In this interview, Yanis Varoufakis provides an honest and enlightening
account of the shortcomings of today’s politics, the rise of techno-
feudalism, and the challenges and achievements that he has encountered
while leading and participating in new democratic movements.
CJLPA: Could you perhaps talk a bit about your personal
trajectory, and how you got to where you are today?
Yanis Varoufakis: I moved to England when I was 17 to study
mathematics and economics. I tried to abandon economics for
mathematics, but then eventually ended up doing a PhD in Economics,
so I was dragged back into the mire of the dismal science. I taught
for decades in Britain, in Australia, in the United States. You would
never have heard of me—unless you wanted to read esoteric stuff on
game theory and political philosophy—if it wasn’t for the fact that
the 2008 global crisis spearheaded the bankruptcy of the Greek state
and the sequence of bankruptcies across the Eurozone, because as a
commentator, I kept saying that all the European Union was doing
was extending the bankruptcy into the future, reproducing it and
magnifying it. At some point, my counterproposals were sought out
by a young man who was going to become Greece’s Prime Minister
[Alexis Tsipras], who then said, ‘You’ve got to put your money where
your mouth is and you’ve got to be finance minister’. Thus, I spent six
months being the finance minister of the most bankrupt European
country, saying no to more loans, the purpose of which was, again,
to extend and pretend the crisis.
CJLPA: What would you say is the main motivation behind
your work, or has it changed across your career paths?
YV: Curiosity. Not taking epiphenomena for granted. Not accepting
that the way things look is how they are. As the Royal Society’s
motto has instructed us, not to take anybody’s word for it, to keep
searching for deeper causes and to discover that those in power have
a vested interest in creating a narrative that obfuscates rather than
— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | 2021/07