Top 15 Yanis Varoufakis Quotes

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.

Why did he call it dark? Because it was founded on a dark, unspoken, implicit pact between America's ruling class and foreign capitalists and rentiers.

A Chinese official once described to me globalization as something that was founded on a "dark deal" – that's how the Chinese official put it to me: a dark deal.

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.

The dollar suddenly became something like an IOU issued by the hegemon. Before long, the global financial system was backed by IOUs issued by a hegemon who decided what foreigners holding those IOUs could do or couldn’t do with the IOUs issued by the hegemon.

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.

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".

Why did the original Non-Aligned Movement fall prey to neo-imperialism's highest form, which is of course globalization, financialized capitalist globalization? The short answer is because capitalists, in practice, proved better internationalists than we were. Because they understood the nature of neo-imperialism better than we did, and that's why they won.

A young man in Australia, a long, long time ago, well before we ever knew about WikiLeaks, had an idea: the idea of using Big Brother’s technology to create a large digital kind of mirror to turn to the face of Big Brother so as to enable us to be able to watch him watching us — a bit like turning the mirror to the face of the Medusa. WikiLeaks is based on that idea... WikiLeaks and Julian, as we know, have been persecuted for revealing to the world, especially to liberals, Democrats, Tories, social democrats — revealing to them the crimes against humanity perpetrated by our own elected leaders, in our name, behind our backs.

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.

So moving from the oligarchic ownership model, where you buy as many votes… and this is how you should think of shares; shares are votes! And they are the votes in the assemblies where serious decisions are made. The serious decisions are not made in the Houses of Parliament. They are not made in the Congress or the Bundestag. They are made in the boards of directors and the general assemblies of Goldman Sachs, of Volkswagen, of Google, and so on. This is where the big decisions are being made, the decisions that determine your life, as well as life on the planet. So these are the votes that count. And to say that there is a market for votes and the rich can buy them is the end of democracy... We have an oligarchy with elections and the elections are bought by the oligarchy.

While bringing about radical change is never easy, it is now abundantly clear that everything could be different. There is no longer any reason why we should accept things as they are.

2020 leaves behind much debris — pain, fear, broken lives, smashed dreams... Governments have stupendous powers that they hitherto chose not to use, deferring to the exorbitant power of Big Business. Yes, the money-tree does exist after all. Except, of course, that is only harvested by the powerful on behalf of the oligarchy: Money created by the rich for the rich. Solvency is a political decision because power-politics, not markets, decide who is bankrupt and who is not. Wealth has nothing to do with hard work or entrepreneurship. America’s billionaires made 931 billion dollars from the pandemic. They got richer in their sleep... Yes, 2020 was a vintage year for capitalists, but capitalism died! Liberated from any remaining competition, colossal platform companies like Amazon own everything. Now, it is up to us to make 2021 a year of radical change in the interests of the many. Happy New Year and carpe diem...

I would like to note that I have long considered myself a libertarian Marxist. This causes laughter and outrage from both Marxists and libertarians because they accuse me of being a hypocrite. If you are libertarian you cannot be a Marxist and if you are a Marxist you cannot be libertarian, they say. I see it differently.

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.