Essays
Should electricity markets be reformed or disbanded? My debate with Michael Liebreich on Cleaning Up
, 01/11/2022
The other day, Michael Liebreich and I had a lively discussion on his CleaningUp podcast provoked by my call “to blow up the electricity markets”. It was fun but, of course, fell short of a comprehensive analysis of the complex issues pertaining to the political economy of electricity generation and distribution. Following our debate, Michael […]
Iran’s Revolutionary Moment as the Internationalist Left’s Great Challenge – by Shoja Azari
, 24/10/2022
Shoja Azari, is an Iranian visual artist and filmmaker based in New York, working with Sherin Neshat, his life-long partner and comrade, on art projects of note and substance. Their last project is Land of Dreams, a magnificent new film set in the United States but ever so redolent of meaning viz. the New Iranian […]
How the West poisoned its money – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 10/10/2022
ATHENS – Capitalism conquered the world by commodifying almost everything that had a value but not a price, thus driving a sharp wedge between values and prices. It did the same to money. The exchange value of money always reflected people’s readiness to hand over valuable things for given sums of cash. But, under capitalism, […]
Is This the End of ‘Socialism for the Rich’? – The Atlantic
, 10/10/2022
Last Thursday, the International Monetary Fund spooked the markets and surprised the commentariat by chiding the U.K. Conservative government for fiscal irresponsibility. The shock was palpable. For the IMF to criticize the government of a major Western economy was a little like the janitor scolding the landlord for putting the building’s assessed value at risk. That sense […]
Trickle-down Truss is carrying on the dirty work of Thatcher, Blair and Osborne – THE GUARDIAN
, 01/10/2022
If Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget survives the storm it triggered, a banker on a million-pound annual salary stands to receive £50,000 of income tax relief – on top of the extra bonuses the bank can throw in, now that the Liz Truss government has removed the cap on them. Meanwhile, a Deliveroo rider gets a pep […]
Zombie capitalism is unravelling – THE NEW STATESMAN
, 29/09/2022
This is no sterling crisis. It is a crisis of British capitalism caused by 40 years of underinvestment and deindustrialisation, exacerbated by chronic reliance on speculative bubbles and triggered by Liz Truss’s extravagant kindness to Britain’s wealthy. While all eyes are on the fall of the pound, the real drama revolves around the Bank of England’s […]
The Greek Watergate – UNHERD
, 23/09/2022
Nothing surprises me more than politicians professing to be surprised that their phones have been tapped. In the world revealed to us by Edward Snowden almost a decade ago, no phone is beyond the reach of motivated eavesdroppers. This is not to say, however, that phone-tapping political opponents has lost its capacity to poison democracy. […]
Why energy markets should be dismantled, especially during and after the war in Ukraine – On Democracy Now!
, 18/09/2022
We look at how the Ukraine war is contributing to an energy crisis across Europe with Greek politician and economist Yanis Varoufakis. Last week Russia announced it would not resume sending natural gas to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, blaming Western sanctions for supposed maintenance delays keeping the gas shut off. Prior to […]
Are we Greeks insufferable nationalists? UNHERD
, 18/09/2022
We Greeks have a reputation for being insufferable nationalists, most of whom genuinely believe that Greek culture is superior to that of other nations and peoples. We were even anointed the most culturally chauvinistic Europeans in a recent Pew survey. At the risk of confirming that stereotype, I shall blame it on… foreigners, with their immoderate […]
Time to Blow Up the Electricity Markets – Project Syndicate
, 18/09/2022
The European Union’s power sector is a good example of what market fundamentalism has done to electricity networks the world over. With the end of cheap natural gas, retail consumers and businesses are paying the price for their governments’ embrace of a shoddy theory. ATHENS – The blades of the wind turbines on the mountain […]
, 18/09/2022
Greeks and other southern Europeans could now be feeling schadenfreude as Germany faces the collapse of its economic model in the face of the Ukraine war and the new cold war with China. But with a democratic Europe in the balance, this is no time to gloat. ATHENS – It is never easy to wake […]
Inflation, socialism’ for corporations & austerity for workers: FORTUNE comments on Yanis Varoufakis’ take
, 18/09/2022
Known for sporting a leather jacket in meetings with foreign dignitaries during his brief stint as Greece’s finance minister in 2015, Yanis Varoufakis has become a bit of a rebel in economic circles. A member of Greece’s Hellenic Parliament and founder of the left-wing European Realistic Disobedience Front, or MeRA25 party, Varoufakis hasn’t historically pulled any […]
Inflation as a Political Power Play Gone Wrong – Project Syndicate op-e
, 30/07/2022
The blame game over surging prices is on. Was it too much central-bank money being pumped out for too long that caused inflation to take off? Was it China, where most physical production had moved before the pandemic locked down the country and disrupted global supply chains? Was it Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine took […]
Chatting with Owen Jones on Rwanda, Brexit, Keir Starmer, Assange, Melenchon, Ukraine and Paul Mason – video
, 20/06/2022
We had a lot to talk about: Britain’s deporting of refugees to Rwanda, how Boris Johnson’s ‘oven-cooked’ Brexit deal is unravelling, Keir Starmer’s dishonest leadership of the Labour party, the political situation in Spain, the revival of the French left, how the horror of the Ukraine war can end, the extradition of Julian Assange, and […]
Should we save capitalism? | Slavoj Žižek, Paul Krugman, Yanis Varoufakis, Shoshana Zuboff, and more – iai video
, 12/06/2022
Leading economists and philosophers discuss in depth the downfall of capitalism and its implications for our social reality. Featuring: Slavoj Žižek, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Shoshana Zuboff, @Yanis Varoufakis, @Mariana Mazzucato , Deirdre McCloskey and Guy Standing. 00:00 | Introduction 00:31 | Paul Krugman 04:07 | Guy Standing 07:01 | Joseph Stiglitz 11:03 | Deirdre […]
“We have a duty to give shelter to Turkish democrats fleeing Erdoğan” – interviewed by Bünyamin Tekin for TURKISH MINUTE
, 06/06/2022
“Democrats have a duty, whenever there is a dictatorial turn in any neighbouring country, to give shelter and asylum to fellow democrats escaping the dictators, the authoritarians. The Greeks have a duty to give shelter to Turkish democrats fleeing Erdoğan or fleeing any regime, for that matter,” MeRA25 MP and party leader Yanis Varoufakis, said […]
The Peace Process Ukraine’s Supporters Should Support – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 06/06/2022
In 1943, progressives had a moral duty to dismiss calls for a negotiated settlement with Hitler. Cutting a deal with the Nazis to end the carnage would have been unforgivable. Civilized people had only one option: to keep fighting until Allied troops stood over Hitler’s Berlin bunker. Today, by contrast, it would be a grave […]
Dangerous fantasy: Gold, Bitcoin won’t help you find freedom outside government – Interviewed on Kitco NEWS
, 06/06/2022
Central banks should issue their own democratically controlled crypto, not bypassed by Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies” I told David Lin, Anchor and Producer at Kitco News; a service catering largely to the crypto community who (as you will see in the comments) cannot stand my rejection of their collective fantasy that crypto currencies will liberate us from […]
“Our Techno-Feudal Hellscape” – On the Real News Network, with Jason Myles & Pascal Robert
, 02/05/2022
From the push to turn more of the workforce into precarious “gig workers” to the ways profit-seeking digital platforms condition how we act and think while extracting free data from us, we can see and feel everyday the creeping evidence that we are living in a new reality. As world-renowned Greek economist, author, and politician […]
Cloudalists: The New Ruling Class & how can we confront its technofeudal order – iai lecture, 10 APR 2022
, 25/04/2022
Capital triumphed over democracy a long time ago. Today, following the Crash of 2008, the deployment of central bank money to refloat Big Finance, and the rise of Big Tech’s platform corporations, a new type of capital has emerged: Cloud capital (a form of command capital living in the ‘Cloud’). Cloud Capital is crushing the […]
Discussing Crypto, the Left & Technofeudalism with Evgeny Morozov – CRYPTO SYLLABUS long interview
, 23/04/2022
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in […]
Our moral duty to Ukraine, and to each other – UNHERD (video + full transcript)
, 23/04/2022
Since war broke out in Ukraine, Greek politician and economist Yanis Varoufakis has been accused of being a Putin apologist, a “Westsplainer”, and a conspiracy theorist. But what does he really think about this conflict? Freddie Sayers spoke to him about liberal warmongering, who’s benefitting from the war, and the West’s moral duty to put […]
Saving Ukraine, dealing with Russia and the global repercussions of failing to do so – On TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin
, 23/04/2022
When economist Yanis Varoufakis last visited The Agenda a decade ago, the world was still reeling from the 2008 economic crash, which decimated the economy of his native Greece. In the years since, he ran for political office, became Greece’s finance minister, and started his own political party. Varoufakis is the focus of a new […]