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
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
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