Yanis Varoufakis: A Hero Worthy Of His Heritage.

Dropping The Pilot: The classical character of Varoufakis’s departure as Greece’s Finance Minister was made even more poignant by the fact that his own personal defeat was announced amidst the echoing tumult of a victory that he, more than anyone, had secured for his people.

 

“WE OF THE LEFT know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office.” How long has it been since a left-wing leader talked like that? Yanis Varoufakis may have used a blogpost to announce his resignation to the world, but the sentiments he expressed were straight out of Homer. Like the hero of an ancient Greek legend, he showed that he understood both the duty he was bound to fulfil, and that he embraced it with a glad heart.

 

The classical character of Varoufakis’s departure as Greece’s Finance Minister was made even more poignant by the fact that his own personal defeat was announced amidst the echoing tumult of a victory that he, more than anyone, had secured for his people.

 

Across the whole of Greece, from Thrace in the north to Crete in the south, the Greek people had delivered a resounding “Oxi!” (No!) to the European Union’s demands for never-ending austerity.

 

Beneath a frenzy of flailing flags, in Athens’ Syntagma Square, tens-of-thousands of supporters of the Syriza Party-led coalition government shouted their defiance of the hated “Troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund). But, even as the Oxi voters celebrated, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was delivering the “Eurogroup’s” lethal ultimatum to his Finance Minister.

 

In Varoufakis’s own words: “Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my… ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today.”

 

If, as Troy burned, King Agamemnon had asked Odysseus to appease its tutelary deities by falling on his sword, the shock of injustice and ingratitude could hardly have been greater. But Varoufakis did not demur. “I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum.”

 

And yet, even as he abandoned his portfolio for the back-benches, Varoufakis could not resist one final, parting shot at the European hierarchs who, in their petulant fury, had demanded his political head.

 

“And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.”

 

This undisguised contempt for both the intellect and the character of Greece’s European creditors was, almost certainly, Varoufakis’s hamartia (in Classical Greek literary tradition, the fatal character flaw that causes the hero’s downfall). The son of a wealthy Greek industrialist, Varoufakis was never for a moment overawed by the European Union’s political bureaucrats and bureaucratic politicians. That he was, himself, an accomplished academic economist and author merely heightened his conviction that he had nothing to fear, and even less to learn, from the Eurogroup’s “participants and assorted partners”.

 

That Varoufakis’s professional analysis of Greece’s economic position was correct (as confirmed by at least two Nobel laureates – Stiglitz and Krugman – and, more recently, by the IMF itself) only made him more insufferable to the likes of Germany’s 72-year-old Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble. The hard-working German ant did not appreciate being lectured at by some upstart Greek grasshopper with a PhD – and no neckties.

 

Varoufakis’s sartorial insouciance was, of course, as carefully calculated as his economic analyses. His leather jackets and brightly coloured shirts (all-too-often unaccompanied by the required necktie) signalled his determination to carry just a little Mediterranean sunshine and machismo into the grey, staid and deeply conventional world of European finance. That these ageing Teutons in their dark suits and sensible ties felt upstaged by Varoufakis’s big fat Greek virility was as obvious as it was disruptive. A rock star at a Rotary meeting could not have been more out of place.

 

But disruption and non-conformity were essential ingredients of the Varoufakis shtick. What better way to demonstrate his radical new approach to doing business with the “suits” than by refusing to turn up in one? In a world increasingly informed by images rather than words, Varoufakis was signalling that Neoliberalism is not the only game in town: that economic alternatives do exist.

 

His people got the message. And even if he is not there to deliver it in person, Varoufakis’s vision of a better world will continue to dazzle the eyes of the “gods” who demanded this Greek hero’s sacrifice.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 July 2015.

The Power of No: The Greeks Expose Neoliberalism's Anti-Democratic Agenda.

No! The decision of the Greek people has shown us that Neoliberalism can be challenged. Whether it can be beaten will require more than the bravery of a single nation. To defeat the neoliberals’ greed and cruelty, not just Greece but the whole world will have to find the courage to say: “No!”

