Varoufakis, DiEM a Corporate Left EU Smokescreen

Contents
1. Will The Real Varoufakis Please Stand Up?
2. Before Applauding Varoufakis New European Democracy
Movement, Think Again
3. DIEM25: A Manifesto for democratizing Europe or for perpetuating
the EU elites domination of the European peoples?
4. Yannis Varoufakis: The Trojan Horse

5. Yanis Varoufakis: more erratic than Marxist

22nd March 2016

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Will The Real Varoufakis Please Stand Up?

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They
have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many
parts
Shakespeare
09 March 2016

Never in history has a finance minister of a bankrupt state - who had pensioners
queuing in 40c heat for their paltry pensions - been able to command so much
hot air and press time and come out unscathed from the 3 rd Troika led Bailout
of Greece. Varoufakis appears to be the man in economics where nothing
sticks. Not a single anti-austerity measure was taken by him when he was
Syrizas finance minister so why is he feted and will now allegedly become an
adviser to Britains Labour Party? Is it a case of the circus going global or
something more sinister?
Early History
Politically associated with PASOK and an adviser of Papandreou between 2004
to 2007 - the period after PASOK came to power Varoufakis helped deindustrialize Greece and set up Coca Colas Olympics which contributed
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massively to the countrys financial bankruptcy. After the mass protests and
occupation of the squares in Greece in spring and summer of 2011, Varoufakis
appeared on the stage alongside three other individuals: Katrougalos (current
Syrizas Pensions minister) Tsakalotos (current Finance Minister) and Kazakis
(currently the leader of EPAM). His close political associate was a woman
called Eleni Panariti (of World Bank notoriety) who earned her spurs with
President Fujimoris Peru and the mass looting of the Peruvian population in the
early 1980s.
In other words, Varoufakis belonged to the economic hitmen circle with
relationships other than the interests of the nation they were supposed to serve.
Varoufakis, a trained political con artist, can be anything to anyone and
everything to someone. He can sell anti-austerity in speeches, rail against the
evils of capitalism and debt servitude, and have as a close political associate a
representative from the World Bank. Its no coincidence that his nickname in
Greek is Baroufakis - a play on the word Baroufa which in Greek means dumb.
A child of a senior manager who subsequently became a director of the Greek
steel companyHalivdourgiki, Varoufakis was privately educated and
basically had an uneventful academic career but somewhere along the way due
to family connections he went on to serve US interests in Greece, which is what
many Greeks who are part of the diaspora do, if they can find a way back, that
is - if they are comfortable enough to be able to do so.
Im not going to betray my view, that I honed back in 2010, that this country
must stop extending and pretending, we must stop taking on new loans
pretending that weve solved the problem, when we havent; when we have
made our debt even less sustainable on condition of further austerity that even
further shrinks the economy; and shifts the burden further onto the have-nots,
creating a humanitarian crisis. Its something Im not going to accept, Im not
going to be party to, argued Varoufakis.
The global markets needed a diversion from the Wall Street crash of 2007-8.
The centre could not be the main culprit so a peripheral country - Greece would be found to play the role of Ifigeniaas a sacrificial lamb to the Gods of
finance. A country with less than 2% of EUs GDP suddenly was at the centre
of the global crash, was responsible for all manners of misdeeds and its working
class were vilified for allegedly being pensioned off too early and not providing
receipts when fixing lavatories. The level of analysis was so low that we were
expected to believe in a new fairy tale like the one of 1929 when they claimed
black dots on the sun led to the Wall Street crash. Varoufakis was recruited
alongside Papandreou to play the role he subsequently did, the latter in bringing
in the IMF to save Greece by economically destroying it and the former to save
Greece by implementing austerity whilst verbally railing against it. If real life
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was a circus Varoufakis and Papandreou would be the leading clowns taking on
a double act.
Since when could a small peripheral country be the centre of a global crash? Its
like arguing that ones primary school aged child bankrupted the family budget
by spending too much on the pocket money. Thats how absurd it was.
Varoufakis as Finance Minister
Varoufakis wasnt the head of Syrizas Finance Team but was the appointed
head of it by Tsipras. The head of Tsipras economics team Milios resigned
early on from the position of being head of Syrizas economics team.
If there was an economic programme and there clearly wasnt, Varoufakis
would have imposed a national programme of action after defaulting on the debt
and calling the creditors bluff, of less work but work for all, to ensure the 2m
Greek unemployed who have no means of subsistence would be able to survive.
Syriza in its pre-electoral programme alleged there would be a programme that
would help those with no means of subsistence. We are still waiting. This
programme was allegedly squandered due to the demands of the Troika and
Syriza accepting with Varoufakis an extension of the previous bailout in
February 2015. Despite many mass demonstrations in defence of default and
rupture with the Troika, Syriza never seriously had this agenda.
Illuminating in this process was the fact that when Tsakalotos, then a deputy
finance minister, visited the British Parliament in a debate chaired by John
Cruddas MP, he essentially argued there never was a left exit from the
Eurozone. Anyone who argues for its break up is essentially from the far right.
This wasnt only Tsakalotos line. When Tsipras went to Austin Texas in
November - to give a speech in Varoufakis base - he argued precisely the same
point. A Grexit would be catastrophic for the Euro.[i] (4)
Syriza and its precursor Sinaspismos as analysed in the book Syriza
Neoliberals in Disguise(produced in early 2014) was from its birth a pro-EU
party as they had voted for Maastricht and came from the strand known as
Eurocommunism i.e. absolute faith in the power of an unelected corporate
bureaucracy based in Brussels which works solely for the big business interests
of large transnational corporations that rule the world. The cornerstone of the
EU is its four core principles: free trade in goods, capital, labour and services.
This is what binds Varoufakis to the EU. He wholeheartedly believes in that
process as is evidenced in his book The Global Minotaur in which the academic
lingua franca of explaining globalization kicks by referring to standard textbook
cases of the growth of Wall Mart and the rise Wall Street in something that
could have been written by anyone in general.

During the first months of Syriza all we heard from the mass media was that we
were running out of money and that everyone should pay as it was a patriotic
duty. Month by month we got a breakdown of what was owed and what would
be paid. There was not once a statement that we will default or that we will not
sacrifice Greece anymore to the banksters. Ironically Paul Mason stated way
back in January that the government had enough money for a few months. So
whilst for internal consumption the end was coming, the reality was that
Varoufakis role as Finance Minister was a show for internal consumption (the
media created a bad boy image on a motorbike who was blanked by
Dijsselbloemin with the infamous handshake played over and over by the
media). Then a big hue and cry was made over emptying all council and
university budgets for them to be handed over to the central government.
Capital Controls on Greek banks
From the moment Varoufakis became Finance Minister he could have imposed
controls on the exodus of money but as if working in tandem with the ECB
billions were allowed to flow out of Greece. When the fake referendum was
called the banks had already closed their doors to withdrawals which were
initially limited to $20 a day, then $60 daily and now to the amazing weekly
amount of $420 in cash. Thousands of Greeks were seen to be queuing in the
sun waiting to make paltry withdrawals from the ATMs. The corporate medias
propaganda and the mass psychology of the banksters world was that if the
ATM dried up everything would fall apart and keeping the ATMs open
signaled a responsible government. Repudiating debts and returning to a
Drachma currency could have provided whatever liquidity one needed in the
short term until new agreements were reached with new countries in terms of
trading.
But the blackmail was done to try and get the right outcome for the referendum
which the corporate media was selling as being very tight (in the end it had a
margin of error higher than 20% and nearer to 25%!). The 3m pensioners and
the 700,000 government employees were the only ones with a regular and
steady income, no talk was made about the 2m who were already removed from
the ATMs via unemployment or those who were underpaid, had to wait months
to get payment etc. They obviously dont exist and the calamity is only for new
customers not old ones.
Any Finance Minister worth his salt would have resigned the moment the ECB
shut down Greek banks, but Varoufakis being a literal clown (photographs in
Hello magazine showed off his expensive villa, his travels on a motorbike, etc.)
had no such inclination. He continued as if nothing happened.
Show me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are
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Varoufakis has been on record to state that Larry Summers and Norman Lamont
are his friends (or are they his handlers?)
Here is an excerpt from one interview, there are so many noes one can keep up!
How did your friendship with Norman Lamont come about and do you have
much in common aside from you wanting Grexit and him possibly wanting
Brexit?
I am very proud of my friendship with Norman, both personally and politically.
When the left and the right can meet on a human level and forge a common
agenda on important topics, such as Europe, I think that bodes well for the
world. When I was a young man living in the UK, I didnt miss a single
demonstration against Mrs. Thatchers government, which Norman was part of.
He doesnt regret his position and neither do I. So what do we have in common?
The answer is a commitment to parliamentary democracy, to liberalism, to the
sovereignty of parliament. Anyone who knows me knows that I dont want
Grexit and despite Norman veering voting in favour of Britain leaving the EU,
he never allowed his own prejudices to colour his advice to me when I was a
minister.[ii]
Who was Norman Lamont? A Rothschild man, Chairman of the Tory Party
Bow group known as the Cambridge mafia, that ran the Tory party in
Thatchers era as opposed to todays crows who are known as the Bullingdon
Club (also includes a Rothschild) that presided over the de-industrialisation of
Britain and the infamous ERM debacle (when Britain was trying to join the
single currency in the making) when the financier Soros crippled Britain to the
tune of 1 billion and proved from then that the project for a capitalist United
States of Europe was doomed to fail from day one. Lamont was also a member
of a cold war security think tank called Le Cercle based in Washington which of
course explain why he is Varoufakis personal friend. All roads nowadays lead
to Washington.[iii]
Labour Party adviser?
As Michael Nevradakis wrote in the past, since leaving Syriza Varoufakis has
in countless appearances and interviews in the media, kept parroting the same
stale myths about Greece, such as the myth, which was proven a lie, that Greece
had the highest rate of Porsche Cayenne ownership in the world.
The Labour Party was taken over lock stock and barrel in the mid-1970s when it
went into bed with the IMF. As a government it recruited and promoted a
Scotland-born individual named McGregor who was to become infamous
during the Thatcher years for closing down the coal mines. This McGregor was
instrumental in setting up a joint US-EEC coordinating committee for
industrialists to coordinate US-EU production. At the same time during his old
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days in the USA he was a trade union breaker, utilizing modern methods of
surveillance, bribery, intimidation and media exposure to get the aim he wanted
to get which was to immobilize trade unions. This was achieved in British
Leyland, in British Steel, in the coup de grace which was the defeat of British
coal workers, and in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) which brought
down the Tory government in 1974.
Varoufakis and Paul Mason seem to be in a marriage made in heaven with the
Party which was instrumental before the rest of the EU in pioneering foreign
imperialist military invasions (Serbia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan) with its
partners in crime - the USA. Paul Mason sycophantic appraisals of Syriza were
so ridiculous that Alexis Tsipras was painted like some Che Guevara figure in
the Mediterranean. Once the absolute sellout was achieved in agreeing to the
3rdBailout, Mason dropped Syriza as the mission was accomplished in terms of
propaganda and is off to new pastures (or are they old?).
From the moment one of the Bullingdon boys (Osborne) can crack a joke at the
expense of the Left, we know why Varoufakis and Mason may become advisers
to the Labour Party to dispel the myth of any radical alternative policies. As
Osborne said, Corbyn recruited them as Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey
Mouse busy. We also know why Corbyn, despite formally opposing the
EEC/EU, is now in favour of Staying In.
Open Borders
In an appearance on the BBC Ones Question, Time Varoufakis defended Open
Borders and showed zero concern for the native Greek population. Any amount
of people could arrive as they did en masse.
We have two [thousand], three [thousand], 5,000, 10,000 people being washed
up on our shores, on the Aegean Islands, every day. In a nation, by the way, that
is buffeted by a great depression, where families, on those islands, in particular,
are finding it very hard to put food on the table for their children at night.
And these people in their crushing majority, Im proud to report, opened their
doors to these wretched refugees. And the thought comes to my mind very
simply: if somebody knocks on your door at three in the morning, and theyre
wet, theyre bleeding, theyve been shot at, and theyre frightened, what do you
do? I think theres only one answer: you open the door, and you give them
shelter, independently of the cost-benefit analysis, independently of the chance
that they may harm you.
Varoufakis supports the EUs globalist pipedream of open borders everywhere
as evidenced in the above piece in the Guardian. This is in line with Goldman
Sachs who have their Managing Director in an important position in the United
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Nations Refugee Agency. It is also in line with thepronouncements of Soros that

