openpolitics.com

Have you wondered why politicians aren’t what they used to be, why governments seem unable to solve real problems? Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, says that it’s because you can be in politics today but not be in power — because real power now belongs to those who control the economy. He believes that the mega-rich and corporations are cannibalizing the political sphere, causing financial crisis. In this talk, hear his dream for a world in which capital and labor no longer struggle against each other, “one that is simultaneously libertarian, Marxist and Keynesian.”

DNA has degenerated it is rather because

one can be in government today and not

in power because power has migrated from

the political to the economic sphere

which is separate indeed I spoke about

my quarrel with capitalism if you think

about it it is a little bit like a

population of predators that are so

successful in decimating the prey that

they must feed on that in the end they

starve

similarly the economic sphere has been

colonizing and cannibalizing the

political sphere to such an extent that

it is undermining itself causing

economic crisis corporate power is

increasing political goods are devaluing

inequality is rising aggregate demand is

falling and CEOs of corporations are too

scared to invest the cash of their

corporations so the more capitalism

succeeds in taking the demons out of

democracy the taller between peaks at

the greater the waste of human resources

and humanity’s wealth clearly if this is

right we must reunite the political and

economic sphere and better do it with

Adiemus being in control like in ancient

Athens except we are the slaves or the

exclusion of women and migrants now this

is not an original idea the marxist left

had that idea 100 years ago and it

didn’t go very well did the lesson that

we learned from the soviet the battle

is that only by a miracle with the

working poor be rien powered as they

were in ancient Athens without creating

new forms of brutality and waste but

there is a solution

eliminate the working poor capitalism is

doing it by replacing low-wage workers

with automata androids robots the

problem is that as long as the economic

and the political spheres are separate

automation makes the Twin Peaks taller

the waist loftier and the social

conflicts deeper including soon I

believe in places like China so we need

to reconfigure we need to reunite

economic and the political spheres but

we better do it by democratizing the

reunified sphere less to end up with a

surveillance mad hypocracy that makes

the matrix the movie look like a

documentary so the question is not

whether capitalism will survive the

technological innovations it is spawning

the more interesting question is whether

capitalism will be succeeded by

something resembling a matrix dystopia

or something much closer to a star

trek-like society where machines serve

the humans and the humans expend their

energies exploring the universe and

indulging in long debates about the

meaning of life in some ancient Athenian

like high-tech Agora I think we can

afford to be optimistic but what would

it take what would it look like to have

this star trek-like utopia instead of

the matrix like dystopia