Essays
What to watch out for in the unfolding Palestinian genocide – a video briefing on 9th Jan 2025
, 09/01/2025
Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace […]
Musk, Trump and the Broligarchs’ novel hyper-weapon – Le Monde 4-1-2025, full original English version
, 06/01/2025
How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? By merely posing his dazzling question in 1952, Aneurin Bevan captured liberal democracy’s greatest paradox. Today, in the era of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and their Big Tech brethren, Bevan’s time-honoured paradox has only grown preposterously. […]
Star Trek: A humanist communist manifesto for our times – UNHERD
, 04/01/2025
On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC aired a Star Trek episode featuring a concept that clashed mercilessly with what had just happened in Vietnam: the Prime Directive – a general ban on its Starship captains from using superior technology (military […]
The West Is Not Dying, but It Is Working on It – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 19/12/2024
Western power is as strong as ever. What has changed is that the combination of socialism for financiers, collapsing prospects for the bottom 50%, and the surrender of our minds to Big Tech has given rise to overweening Western elites with little use for the last century’s value system. ATHENS – A motley crew of […]
My reply to Chris Giles celebration of the eurozone bailouts in the Financial Times
, 13/12/2024
@ChrisGiles (Financial Times) decided to have some fun by celebrating “The astonishing success of Eurozone bailouts”, using Greece as the poster girl/boy of that exercise in futility, the EU’s most spectacular failure. With such friendly scribblers, Europe has no need for sworn enemies! His evidence? That Greece, the basket case of the euro crisis, reported […]
Lessons from Syria: An imperialist’s enemy is not always an anti-imperialist’s friend – China Academy op-ed
, 10/12/2024
On 15th August 2021, when the Kabul US-puppet regime fell, I expressed relief that US imperialism was defeated and, simultaneously, horror at what the women of Afghanistan were about to suffer in the hands of the jihadist Taliban. Immediately, the US liberal-imperialist lobby attacked me for… celebrating the Taliban victory. You see, for imperialism’s stooges, […]
America’s Trade Deficit Is Not Afraid of Donald Trump – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 02/12/2024
If the US president-elect’s efforts to eliminate America’s trade deficit succeed, real-estate prices in Miami and Manhattan will crash, the cost of servicing government debt will skyrocket and the Dow Jones will plummet. Perhaps he should be reminded that the most vengeful of deities is one that grants him his sincerest wish. ATHENS – Donald […]
Yanis and Slavoj in London, celebrating Zizek at 75! – How to Academy
, 15/11/2024
On 15th November, I interviewed Slavoj Zizek, live on stage, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. Judge for yourself whether we had fun (and maybe had something of interest to say…) To watch the rest click below: Part 2 – Trump is a fetish Part 3 “Israel Needed War” Part 4 Optimism or […]
Brian Eno’s & Yanis Varoufakis’ Open Letter to the Judges of the ICC, on the anniversary of 7th October: Act now or International Law withers forever
, 07/10/2024
OPEN LETTER TO THE JUDGES OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT 7th October 2024 Dear Judges of the International Criminal Court, When we heard in January that the Court on which you sit had decided to hear the case concerning the situation in Israel-Palestine, we were encouraged. Humanity needs an International Criminal Court that upholds the […]
The Road from Fascism – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 19/08/2024
Once fascism is in the air, it is pointless to pander to xenophobia, as liberals do when they embrace an anti-immigrant agenda, or to rail against austerity, as leftists do. Neither issue is what is really fueling far-right extremism, which is good news for progressives. ATHENS – The recent riots in the United Kingdom have […]
Macron and Europe’s Centrists Are Out of Good Options – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 26/07/2024
After four years of pandemic-induced fiscal laxity, the eurozone’s rules are back in force, requiring that France impose severe austerity measures to reduce its deficit. Though no political party ever wants to go down this road, it is the only choice that French President Emmanuel Macron has left himself. ATHENS – France’s political impasse reflects […]
Three Myths Haunting the West – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 26/06/2024
Three myths underpin the collective frustration of Western centrist political leaders, who have long taken their hegemony for granted. Each myth is worse than erroneous, and debunking them is a necessary, if insufficient, step toward making sense of the present. ATHENS – Confident elites reflect viable regimes. Today, elites on both sides of the Atlantic […]
