Yanis Varoufakis Quotes

I mean, the enclosures in Britain would never have happened without the king's army and without state brutality for pushing peasants off their ancestors' land and creating the commodification of labor, the commodification of land which then gave rise to capitalism.

They [the Chinese] are immensely self-serving, as they would. But a the same time they have a quality that we need in Southern Europe. Actually, I think everyone needs to have foreign direct investment by patient inverstors. They are patient investors. They don't come in to grab an asset for speculative purposes. They come in order to create a base on which to build and build and build. And their horizon is 20-30 years. What Europe has not done with Greece is to do what the Chinese were prepared to do to come there with their workers, with their engineers, and actully do some serious work.

The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage...

I call it techno-feudalism. I don’t call it capitalism anymore. We need to distinguish what was going on before 2008 from what was going on after 2008. Amazon is not a market; it’s a fiefdom. And it’s a fiefdom that’s connected to other fiefdoms, like Facebook, through the cloud services of Amazon, which are much greater and bigger than Amazon.com. It’s like a much more technologically advanced form of feudalism. And this is completely sustained by central bank money. So you have the combination of the king, the sovereign, the state, the central bank and the feudal lords, the techno-feudal lords. You can see that this system is constantly doubling-down on our extinction as a species. We had the pandemic and what did they do? More of the same...
Jeff Bezos is getting rich not because of the profits of Amazon, but because of the increase of the share price. You’ve heard that he made what, $60 billion since the beginning of the pandemic? That’s not because of the profits of Amazon. Amazon is not that profitable. They have huge revenues, but they also have costs. The actual profits are nothing like that. It’s maybe one billion altogether, but he made 60! From the share price.

These lazy answers always flourish during periods of deflation. Deflation, ladies and gentlemen, was always going to be the result of this particular design of the euro and deflation begets monsters: it was Mussolini, it was Hitler; now it is [a new fascist international].

Without the dollar's and America's global dominance, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or German capitalists would not have been able continually to extract colossal surplus value from their workers and then stash it away in America’s rentier economy.

We need to change the circumstances of people's lives, so we need investments. We need to push investment up because investment is what we need to create the good quality jobs that will create the incomes that will stop deflation: the markets won't do it on their own.

Europe in its infinite wisdom decided to deal with this bankruptcy by loading the largest loan in human history on the weakest of shoulders … What we’ve been having ever since is a kind of fiscal waterboarding that has turned this nation into a debt colony.

I’d say DiEM25’s program is the only one worth fighting for. In the European elections we didn’t do well — we got just over 1 percent of the vote. But I should add, our total budget was just €85,000, a pitiful sum for a European election. People running to be the mayor of even a small town would spend many times that. Running on a principled position meant we didn’t have the infrastructure or spending power to do better. ... in the European elections our party, MeRA25, had to struggle against a systematic effort to silence us. We received absolutely no media exposure until the moment where media were forced by law to mention us and give us a little airtime. This was not true of Popular Unity or other smaller parties advocating Lexit [a left-wing exit from the EU]. …These are deeply conservative forces... There is nothing liberal about them: they are traditional, austerian class warriors against the working class... The regime did not feel threatened by parties advocating exit from the euro and EU.

Why did they force us to close the banks? To instil fear in people.
And spreading fear is called terrorism.

If you take an iPhone apart, every single technology in it was developed by some government grant, every single one.

And how right Nixon was. As the American – the US, I shouldn't say American – as the US deficit skyrocketed, the world was flooded with American dollars. And the banks, the central banks outside the United States, were forced to use these American dollars, since they could not be converted to gold anymore, as the reserves with which they backed their own currency.

America was now a fully fledged deficit country, with a big trade deficit. But it was nothing like any other deficit country in the world. You see, Argentina, France, India, Greece needed to borrow dollars. America didn't need to borrow dollars to back up its currency. It didn't need to raise interests rates in order to prevent an exodus of dollars. The exodus of dollars was the foundation of American hegemony.

What did they understand better than we did? They understood better than we did the new, audacious imperialism that was born in 1971, when Bretton Woods collapsed, and the United States dollar was no longer convertible to gold, prompting [President] Richard Nixon to send a message to Europeans, European governments, and the world's capitalists, saying: "The dollar, as of today, is your problem".

Unfortunately the euro's design has created a vicious cycle between failed institutions that create failed policies that lead to discontent and then the only way the powers-that-be in Brussels can clamp down and continue to impose their authority is through increasing degrees of authoritarianism.