and the Americas for centuries. It is only natural that Israelis live in fear of a new pogrom if the Israeli army folds. However, by imposing Apartheid on their neighbours, by treating them like sub-humans, the Israeli state is stoking the fires of antisemitism, is strengthening Palestinians and Israelis who just want to annihilate each other and, in the end, contributes to the awful insecurity consuming Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. Apartheid against the Palestinians is the Israelis’ worst self-defence. What about antisemitism? It is always a clear and present danger. And it must be eradicated, especially amongst the ranks of the Global Left and the Palestinians fighting for Palestinian civil liberties –around the world. Why don’t Palestinians pursue their objectives by peaceful means? They did. The PLO recognised Israel and renounced armed struggle. And what did they get for it? Absolute humiliation and systematic ethnic cleansing. That is what nurtured Hamas and elevated it the eyes of many Palestinians as the only alternative to a slow genocide under Israel’s Apartheid. What should be done now? What might bring Peace to Israel-Palestine? · An immediate ceasefire. · The release of all hostages: Hamas’ and the thousands held by Israel. · A Peace Process, under the UN, supported by a commitment by the International Community to end Apartheid and to safeguard Equal Civil Liberties for All. · As for what must replace Apartheid, it is up to Israelis and Palestinians to decide between the 2-state solution and the solution of a Single Federal Secular State. Friends, We are here because vengeance is a lazy form of grief. We are here to promote not vengeance but Peace and Coexistence across Israel-Palestine. We are here to tell German democrats, including our former comrades of Die Linke, that they have covered themselves in shame long enough – that two wrongs do not one right make – that allowing Israel to get away with war crimes is not going to ameliorate the legacy of Germany’s crimes against the Jewish People. Beyond today’s Congress, we have a duty, in Germany, to change the conversation. We have a duty to persuade the vast majority of decent Germans out there that universal human rights is what matters. That Never Again means Never Again. For anyone, Jew, Palestinian, Ukrainian, Russian, Yemeni, Sudanese, Rwandan – for everyone, everywhere. In this context, I am pleased to announce that DiEM25’s German political party MERA25 will be on the ballot paper in the European Parliament election this coming June – seeking the vote of German humanists who crave a Member of European Parliament representing Germany and calling out the EU’s complicity in genocide – a complicity that is Europe’s greatest gift to the antisemites in Europe and beyond. I salute you all and suggest we never forget that none of us are free if one of us is in chains.
Yanis Varoufakis1,176,434 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce
In praise, support and, yes, celebration of Francesca Albanese. As Francesca prepares to present her 8th report to the UN on the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, her demonisation follows a familiar pattern: Some fake NGO spreads falsehoods about Francesca, outrage is then engineered and, finally, calls for her resignation as the UN’s Special Rapporteur are issued by the governments of Germany, France, Czechia etc. - by politicians who for years now have done their utmost to arm and provide diplomatic cover to Israel’s genocidal government. Why? For a simple reason: So that you and I, we, do not talk about the hideous facts that Francesca is exposing with such brilliant clarity and legal precision: the Palestinians’ genocide, the economic motives of a corporate world that profits from the Occupation, the torture of Israel’s Palestinian captives, Israel’s never-ending violations of International Law etc. Today, Francesca Albanese’s detractors, those who seek to shield Israel from her well-documented, factual, legitimate criticism by getting her fired or by forcing her resignation from her position of UN Special Rapporteur – these people do not understand one thing: Francesca will NEVER stop! She will continue to expose Israel’s crimes whether she is the UN’s Special Rapporteur or not. My message to them is simple: Francesca Albanese may be even more successful in shining light on Israel’s genocide if you strip her of her UN role. Beware what you wish for!
Yanis Varoufakis192,129 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
Every week, the number of protesters in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa carrying pictures of Gaza children murdered by Israel grows. They congregated in their hundreds. Now they congregate in their thousands. A thin ray of light in the endless darkness Stop the genocide!