 

THE UNFOLDING CRISIS in Greece has stripped Neoliberalism of its protective disguise and the world is recoiling from its ugliness. In normal circumstances the true purposes of the world’s neoliberal elites are masked by their use of opaque economic jargon. In the case of Greece, however, the social science of economics has been turned against them by some of its most impressive exponents. Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have told the world that what is being done to Greece has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with politics. A whole country is being driven to the wall in a desperate bid to destroy its left-wing government. Neoliberalism simply cannot allow the Greek Prime Minister’s, Alexis Tsipras’s, powerful lessons in democracy to go unpunished. If his Syriza Party is allowed to defeat austerity in Greece, what is there to prevent Podemos from defeating it in Spain? Or Sinn Fein in Ireland?

 

Hence the ugliness. Deprived of credible economic arguments for insisting that the Greek government persist with an austerity programme that has already shrunk Greece’s GDP by 25 percent and kept upwards of 60 percent of her young people out of the paid work force, the EU’s neoliberal elites – particularly the German holders of the neoliberal franchise – have been forced to resort to outright lies and childish insults.

 

Germany’s 72-year-old Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, has clearly been unable to cope with his 54-year-old Greek counterpart, Yanis Varoufakis. Everything about the free-wheeling Greek economics professor offends the unyielding German ideologue. Varoufakis has been unsparing in his criticism of Germany’s inability to grasp the necessity for Greek debt relief (which even the IMF now acknowledges). It’s an act of insubordination which Schauble and his colleagues are resolutely determined to punish. So unchallenged has neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony been since the collapse of Soviet-style socialism that it finds itself unable to adequately respond to Varoufakis’s neo-Keynesian populist critiques. Their greatest fear is that, like the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the Greek Finance Minister will draw the world’s attention to the fact that the neoliberal German Emperor is wearing no clothes.

 

With Schauble and his neoliberal colleagues forced on to the defensive by the combined diplomatic and intellectual onslaught of Tsipras and Varoufakis, mobilisation orders were swiftly issued to neoliberalism’s reserve units located in the global news media. These latter lost no time in launching vicious attacks against the Syriza leadership – especially Varoufakis – and redoubled their blatantly racist denigration of the Greek people as a whole. This latter tactic had been in operation ever since Greece’s creditors had forced successive Greek governments into slashing the living standards of their own people. Cast as indolent Mediterranean grasshoppers (so unlike the hard-working Teutonic ants, whose borrowed Euros they had fecklessly frittered away) the Greek victims of neoliberal extremism were told that they had no one to blame but themselves.

 

Even at a distance of 17,000 kilometres from Athens, New Zealand’s neoliberal journalists and commentators have been working hard to maintain the two central arguments for neoliberalism’s assault on Greece. That the Syriza Government’s position is economically untenable; and that, in any case, the Greek people had it coming and richly deserve everything they have got. To pull this off they have had to studiously ignore the highly critical contributions of leading economists, while attempting to preserve the fiction that Greece has no alternative except to swallow still more of the austerity poison.

 

The most disturbing aspect of the mainstream news media’s adherence to the neoliberal line has been its willingness to go along with ethnic defamation. Just substitute the word “Maori” for “Greeks” in these neoliberal tirades and the full racist character of the attacks becomes clear. Newspapers and networks that would never allow contributors to get away with calling Maori lazy, good-for-nothing, ne’er-do-wells with no one to blame for their poverty but themselves, were quite happy to have it said of the Greeks.

 

It was, however, Tsipras’s decision to put the question of whether or not to persist with the EU’s austerity programme to a referendum that stripped away the last vestiges of Neoliberalism’s technocratic disguise. Now they were required to openly disparage not just Syriza, not just the Greek people, but democracy itself. In extremis, the neoliberals had no choice but to demonstrate, in a fashion that people who value democratic principles could not miss, that the interests of those who are both empowered and enriched by their control of the markets; and the interests of the people whose lives are cheapened and constrained by the operations of those same markets; have always been, and are still, on a collision course.