put him into conflict with the Prime Minister of Hungary Orban.
Varoufakis new European movement (DiEM25) is just an attempt to salvage
with his fake left credentials the imploding EU. For if the powers that be
assume they can double the population of the EU in one generation when there
are 40m officially unemployed in the continent then they may need to wake up
from their dreams. You would have to be politically comatose to believe
another European New World Order - an Orwellian globalist free for all as
envisioned in the mind of Varoufakis can be implemented without severe social
conflicts and a civil war type of disturbances. What was gained in blood - the
right of nations to live in peace and trade with one another - cannot easily be
erased by the stroke of a pen of unelected gauleiters in Brussels.

[i] Tsipras in Texas: Eurozone a Mistake, Exiting it a Disaster

http://www.thepressproject.net/article/50300/Tsipras-in-Texas-Eurozone-amistake-exiting-it-a-disaster
[ii] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/yanis-varoufakis-closingborders-muslim-refugees-only-fuels-terrorism
[iii] Le Cercle is a foreign policy think-tank specialising in international
security. Set up after World War II, the group has members from twenty-five
countries and meets at least bi-annually, in Washington, D.C., United States.
The group's current chairman is Norman Lamont, former British Chancellor of
the Exchequer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cercle

VN Gelis

Before Applauding Varoufakis New European Democracy

Movement, Think Again
February 11, 2016

By Michael Nevradakis
Once again, Greece is experiencing a time of political and social uncertainty, a
time where yet again many citizens have begun to search for a new political
savior, one that will pull Greece out of its current economic abyss and provide
the promise of hope and change, putting an end to the crisis and placing
Greece back on a path towards growth and better days.
This is highly similar to what was taking place in Greece just over a year ago,
when millions of people within and outside of Greece believed that SYRIZA
could comprise this sort of political force. And they believed this purely on the
basis of rhetoric and promises. The big promises made by Alexis Tsipras and
the rest of SYRIZA regarding the abolition of the austerity measures with one
law and one article, the supposedly anti-austerity Thessaloniki policy platform,
the tearing apart of the memorandum agreements, promises, promises and yet
more promises from SYRIZA, including promises that all of these wonderful
things could take place firmly within the confines of the European Union and
the Eurozone, and that SYRIZA, when in power, would indeed manage to
change Europe!
No one, however, seemed to notice how SYRIZAs pre-election rhetoric was
already being significantly watered down compared to their earlier promises.
No one noticed that whereas Tsipras had once said that remaining in the
Eurozone is not a fetish, SYRIZA was now not even contemplating an exit from
the euro, not even as a Plan B. No one noticed that SYRIZA abandoned its
platform to nationalize the banking system. Formerly radical economist Costas
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Lapavitsas, whom we have unfortunately interviewed in the past on our

program, had once been proposing a so-called radical economic platform
including a euro exit. In January 2015 however, just prior to the elections, he
appeared on the BBC to defend SYRIZAs economic platform as a form of
mild Keynesianism. Dozens of candidates on SYRIZAs ballot were former
members of the corrupt PASOK party which ruled Greece for most of the 40
years following the fall of the military dictatorship, and many of them were
elected and attained cabinet posts in the new government of supposed hope and
change.
However, perhaps the biggest sign of the flip-flop and broken promises that
were to follow was the inclusion of the false prophet Yanis Varoufakis on the
SYRIZA ballot and his selection as Greeces minister of finance after the
elections. Varoufakis, a former adviser to PASOKs George Papandreou, who
brought austerity and the IMF to Greece, had carefully developed a reputation
as a supposedly radical anti-austerity economist who was not afraid to clash
with the system and who would demand the end of austerity and the
memorandum agreements. Yet this same Varoufakis was telling us, long before
the elections, that it was impossible for a country to leave the Eurozone, while
rejecting the actions of countries such as Argentina and Iceland, stating that he
instead sought a so-called European solution for the Greek crisis. Nobody
seemed to notice this, and instead, Varoufakis earned the most votes of any
individual candidate in the January 2015 elections.
Now, one year later, we are once again seeing the same theater of the absurd
take place before our eyes, and this time Varoufakis, the son of a wealthy
industrialist who is married to the daughter of another wealthy industrialist, is
being presented as the best and only hope for change and for the elimination of
austerity, not just in Greece but for all of Europe. On February 9th, he will
announce the launch of his new pan-European political movement with a
presentation in, where else, Berlin, a movement that is already promising to
restore democracy to Europe and to save Europe from itself. And everyone
who last year was ridiculing and insulting anyone who dared to suggest that
SYRIZA was not what it presented itself as being and that it would break is
promises, has now forgotten what they were saying a year ago and is doing the
same exact thing to anyone who dares to question Varoufakis, his record, or his
sincerity.

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Lets take this opportunity, therefore, to remind everyone about the major
achievements of Varoufakis, before, during, and after his term as Greeces
finance minister.
Varoufakis is the man who, as Greeces finance minister in the first days of the
new SYRIZA government last year, had gone to the initial negotiations at the
Eurogroup summit proposing the continuation of 70% of the previously existing
austerity measures and memorandums, for another six months, as he said. He
refused to even raise the specter of a Eurozone exit for Greece, not even as a
negotiation tactic or as a Plan B. In fact, Varoufakis, while he was supposedly
negotiating hard with the troika, publicly stated that Greece has no Plan B! It
should therefore come as no surprise that the 70% proposed by Varoufakis
became 100%, meaning continuation of 100% of the previous austerity
measures and memorandums, for the next four months. Varoufakis agreed to
this and had the audacity to return to Greece claiming that the agreement was an
example of creative ambiguity and that the troika would now be known as the
kinder, gentler institutions.
The excuses and spin began immediately, that Varoufakis and SYRIZA were
new and deserved more time, that they were not prepared for what they would
face at the Eurogroup summit, that they deserved our continued support and that
there was no alternative and that anyone who dared to speak out against
SYRIZA was clearly a supporter of the previous governing parties or a fascist.
In this way, the blinders remained firmly in place for what was to follow, such
as when Varoufakis announced that the Greek finance ministry had hired Wall
Street firm Lazard in an advisory capacity. The same Lazard that had advised
George Papandreou on the introduction of the first memorandum agreement in
2010, when he was prime minister. The same Lazard that had advised the
unelected technocrat prime minister Loukas Papadimos regarding the
introduction of further austerity in 2012. The same Lazard that had advised the
previous New Democracy-PASOK coalition government on the privatization of
public assets.
At the same time, Varoufakis, in countless appearances and interviews in the
media, kept parroting the same stale myths about Greece and the people of
Greece, such as the myth, which was proven to be a lie, that Greece had the
highest rate of Porsche Cayenne ownership in the world. Varoufakis lectured us
about the, quote, hard working German taxpayers, who were, quote, bailing
out Greece, and who, quote, wanted a return on their investment, neglecting
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to say, however, that Germany and the troika have profited quite handsomely
just off of the interest that Greece is paying on its forced loans, without even
getting into the lucrative assets which Greece was forced to privatize and which
they bought up. Instead, Varoufakis was telling us about the need to lead a socalled austere existence, all the while he and his wife were photographed for a
French magazines photo shoot, in front of a table full of lobster and champagne
at their home with a full view of the Acropolis.
This was nothing, however, compared with what was to follow. Varoufakis,
along with the other saviors within SYRIZA, nominated and elected the corrupt,
conservative, pro-austerity former New Democracy minister Prokopis
Pavlopoulos as president of the republic. Once again, the SYRIZA and
Varoufakis apologists told us to give them more time. Varoufakis repeatedly
stated that Greeces debt would be repaid, quote, in perpetuity and that it is
legal, at the same time that the Greek government had put on a big show of
creating a parliamentary committee to investigate the legality of this very same
debt. In an interview with the Associated Press, Varoufakis flatly stated that he
will squeeze blood from a stone in order for the IMF to be repaid, while in
another interview, Varoufakis stated that he sought to develop good relations
with Christine Lagarde and the IMF, which held views that he, quote,
personally agreed with.
Varoufakis repeatedly stated that his homeland is Europe and not Greece and
that he would like to see the development of a so-called United States of
Europe. He stated that the Eurozone is like the Hotel California, where you
can check out any time you like but you can never leave. Such was the nature of
Varoufakis supposedly fierce negotiation, just as when he told ABC Television
in Australia that even if Greece wanted to it was unable to mint its own
currency, because Greeces mint was destroyed when Greece joined the
Eurozone. It seems he was unaware of the fact that Greeces mint is still alive
and well and is where the 20 euro notes are still printed today.
Moving forward, the heroic Yanis Varoufakis stated that the previous
privatizations would not be rescinded and that he agreed with the privatization
of public assets such as airports and harbors under certain supposed conditions.
Indeed, he spoke out in favor of further so-called investments by Chinas
Cosco in Greece, including the privatization of the port of Piraeus, saying that
this would be a positive development for the country.