Yanis Varoufakis553,258 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
On Friday 14th, Argentina's President Milei tweeted about the $LIBRA coin, encouraging his followers to buy it on the grounds that it would “help fund small businesses and start-ups”. As if that weren’t enough, he shared a link for people to buy it online. Naturally, within a few hours, $LIBRA’s price shot up. Many more people, trying to escape the poverty that Millei’s policies have subjected them to, rushed in to buy. Alas, soon after the price of $LIBRA crashed and they lost their money. This is a standard tactic by crypto scammers. It is known as a ‘rug pull’: draw in naïve buyers only to stop trading and run with their money. But when the President of the country does it, it is more than a scam, a scandal. It is a crime. More broadly, this incident confirms how dangerous the illusion of apolitical, non-state, money is. Money can never be anything other than state based. That we need to democratise our public money is, of course, crucial. But any attempt to privatise money, however well-meaning its adherent might be, is bound to end in tears and to empower an oligarchic circle. End of story.
Yanis Varoufakis537,242 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
As long as there are Israelis like Gaia, there is hope.
Yanis Varoufakis664,008 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Israel's delusion that it can cover up its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under a veil of smoke and fire descending upon the region is enabled by Europe's and America's complicity. The carnage is on us: Americans, Europeans, Australians, Canadians...
Yanis Varoufakis559,583 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Ten years after the majestic, globally significant, yet betrayed NO Referendum of the Greek people – a personal message: On 5th of July 2015 the Greek people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to say a big, beautiful NO to the Big Business and Big Finance who, through their centre right and centre left political representatives, were demanding of the Greek people that they shoulder the costs of the banking crisis which Big Business and Big Finance had caused, with the result that hundreds of millions of people in Europe and America were crushed under mountain ranges of banking losses which governments then turned into public debt, before shifting it to the shoulders of the weakest of citizens through universal austerity – the working classes, the poor, the elderly, the young, the women, people who lacked the power to defend themselves from the powerful plucking the very moneytree whose existence they denied. Churchill once said of the battle of El Alamein that, before it, the Allies had never won but that, after it, they never lost again. I could say something similar about that splendid and, at once, tragic day, of the Greek NO Referendum ten years ago today – the day when 62% of Greek voters ignored the financial terrorism of the European Central Bank (which had shut down the Greek banks to blackmail voters to accept the terms of surrender they were dictating to the Greek people). That same day when my former comrade, the PM I was serving as finance minister on behalf of the Greeks who were resisting, trashed their verdict and defected to the Big Finance and the Big Business in the name of the left. Before that day, before the magnificent NO Referendum outcome of 5th July 2015, and during the months and years leading to it, we could not imagine losing in the long run our fights against the Big Finance and the Big Business that blew up our social economies in 2008. But after it, since the PM I was serving under overturned our people and betrayed their referendum verdict, we cannot imagine winning ever again, at least not in our lifetimes, against the Big Finance and the Big Business whom the betrayal of the NO Referendum helped recover. It was THAT significant a day. It was THAT significant a defection. Now, I know it is not the done thing to sully the spirit of one’s fellow travellers, one’s comrades, to say things like that - to surrender in public to the admission not only of the size of our defeat but also of the possibility that we may not win again for the foreseeable future. Alas, now is the time for honesty – for without honesty amongst rebels no rebellion worth its salt can be staged. Indulge me friends, fellow travellers, comrades. My point is not to bring you down. My point is to acknowledge where we are not just in Greece, in Germany, in Britain, in Europe but globally. To take stock properly of our situation globally not to mourn nor for some perverted sense of inverted glory, certainly not for gain, but for the simple, stubborn hope of rising again. Somewhere to the North of where I am talking you from, the killing fields of Ukraine are devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Where is the Peace Movement to stop this? Nowhere really. Instead Europe is sinking fast into Military Keynesianism, with large majorities in our parliaments voting for unspeakable amounts of new debt to go to weapons of mass destruction we neither need nor can afford – and certainly weapons that people with the slightest of sense left in their hearts and minds should not want. Meanwhile, needless to say, from my southeast, from the scorched land of Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifts on the wind. Yes, we have staged magnificent marches on our streets. Yes, our