 

The decision of the Greek people has shown us that Neoliberalism can be challenged. Whether it can be beaten will require more than the bravery of a single nation. To defeat the neoliberals’ greed and cruelty, not just Greece but the whole world will have to find the courage to say: “No!”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 6 July 2015.

Can Democracy Save The Greeks?

Ode To Joy! Syriza supporters cheer as their party's victory is announced, But will the people of Greece be able to successfully reoccupy the democratic institutions emptied out by the twin evils of neoliberalism and austerity?

 

GREECE, the birthplace of democracy, is now the test of whether democratic governments still possess the power to effect meaningful change. If it passes the test, then the election of the left-wing Syriza Party, on 26 January 2015, will mark the beginning of the end of the 30-year neoliberal experiment. But, if it fails, then the growing perception that democracy has become an empty shell, incapable of delivering anything more than more of the same, will harden – not only in Greece, but across the whole world.

 

There are those who suggest that, when it comes to democracy, the neoliberal doctrines of the political class have acted like a neutron bomb. For those unfamiliar with the term, the neutron bomb was one of the Cold War’s most abhorrent creations. It’s great “selling point” was that its detonation, while killing human-beings by the million, would leave key infrastructure intact. Ready and waiting, following a suitable interval, for occupation and use by the “victors”.

 

According to the neutron bomb metaphor, neoliberalism has eliminated the vital human elements of our democratic system. The mass participation in political life for which New Zealand was justly famous (roughly a tenth of our adult population once belonged to a political party and the numbers voting frequently exceeded 90 percent of registered electors) has dwindled dramatically, reducing our democratic institutions to empty, echoing shells. The awful uniformity, both in terms of the political choices on offer, and the politicians offering them, is thus explained.

 

The Syriza Party’s stunning victory in the Greek general election is significant precisely because it has allowed the Greek people to re-occupy their country’s democratic infrastructure. The resulting surge of hope that has swept through the Greek population – evident in the highly emotional responses of ordinary Greek citizens interviewed on the streets of Athens by the world’s bemused media – is at once the new Prime Minister’s, Alexis Tsipras’, greatest asset and the source of his greatest vulnerability.

 

The neoliberal financiers of the European Union are adamant that the Greek people will not be released from the debt obligations imposed upon them by the profligate borrowings of corrupt politicians more than a decade ago. The devastating austerity programme overseen by the so-called “Troika” (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) which has seen unemployment soar to 1 in 4 of the workforce, and the incomes of those lucky enough to still have a job slashed by as much as 40 percent, must, according to Greece’s unyielding European creditors, remain in force.

 

The neoliberal elites’ assumption has always been that by forcing savage reductions in the size and scope of Greece’s public sector, the confidence of her private sector would soar, investment would surge, and before you could say “Long live the Eurozone!”, the Greek economy would have grown its way back to prosperity.

 

In the real world, however, events have unfolded very differently. Health cuts left the chronically ill without medicine. Wage cuts led to mortgage defaults and homeless families. Confidence collapsed. Investment dried up. Emigration soared. And when the desperate victims of austerity protested, their political representatives, pledged to defend the almighty Euro, called out the Riot Police.

 

When the Greeks voted-out the politicians responsible, they discovered to their horror that the replacements were just as committed to implementing the Troika’s austerity programme as their predecessors. When tested, political parties nominally of the Left turned out to be practically indistinguishable from their supposed ideological rivals on the Right. In the end, politicians from the traditional parties felt obliged to join forces against what they saw as the unrealistic and unreasonable demands of the electors. Isolated and vilified as traitors, the Greek political class would have struggled to detect the irony in Berthold Brecht’s famous suggestion that it might be easier for the Government “To dissolve the people and elect another.”

 

Greece’s electors have now delivered their emphatic reply to the brutal economic absolutism of successive neoliberal governments. The halls of the democratic Greek Republic, for long the exclusive preserve of neoliberal technocrats and their local political collaborators, are now ringing with the excited voices of the Greek People.

 

And the peoples of the European Union, themselves no strangers to the brutalities of austerity, are listening. If Syriza is to succeed, it is to this audience that it must appeal.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 30 January 2015.