Strict Separation Is Not the Answer for Palestine and Israel – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 29/05/2024
As the bombs continue to fall, and the propaganda war rages, it is hard to imagine any way out of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. But that could reflect our failure to imagine two states whose purpose is to bring the two people closer, not to create two apartheid states where there is now one. ATHENS – […]
The day Germany banned me! – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 30/04/2024
Germany recently prohibited a Palestinian Congress from taking place in Berlin, arrested its Jewish supporters, and barred one of its organizers, Greece’s former finance minister, from entering the country. But the turn to repression is powerful evidence that the country’s pro-Israel political consensus is breaking down. ATHENS – Three weeks ago, I was banned from entering […]
Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism – interviewed by WIRED magazine
, 22/04/2024
The tech giants have overthrown capitalism. That’s the argument of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who became famous trying to defend debt-laden Greece from its German creditors. Varoufakis has never quite regained the notoriety of 2015. But he has remained a prominent left-wing voice. After a failed campaign for a seat in the European […]
Europeans Have No Right to Tell Palestinians How to Escape Their Prison – with Rania Khalek
, 22/04/2024
Rania Khalek was joined by Yanis Varoufakis, economist, political leader, former Finance Minister of Greece and the author of many books including his latest “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism,” to discuss Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A European War Union? – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 22/04/2024
Advocates of European unity used to celebrate the European Union as a peace project. But well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European vision of a peaceful road to shared prosperity had begun to frazzle, and now the invasion has facilitated the EU’s mutation into something much uglier. ATHENS – Europe has become unrecognizable. Advocates of […]
My Berlin speech on Palestine that German police entered the venue to ban – and whose publication here led to my being banned from Germany!
, 13/04/2024
Watch/read the speech that I could not deliver because German police burst into our Berlin venue to disband our Palestine Congress (1930s style) before I could address the meeting. Today, because I dared publish this speech here, the Ministry of Interior issued a “Betätigungsverbot” against me, a ban on any political activity. Not just a […]
NEW YORKER magazine: Has Capitalism Been Replaced by “Technofeudalism”?
, 01/04/2024
“I never planned to be a politician. Never. Not in my wildest nightmares,” the economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said the other day. He was fighting his way toward the exit at Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall, where he’d just spoken at a conference on sustainable development. A man blocked his path: […]
Greece, EU elections, Palestine & the International Order – JACOBIN interview with David Broder
, 01/04/2024
Yanis Varoufakis’s new film series explains how elites used the financial crisis to terrorize Europe’s populations into submission. In this interview, he tells Jacobin why the anti-austerity movement failed and why the center is converging with the far right. Debt is to capitalism what hell is to Christianity: unpleasant, and essential.” Speaking in his new documentary […]
Economics is Irredeemably Sexist – Project Syndicate
, 01/04/2024
One reason women avoid the field of economics is the male chauvinist pig standing at its center, masquerading as the model of rationality. No sensible woman recognizes herself in Homo economicus, who always gets what he likes and likes what he gets. ATHENS – Economics has an intractable “women problem.” High-school girls avoid it. Female undergraduates abandon it. And […]
“It’s hard to read this book and deny its power” – WASHINGTON POST review of TECHNOFEUDALISM
, 01/04/2024
In the not-too-distant past, many Marxist philosophers were weighed down by a shared despair. Capitalism, they feared, had become so totalizing, so all-consuming, that there was no longer any possibility of overthrowing it. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” Karl Marx famously wrote in 1845, […]
Does Australia know what it is getting into viz. the US-China New Cold War? GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA podcast
, 01/04/2024
Does Australia really want to become entangled in a war (Cold or Hot) between the US and China motivated by the clash of the world’s two super cloud fiefs?
Reversing Europe’s and Australia’s slide into irrelevance & insecurity – National Press Club of Australia speech
, 14/03/2024
“Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.” Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National […]