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Forging ahead, Varoufakis selected Elena Panaritis as Greeces representative to

the International Monetary Fund. The same Panaritis who was a former World
Bank official and who had designed the destructive Fujishock policies which
had been implemented in Peru and which drove millions of people into poverty,
which led to price increases on basic goods of up to 8000%, where hundreds of
public assets were privatized, and all of this done under the rule of an autocratic
government whose ruler, Alberto Fujimori, is now serving a 25 year sentence
for murder and other serious charges. The same Elena Panaritis who, as a
member of parliament with PASOK, voted in favor of austerity and the
memorandums. This was the selection of the supposedly heroic Yanis
Varoufakis, who however never raised the issue of German war reparations to
Greece and never investigated the actions of Yannis Stournaras and other
former finance ministers for their role in bringing the austerity agreements to
Greece.
Continuing on, Varoufakis, in the spring of 2015 when he was still finance
minister, oversaw the issuance of a governmental decree, a practice which
SYRIZA had promised it would not follow when in government, which
confiscated the cash reserves of the entire Greek public sector. This decree was
then ratified by the Greek parliament, including with the vote of Varoufakis,
and the cash reserves of the Greek public sector were confiscated and used to
make the May IMF loan repayment. After this, Varoufakis and the SYRIZA
government, as part of their supposedly hard negotiations with the European socalled partners, presented a 47 page proposal which foresaw 8 billion euros of
new austerity measures, including a perpetually increasing primary budget
surplusmeaning more austerityfurther tax increases, elimination of early
pension benefits, which do in fact exist in countries like the US and elsewhere,
and the privatization of public assets such as major airports and harbors.
Everything that the current SYRIZA government is doing and that Varoufakis
apologists claim to be against. At around the same time, Varoufakis presented a
proposal for the introduction of a parallel currency following the model of the
IOUs issued by the state of California, while he publicly admitted that capital
controls would be introduced in Greece.
After this followed the big, heroic example of democracy in action, the
referendum on whether to approve or reject the austerity measures proposed by
the European so-called partners of Greece. Varoufakis, who was still finance
minister, did not present any proposal to the Greek people, however, of what the
governments plans would be if the no vote prevailed. And indeed, when the
13

no vote did in fact prevail, not only was there no plan, but Varoufakis
coincidentally was absent from the parliamentary vote which gave authorization
to Alexis Tsipras to reach a deal with the lenders. Varoufakis did state publicly,
however, that if he had voted, he would have voted yes to give Tsipras this
authorization, authorization which resulted, of course, in the third and harshest,
thus far, memorandum agreement for Greece.
This is the charlatan whose record as Greeces finance minister is one of
nothing but austerity, and who yet is now being touted as the savior not just for
Greece but for all of Europe, the man who will end austerity and, quote, save
Europe and save capitalism from itself. Varoufakis is the man who has praised
the, quote, radical and dynamic individualism of Thatcherism, in other
words, of neoliberalism, and the man who publicly eulogized Thatcher on his
blog after her death in 2013. He is the man whose new book was presented in
the Athens Music Hall in January 2015, just prior to the elections which brought
SYRIZA to power, by far-right Greek television talking head Mbambis
Papadimitriou, who once expressed his support for a so-called serious Golden
Dawn. Varoufakis is the man who has repeatedly heaped public praise on
German chancellor Angela Merkel for her handling of the refugee crisis, the
same Merkel and the same Germany which has contributed militarily to the
carnage in the Middle East, the same Germany where there have been dozens of
arson attacks of refugee housing facilities, the same Germany which has housed
some refugees in former concentration camps, the same Germany which has
confiscated valuables from refugees entering the country, the same Germany
which is accused of paying off African governments to take back asylum
seekers and to prevent them from coming to Germany again. And we are
supposed to believe the words of this man, Varoufakis, when he says that he can
somehow change Europe and the EU for the better, but that the euro cannot be
changed and that a country could never leave it.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the bold, brilliant, anti-austerity savior Yanis
Varoufakis. Run, run as fast as you can to vote for him! But in all seriousness,
when will we stop believing in the hope and change that the system itself
presents to us?
http://dialogosmedia.org/

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DIEM25: A Manifesto for democratizing Europe or for

perpetuating the EU elites domination of the European peoples?

Towards a democratic community of sovereign nations

TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
(19.02.2016)

Abstract: In the midst of huge publicity, particularly by the mass media of the
globalist Left (i.e. the Left that is fully integrated into the New World Order
(NWO) of neoliberal globalization) such as The Guardian, Y. Varoufakis one
of the protagonists of the present economic, political and social Greek
catastrophe presented himself as the saviour of Europa, as he was described
by another well-known member of the same Left in an article published (of
all places!) in RT.[1] In this article I will try, first, to examine the democratic
credentials of this manifesto and, second, to explore its aims and strategy. Then,
I will try to answer some crucial questions concerning the timing of this
manifesto and who supports it. I will conclude with a proposal for a Democratic
Community of Sovereign Nations, which, to my mind, represents a real option
now vs. the pseudo-options offered by this so-called manifesto, which,
indirectly has already been approved by the elites.[2]

1. The pseudo-democratic credentials of DIEM25

Varoufakis begins his manifesto by stating that for all their concerns with
global competitiveness, migration and terrorism, only one prospect truly
terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracyfor rule by Europes peoples,
government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of the European
elites.[3] Then he makes clear what he means by this when he describes in
detail who these elites are, namely:

15

The Brussels bureaucracy and its lobbyists,

Its hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika,

The powerful Eurogroup that has no standing in law or treaty,

Bailed-out bankers, fund managers and resurgent oligarchies,

Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom and

solidarity,

Governments that fuel cruel inequality by implementing austerity,

Media moguls who have turned fear-mongering into an art form,

Corporations in cahoots with secretive public agencies investing in the

same fear to promote secrecy and a culture of surveillance that bend
public opinion to their will.

As is obvious from this list, the EU elites are defined in purely political terms
and, particularly, in terms of their power to manipulate public opinion through
the lack of transparency and the framework of secrecy within which mostly
unelected EU organs dominate their subjects, i.e. the European peoples. In
other words, the defining characteristic of the members of these elites is
their political power, through which they can manipulate the European peoples
to serve their aims.
What is NOT mentioned at all is, who the elites exercising economic powerare
and what their role is in manipulating the decision-making process of the EU.
That is, there is not a single word about the Transnational Corporations (TNCs),
particularly those of European origin like the European Round Table of
Industrialists, which consists of the main Transnational Corporations (TNCs)
running the EU.[4] Similarly, there is no mention of the various international
economic institutions which are controlled by the Transnational Elite[5] (i.e. the
elites that are based in the G7 countries), namely the EU, WTO, IMF and World
Bank, and their role behind the scenes in determining the EUs decisions
(economic and political as well as cultural).
In fact, the Manifesto does everything possible to stress the supposedly purely
political nature of the democracy (which it mostly identifies with human
rights!), as when it points out that the European Union was an exceptional
achievement (...) proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of
human rights across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous
chauvinism, racism and barbarity. Even when the Manifesto tries to allude to
economic elites, again it does not put the blame on the vastly unequal
distribution of economic power on which the EU elites thrive, but on the
unequal distribution of political power which, supposedly, makes it possible for
the economic elites to exercise their power:
A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically nave officials and
financially incompetent experts submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and
industrial conglomerates, alienating Europeans and stirring up a dangerous antiEuropean backlash (...) At the heart of our disintegrating EU there lies a guilty
deceit: A highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is
16

presented as apolitical, technical, procedural and neutral. Its purpose is to

prevent Europeans from exercising democratic control over their money,
finance, working conditions and environment.[6]
It is therefore absolutely clear that, according to the Manifesto, it is the
inequality in the distribution of political power that is the cause of all evil in the
EU. This is a conclusion which, at best, betrays a complete ignorance of what
democracy is really all about and, at worst, attempts to deceive the victims of
globalization in Europe as to the real causes of their present ordeal. Needless to
add that Varoufakis, as the ex-Finance Minister of the Greek government,
knows a few things about political deception, since this is a government of
unprecedented political crooks as they are referred to by most Greeks
currently in open revolt against the government, making it difficult for Ministers
and Syriza parliamentarians to go about on the streets and forcing them to resort
to the special riot police units for their protection. Yet Varoufakis has no qualms
about discussing political deception, as when he emphasizes that the price of
this deceit is not merely the end of democracy but also poor economic policies,
by which he means as he explains further on the austerity policies
implemented by the EU elites resulting in permanent recession in the weaker
countries and low investment in the core countries (a misconception that I will
consider below) and unprecedented inequality. So, we learn that the present
unprecedented inequality is not the inevitable result of the opening and
liberalization of markets implied by globalization, but simply the outcome of
the guilty deceit he describes, supposedly due to the non-democratic
character of the EU apparatus.
However, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[7] if we define political democracy
as the authority of the people (demos) in the political sphere a fact that
implies political equality then economic democracy could be
correspondingly defined as the authority of the demos in the economic
sphere a fact that implies economic equality. Economic democracy therefore
relates to every social system that institutionalizes the integration of society
with the economy. This means that, ultimately, the demos controls the economic
process, within an institutional framework ofdemotic ownership of the means of
production. In a narrower sense, economic democracy also relates to every
social system that institutionalizes the minimization of socio-economic
differences, particularly those arising from the unequal distribution of private
property and the consequent unequal distribution of income and wealth (as the
old social-democratic parties used to preach). It is obvious that economic
democracy refers both to the mode of production and to the distribution of the
social product and wealth.
In this sense, the EU apparatus is not, and could never be, a democracy within
an institutional framework that secures the unequal distribution of economic
17

power, as the NWO of neoliberal globalization does. To put it simply, as long as

a minority of people own and control the means of production and distribution,
it is this minority (or elite) that will take all the important economic decisions,
and not the political elite who crucially depend on the former for the funding of
their expensive election campaigns, or for their promotion through the mass
media which the economic elites also control and so on. Yet one of
Varoufakiss main supporters (and one of his political advisers when in
government, presumably at the expense of the Greek people), James K
Galbraith a well-known member of the globalist Left did not hesitate to
compare how democratic the US Congress is in relation to the EU apparatus:
what struck me in particular from the standpoint of a veteran of the
congressional staff was the near-complete absence of procedural safeguards, of
accountability, of record-keeping, of transparency, and also the practical
absence of an independent and sceptical press. These are the elementary
functional components of a working democracy, and their absence is an
enormous obstacle to the progress of democracy in Europe, and are therefore, an
excellent place to begin.[8]
So, according to this criterion of democracy (transparency etc.), which is also
the Manifestos main criterion, the model for EU democracy should be the
absolute degradation of any concept of democracy which US institutions in fact
represent whereby Congressmen and the President himself are elected
according to how much support they can muster from the economic elites
(funding, mass media support etc)!
2. The aims of authentic democracy and the strategy of DIEM25
Having described this parody (or rather complete distortion) of the concept of
democracy as authentic democracy, the Manifesto then proceeds to define, in
chronological order, the aims of the DIEM25 movement.
A. IMMEDIATELY
The immediate aim is full transparency in decision-making, i.e. the
publication of the minutes of EU institutions, the online uploading of important
documents, the monitoring of lobbyists etc. Any comments here would
obviously be superfluous, as it is clear that the reason such a petty aim is
associated with authentic democracy is clearly to distract people from the real
conditions which must be met for political power to be distributed equally
among all citizens.
B. WITHIN TWELVE MONTHS
The aim here is to address the ongoing economic crisis utilizing existing
institutions and within existing EU Treaties. The proposed policies, according
to the Manifesto, will be aimed at re-deploying existing institutions (through a
18

creative re-interpretation of existing treaties and charters) in order to stabilize

