Yanis Varoufakis Quotes

In the United States you have the ridiculous situation where the Democratic Party is going to the people who voted for Trump saying you were duped by Putin, Putin stole the election through Facebook. (...) Did Putin try to influence the election in the United States? I'm sure he did. But I did too. I did, I really did. I did my best to influence the election and failed spectacularly and Putin had about the same impact that I had. This is really very important: we do not sacrifice good people to the ultra-right by treating them like morons and by demonizing them. This is crucial: we have to win the battle of ideas by treating people with respect independently of whether they agree or even like us or not.

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.

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].

What is being offered to the Greek people is circuses with no bread. And the circuses are not even funny.

Millions of Europeans looked with hope to this country, and it was Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government (elected that January) that had the responsibility for keeping that window open, and for opening it up further for others. What these millions wanted a break from was not even true neoliberalism, but what I would call bankruptocracy — a new regime in which the greatest power was wielded by the most bankrupt bankers. Tsipras’s surrender in July 2015 closed that window of opportunity... Ever since he surrendered to the troika, Tsipras... dilemma put to progressives: “Who do you want to torture you — an enthusiastic torturer, or someone like me who doesn’t want to torture you but will do it to keep his job?”

Our view — that we’re not going to leave, and it’s up for the German government to leave, or to throw us out — is harder for them to deal with. The regime despised us because we neither want Grexit nor fear it. Our call unilaterally to implement perfectly moderate policies without fear or passion destabilized them. It was a danger to their system because of its widespread appeal....But things are also changing. In recent weeks, we have built strength among the trade unions, for instance among the electricity workers. They were betrayed by Syriza, who broke up and privatized the public energy company.... the cleaning workers in the public sector... bore the brunt of the troika’s assault against the poor...Social movements... need a political organization that allows them a voice beyond their specific localities... one that doesn’t dominate them. If they don’t have this, then they will be crushed by a new right-wing regime of a resurgent oligarchic right – one founded on.. the state of debt bondage until 2060 agreed with the creditors by Syriza...
Consider this, for instance: Syriza sold the railways for €43 million... they’d have got more money tearing up the rails and selling them as scrap metal. Or take gambling — Syriza enabled the deployment of thirty-five thousand poker machines by a private company, exploiting a bankrupt people with the fake promise of easy winnings. Even the Right’s privatizations were less deplorable than Syriza’s.

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.

They [the Chinese] are far more humanistic than the United States ever was. [...] Of course they're trying... they are peddling for influence, but they are non-interventionists. Absolutely non-interventionists in a way that Europeans, the West, has never managed to fathom. The Chinese never asked Apple to go to Shenzhen and produce all the iPhones, it was Steve Jobs that decided that. It was not China that went to Washington DC and demanded that they buy a third of your national debt. If they hadn't bought it, you would be in serious trouble. [...] When it comes to the influence of China outside its borders, it's quite remarkable that they don't seem to have any military ambitions. Instead of going into Africa with troops, colonially destroying the country, killing people like the West has done for the last hundred years, what they did was they went to Addis Ababa and they said to the government: "We can see you have problems with your infrastructure, we would like to build some new airports and upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild your roads. And we will do this all for free." No strings attached. "We don't want anything from you". And they did. Why did they do it? Because this is soft power.

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.

[F]aced with a choice between an agreement that is to the advantage of the peoples of Europe and one that bolsters their own power within the EU institutions at the expense of Europe's social economies, the Brussels establishment, and the powerful politicians behind them, will choose the latter every time. ... negotiations will be an exercise in futility and frustration. Barnier's two-phase negotiation announcement amounts to a rejection of the principle of … negotiation. He is, effectively, saying to you: First you give me everything I am asking for unconditionally (Phase 1) and only then will I hear what you want (Phase 2).

The world we live in is ruled by insiders... one of the first things said to me by a very high ranking American official.. when I was minister... you have a choice. You can be an insider or an outsider. If you are an outsider you'll retain your right to say anything you want, whatever you believe in but know that you're going to be persecuted, you're going to be villified and you'll be jettisoned. … On the other hand, you can chose to be an insider, to play the game... if you chose to be an insider you'll be given information that outsiders don't have, you'll be given... an opportunity... to make some... small tiny changes within the inside, but the one rule that you must respect, is that insiders do not tell outsiders the truth, and they do not turn against other insiders ... Julian [Assange]... created the technology that allowed the outsiders to get a glimpse within...and this is why he's being persecuted this way and one of the worst aspects of this persecution from a feminist perspective is that he's been accused of a crime for which he's never been charged, that turns progressives against feminists and feminists against progressives. This attempt by the establishment to turn progressives against themselves in order to prosecute someone who has... revealed their crimes is a heinous crime in itself..."

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.

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

Politics, I now understand, is at its best when it enlightens us via an opponent's insight.

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