Yanis Varoufakis

fence border weakness

"Fences and borders are a sign of weakness."

— Yanis Varoufakis

compomise compromised

"We will compromise and compromise and compromise but we will never be compromised."

— Yanis Varoufakis

Crisis future revolution agriculture industry technology antibio

"Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born."

— Yanis Varoufakis

Brexit city of London financial center

"I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world."

— Yanis Varoufakis

greece bankrupt money banker debtor

"Every sensible banker understands that Greece should not have received any more money: a bankrupt state that can never be expected to repay loans is not a good debtor."

— Yanis Varoufakis

history democratic farming industry crisis future past

"Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past."

— Yanis Varoufakis

Greeks black Europe

"We Greeks are the blacks of Europe."

— Yanis Varoufakis

social efficiency capitalism clash technology distribution

"The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge."

— Yanis Varoufakis

non-marxist economy theory human dehumanisation labour

"Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value."

— Yanis Varoufakis

economy important economists

“The economy is too important to leave to the economists”

– Yanis Varoufakis

technofeudalism cloud capital

"The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the Global Financial Crisis in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:

1. It grabs our attention.

2. It manufactures our desires.

3. It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have.

4. It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces.

5. It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs.

6. It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments."

— Yanis Varoufakis