the crises of public debt, banking, inadequate investment, and rising poverty.
However, it can be shown that it is the EU institutions themselves that have
created these crises, which therefore can never be stabilized within the
existing institutions and treaties. Thus it can be demonstrated that, since the
present globalization developed under conditions of capitalist ownership and
control of the means of production, it could only be neoliberal. It is the
proliferation of multinationals (or Transnational Corporations -TNCs), from the
mid-1970s onwards, which has led to the phenomenon of neoliberal
globalization (no relation to the failed attempt at globalization in the early 20th
century).[9] The vast expansion of the TNCs necessitated the opening and
liberalization of markets for goods, services, capital and labor. The opening of
capital markets was initially informally achieved by the TNCs from below
(the Euro-dollar market, etc.) before being institutionalized, first in Britain and
the US through Thatcherism and Reaganism correspondingly, and then through
the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and of course the EU,
worldwide. Needless to say that when the economic mechanisms (i.e. economic
violence) have not been enough to integrate a country into the NWO, the
TE i.e. the economic, political, media and academic elites based in the
countries (mainly the G7) where the large TNCs are headquartered (not in the
formal legal sense), has had no qualms about using brutal physical violence
to incorporate them by force (e.g. Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, etc.).
However, the opening and liberalization of markets brought about a structural
change in the capitalist economic model, which most Marxists (I refer to the
remaining anti-systemic Marxists apart from some notable exceptions like
Leslie Sklair and not the pseudo-Marxists of the globalist Left) have failed
to understand. Hence, they cannot see the direct link between neoliberalism and
the opening/liberalization of markets: it can be shown that the famous four
freedoms, i.e. the opening and liberalization of markets (for capital, goods,
services and labor) that were institutionalised first by the EU Maastricht Treaty
and those following it, were the ultimate cause of all the present EU crises (debt
crises, rising inequality and unemployment as well as the refugee crisis).[10] In
other words, these Marxists cannot see that throughout the pre-globalization
part of the post-war period from 1945-1975, the capitalist development model
was based essentially on the internal market. This meant that the control of
aggregate demand policies and especially fiscal policies (regarding taxation but
also, more importantly, public spending including public investment, social
spending and the welfare state), played a critical role in determining national
income and employment levels. In contrast, in the globalization era that
followed with the opening and liberalization of markets, the basis of growth
shifted from the internal to the external market. This meant that competitiveness
became the key criterion for the success of a capitalist market economy and,
19

consequently, the multinationals now play a key role in the growth process
through the investments that they essentially finance, as well as through the
expansion of exports that can be brought about by the installation of affiliates in
a country. The EU is, of course, the main expression of neoliberal globalization
in the European space.
In this context, it is not the austerity policies imposed by some baddies in the
political and economic elites that are the cause of the present low growth
economy, just because they do not wish to adopt Keynesian policies to expand
incomes and demand[11]. The austerity policies are simply the symptom of
globalization in the sense that, if competitiveness cannot improve through more
investment based on research and development, then, in case such investment is
lacking, the alternative cheap way to achieve the same result is through the
suppression of domestic wages and prices, by means of austerity policies of
some sort. In fact, today it is not only nave economists belonging to the
globalist Left who support Keynesian policies, presumably because they still
live in a nation-state time capsule where such policies and all its ideological
paraphernalia are promoted, but even Nobel laureates in economics. Of course
in the latter case one cannot talk about naivety but, rather, deliberate
disorientation. For instance, Paul Krugman, in a recent article in the
Guardian[12] the flagship of the globalist Left systematically attempts
to bypass the crucial issues of our era and particularly globalization and its
neoliberal ideology, preferring to concentrate instead on the austerity delusion
or obsession of policy makers, particularly in the UK conveniently
forgetting that these are also the EUs policies, as well as those of the US
since Reagan. In other words, he ignores the fact that these are the policies of
the Transnational Elite imposed, one way or another, on every country
integrated into the NWO.
C. WITHIN TWO YEARS
A Constitutional Assembly should be convened consisting of representatives
from national assemblies (Parliaments), regional assemblies and municipal
councils. The resulting Constitutional Assembly, according to the Manifesto,
would be empowered to decide on a future democratic constitution that would
replace all existing European Treaties within a decade. Here it is obvious that
the author of the Manifesto has no idea whatsoever about the meaning of
classical democracy or the concept of demos which he so extensively uses, and
yet he has no qualms about identifying representative democracy with
classical democracy!
In fact, it was only during the sixteenth century that the idea of representation
entered the political lexicon, although the sovereignty of Parliament was not
established until the seventeenth century. In the same way that the king had
20

once represented society as a whole, it was now the turn of Parliament to play
this role, although sovereignty itself was still supposed to belong to the people
as a whole. The doctrine that prevailed in Europe after the French revolution
was not just that the French people were sovereign and that their views were
represented in the National Assembly, but that the French nation was sovereign
and the National Assembly embodied the will of the nation. As it was observed,
this was a turning point in continental European ideas since, before this, the
political representative had been viewed in the continent as a delegate.
According to the new theory promulgated by the French revolutionaries (...) the
elected representative is viewed as an independent maker of national laws and
policies, not as an agent for his constituents or for sectional interests.[13]
Actually, one may say that the form of liberal democracy that has dominated
the West in the last two centuries is not even a representative democracy but a
representative government, that is, a government of the people by their
representatives. Thus, as Bhikhu Parekh points out:
Representatives were to be elected by the people, but once elected they were to
remain free to manage public affairs as they saw fit. This highly effective way
of insulating the government against the full impact of universal franchise lies at
the heart of liberal democracy. Strictly speaking liberal democracy is not
representative democracy but representativegovernment.[14]
The European conception of sovereignty was completely alien to the Athenian
conception, where the separation of sovereignty from its exercise was unknown.
All powers were exercised directly by the citizens themselves, or by delegates
who were appointed by lot and for a short period of time. In fact, as Aristotle
points out, the election by voting was considered oligarchic and was not
allowed but in exceptional circumstances (usually in cases where special
knowledge was required), and only appointment by lot was considered
democratic.[15] Therefore, the type of democracy that has been established
since the sixteenth century in Europe has had very little in common with the
classical (Athenian) democracy. The former presupposes the separation of the
state from society and the exercise of sovereignty by a separate body of
representatives, whereas the latter is based on the principle that sovereignty is
exercised directly by the free citizens themselves. Athens, therefore, may hardly
be characterised as a state in the normal sense of the word.
D. BY 2025: ENACTMENT OF
CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY

THE

DECISIONS

OF

THE

Therefore, the ultimate aim of the process envisaged by DIEM25 is PURE

DECEPTION, and Y. Varoufakis has shown in his career as a Finance Minister
that he is a master of this. He claims that the Constitutional Assembly (or We,
21

the peoples of Europe as he calls it, copying the American Constitution) will
bring about the radical change envisaged by the Manifesto. Yet the American
case is hardly a model for democracy, as A. Birch pointed out: the American
Founding Fathers Madison and Jefferson were sceptical of democracy, precisely
because of its Greek connotation of direct rule. This is why they preferred to
call the American system republican, because the term was thought to be more
appropriate to the balanced constitution that had been adopted in 1787 than the
term democratic, with its connotations of lower-class dominance.[16] As John
Dunn aptly stressed while describing the aim of representative democracy:
It is important to recognize that the modern state was constructed,
painstakingly and purposefully, above all by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes,
for the express purpose of denying that any given population, any people, had
either the capacity or the right to act together for themselves, either
independently of, or against their sovereign. The central point of the concept
was to deny the very possibility that any demos (let alone one on the
demographic scale of a European territorial monarchy) could be a genuine
political agent, could act at all, let alone act with sufficiently continuous identity
and practical coherence for it to be able to rule itself (...) the idea of the modern
state was invented precisely to repudiate the possible coherence of democratic
claims to rule, or even take genuinely political action (...) representative
democracy is democracy made safe for the modern state.[17]
Clearly then, what Varoufakis had in mind with his Manifesto was simply to
repeat the American Founding Fathers deception and create another
democratic monster, like his beloved American one, in Europe!
Unsurprisingly, he tries to hide the fact that what he talks about has nothing to
do with classical democracy, despite the misleading terminology he uses
(demos etc). Thus, as he stresses, we consider the model of national parties
which form flimsy alliances at the level of the European Parliament to be
obsolete. He then goes on effectively to negate this statement by saying:
While the fight for democracy-from-below (at the local, regional or national
levels) is necessary, it is nevertheless insufficient if it is conducted without an
internationalist strategy toward a pan-European coalition for democratizing
Europe. European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda,
and then find ways of connecting it with local communities and at the regional
and national level.[18]
It is therefore obvious that his aim is purely to save the EU, rather than
democracy, as he knows very well that the process he suggests could never lead
to a democracy from below. Such a democracy could only start from the local
level and then local demoi could federalise into democratic regions, nations and
finally a democratic Europe. Not the other way around as he deceptively
22

suggests, particularly when we are talking about a continent which, unlike the
USA, consists of a multiplicity of peoples with different languages, culture and
history. Varoufakis states that:
our overarching aim to democratize the European Union is intertwined with an
ambition to promote self-government (economic, political and social) at the
local, municipal, regional and national levels; to throw open the corridors of
power to the public; to embrace social and civic movements; and to emancipate
all levels of government from bureaucratic and corporate power[19]
What he actually has in mind here is to deceive people into thinking that they
are fighting for a conversion of the EU into a democracy through some sort of
decentralization of power to the local, municipal, regional and national levels
(in fact the EU is also supposed to encourage such decentralization!), while of
course the economic and political elites will continue to monopolize economic
and political power, exactly as at present.
3. Why such a manifesto now? The rise of the neo-nationalist movement
One reasonable question arising with respect to the timing of the Manifesto is
why such a manifesto for the democratization of the EU should be necessary
at this particular moment. Given that this is not really a manifesto for the
democratization of Europe but, rather, an attempt to promote the EU, as we saw
above, the motives behind this pseudo-manifesto are now clear. Particularly so
if we consider that this is in fact the moment of truth for the EU, not just
because of the refugee problem, but also because of the Eurozone crisis, the
possibility of the UK exiting from the EU and so on. Yet all these crises are not
external to the EU crises, but have actually been created by the EU itself and
its institutions.
The opening of the labor market within the EU and the removal of border
controls through the Shengen agreement was one of the main causes of the
refugee problem. However, a decisive role in this was also played by the EU
elites, as part of the Transnational Elite, which destroyed the stable Baathist
regimes in both Iraq and Syria, as well as the Libyan regime. The TEs sole aim
here was regime change, i.e. to integrate all these peoples who were resisting
the NWO as they fought to maintain their national sovereignty.
Then, it was the institutions of the Eurozone itself which created the Eurozone
crisis, the debt crisis and the massive rise in unemployment and poverty. As I
have shown elsewhere,[20] these institutions were tailor-made to create a
mechanism for the transfer of economic surplus from the less developed
members of the Eurozone (eg. Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain) to the more
advanced ones, particularly Germany.