people have marched to Gaza, other comrades risked life and limb to sail to that coastal war crime scene. Yes we have made it possible to speak of the genocide without being treated as buffoons. Yes, we have shifted public opinion. But, nothing is changing on the ground where Palestinian life is eradicated at a steady, at an unbearable rate, or in the corridors of power. Where are the sanctions on Israel? Where is the UN Peacekeeping force that should have been parachuted in to stop the genocide in its tracks? Nowhere. The only people that are hounded are people like the UN’s Special Rapporteur, my friend Francesca Albanese, for daring to report on the political economy of genocide. Why has Brazil, Spain or Ireland, countries whose governments have been supportive of the Palestinians not joined the Hague Group that our Progressive International has brought together to isolate Israel? What are they waiting for? Friends, fellow-travellers, comrades, at the risk of saddening, maybe even angering you, I shall say it again: Since that NO referendum was overturned ten years ago, today, by the left’s own leadership, we are losing at every front. Who is winning? Not the liberal authoritarian establishment – Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz. No the pro-genocide radical centre they sensationally unpopular. Even if they are clinging onto power for the time being, they are thoroughly discredited, despised even. No, the winners nest elsewhere in even uglier echelons of the political spectrum. Have you not smelled its smell? Can’t you smell the fascism in the air? Can’t you feel its sour, metallic taste clinging to the back of your throat? What happened to our great hopes? Remember Woman-Life-Freedom? The whispered three-word promise Kurdish heroines carried like a fragile beacon in their hands, a promise that until recently seemed to shimmer just within reach? Well, take a look at the triumphant Donald Trump on the one hand – yes, he is winning on every front – and the pathetic Kamala Harris, or the even more pathetic Hillary Clinton, on the other. Between them, willingly in Trump’s case, they created the manosphere’s unyielding juggernaut, which trampled upon Woman-Life-Freedom, as if these precious little words, had never been spoken at all. Authoritarianism, that most insidious of plagues, has crept into every sinew of life. Along with the smell of pollution in the air, microplastics in our oceans, the insidious power of cloud capital hardwired into our brains, delivering our minds to the whims of our new techlords – this New Global Ecocidal Hyper-Exploitative Ruling Class is entrenching itself as the new order, its cold grip tightening with each passing day. I don’t know about you but, speaking personally, on this, the 10th anniversary of our Great Victory which was turned overnight into the Great Betrayal, it is ever so easy to surrender to the feeling, the sensation, that my political struggles, fuelled by a fierce and unyielding hope, are taking me from one defeat to the next, making me feel like a character in some twisted simulation, doomed to repeat the same futile actions over and over. BUT, I shall not surrender. And nor will you! Acknowledging our defeats, the overwhelming strength of the monsters in power, and the magnitude of the task, needs to be done so that we ground our disobedience, our activism, our sacred campaigns for Humanity and for Nature, on solid ground. So that we learn from the past, from what happened to the brave Greek people 10 years ago to this day, focussing with laser sharp precision not only on the economics and the politics of what needs to be done but, much more so, on the greatest solvent, the ugliest enemy, of solidarity: The tendency of our own side, our own comrades, to be lured by power into defecting to the other side – to the oligarchs who are ever so eager to co-opt us, to co-opt our leading figures especially. So, on behalf of DiEM25, today, the 5th of July 2025, exactly 10 years after the Greek people’s majestic, betrayed, but inspiringly courageous NO – that ethereal revolutionary little word – a word redolent of the only Freedom that matters, the freedom to turn down exploitative, extractive deals. On this day, I bid you farewell. Battle well, and let us all, grounded on facts, work joyously to devise acts that make the fascists, the radical centre, the genocide practitioners and the purveyors of all types of exploitation lose their sleep at night so that the many can dream again.
Yanis Varoufakis255,036 görüntüleme • 11 ay önce
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Israel’s bombs and starvation tactics in Gaza, along with their ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the West Bank have not only placed a whole people on death row, have not only aimed at extinguishing Palestinian life from Palestine – no, they have done something else, something of universal, global significance. They have trashed the idea of Int Law, propelling humanity back to the prewar era where might-was-right even in law. With the Int Court of Justice ignored, with the Int Criminal Court sanctioned and annulled, it is down to the Global Majority to defend human, political rights – to uphold Int Law. This is what the Gaza Tribunal is doing this week between 23rd and 26th October at Istanbul University. Watch, attend and support the Gaza Tribunal. For humanity’s sake.
Yanis Varoufakis153,304 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce