Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Virgil Interviews Yanis Varoufakis

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Virgil talks to former Greek minister of Finance and academic Yanis Varoufakis about DiEM25, his new project to build a pan-European leftist movement. DiEM25: https://diem25.org/ European Spring: https://europeanspring.net Progressive International: https://www.progressive-international.org EDITORS NOTE: If any listener has any way to put us in contact with Jarvis Cocker to follow up on the questions raised in this show, please contact us at [e-mail]

Hey everybody, it's Virgil. I'm sitting here in the Roxy Hotel with former Greek finance minister and professor of economics, Janis Farofakis. Thank you so much for joining us today, Janis. Well, thank you, Virgil. Thank you for having me on this fantastic podcast. Oh, I thank you. Have you listened to it before? I've heard a lot about it. And it's all good, especially the business model and the way that you combine good quality politics with fun. We do like to have fun here. You have fun too. Right now, you're involved in a very

new, very fun project called DM25. Could you discuss what you're doing over there in Europe? Well, we're trying to do something that is completely not really mad, but to do it in a reasonable way. Europe is a very big place. It comprises, as everybody knows, many different countries, more divisions than unity. And yet, we have a common crisis across Europe, which is causing a fragmentation and the toxification of our societies. So the crazy project that we have embarked upon is about creating a transnational unified pan-European movement, not a confederacy of a French movement, a German movement, a Greek movement, but one movement across the whole of Europe with one agenda that tries to run simultaneously in

elections everywhere. That is a completely daft project. But at the same time, it is the only thing that can prevent the post-modern 1930s, which is descending upon Europe at the moment. At least that's what we think. You have a, in addition to DM25, there is a transnational party that's going to contest races in the European Parliament and then races on a national level. And you yourself are running for the European Parliament in Germany for that list, but you're also going to be running in Greece in the next elections there, is that right? I thought you were doing something really mad.

Yes. Well, look, DM25 is a social movement. We begun as a movement, the purpose of which was to bring people together, to have a discussion about what needs to be done differently, what kind of new politics we want by which to replace the old cynical politics of the past. Now, for two years we had this conversation, 120,000 of us, and we decided that, I think, we think that now we know what needs to be done about funding an anti-poverty program, about dealing with the banking system, dealing with all the things that are disintegrating our lives. But of course, the thing is that when you reach that conclusion in a quest for a program,

you realize that nobody gives a damn about it until you bring it to polling stations and you threaten the existing parties with a program that they don't have and they don't really want to engage with. So the movement begot what we call electoral wings, electoral vehicles, political parties that are all under the movement. So to put it slightly differently, the movement has not degenerated into political party. It has created political parties that are hanging under the umbrella of the movement, controlled by the movement, in a bid to prevent ourselves from becoming party apparatchiks. And this movement is called the European Spring, is that right?

That's correct. We called the European Spring because we don't mind failure. The Arab Spring failed abysmally. The Prague Spring failed. The Athens Spring in 2015 is defeated, but we believe that heroic defeats are a way forward. So it's interesting here because it seems like since the financial crisis, the far left has achieved its greatest level of electoral success in Europe that it's achieved in years. I reason winning in 2015, winning two elections, Jeremy Corbyn taking control of the Labour Party and denying Theresa May her majority in those snap elections there. But it also feels like from my sense of things, and I'm not that big of an observer of Europe, it

also feels like these stronger socialist parties in Europe are becoming more cloistered from each other. That's Labour in the UK is increasingly on the side of Brexit, increasingly Eurosceptical. As far as I understand it, Melanchon in France has some views about building socialism that are seeming at odds with the pan-European viewpoints with the EU. I hope I won't break the heart of our socialist comrades who are listening, but I don't agree with you. I think that the left has been an abysmal failure across Europe. Yes, we did win in 2015 and that was a majestic moment, especially not so much a victory that brought us to government in Greece in 2015, but the fantastic referendum in the middle of that

summer in July of 2015 that empowered us with an amazing mandate of 62% of the Greek population who didn't just become socialists overnight, but they empowered us to carry on the fight. And yet that same night, my Prime Minister and our party completely capitulated and from there onwards we have one defeat after the other. I will also disagree with the view that the Labour Party is becoming increasingly Eurosceptic in Britain. I don't believe that. If you look, Britain is a very divided society and so is the British Labour Party, but the majority of the members of the Labour Party are Remainers. And with Jeremy Corbyn and John MacDonald, the shadow treasurer, we campaign together in favour of Britain staying in the

EU. And Jeremy agrees with this to this day, but at the same time we lost the referendum. So we have to respect, as Democrats, the verdicts of the British people. So the difficulty now for the Labour Party is to find the middle road between respecting the democratic verdicts of the referendum and at the same time minimising the harm done to people through Brexit. Well, don't the rules of the EU prevent Jeremy Corbyn from achieving aspects of his very ambitious programme, nationalising the railways, for instance? No. No. And no. Let me remind you that in 2008 we had nationalisation in Britain, as well as in other places, which exceeds anything that Vladimir Ilych Lenin did in 1917. Remember,

they nationalised the whole bloody banking system. And the EU never stopped them doing that. Well, we were on this panel last night, and I want to go back to this discussion that we had then, and it's a discussion that we actually have on this show, because we have a sort of comradely disagreement among our co-hosts. And that's on the question of electoralism. And my colleague, Matt Christman, I know from my extensive and frequently drunk discussions with him, is someone who is more or less opposed to electoralism. And he cites the example of 2015 of the Syriza government. And this essence of his argument is that, look, even

if you could get to this point where you can capture power with this, with a majority support with a very popular platform, and you come into office and you say, we're not going to compromise, we're going to fight, we have a mandate, and we're going to do what we said we would do, this will bring you into conflict with capital, and capital is just so powerful that chances are you're going to blink. And that, I think, is a very fair depiction of what took place in 2015 in Greece. Absolutely. It's totally correct. But this is not an argument, not to contest other elections. And to our revolutionary friends who detest political processes and electoral processes,

two messages for me. First, I detest them, too. I have competed in elections, I have won elections, and I can tell you, there is nothing uglier than that. I absolutely loathed. There's no doubt about that. But at the same time, what's the alternative? Revolution? Hasn't every revolution we've ever had not failed from Spartakus all the way to the October revolution in Russia? Everything has, every revolution eats its children and spits them out, and in the end gives rise to some kind of authoritarianism, which is beyond belief. The fact that every revolution has eaten its children is not a reason not to have a revolution. The fact that every election of a left-wing government has led to disappointment is not

an argument not to compete in elections. As I said yesterday in the event that you and I participated in, every generation is condemned to fight the same struggle again and again and again. But you know that all these failures are what changes the world. Usually the counterargument here is no, instead of participating in the electoral arena, we need something like block by block, community organizing, we need perhaps a renewed labor militancy, wildcat strikes, and these are the institutions through which the proletariat can actually flex its muscle. That's where the actual power is. Well, this is where the power is, as well as at other levels. Militancy at the level

of neighborhoods and the level of factories is absolutely essential. I don't want to down claim it, but we need to get Congress. We need to occupy the Fed. We cannot allow the bourgeoisie to control the production of money, the distribution of wealth, and the laws of our communities and our state, while we confine ourselves to the level of organizing, the level of communities and factories. DM25, that's a very interesting list of personalities involved with that. It's you, Negri's on there, Slavoj Gizheks on there, I think Julian Assange is on there. How did this all come about? It seems like a very eclectic group. It's not eclectic at all. You may look that way. What happened was, when I resigned the

ministry in the summer of 2015, there was a lot of pressure on me by colleagues in the Greek parliament to start a Greek party, and I just couldn't do it. We had just been defeated by our own party. This is a message to our friend who despises electoralism. I just didn't have the will to continue along the lines of yet another national political party. And then I remember in that summer I was in a field in the middle of nowhere in France, and two or three thousand people came to listen to me and some other left-wing politicians in France talk. And I realized they didn't come because of me, they didn't come because they wanted to show solidarity with the Greek people. They came because they were really

worried about their hospitals, their own schools, their wages, their pensions, because they knew that what was being tried out in Greece by the creditors, by the oligarchy, was just a test run, a grand rehearsal for what was coming in France. At that point, of course, I was reminded of the importance of internationalism. A couple of weeks later, I happened to be in Berlin having coffee with a friend of mine, a Croat philosopher, not a Slovenian philosopher. I'm not talking about Gisec, I'm talking about Sresko Horvat. And he said to me, so what do you want to do now? What's the next thing for you? And I thought about it and I said, it would be good to have a pan-European internationalist progressive movement. He said, yeah, do it.

I said, are you crazy? I'm one person in the U.S. and we're having coffee. What are we going to do? Anyway, next morning he called me up and he said, remember that big, huge, fantastic theater opposite us at the café? The Volksbühne, an icon of the left. It was built by workers, four workers, back in the 1920s. He said, well, I booked it three months from now. Let's start the movement. So we began. And we issued an open call. I said, who wants to come? And those crazy people that you mentioned, you know, Gisec and Norm Chomsky and all of them, they said, yeah, we're on. So they came. It's self-selection, as they say. Sure, sure. Well, I mean, let me ask you, the word socialism doesn't appear

anywhere in the DM25 manifesto. No, because we've had enough of this word. I've had enough. I'm a socialist and, you know, so much harm has been accomplished by those who pretended to be trading for socialism. It's, you know, it's a bit like democracy in Iraq. People hear the word and they take cover because I think the American Air Force is going to bomb them any minute now. It's interesting because we don't need it. We're socialists, but we don't need it. I mean, here in the United States, it has not been abused because thankfully, you know, the socialists were already eradicated in 20s. So they never got any chance to do any harm. So you can revive the term socialism and run with it. Good luck.

But in Europe, that's not the case. And you're, so what I mean, what? Well, they said, when I was a young man, I joined something called the Greek Socialist Movement, PASOK, which was a very interesting movement at the time. And then it became the greatest organ of the oligarchy. Later, you know, I joined the Syriza Party, which was a radical left party. And look at what they're doing now. They're implementing every austerity policy that the sick mind of our creators has thought. So I'm falling back increasingly to an older term, democracy, but democracy not as in the American Democratic Party, which sucks and we all know that. But in terms of how Aristotle defined democracy, and he defined

it as a regime, a system of government in which the poor control government, because the poor are in the majority. And that that is a good socialist ideal. You know, the DSA here in the United States, they dropped out of the, what was it, socialist international, right? The collection of the socialist parties in Europe, they voted to do that last year. And very well. And in you, you have the example of PASOK and you have the example of Syriza that that socialist and then they go into austerity and neoliberalism and sell, you know, they blink when they face on Capitol. How is what you're proposing going to be different? And I mean, that's a question for pretty much everyone.

No idea. If I were to answer this question, I would be lying to you. I don't want to lie to you. The best I can, I can do in terms of an answer is to say that it is essential that our movement continues to comprise people who love the idea of being in office. Anybody who likes the idea of being elected to Congress, to government, to be a secretary, a minister, president, the prime minister, whatever should immediately be disqualified. We should look at office, elected office in the same way we look at taking the garbage out at night. Anything that is ugly, we don't want to do it, but it must be done. So as public service. As long as we maintain continual grassroots democracy within the movement, so for instance

in team 25 we vote about everything and every Monday, Wednesday and Friday almost, you know, there's a vote about our policies about what are we going to do in Italy, what are we going to do in Poland and so on. There's a chance. There are no guarantees because the nasty side of humanity is always just below the surface, ready to pounce up and destroy the best and the most humanistic of projects. This is why the progressive international that we just set up with the Sanders Institute in Vermont, we have two colors, black and red, like the old anarchists. Red for revolution and the heart and black for the dark side that resides in each one of us. Star Wars. No, no, no, Star Trek. I hate Star Wars.

Okay. Star Wars is just so American. Well, that's a discussion for another episode, I think. Oh, let's have it. It's an important discussion. You mentioned the Sanders Institute and let's talk about something that you announced there. You co-signed this letter with Jane Sanders, the head of the Sanders Institute, Bernie Sanders' wife, calling for the formation of a progressive international. What are the goals with that? Isn't it remarkable that after the gigantic crisis of 2008, the only people around the planet who've been organizing internationally are the bankers on the one hand and the fascists on the other, and we progressives are killing each other and disagreeing and not collaborating. We're just such a sorry,

ridiculous lot. Isn't it time that we created the progressive international by which to fight on the one hand the so-called liberal establishment, which as I keep saying is neither liberal or not very well established anymore, and on the other hand the Trumpian fascists. But what is this actually? What does this look like in practice? Well, it's very bare bones, simple organization, not at all hierarchical and not at all megalomaniac. We're not going to create an international organization that will rule the world. What we want is a network of trade unions, of political movements, social movements, of political parties, of municipalities that created the basic infrastructure for us to be able collectively

to develop answers to basic fundamental questions that progressives cannot leave unanswered. Like, what do we do? How do we fund the green transition that we will talk about? It's one thing to say, we know we want a green new deal for the world, but where will the money come from? And we don't want just, you know, hand waving and generalisms and wishful thinking with tax the rich. Yeah, but exactly how do we do it? And do we need to tax the rich so much? Or can we print the money? Like they have been, you know, the rich have been printing in order to distribute to one another after 2008. So these are important questions. How do we fund an anti-poverty program? How do we distribute wealth, redistribute wealth within our countries

and between our countries, which is absolutely essential if we don't do that. We cannot really talk about the green new deal. These are questions that previous generations try to answer. So the first international, communist international, tried to answer those questions and there were some very interesting answers. Even in the FDR and his administration during the war, tried to answer that question and there was always the Bretton Woods system. And it was an audacious system. It had some very interesting characteristics and very progressive ones. For instance, you know, completely defying the finances. And that's why the finances hated Bretton Woods. These, therefore, are the questions that we, this generation,

must sit down and work out at the transnational planetary level. Certainly. But you know, it's, right now, you know, you say yourself, and you've written recently in these op-eds about DM25, about your new projects, that the European project is falling apart, the resentment towards Brussels, towards the EU's increasing, especially from the far right, but also from some sectors in the left. Here in the United States, we feel like, by and large, that, you know, we are siloed off from the rest of the world. And even on the left here in the United States, democratic socialists here prioritize the American working class, which often whose interests can often be in conflict with, say, the proletariat in the global south. How can you,

you know, we solve these problems, we think about a global new deal. That's something that necessarily involves massive wealth transfers, right? If it's going to have a moral basis and actually solve the question of climate change, how was that sold to Americans, working class Americans, working class Europeans? Easily. Well, firstly, anybody who calls themselves socialist, democratic socialists in some America, of Yemen, of France, let us remind ourselves how the whole thing began. It began with workers of the world unite, did not begin with workers of the world divide and look after each other and don't give a damn about workers in other countries in the world, right? Point number one. Point number two, we all know that the way in which the global oligarchy

of the Davos Foundation, of the Davos kind, the way they prevail and the way they manage to reproduce their privileges is through a race to the bottom, pitting one working class against the other. So the obvious thing to do is to have a progressive international and anybody with things that they can create socialist in one country. Let me remind you that that was Joseph Stalin's project. It didn't work very well because even if you have a large country and you managed to create a worker state without the internationalism that we are proposing, all you end up doing is reproducing patriarchal authoritarianism within one country. You're in the United States, so you just came back from the Sanders Institute up there in Vermont and you went to the president, you said,

I, Bernie Sanders absolutely must run for president. So what is your thinking on that? Well, my thing is really very simple. Bernie Sanders' run was almost accidental back in 2016. Oh, yes. Almost accidental. Just like Jeremy Corbyn's success in usurping the leadership of the Labor Party, but the best things in life happen as a result of an accident. And that run unleashed a great deal of progressive socialist potential in this country that even socialists in this country never thought this country had. Absolutely. When he won Wisconsin, I thought, my goodness, I didn't know they were socialists in Wisconsin. And you can see that with the midterms that just happened. So many progressives, especially women,

yes, erode the wake that Bernie Sanders had created back in 2016 with a process of empowerment of minorities, of women, of progressive ideas that is remarkable. This is too fresh, too recent to be left to its own. In other words, if Bernie doesn't run again, I very much fear that this momentum is not going to be maintained. For better or for worse, presidential runs are wonderfully capable of concentrating the mind and turbocharging these small tsunamis. Now, I do not believe in particular personalities. I believe that all of us as individuals are accidents of history. So if it wasn't Bernie, it could have been somebody else. I'm not saying that Bernie is irreplaceable. But today, as we're speaking, end of 2018, as we're approaching the

2020 election, I believe that I can't see anyone else who can energize or continue to energize progressives in the United States. There is no one else. So he has to run. He has a moral responsibility. I don't give a damn about whether he wants to run or not. I don't mind with his age. I don't mind whether he feels that he has what it takes. He's got to run and he better run. He is a million years old, you realize. Yeah, okay. So what? 79. I'm pushing 60, you know. Really? You look great for 60. I'm not that far off. I'm just thinking if I were 79, I couldn't run for president. I couldn't run for anything. Well, you know, but the beauty of life is that the best laid plans, laying ruins. I was planning by the age of, by the time I was 55 to retire to the

island of Agena and look at me now. You know, I remember Bernie Sanders ran in, you know, he started that campaign in 2015, not to win, but to make a point. Yeah. And then he won the New Hampshire primary by landslide. Beware what you wish for. Almost won the Iowa caucus. And you realize, oh, shit, I've got to run a real campaign now. And what's fascinating about that is, you know, this was supposed to be a coronation for Hillary Clinton. And I remember it very clearly. You know, I was very cynical. Most on the left thought, okay, it's just going to be Hillary. We're going to focus on the grassroots. We're not going to focus on the presidential election. I remember watching those debates and just hearing things that I never thought in my lifetime, I

would ever hear on, you know, national television. Talking about poverty, for instance. Talking about poverty, talking about, say, for instance, you know, we don't need 50 fucking brands of deodorants, you know, in the market shelves or that, you know, I'm glad that I'm not friends with fucking Henry Kissinger. And I thought that's amazing. And that's the best thing you never really hear. That never gets a platform in the media. So, I mean, I'm definitely on your side on that question. And I definitely absolutely agree with you on the necessity of electoral politics. I think we're about running out of time. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you this. I know you've gotten this question before and you brushed it off a little bit. But I have to ask you again,

is common people about your wife? Well, you may very well say this, but I couldn't possibly comment because this was written years and years before I met my wife. But I can tell you that she was a student of sculpture at St. Martin's College. Yes. Well, I mean, I just think if, you know, I met Blair a year ago, and if she were to come up to me one day, if she had been, say, the topic of, I don't know, Champagne Supernova or something, I feel like she would have just mentioned it at some point. Well, I didn't say that she didn't mention anything. I'm saying that I couldn't possibly comment. Okay. Yannis Verofakis, thank you so much for joining us. Next interview, Jarvis Cocker,

we will get to the bottom of this. I promise you, Chris. I'm looking forward to hearing that next interview. Thank you.