23

Similarly, it is the resentment of the British people at the loss of their national
sovereignty within the EU (despite the fact that the British elites are a
constituent part of the Transnational Elite), which has led to a growing anti-EU
movement in Britain that may well lead to a Brexit an event which could
have catalytic implications for the EU itself. This is particularly because, as the
British elites themselves recognize, the anti-EU movement in Britain is actually
a movement against globalization (a fact that the Globalist Left ignores),
which could also explain the rise of the nationalist UKIP party:
The surge in support for UKIP is not simply a protest vote. The party has a
constituency among those left behind by globalization (...) the globalization of
the economy has produced losers as well as winners. As a rule the winners are
among the better off and the losers among the least affluent.[21]
The same process is being repeated almost everywhere in Europe today,
inevitably leading many people (particularly the working class) to join the neonationalist Right. This is not of course because they have suddenly became
nationalists, let alone fascists (as the globalist Left accuses them in order
to ostracize them!), but simply because the present globalist Left does not
wish to lead the struggle against globalization while, at the same time, the
popular strata have realized that national and economic sovereignty are
incompatible with globalization. This is a fact fully realized, for example, by the
strong patriotic movement in Russia, which encompasses all those opposing the
integration of the country into the NWO from nationalists to communists and
from orthodox Christians to secularists while the Putin leadership is trying to
accommodate both the very powerful globalist part of the elite (the oligarchs,
mass media, social media etc.) and this patriotic movement.
But it is mainly Le Pens National Front party, more than any other neonationalist party in the West, that has realized that globalization and
membership of the NWs institutions are incompatible with national
sovereignty. As she recently stressed, (in a way that the Left stopped doing
long ago!):
Globalization is a barbarity, it is the country which should limit its abuses and
regulate it [globalization]. (...) Today the world is in the hands of multinational
corporations and large international finance (...) Immigration weighs down on
wages, while the minimum wage is now becoming the maximum wage.[22]
In fact, the French National Front is now the most important nationalist party in
Europe and it may well be in power following the next Presidential elections in
2017, unless of course a united front consisting of all the globalist
parties with support from the entire TE and particularly the Euro-elites and
the mass media controlled by them prevents it from doing so. This is
24

how Florian Philippot, the FNs vice-president and chief strategist, aptly put
forward the Fronts case in a FT interview:
The people who always voted for the left, who believed in the left and who
thought that it represented an improvement in salaries and pensions, social and
economic progress, industrial policies (...)these people have realized that they
were misled.[23]
As the same FT report points out, to some observers of French politics the FNs
economic policies which include exiting the euro and putting up trade
barriers to protect industry read like something copied from a 1930s political
manifesto, while Christian Saint-tienne, an economist for the newspaper Le
Figaro, recently described this vision as Peronist Marxism. [24] In fact, in a
more recent FT interview Marine Le Pen, the FN president, went one step
further by calling for the nationalization of the banks, in addition to an exit from
the Euro (which, she expects, would lead to its collapse, if not to the collapse of
the EU itself which she welcomes), while also championing public services and
presenting herself as the protector of workers and farmers in the face of wild
and anarchic globalizationwhich has brought more pain than
happiness.[25] By comparison, it never even occurred to SYRIZA and Y.
Varoufakis to use such slogans before the elections - let alone after the second
general election when it fully endorsed all the EU elites and the Troikas
policies which, before the first general election, it had promised to reverse!
Needless to say that Le Pens foreign policy is also very different to that of the
French establishment (and of course that of the EU elites), as she wants a
radical overhaul of French foreign policy in which relations with the regime of
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would be restored and relations with the likes
of Qatar and Turkey which, she alleges, support terrorism, would be reviewed.
At the same time, Le Pen sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and
Russia as a more suitable friend.
On top of all this, G. Soros (who is behind every color revolution on Earth
with the myriad of NGOs etc which he funds it would not be surprising if we
later learn that he is also funding the movement behind DM25) has written
an article also published by the flagship of the globalist left, The
Guardian (which has repeatedly promoted Varoufakis massively) entitled,
Putin is a bigger threat to Europes existence than Isis! [26]
4. The bankruptcy of the Globalist Left and the Manifesto
It goes without saying that this neo-nationalist movement, which is usually an
explicitly anti-EU movement as well, is presently engulfing almost every EU
country. The unifying element among the neo-nationalists is their struggle for
national and economic sovereignty, which they rightly see as disappearing in
the era of globalization. Although sometimes their main immediate motive is
25

the fight against immigration, it is clear that they are misguided in this as they
usually do not realize that it is the opening up of all markets, including the labor
markets particularly within economic unions like the EU, that is the direct cause
of their own unemployment or low-wage employment. In other words, this is
not a racist movement as such but a purely economic movement, although the
Transnational and Zionist elites, with the help of the globalist Left, are trying
hard to convert it into an Islamophobic movement as the Charlie Hebdo case
clearly showed so that they can use it however they see fit in their support of
the NWO. Inevitably, Islamophobic if not racist trends have also
developed within some of these neo-nationalist movements. As we shall see in
the last section of this article, this is one more reason why Popular Fronts for
National and Social Liberation must be built in every country to fight not only
the EU and the NWO which is of course the main enemy but also any
racist trends developing within this new anti-globalization movement. This
would also prevent the elites from using the historically well-tested practice of
divide and rule to create conflict between the victims of globalization.
This movement is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over
Europe, particularly the working class that used to support the Left[27], whilst
the latter has effectively embraced not just economic globalization but also
political, ideological and cultural globalization and has therefore been fully
integrated into the New World Order a defining moment in its present
intellectual and political bankruptcy. The process of the Lefts bankruptcy has
been further enhanced by the fact that, faced with political collapse in the May
2014 Euro-parliamentary elections, it allied itself with the elites in condemning
the neo-nationalist parties as fascist and neo-Nazi, while in extreme cases it has
even consented to the use of blatantly fascist methods in order to suppress some
of them (e.g. the Golden Dawn party in Greece).
However, today, following the successful emasculation of the antisystemic
movement against globalization (mainly through the World Social Forum,
thanks to the activities of the globalist Left),[28] it is up to the neo-nationalist
movement to fight globalization in general and the EU in particular. It is
therefore clear that the neo-nationalist parties which are, in fact, all under attack
by the TE, constitute cases of movements that have simply filled the huge gap
created by the globalist Left. Instead of placing itself in the front line among
all those peoples fighting globalization and the phasing out of their economic
and national sovereignty, this Left has indirectly promoted globalization,
using arguments based on an anachronistic internationalism supposedly founded
on Marxism.
As one might expect, most members of the Globalist Left have joined the new
movement to democratize Europe, forgetting that Democracy was also the
Wests propaganda excuse for destroying Iraq, Libya and now Syria. Today it
26

seems that the Soros circus is aiming to use exactly the same excuse to destroy
Europe, in the sense of securing the perpetuation of the EU elites domination of
the European peoples.
The most prominent members of the globalist Left who have already joined
this new movement range from Julian Assange to Suzan George and Toni
Negri, and from Hillary Wainwright of Red Pepper toCounterPunch and other
globalist Left newspapers and journals all over the world. In this context, it is
particularly interesting to refer to Slavoj ieks commentary on the
Manifesto that was presented at the inaugural meeting of Varoufakiss new
movement in Berlin on February 2016. This commentary was greeted
enthusiastically by Varoufakiss globalist Left supporters. Zizek began by
blatantly attempting to deceive the audience with respect to Syrizas rise to
power. He talked about a defeat but he added, I don't blame them, their
situation was hopeless from the beginning. Of course, he did not mention that
the situation was hopeless only because SYRIZA took for granted what actually
needed to be changed, if they were to realize their promises to reverse the
austerity policies imposed by the Troika, to tear up the Mamoranda along with
them, to stop privatizations and so on. That is, SYRIZA took for granted
Greeces membership of the EU and the Eurozone and, accordingly, never
prepared for a Plan B so that, as soon as the European Central Bank began
cutting off liquidity (which led to capital controls that still continue to this day),
they could have re-introduced the drachma. Varoufakis, who was Finance
Minister at the time, said that he had it in mind and that he discussed it with
close associates, but of course he never thought to resign when he discovered
that his plan was not accepted. Instead, he resigned (or, more likely, was
forced to resign) only after the defeat as Zizek euphemestically called it
had become inevitable.
Zizek then launched a vitriolic attack on the rising neo-nationalist movement (as
the entire globalist Left is currently doing, inspired by Soros and other
members of the TE):
Sometimes even if you rationally know the situation is hopeless you have to
experience it. The lesson was a very important one of the defeat of syriza, the
lesson was the crucial step forward, the way to undermine global capitalism
cannot be done at the level of nation states. There is a great temptation now all
around Europe, a kind of neo-keynesian social democratic nationalist
temptation, the idea is since we live in a global market, and this means
international relations are dominated by the logic of capital, the only hope is to
return to a stronger nation state, with all this implies a certain level of
nationalism/populism and we establish again strong nation states which impose
their own laws, regulate their own financial policy and so on and so on. That

27

illusion has to be abandoned I claim. And this is why I think what DIEM is
doing is strictly linked to the failure of syriza (...)[29]
In fact, along the same lines the Manifesto itself stresses that, Two dreadful
options dominate: Retreat into the cocoon of our nation-states, or surrender to
the Brussels democracy-free zone. Yet this is a pseudo-dilemma or, more to
the point, a highly deceptive description of the actual choices involved, as we
shall see in the next section which will present a real third option, unlike the
Manifesto. But before we do this, let us see the highly deceitful way in which
Zizek attempted to justify the globalist Lefts approach which is, in fact, a
celebration of the NWO.
In his commentary at the DIEM25 meeting, he stressed that our only hope is to
engage in very concrete very specific acts, we have to choose very well our
concrete act, our concrete demand (...) that is the art to demand something
relatively modest, but if you follow to the end this demand, everything will fall
apart. You open up the path to general rearrangement of social relations.
Of course, for anybody with an elementary knowledge of what is going on at
present in Greece this can only be taken, at best, as a joke and, at worst, as a
deliberate attempt to justify SYRIZAs criminal policies. These simply aim to
execute every single order that comes from the EU (perhaps with some minor
modifications accepted in advance by the Troika to create the pretence of
negotiations) in order to satisfy the Transnational Elites lenders as represented
by the Troika. The aims currently pursued by the elites, according to the new
Memorandum (perhaps the worst ever) signed by SYRIZA in July, include:

the effective smashing of farmers incomes with heavy taxation and the
destruction of their pension system (they are presently blocking all the
main roads and the Leftist government is using the special riot units to
control them)

the actual pauperization of pensioners of all kinds (demonstrations over

this issue are occurring daily in Athens)

the sell-out of all social wealth, starting with seaports and airports etc.

It is clear now to everybody that SYRIZAs only aim is power for powers sake.
No wonder that Greece, a country with a very strong Left tradition historically,
may soon see the destruction of its Left movement altogether (given in
particular the fact that KKE the Greek Communist Party engages in strong
rhetoric not matched by its actions), with most people turning to political
apathy. In fact the abstention rate in the last election, following the signing of
the new Memorandum by SYRIZA, was at an all-time high!

28

Of course Zizeks stand on SYRIZA and the Manifesto in general is far from
unexpected. In advocating the need for a big socio-economic revolution
within Arab countries (in contrast to his present position), he indirectly
supported the campaigns for regime change in Libya and Syria. He also did this
directly when he adopted the western propaganda that Libya and Syria were
governed by dictators not bothering (despite his high qualifications) to
examine the history of these regimes, which were backed by strong national
liberation movements and had really achieved significant social changes. Then,
he celebrated the Ukrainian revolution in Kiev[30], together with the likes of
Victoria Nuland and John McCain,fully revealing to which camp he really
belongs. No wonder that he never proposed any concrete alternatives to the
present system, as a system, but instead just promoted changes guaranteeing the
protection of human rights as every good supporter of the ideology of
globalization does or talked about communism as an abstract ideal without
ever attempting to specify the preconditions for it, let alone any transitional
strategy towards achieving it!
5. Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations[31]
It is clear that the social struggle in the era of neoliberal globalization can no
longer be just a struggle for social liberation, as obsolete Marxists still believe
today and some Trotskyites have always believed. This becomes obvious when
one considers the fact that, as soon as a country (not belonging to the
Transnational Elite, i.e. mainly the "G7") is integrated intothe NWO of
neoliberal globalization, it
loses every trace
of
economic and,
consequently, national sovereignty, either because it has to obey the EU rules
(in Europe) or the WTO and IMF rules (in the rest of the world), as well as the
orders given by capitalist lenders, bankers and the TNCs executives, of
course. This is why the struggle for social liberation today is inconceivable
unless it has already gone through national liberation. Theoccupying troops
that are now destroying and plundering countries likeGreece, Portugal, Spain,
Argentina etc, as well as the weakest social stratain all countries, even the most
economically advanced ones (with the full cooperation of small, local privileged
elites which control the media, the political parties, the Left intelligentsia
etc.), are not a regular army inuniform with lethal weapons of physical violence
at their disposal. The occupying army today is an economic army in suits,
possessing equallylethal instruments of economic violence, as well as
the means (the mass media and social media, NGOs etc) to justify it.
So, at this crucial historical juncture that will determine whether we shall all
become subservient to neoliberal globalization and the transnational elite (as the
DIEM25 Manifesto implies through our subordination to the EU) or not, it is
imperative that we create a Popular Front in each country which will include all

29

the victims of globalization among the popular strata, regardless of their current
political affiliations.
In Europe, in particular, where the popular strata are facing economic disaster,
what is needed urgently is not an "antifascist" Front within the EU, as proposed
by the parliamentary juntas in power and the Euro-elites, also supported by the
globalist Left (such as Diem25, Plan B in Europe, Die Linke, the Socialist
Workers Party in the UK, SYRIZA in Greece and so on), which would, in fact,
unite aggressors and victims. An antifascist front would simply disorient the
masses and make them incapable of facing the real fascism being imposed on
them by the political and economic elites, which constitute the transnational and
local elites. Instead, what is needed is a Popular Front that could attract the vast
majority of the people who would fight for immediate unilateral withdrawal
from the EU which is managed by the European part of the transnational elite
as well as for economic self-reliance, thus breaking with globalization.
To my mind, it is only the creation of broad anti-EU Popular Fronts that could
effect each countrys exit from the EU, with the aim of achieving economic
self-reliance. Re-development based on self-reliance is the only way in which
peoples breaking away from globalization and its institutions (like the EU)
could rebuild their productive structures which have been dismantled by
globalization. This could also, objectively lay the ground for future systemic
change, decided upon democratically by the peoples themselves. To expect that
the globalization process will itself create the objective and subjective
conditions for a socialist transformation, as some Paleolithic Marxists believe,
or alternatively, that the creation of self-managed factories within the present
globalized system will lead to a self-managed economy, as a variety of life-style
anarchists suggest, is, in effect, to connive at the completion of the
globalization process, as planned by the elites. Even worse, to expect that within
the NWO institutions, like the EU, a good EU and consequently a good
capitalist globalization will emerge at the end, as DIEM25, SYRIZA, Podemos
and the like suggest, amounts to the pure disorientation of peoples which allows
the plan for global governance to be fully implemented.
In other words, the fundamental aim of the social struggle today should be a
complete break with the present NWO and the building of a new global
democratic community, in which economic and national sovereignty have been
restored, so that peoples could then fight for the ideal society, as they see it. The
conditions of occupation we live under today mean that people resisting it have
to make broad political alliances with everyone concerned who accepts the aims
of a Popular Front for National and Social Liberation, particularly the basic aim
of breaking with the NWO. Then, once the people of a particular country have
broken with the NWO, they need to join with peoples from other countries who
have already achieved their economic and national sovereignty and, together,
30

form new economic unions of sovereign states to sort out, between them and on
a bilateral or multilateral basis, the economic problems arising from trade and
investment. Then and only then, the crucial issues of the form that a future
society should take, and the strategy needed to achieve it, could be raised.
Therefore, the vital issue today, in the fight for the creation of a new democratic
world order, is how we create this alternative pole of sovereign self-reliant
nations, in full knowledge that the TE will use any kind of economic or physical
violence at its disposal to abort any such effort, with all the huge means
available to it. To my mind, under conditions of effective occupation, as many
describe the present situation, this is impossible today without the creation of a
Popular Front for National and Social Liberation (FNSL) in each country,
allowing peoples to achieve their economic and national sovereignty as a
precondition for social liberation.
The social subject of a mass popular front pursuing the aims I described above
would be all the victims of neoliberal globalization: the unemployed and the
partially employed, wage-earners on the very edge of survival (zero-hour
contracts, occasional workers etc.), children without education who are
punished for being unlucky enough to be born to non-privileged parents,
as well as all those at the subsistence level (pensioners, the sick who lack
medical insurance amounting to one third of the population today and
others).
As far as the political subject is concerned, there are two possible options
concerning the required Front for National and Social Liberation (FNSL): a
front from below or a front from above. The preferred option is of course the
former, but in case this becomes unfeasible because the level of political
consciousness of the victims of globalization and their will to fight is inadequate
for this huge task, then the only other possibility is for existing political forces
to take over the task of achieving sovereignty and self-reliance. A FNSL from
below could be organized from among local assemblies, committees, groups
and initiatives consisting of the victims of globalization (namely, the vast
majority of the worlds population) who ought to join as ordinary citizens,
irrespective of party affiliations and ideologies or religious and other
differences, as long as they share the ultimate aim of national and economic
sovereignty. The intermediate target should be the exit from the international
institutions of the NWO like the EU, so that the victims of globalization could
escape the present process of economic catastrophe.
Then, once the people of a particular country have broken with this criminal
Order, they should join with peoples from other countries, also fighting for
the same aims, to form new political and economic unions of sovereign Nations
and the corresponding democratically-organized international institutions
31

together, within a new international community of self-reliant nations based on

the principle of mutual aid rather than competitiveness the guiding principle
behind the present criminal NWO. As long as the member countries share
complementary production structures, the possibility of an involuntary transfer
of economic surplus from some countries (usually the weaker ones, as is the
case in the EU) to other countries in the Union can be ruled out. Therefore, a
collective kind of self-reliance could be achieved within the economic area
covered by such a union, which should be based on the sovereignty of each
participating country.
In other words, a FNSL would function as a catalyst for fundamental political
and economic change, which is the only kind of change that could get us out of
the current mire, while also revealing the attempted deception by the globalist
Left, according to which we could somehow emerge from this catastrophe
even without leaving the EU as DIEM 25 deceptively preaches.

[1] Pepe Escobar, It takes a Greek to save Europa, RT (11/2/2016).

[2] It should be noted that the Manifestos options were also approved, albeit indirectly, by
George Soros, one of Varoufakiss strongest supporters, who stressed at the same time that
Putins aim is to foster the EUs disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood Europe
with Syrian refugees. (G. Soros, Putin is a bigger threat to Europes existence than
Isis, The Guardian(11/2/2016).

[3] Y. Varoufakis, A Manifesto for democratising Europe (February 2016).

[4] See the official site of the European Round Table of Industrialists. See also the film by
Friedrich Moser & Matthieu Lietaert, The Brus$ls Business : Who Runs the European
Union? (2012)

[5] Takis Fotopoulos, he Transnational Elite and the NWO as

conspiracies The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 10,
Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2014)
[6] Y. Varoufakis, A Manifesto for democratising Europe, op. cit.
[7] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy (London/NY:
Cassell/Continuum,1997), chs 5- 6.
[8] See unofficial transcript of DIEM25 speeches
athttps://pad.riseup.net/p/DiEM25_Transcript

[9] See Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy, op. cit.

[10] See Takis Fotopoulos, The New World Order in Action: War and
economic violence, from the Middle East through Greece to
Ukraine (under publication by Progressive Press), Parts I & III.
[11] See Takis Fotopoulos, The New World Order in Action, op. cit. ch. 6.
[12] Paul Krugman, The austerity delusion, The Guardian (29/4/2015).
32

[13] Anthony H. Birch, The Concepts and Theories of Modern

Democracy (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 58.
[14] Bhikhu Parekh, The Cultural Particularity of Liberal
Democracy, Political Studies, Volume 40, Issue Supplement s1, pages
160175 (August 1992).
[15] According to Aristotle, ...I say that the appointment by lot is
commonly held to be characteristic of democracy, whereas the process of
election for that purpose is looked upon as oligarchic;
Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, 1294b, John Warrington, ed. (London: Heron
Books)
[16] Anthony Birch, The Concepts and Theories of Modern
Democracy, op. cit., p. 50.
[17] John Dunn, Conclusion in Democracy, the Unfinished Journey, 508
BC to AD 1993, pp. 247-48.
[18] Varoufakis, A Manifesto for democratising Europe, op. cit.
[19] ibid.
[20] Takis Fotopoulos, The real causes of the catastrophic crisis in
Greece and the 'Left', The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
Vol. 9, Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2013)
[21] Editorial, The Peoples Revolt, The Times (11/10/2014).
[22] Globalization is barbarous, multinationals rule world Marine Le
Pen, RT (10/1/2015).
[23] Adam Thomson, Frances far-right National Front seeks voters from the
left, Financial Times (4/1/2015).
[24] ibid.

[25] Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Roula Khalaf, Marine Le Pen lays out
radical vision to govern France, Financial Times (5/3/2015).
[26] G. Soros, Putin is a bigger threat to Europes existence than
Isis, The Guardian (11/2/2016).
[27] Francis Elliott et. al., Working class prefers Ukip to Labour, The
Times(25/11/2014).
[28] Takis Fotopoulos, Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation
Movement, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2001)
[29] See unofficial transcript of DIEM25 speeches
athttps://pad.riseup.net/p/DiEM25_Transcript. See also the video itself
athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFNJYpwv39s
[30] See the Open letter on the future of Ukraine, signed by scores of Zizek-type
globalization intellectuals, politicians et al, which declares their admiration for the Ukrainian
revolutionaries: They defended their democracy and their future 10 years ago, during the
Orange Revolution, and they are standing up for those values again today
, euobserver (27/1/2014).

33

[31] This section is based on Part VI of the forthcoming book The New
World Order in Action: War and economic violence, from the Middle East
through Greece to Ukraine, op. cit.
http://inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol12/vol12_no1_Diem25_manifesto_demo
cratizing_europe_or_for_eu_elites_domination.html

34

YANNIS VAROUFAKIS: THE TROJAN HORSE?

On February 9 2016, a new pan-European leftist "progressive" movement called
Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM 25) was inaugurated in Berlin
11 March 2016

George Soros, whose main mission is to infiltrate the progressive left movement
and neutralize its anti-capitalist underpinnings, has struck again through one of
his Trojan horses Yiannis Varoufakis. In a typical Hegelian fashion, the leader
of this new group, which bills itself as anti-austerity, anti-bankers, and antibureaucratic, is none other than the former SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical
Left) Finance Minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis.
Yanis Varoufakis is a citizen of Australia who was educated in Britain and
worked as a professor at the University of Texas. Varoufakis served as an
economic adviser to the failed PASOK Social Democratic Government of Prime
Minister George Papandreou since mid-2000, the man who first put Greece on
the road to draconian austerity measures in 2010. Varoufakis now claims that he
was ardently opposed to Papandreous deal with the Troika but no one will ever
know how much the now supposedly anti-austerity figurehead agreed to while
he was advising Papadreou on the proper course of action to settle Greeces
enormous debt problem. Interestingly enough, there is a deep connection
between the Papandreou government and Tsirpas government. First, Varoufakis
35

is a close friend of American economist and fellow University of Texas

professor James K. Galbraith, the son of the late minence grise of American
economists, John Kenneth Galbraith. Varoufakis and James Galbraith coauthored together. Galbraiths ties to the global banking elite are exemplified by
his guest scholar position at the elitist Brookings Institution in Washington.
Varoufakis second and most important connection is Jeffrey Sachs.
Sachs is well-known from his economic reforms in developing or fragile
economies. Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet Union fell
apart, Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a
dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russias
economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsins
first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of shock therapy to
swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned
life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock not
least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent than therapy. One result of this was
the evaporation of much potential for future capital investment: the substantial
savings of Russians.[i] In 1995, in the Chubais-organized insider auctions of
prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management
Company (H.M.C.), which invests the universitys endowment, and billionairespeculator George Soros, were the only foreign groups and individuals allowed
to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders
in Novolipetsk, Russias second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose
reserves exceed those of Exxon Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in
Russias high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.[ii]
Many years later, in Greece, Sachs, Varoufakis and Galbraith all became
George Papandreous and Alexis Tsipras ad hoc advisers. Nevertheless,
Varoufakis became the Finance Minister in Tsipras first cabinet despite its goal
of renegotiating the bailout agreed to by Papandreou for whom Varoufakis
served as an adviser. There is much evidence to the claim that Varoufakis was a
Soros implant within the "leftist" government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras a claim supported by multiple different sources.[iii] Varoufakis's first move was
to cut deals with the very same European bankers against whom the Greek
electorate rebelled by electing SYRIZA. Rather than cancelling Greece's
usurious debt arranegements with the bankers, Varoufakis began to negotiate
with them in order to keep Greece within the disastrous "eurozone."
Varoufakis claimed to have been given an okay by Tsipras last December 2014
a month before the general elections that brought SYRIZA to power for a
planning of a payment system that could operate in euros but which could be
changed into drachmas overnight if necessary. He worked with a small team
36

to prepare the plan, which would have required a staff of 1,000 to implement,
but he did not get the final go-ahead from Tsipras to proceed, he argued. The
plan would involve hijacking the AFMs of taxpayers and corporations by
hacking into the General Secretariat of Public Revenues website, Varoufakis
explained to his interlocutors.[iv] This would allow the creation of a parallel
system that could operate if banks were forced to close which would allow
payments to be made between third parties and the state and could eventually
lead to the creation of a parallel banking system, he said. Since the general
secretariat is a system that is monitored by Greeces creditors and is therefore
difficult to access, Varoufakis said he assigned a childhood friend of his, an
information technology expert - who became a professor at Columbia
University, to hack into the system.[v] A week after Varoufakis took over the
ministry in February 2015, he said the friend telephoned him and said he had
control of the hardware but not of the software which belongs to the
troika.[vi]
When Alexis Tsipras told his fellow citizens he would call a referendum on the
bailout accord that international creditors proposed to keep the debt-stricken
country afloat on July 5, 2015, Jeffrey Sachs was one of the prominent NO
supporters. Sachs saw a way out of the crisis if Greeces debt burden is eased
while the country stayed in the eurozone. According to Sachs, for that to happen
Greece and Germany would need to come to a rapprochement soon after the
referendum and agree to a package of economic reforms and debt relief. Sachs
explained on Project Syndicatethat I recommend that the Greek people give a
resounding No to the creditors in the referendum on their demands this
weekend.[vii] One day after the referendum Varoufakis was removed and his
masterminded plan - perhaps meant to be carried out by Jeffrey Sachs of
Columbia University- remained unimplemented.
Now, Varoufakis is back with DiEM25.
The aim of the DiEM25 movement is, quite simply, to democratise the EU in
the knowledge that it will otherwise disintegrate at a terrible cost to all. This is
presented as the only viable alternative to the two remaining dreadful options:
(i) retreat into the cocoon of the nation-state and (ii) surrender to the Brussels
democracy-free zone.[viii]
DiEM25s immediate priorities are: full transparency in EUs decision-making:
live-streaming of European Council, ECOFIN and Eurogroup meetings, full
disclosure of trade negotiations and publicizing ECB minutes among other
things, and the urgent redeployment of existing EU institutions in the pursuit of
policies that genuinely address the crises of debt, banking, inadequate
37

investment, rising poverty and migration. DiEM25s long-term goal is, in other
words, to bring about a fully democratic, functional Europe by 2025.
The idea that the European Left should aim for a radical, progressive overhaul
of Europes institutions rather than their rejection is not new, of course, and
has been the consensus among European progressive/leftist movements all
throughout the crisis, despite the recent rise of left-wing euro-scepticism. Such a
reformed system should rest on a significantly empowered European
Parliament, which should be the sole initiator of European legislation,
alongside a completely reformed executive branch: a revamped European
Commission with a directly elected President (who would in effect become the
President of Europe), alongside a European finance minister, foreign minister
and so on.[ix] However, the extent to which such a system of supranational
democracy could be made truly representative and respectful of the needs of the
weaker states of the Union is far from clear. So far the EU elite has expressed
an adamant refusal to consider the legitimate economic claims of countries as
Greece and Portugal and has displayed outright contempt to countries as
Greece. Greece has seen a high rise in people committing suicide due to
poverty, and the EU still refuses to give it a path to economic growth that does
not involve cutting down the already small pensions and refuses to create an
economic stimulus. EU would not come at the expense of national selfdetermination the DiEM25 manifesto says. But the EU did just that. The
Greek government has no say in its internal affairs and cannot make a single
economic decision on its own. In addition, its armys budget has been sliced
significantly due to the memorandum and it cannot even protect its own
borders. Anyone who today takes the position that a democratic reform of the
EU is the way forward for Europe has a duty to explain, in concrete terms, what
he or she means by this and how this matches with reality.
Finally, DiEMs approach takes the survival of the EU/EMU for granted. But
that remains to be seen. By concentrating on the reform of existing European
institutions, isnt there a risk for the Left of finding itself dangerously
unprepared in the face of an unforeseen implosion of the monetary union?
Especially if we take into account that there is little reason to believe that
Germany and the other countries of the ordoliberal bloc would yield to a
reform of the EMU in a more Keynesian, progressive direction, even in the
unlikely event where we could see a sufficient number of countries backing
such a proposal.[x] If such a situation should emerge, the most likely outcome
would be a German exit from the monetary union (leading to a possible collapse
of the entire currency system).

38

DiEM's major task is to curtail support for Europe's right-wing nationalists. As

Soros's disastrous mass migrant invitation has resulted in hundreds of women
being raped and sexually assaulted by young Arab and North African males newly-arrived migrants - on the streets of Cologne on New Year's Eve and as
the Soros controlled European media attempted to cover up the story, there has
been a huge backlash against pan-Europeanism and globalism across Europe.
Varoufakis admits that the main goal of his new movement is to curtail the
influence of anti-immigration parties, such as Golden Dawn, in his native
Greece but he also ensures that left governments will not pursue the sovereignty
of their respective nations. The second major goal of Varoufakis and DiEM25 is
to co-opt Spain's leftist Podemos ("We can") party, the Portuguese left parties in
the Portuguese coalition government, and the new leftist leadership of the UK
Labour Party (whose Leader Jeremy Corbyn appointed Varoufakis as adviser)
into supporting the globalist and pan-European goals of Soros and his banker
friends.
[i] http://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/
[ii] http://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/
[iii] http://www.iefimerida.gr/news/203454/vima-ti-gyreyei-o-varoyfakis-me-ton-tzortz-soros
[iv] http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/27/news/greece-varoufakis-hacking/
[v] http://www.reuters.com/article/eurozone-greece-varoufakis-idUSL5N1073NO20150727
[vi] http://www.ekathimerini.com/199945/article/ekathimerini/news/varoufakis-claims-hadapproval-to-plan-parallel-banking-system
[vii] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/greek-referendum-what-the-experts-say
[viii] https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/02/a-critique-of-yanis-varoufakis-democracy-ineurope-movement-diem25/
[ix] https://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/08/why-we-should-be-wary-of-proposals-toparliamentarise-eu-decision-making/
[x] https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/02/a-critique-of-yanis-varoufakis-democracy-ineurope-movement-diem25/

https://gianalytics.org/500-yannis-varoufakis-the-trojan-horse

39

Yanis Varoufakis: more erratic than Marxist

While the enfant terrible of the financial media, Greeces new finance minister Yanis
Varoufakis, enters key negotiations with other Eurozone finance ministers on a deal over
Greek debt and economic recovery, I have been reading up on Varoufakis economics and
philosophical ideas.
As a trained economist who has held many academic posts in various universities around
the world, YV considers himself a Marxist, but an erratic one. As he put it in a post on
his blog back in 2013 (http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/12/10/confessions-of-an-erraticmarxist-in-the-midst-of-a-repugnant-european-crisis/#_edn2), while an unapologetic
Marxist, I think it is important to resist him passionately in a variety of ways. To be, in
other words, erratic in ones Marxism.
In his confessional post, VF explains that, although he considered himself a Marxist, he
avoided studying Marxist economics at university because he wanted to understand and
take on the basic premises of mainstream bourgeois economics. When I chose my
doctoral thesis, back in 1982, I chose a highly mathematical topic and a theme within
which Marxs thought was irrelevant, by design. He is apparently an expert on the role
of game theory in markets and the economic behaviour of market agents, being
employed at one time by a gaming company for his expertise.
But he recognised that bourgeois economic theory bore little relation to reality. When
called upon to comment on the world we live in, as opposed to the dominant ideology
regarding the workings of our world, I had no alternative but to fall back on the Marxist
tradition.
And what were key merits of the Marxist tradition in the eyes of YV? First, it was Marxs
insight that the world was full of contradiction: wealth and poverty; growth and collapse;
democracy and the rule of the elite. This dialectical perspective, where everything is
pregnant with its opposite, and the eager eye with which Marx discerned the potential for
change in the seemingly most constant and unchanging of social structures, helped me
grasp the great contradictions of the capitalist era. It dissolved the paradox of an age
that generated the most remarkable wealth and, in the same breath, the most conspicuous
poverty.
It was Marxs dialectical thinking that enabled him to make his most important discovery
about the capitalist mode of production, namely the binary opposition deeply within
human labour. Between labours two quite different natures: (i) labour as a value40

creating (fire breathing) activity that can never be specified or quantified in advance
(and therefore impossible to commodify), and (ii) labour as a quantity (e.g. numbers of
hours worked) that is for sale and comes at a price.
Thus Marxs brilliant insight into the essence of capitalist crises was precisely this: the
greater capitalisms success in turning labour into a commodity, the less the value of
each unit of output it generates, the lower the profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the
next nasty recession of the economy as a system.
Thus VF correctly captures the key law of contradiction under capitalism: the
accumulation of capital through the exploitation of labour has a tendency to lower
profitability and engender regular and recurrent crises in production. So as YV puts
it: Capital can never win in its struggle to turn labour into an infinitely elastic,
mechanised input, without destroying itself. That is what neither the neoliberals nor the
Keynesians will ever grasp! If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be
annihilated by machinery, wrote Marx how terrible that would be for capital, which,
without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!
For YV, Marx exposes the false consciousness of bourgeois economics that
reckons wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate
state when the opposite is the reality wealth is collectively produced and then privately
appropriated through social relations of production and property rights. Moreover,
YV also recognises that Marx does argue that what is wrong with capitalism is not
inequality (that has existed in all class societies) but that it is wracked with continual
crises that are irrational, as it habitually condemns whole generations to deprivation
and unemployment.
All this would seem to make YV a Marxist by most definitions. But YV goes onto to say
that he is really an erratic one because, in his view, Marx was wrong in two key areas.
First, he was far too dogmatic and closed in his views. As a result, he bred Marxists after
him who adopted authoritarian policies and actions. Marx failed to give sufficient
thought, and kept a judicious silence, over the impact of his own theorising on the world
that he was theorising about He just did not consider the possibility that the creation of
a workers state would force capitalism to become more civilised while the workers state
would be infected with the virus of totalitarianism as the hostility of the rest of the
(capitalist) world towards it grew and grew.
Thus YV agrees with the superficial view of the populist right-wing papers and
conservative thinkers that there is a straight line from Marx to Stalin and Pol Pot. There is
no space here to deal with this ludicrous calumny of Marx and Marxism. I leave the
reader to consider how justified YVs argument is.
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Thats because, according to YV, Marxs other big error is even worse than breeding
authoritarian and totalitarian regimes calling themselves Marxist. It was his assumption
that truth about capitalism could be discovered in the mathematics of his models (the socalled schemas of reproduction). This was the worst disservice Marx could have
delivered to his own theoretical system.
According to YV, Marx was determined in his determinism (my phrase). Marx wanted to
find economic models and laws that proved capitalism would collapse or be subject to
crises, when no such proofs can exist. By toying around with simplistic algebraic
models, in which labour units were, naturally, fully quantified, hoping against hope to
evince from these equations some additional insights about capitalism. As a result, we
epigones of Marxist economics havewasted long careers indulging a similar type of
scholastic mechanismFully immersed in irrelevant debates on the transformation
problem and thus being ignored by mainstream economics.
YVs argument smacks of empiricism and opposition to theory. Actually, the scholastic
debates over the transformation problem by Marxists in the 1980s and 1990s eventually
culminated in an important advance in Marxist economic theory that successfully
defended Marxs law of profitability against the attempts of mainstream neoclassical and
neo-Ricardian economics to rubbish it (see Andrew Klimans seminal book, Reclaiming
Marxs Capital,http://akliman.squarespace.com/reclaiming/). That is what theoretical
debate is about: to advance our understanding in a rigorous way.
Yet YV goes on It was this determination to have the complete, closed story, or
model, the final word, is something I cannot forgive Marx for. It proved, after all,
responsible for a great deal of error and, more significantly, of authoritarianism. Errors
and authoritarianism that are largely responsible for the Lefts current impotence as a
force of good and as a check on the abuses of reason and liberty that the neoliberal crew
are overseeing today. Thus Marx was a closed mind thinker, a determinist who had no
room for error and doubt and thus wasted the time of later Marxists in pointless debates
and he was so harsh on those who criticised this determinist view that he bred
authoritarian attitudes in his followers.
Serious crimes, indeed, if they were true. But YV is talking nonsense. YV criticises
Marxs Volume 2 of Capital for trying to find a mathematical formula to show that
capitalist accumulation can grow smoothly, when the real world is indeterminate, full of
chance and change. But like many others, YV fails to recognise that Marxs reproduction
schema in Volume 2 are not meant to depict the reality of capitalism with all its warts.
They are a model of capital in general, where capitalism is reduced to the basic forces of
value creation and reproduction, excluding competition between capitals, credit, money,
the equalisation of the rate of profit between capitals and the differences engendered
between values and prices of production, let alone daily market prices.
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Marxs schemes of reproduction in Volume 2 were not a closed model of capitalism.

What they show is that capitalist accumulation will not stumble because of the lack of
effective demand. Accumulation can take place with demand for capital goods and
consumer goods. It is possible for a balance. But in reality that never happens except by
accident. It is as indeterminate as YV wants. Marx recognised and argued that the
capitalist mode of production was a dynamic and uncertain system, but he delved below
the level of uncertainty and appearances to the essence of capital in general and then
added back each stage of reality to the level of many capitals (Volume 3) and then to
market prices.
As Henryk Grossman explains in his essay on value and prices of production, at the level
of many capitals, it is prices of production that move to establish an average rate of profit
not values (see here Intro to Grossman Value-price trans and crisis 141101). And this is
where the crux of crises rests in the movement of the average rate of profit (Volume 3),
not in the value reproduction schemes (Volume 2). This is a key mistake of Luxemburg
and Bauers understanding of Marxs reproduction schemas and it seems YV as well.
Having convinced himself that Marx had a serious whiff of authoritarian determinism, he
contrasts this with his delight in John Maynard Keynes eclectic indeterminancy. Yes,
Keynes was on the side of the bourgeois and yes he was a snob etc, and he supported the
ideas of that arch conservative thinker of classical economic, Rev Thomas Malthus,
but Keynes embraced Malthus scepticism regarding (a) the wisdom of seeking a theory
of value which is consistent with capitalisms complexity and dynamics, and (b) Ricardos
conviction, which Marx later inherited, that persistent depression is incompatible with
capitalism.
You see, YV says, the trouble with Marxs theory of crises is that it too generous to
capitalism. Once sufficient capital values are destroyed and profitability is restored,
capitalism can recover into a new cycle of accumulation and growth. But Keynes (and
Malthus apparently) saw that this was wrong because capitalism can get locked into Great
and Long Depressions that it cannot get out of. Marx told the story of redemptive
recessions occurring due to the twin nature of labour and giving rise to periods of growth
that are pregnant with the next downturn which, in turn, begets the next recovery, and so
on. However, there was nothing redemptive about the Great Depression. The 1930s
slump was just that: a slump that behaved very much like a static equilibrium a state of
the economy that seemed perfectly capable of perpetuating itself, with the anticipated
recovery stubbornly refusing to appear over the horizon even after the rate of profit
recovered in response to the collapse of wages and interest rates.
So Keynes gem of a discovery about capitalism was twofold: (A) It was an inherently
indeterminate system, featuring what economists might refer to today as an infinity of
multiple equilibria, some of which were consistent with permanent mass unemployment,
43

and (B) it could fall into one of these terrible equilibria at the drop of a hat,
unpredictably, without rhyme or reason, just because a significant portion of capitalists
feared that it may do so.
YVs view that Marxs theory of crises under capitalism cannot encompass long and
lasting depressions and only explains regular and normal recessions is again poppycock.
Indeed, this blog has spent loads of words and time on arguing that Marxs theory of
crises provides the best explanation of the Great Depression and the current Long
Depression, unlike Keynesian answers (see my
posts,https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/why-is-there-a-longdepression/). And my upcoming book, due out in June, deals exactly with this issue.
YV exalts Keynes notion of animal spirits, i.e. that what drives capitalist accumulation
is not the movement of profitability but the psychological and emotional confidence of
individual capitalists. According to YV, this is a deeply radical idea because it
capturesthe radical indeterminacy buried inside capitalisms very DNA., a concept that
Marx had abandoned so as to establish his theorems as mathematical, indisputable
proofs. Again I have not the space to deal with the fallacies of Keynesian uncertainty
and animal spirits as an explanation of capitalist crises (see my essay on Keynesianism
here, APPENDIX TWO).
But most erratic is YVs views about the current global economic crisis and in particular,
the crisis in the Eurozone. He dramatically points out that Europes present crisis is not
merely a threat for workers, for the dispossessed, for the bankers, for particular groups,
social classes or, indeed, nations. No, Europes current posture poses a threat to
civilisation as we know it. Yikes, the end of civilisation: this suggests the need for
radical socialist policies before it is too late.
But no. You see, the long depression being experienced in Europe (which I agree is a
correct interpretation) puts radicals in a terrible dilemma. You see, it is not an
environment for radical socialist policies after all. Instead it is the Lefts historical duty,
at this particular juncture, to stabilise capitalism; to save European capitalism from itself
and from the inane handlers of the Eurozones inevitable crisis.
Thus, YV says, his interventions in the public debate on Greece and Europe (e.g. the
Modest Proposal for Resolving the Euro Crisis (seehttp://yanisvaroufakis.eu/eurocrisis/modest-proposal/), that he, Stuart Holland and James Galbraith (see my
post, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/from-establishment-to-antiestablishment/) co-authored and have been campaigning in favour of does not have a
whiff of Marxism in it.Modest indeed!

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YV says he would rather promote socialist policies as an answer to the Euro crisis but that
would be unrealistic. Radical policies did not achieve anything against the forces of
neoliberalism and Thatcherism in the 1980s: What good did we achieve in Britain in the
early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned
while falling headlong into Mrs Thatchers neoliberal trap? Precisely
none. Apparently, it was a waste of time advocating socialist policies (assuming we did)
in the 1980s because the people of Britain just swallowed Thatcherism hook, line and
sinker (just a point, Thatcher never gained more than 40% of the vote in any election and
most voters voted against her in all elections). So when will socialist policies be worth
advocating, according to YV after we have saved capitalism? I dont follow the logic.
This erratic Marxist, now negotiating with the neo-liberal Euro leaders aims to save
European capitalism from itself so as to minimise the unnecessary human toll from this
crisis; the countless lives whose prospects will be further crushed without any benefit
whatsoever for the future generations of Europeans. Apparently socialism cannot do
this. YV says we are just not ready to plug the chasm that a collapsing European
capitalism will open up with a functioning socialist system.
Instead, according to YV, a Marxist analysis of both European capitalism and of the
Lefts current condition compels us to work towards a broad coalition, even with rightwingers, the purpose of which ought to be the resolution of the Eurozone crisis and the
stabilisation of the European Union Ironically, those of us who loathe the Eurozone
have a moral obligation to save it! Thus YV has campaigned for his Modest Proposal
for Europe with the likes of Bloomberg and New York Times journalists, of Tory
members of Parliament, of financiers who are concerned with Europes parlous state.
An erratic Marxist indeed!
Michael Roberts
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/yanis-varoufakis-more-erratic-thanmarxist/

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Books by authors

Isbn 1517092396 / 9781517092399

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